Fantasy
Fantasy

Fantasy

Crafting a Magic System

If 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...

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Books to Read for Writing Fantasy

Nobody springs fully formed from the head of Zeus, and none less so than the writer. To attain any skill in writing, we devour thousands of books, write millions of words, and talk endlessly with each other about the act of turning our private thoughts into stories for strangers’ consumption. This list isn’t anywhere near exhaustive, and some of the selections may seem downright strange, but I’m hoping to showcase some books that maybe you haven’t heard of before. Note: I am a big early/middle medieval guy, so a lot of the history books on this list are centered around that time...

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