Military Fantasy GuideMost genre names aren't hard to interpret, and military fantasy is an especially obvious example. In military fantasy, the military takes center stage. Your protagonist will be a soldier and they will do soldierly things. Fights, battles, melees...
Epic Fantasy BlueprintThis blueprint utilizes the Hero's Journey story structure, a structure created by Christopher Vogler that is uniquely suited to fantasy. The terms that have been metaphorized to apply to modern fiction can be applied literally in fantasy. Look to the original structure Vogler...
The Hero’s JourneyThe Hero’s Journey is a story structure based on Joseph Campbell’s seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, where he lays out the commonalities to stories, myths, and legends that have been told for thousands of years. The structure works because of that: there is something in the structures and archetypes contained in the Hero’s Journey that continue to resonate, even in the modern mind. 50,000 years is an evolutionary eyeblink; we are not so different from our ancestors who told these tales around the life-giving fire, or scrawled them in pictograms on cave walls. Campbell’s work was adapted...
Should I Write Epic Fantasy?Do you hate the mundane world? Do you long for a world where evil lurks but you know heroes will rise to fight it? Do you yearn for days of old when magic filled the air? Is Led Zeppelin your favorite band?
Then epic fantasy just might be for you.
Crafting a Magic SystemIf you ask a thousand fantasy authors what makes a good magic system, you’ll get a thousand different answers. I am not going to give you answer one thousand and one. I’m not going to do that simply because the details of your magic system don’t matter. It doesn’t even matter if your system has details. Or if there’s a system at all. Some authors—and their characters—treat magic like a science. If magic is common enough, it seems human nature that it would be studied, codified, even standardized to some extent. Spells are like recipes or language, things to be...
Should I Write Fantasy?Fantasy is such a broad genre that this question is much better answered in the subgenre you want to work in. But for the people who are just poking their toe into the deep waters of fantastic literature for the first time, I'll do my best.
Should I Write Intrusion Fantasy?My first few novels were all intrusion/urban fantasy. I think it's a great genre for beginning novelists, as you're given half the setting for free and can dive right in without all that pesky worldbuilding.
Should I Write Dark Fantasy?Dark fantasy is for those writers with a darker sensibility than other fantasy writers. Where other fantasists imagine the woods filled with fey creatures, we see them filled with monsters. Their castles are of white stone with banners flying; ours are tumbled down and haunted. There may be a happy ending (doubtful), but if there is, you can be damn sure the characters paid a price to reach it.
Dark Fantasy Study MaterialsIf you want to write in a genre, you have to read that genre. Experts in the industry are consistent with their advice that you must be an avid reader of a genre to write well in it. The books listed below will teach you about the genre and help you get a feel for all the different things you can do with it.
Genres for the Independent AuthorGenres are a fascinating part of the writing profession. They mean nothing and everything; they are both limiting and freeing; they are arbiters and arbitrary in near equal measures. I began my career as a traditional author. As such, genres were the purview of publishers and booksellers. I wrote the book and then they told me what genre it was in. That didn’t mean I didn’t know what genre my books were in; it just meant I didn’t care if they decided it was something different. It was their job to sell those books, and if they thought it would...
