Because Modern Fantasy fiction comes in so many flavors, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a definitive recipe for writing The Perfect Fantasy Novel. What I propose to do, in this and subsequent posts, is to examine technical strategies for producing a good fantasy novel regardless of sub-genre. One of the first distinguishing features of a fantasy novel is that it takes place in a setting defined by the imagination of the author. Where (as in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings ) the setting is completely detached from the mundane world as we know it, the author must reckon with the sub-creative process known in the trade as world-building . World-building entails “realizing” your fantasy world by endowing it with features analogous to the world we know. These features include geography, history, languages, culture, and technology. As a general rule, the more “concrete” your fantasy world in terms of these attributes, the more convincing the setting becomes to your readers. ...

In my previous installment , I posed two questions: (A) What is there about fantasy literature that elicits such enthusiasm among so many readers? and (B) What are the reasons underlying the corresponding critical contempt? I’ll be dealing at length with Question A in up-coming posts by way of exploring the challenges of writing fantasy from a practical perspective. For the moment, I’m going to focus on Question B: Why are so many mainstream writers, critics, and academics so hostile to the genre? Two key factors are involved in the answer: on the one hand, semantics; on the other, marketing pressures within the publishing industry during the genre’s infancy. In this month’s article, I propose to address the former factor, taking as my chapter and verse a quote from Shakespeare’s Juliet who asks plaintively, “What’s in a name?” ( Romeo and Juliet , II.ii.1-2) At the University of St. Andrews in 1938, J.R.R. Tolkien delivered a now-famous essay titled On Fairy Stories . In t...

The birth of Modern Fantasy as a distinct literary genre can be arguably dated to 1965, the year in which Ballantine Books brought out the first authorised paperback edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings .  This singular work, rooted in an erudite philologist’s musings on the origin and transmission of languages, captured the imagination of the American reading public.  Sales figures soared, Tolkien’s name became a household word, and American publishers embarked on an urgent quest to find more works of fantasy to satisfy public demand. But where to look? In theory (at least) they didn’t have to look very far. The hallmark elements of Tolkien’s fantasy  – non-human races, inhuman monsters, imaginary landscapes, epic battles, heroic legends – have been around since the dawn of Western Literature.  Classical examples include Homer’s two Greek epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Virgil’s Latin epic, The Aeneid , and Ovid’s Metamorphosis , all of which are...