For those of you just tuning in, I want to preface the following by reiterating that I am an aspiring novelist. My genre of choice, if it wasn’t apparent, is fantasy.
The genre of fantasy encompasses so many sub-genres. From the magical realm of J. R. R. Tolkein’s “Middle Earth”, to the science fiction wonders of Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game”, and even steam punk world of Philip Reeve’s “Mortal Engines”, fantasy is the mother of many identities.
But how does one weave a truly wondrous tale of fantasy?
I think it’s important that when you’re conveying a place of fiction, that you really capture your readers attention. To do that you need to keep in mind at all time what sets the world you’re writing apart from the world we live in. So the question becomes “How can you make the reader feel like they’ve been transported to the world you’re writing”?
While it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that if you’re writing science fiction, you just add technology, I think it’s more important to address the type of fantasy you’re writing about first.
In the instance of the novel I’m writing, magic is the key form of fantasy ever-present throughout the story.
In my novel, the protagonist finds himself in a world every bit straight out of fairy tales. There, all manner of magical beings and tools exist. But how do I convey this in a way that really makes the reader think “Wow. I really want to go there”?
For me, I find that setting myself a “magical quota” per chapter does the trick. By that I mean that for each chapter I tell myself “this chapter must have X number of magical scenes, object, and or people in it”. In doing this I’m able to keep the “world” that I’m writing at the forefront of my mind, keeping it distinguishable from the real world in every sense of the word.
Once you give shape to your world, I find that the rest of the story will begin to tell itself; the world you create will naturally give birth to the magic you want to write.
I hope my ideas are helpful, and remember:
Dream – Imagine – Create
A.
A Life Imagined 