Skip to main content

Finding Fantasy

Transformation.  It’s an idea older than the mythological Greeks.  It seems that people everywhere have wondered what it would be like to be something else.  It’s also a staple of fantasy literature.

I recently read The Lizard Princess by Tod Davies.  It is a heavily symbolic work, and one that makes the reader think.  Nothing can be assumed in this world.  Even death is not what it seems to be.

Fantasy novels rely on a willing suspension of belief.  It is difficult to read such stories with a critical eye and enjoy them.  Ironically, I found George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones difficult to get into.  The writing is what I call “power writing”—full of bravado and flash.  A fantasy, it seems to me, should have a certain gentleness to the narrative.

I’ve occasionally presented Boeotian Rhapsody, my Medusa novel, to publishers as a fantasy.  It really isn’t.  Magical realism, perhaps.  Fabulism maybe.  Weird fiction writ long.  It is fantasy in that it could never happen, it is a world that doesn’t exist.  I’m not sure if that’s fantasy or not.

The Lizard Princess surely is.  A princess transformed (at least part-way) into a lizard is a fantasy theme.  The adventures she experiences are what you find in fantasy novels.  You know what you’re reading in a book like this.

I sometimes suffer from writing in no genre.  Purists wouldn’t call it literary fiction, that catch-all that doesn’t really catch all.  I think of my stories as gentle horror, or weird tales.  Reality is all around me, so I don’t need to write fiction that’s too realistic.  If you can’t label it, however, publishers will shun it.



There is a wisdom in writing what you want to write, and not worrying about the consequences.  Some of my stories are never intended for public viewing.  Those that are, however, are bits of my consciousness formalized in words.  I hope that someone, some day, may be interested in seeing what I thought.


Famous authors are considered national treasures.  We want their opinions on subjects they know nothing about.  The vast majority of us who write, however, remain obscure.  Some of us can’t even put a label on what we write.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Working Through It

  The thing about being a working writer is you don’t have time.   Between working nine-to-five and trying to eat and sleep, and write, of course, the week is shot.   Weekends are spent doing the errands that you can’t do during the week. I should probably have known better than to join a local writers’ group.   Their meetings, although only once a month, are all-day affairs on a Saturday.   I generally don’t have all day Saturday to spare.   I work all week and I need groceries and the occasional Target run.   And I haven’t yet learned to go a week without eating. This is actually the third writers’ group I’ve joined.   One was not too far from home, but not terribly helpful.   They met on Saturdays, but in the morning only.   Nobody seemed interested in what I was writing, so I stopped going. The second one was about an hour away.   They also met on Saturdays.   Their big thing was having lunch together after the meeting. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Patterns

  There’s a pattern I’m noticing.   For fiction publishers.   Even if you aim low you’ll find it a struggle.   Part of the reason is the pattern. Lots of websites list publishers.   The smaller, hungrier presses either eventually close or get to a place where they require an agent to get in.   That’s the kiss of death. Although my stories have won prizes, and been nominated for prizes, I can’t get an agent interested.   I’ve queried well over a hundred, so the agent route is one of diminishing returns.   This too is a pattern. Back to the smaller presses.   I check many lists.   What I write, you see, is highly idiosyncratic.   It’s literary but it’s weird.   Publishers don’t know what to do with it.   If a smaller press published stuff like this, I’d find it. The pattern includes writers who never get discovered.   Ironically, a number of editors of fiction literary magazines (mostly online) tell me they enjoy my wor...
Post a Comment
Read more

Creativity

  Maybe you’ve noticed this too.   When you step away from fiction writing for a while, your creativity becomes flaccid.   I’ve had to step away from this blog for a while because I was writing my sixth nonfiction book.   God, I’ve missed fiction! Now that I’ve entered that phase of waiting for publishers to respond, I’ve turned my limited writing time back to fiction.   I submitted a couple of stories this week and am waiting to hear about those as well.   When you’re a writer, waiting is a way of life. Opening my software where I store my fiction stories, I was amazed by how many I found.   Some of them are bad—so bad that they’ll never (rightfully) be published.   Some are surprisingly good and have been sitting around while I finished up my nonfic. The vast majority, however, are unfinished.   Some years back I realized that when I’m writing in the heat of inspiration but don’t have time to finish a story that I need to write down where I...
Post a Comment
Read more