As you may see from my previous
post, I find a lot of fantasy rather unimaginative. Looking at my own (as yet
unfinished) book series, Spirit Rider,
there’s no point in saying that it’s like nothing you’ve ever read before, or
that it’ll blow your mind. Some tropes were simply too good a fit. For example,
Spirit Rider is, at its heart, a
battle of good versus evil. It features a reluctant, ill-equipped, teenage
hero. There’s a quest across a pseudo-medieval
world, with magic… and there’s a queen involved. But that, my friends, is where
the buck stops.
I like to pride myself on defying
expectations. I don’t feel the need to make excuses for my book. Because of
fantasy’s sometimes stagnant reputation, people often get a little embarrassed to admit that they write /
read the genre. Unfortunately, because of this stigma, whilst I’m not afraid to
say that I write fantasy, I do sometimes feel that I need a disclaimer after
the statement, informing people that I’ve lovingly crafted a (in my opinion)
unique world and characters, which defy many of the established criteria.
If you want to do this as well,
then you must be aware of the extremely precarious position we find ourselves
in. You want to move away from the clichéd traditions, but with that in mind,
don’t go opening the story in a meadow of multicoloured straw, under an amber
sky, speckled with black stars. It’s a very fine line between ‘Seen it a
million times before’ and ‘Urgh! What are these images? It’s too much!’ Find a
middle ground. Take what’s there and do something new with it. Find something just beyond the norm. To take two landscapes
from Spirit Rider, there’s the
Ashlands, a wasteland surrounding a long since erupted volcano, where the air
is so full of ash, that you can’t see two feet in front of you and the whole
place is toxic. There’s also the Whistle-Moors, moody, gloomy moors, where the
lay of the land accelerates the ferocious winds, to the point where they could
easily slice a person to ribbons.
Push the boat out, just don’t
push it over a waterfall.
Characters are another thing.
When you’re designing a character’s personality, think, have you seen this
before? Some people suggest you should base your characters on interesting
people you know / have met. This works sometimes, but only if those people are real characters, in the truest sense of
the word. Otherwise, I tend to find day-to-day, real-life people somewhat
uninspiring. All too often I’ve seen these attempts at ‘real people’ in fantasy
novels with a large cast (which is a problem in itself, but that’s for another
time). To conjure an example, let’s say you’ve got Risenbeard, the wise and
intelligent wizard. Alright, he’s a wizard, he wise, he’s intelligent. And
that’s enough for some people. But if you want to make Risenbeard really real, then
he needs more definition. What does he do when he’s not out saving the world?
Does he have a family? How would his night go if he’s out for a nice meal? What
would he eat?
A character needs to have a life
beyond the page and in the best cases, it needs to be something unexpected,
perhaps even opposite to what you’d expect. Maybe wise and intelligent
Risenbeard has a soft spot for comics? Look to the Harry Potter series’ very own Albus Dumbledore. He’s the greatest,
wisest, most powerful wizard in the world. He’s almost always very kind and
sagely. But guess what? He’s got a big sweet-tooth, names his secret passwords
after sweets, and enjoys reading knitting patterns in non-magical magazines.
To bring along one of my own Spirit Rider examples again, we’ve got
Matt Pinely. He’s the head of all things magical in the world. He’s an
arrogant, superior, condescending ass, who takes a real issue with the carefree
kind-hearted Grim Reaper. But when you look a little closer, there’s a hint
that he hasn’t always been rich and powerful, suggesting that he had much humbler beginnings. And of course
once we learn a little more about the Grim Reaper, then his prejudice starts to
make sense.
Your main character, or more
importantly, their journey and evolution, needs to stand out. It needs some
degree of realism. If your hero is one of those annoyingly common
trained-as-a-swordsman-their-whole-life types, then sure, they’ll not have the
trouble of learning to do anything. If you want to torture us, then you might
show them spending all their spare time training and sparring. I shudder at the
very thought. However, if your character is someone plucked from obscurity,
with no former experience, I don’t want to see them wielding a sword with
expert precision by the end of the book, unless years have passed. This isn’t the kind of thing you just pick up.
My own main character from Spirit Rider,
Sam Mundle, has zero ability with weaponry. By the end of the first book, he
can swing a sword, but still has no real fighting ability. Magic, luck, intelligence and
other people are usually the things which save his neck.
Likewise again, I turn to Harry Potter. The titular boy wizard
comes up against the big-bad Lord Voldemort more than once – and he never wins in a straight fight. Even
after seven years of magical education, he simply doesn’t compare in terms of
power or skill.
So, in short, we all need to
start going against the trend. Do the unexpected. Make new tropes. Toe the line
between the familiar and the new. Most importantly of all – be interesting!
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