People often ask me, “Why do you write fantasy?”
Okay, that’s a lie. Nobody’s actually asked me that question before. I just thought it was an interesting question, so I asked myself. And, well, there’s the easy answer, and there’s the… well, it’s still an easy answer. Just a bit more complicated.
The easy answer is, “I’ve always been writing fantasy.” Ever since I was a little kid, before I could even write, as long as I could talk, I was telling stories. Making stuff up. I would tell my parents about my imaginary friend who lived in a secret valley where dinosaurs were still alive. Or I’d explain how to make a car, which at one point involved putting all of the ingredients in the freezer. For some reason.
Those wild imaginings never really stopped. I made up superheroes when I was in elementary school, drawing awkward comic strips about them (I wasn’t much of an artist). After my mom introduced me to Star Wars for the first time, I watched those movies over and over, and if I hadn’t already known that swords were one of the coolest inventions ever, lightsabers sealed the deal. Nothing’s cooler than a lightsaber. And who doesn’t wish they could use the Force? And when I wasn’t making up stories, I was making up new rules to existing board games and card games and, well… every game. I’d come up with a new way to play chess almost every week for a while.
I just… like to make stuff up.
But I couldn’t just pull ideas out of the ether. Imagination needs inspiration, and thankfully, that was another thing I loved to do: research. I’d read the encyclopedia, pick up reference books from the library, and sit at my desk taking notes on everything. My first love was dinosaurs, and then I became infatuated with castles and knights, armor and swords and shields. But when I wasn’t hyper-focusing, I’d read about everything. Animals, cities, technology, vehicles, nature, foreign cultures, history… And we had a whole binder full of interesting space-age futuristic speculative… somethings, whatever you’d call it, it was all just exploring the possibilities of the galaxy and tech. Topics like space colonies, artificial gravity, silicon-based lifeforms, black holes, wormholes, the life cycle of stars, faster-than-light travel…
And oh my goodness, just open up the Bible! While so many kids, somehow, someway, find church and Christianity boring and stuffy and restrictive, my imagination was deeply fueled by the stories of my faith. God just speaks and the world comes to life with all its vibrancy and beauty and diversity? The dramatic and often traumatic odyssey of the Israelites, the visions of the prophets, the miracles of Jesus, the imagery of the Psalms… this was a treasure-trove, to fit right alongside everything else in life that I loved.
Imagination and learning go hand-in-hand. I wasn’t always a big fan of school, but I’ve always loved to learn things. (That’s what usually got me into trouble in school — I’d spend so much time researching my own topics of choice that I’d forget to do my actual homework!)
By the end of middle school and into high school, I was writing constantly. Drawing was time-consuming and difficult — words were easy (for me, anyway — I know for some people it’s the other way around!). It was the fastest way to put my stories onto paper, and because I was constantly seeking out stories, and I was still learning, growing, figuring out who I was and what I was trying to say, of course my own stories fell into the same traps that lots of young writers do: they could be wildly derivative. When you’re young, you learn by doing, and often by copying the people who know what they’re doing. I loved so many different stories, from Star Wars to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, from The Legend of Zelda to Pokémon, from Ogre Battle to Final Fantasy, from Dragon Ball Z to Sailor Moon to Gundam Wing, from favorite superheroes (Spider-Man!) to…
So much. Just so much, and what I’ve listed only scratches the surface. But that all kind of circles around to the thing that, as an adult, continues to draw me to the fantasy “genre.”
Fantasy can be anything.
I think for a lot of people, the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the word “fantasy” is dragons. Or wizards. Or both! Usually in a world of castles and kings, knights and princesses, that sort of thing. And that’s fantasy, totally! It’s way cool, too!
But fantasy doesn’t have to be in a vaguely medieval European setting. You can have magic in the modern world like in Harry Potter. You can have dragons in the modern world, like in Jaimal Yogis’ and Vivian Truong’s City of Dragons graphic novel (which is really cool, by the way!). Or you can even have shapeshifting dragons in a fantastical futuristic galaxy, like in Timothy Zahn’s Dragonback series!
And circling back to those three examples, genre-wise, they’re quite different (also, I know, Harry Potter has dragons, but they’re only in like two books and only for specific set-pieces, so they’re not really about dragons). The Harry Potter novels are mystery novels, trying to unravel the clues to solve the central question. City of Dragons is an adolescent coming-of-age adventure. And Dragonback, at least the first novel, is a heist story! And just so we can have another dragon on this list, Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is a fairy-tale romance musical — with a dragon!
Setting, content, genre… fantasy can cross all the lines. Because really, what fantasy is all about, what is so appealing about it… is imagination. Imagining, dreaming, creating, inventing, that’s what I’m pulled towards, constantly. And I love the sheer scope, the possibility, the lack of boundaries or limits here. There’s often debate about fantasy as a “genre.” The Final Fantasy series took a strong shift towards technological, quasi-futuristic fantasy in the seventh and eighth installments, and some fans really value Final Fantasy IX for going “back to the series’ roots” with a “proper” fantasy. Because it has castles, and kingdoms, queens and sorcerers, and is, for most of its runtime, more sparse on the tech side of things (though the city of Lindblum and the entire endgame definitely make that claim questionable, not to mention the Black Mage puppet soldiers, or Alexander, or…).
There are so many reasons to love Final Fantasy IX. It’s a magnificent game with a sweeping, adventurous, emotional tale and wonderful characters that will capture your heart. But the idea that this — castles and knights and sorcery — is what “real” fantasy is?
That’s just sad.
Star Wars is fantasy in a galaxy far, far away. Dragon Ball Z is a martial arts superpower fantasy (with dragons!). Sailor Moon is a fantasy in then-modern-day Tokyo (but also kind of far-future Tokyo, and an ancient moon kingdom too, it gets crazy) about a moon princess and her guardians. Pokémon is a creature-collecting fantasy (with dragons!) about ten year-old children beating battle-hardened adults at their own game to become the champions of the region. Codex Alera is a crazy fantasy mash-up of the lost Roman legion and Pokémon with wolf-people and an evil horde of spider-aliens bent on taking over the world. Incarceron is a fantasy about inmates trying to escape from a living prison that is far more than it seems in a world that’s hidden its entrance in a place you would never expect. Spider-Man is a fantasy about a kid getting bitten by a radioactive spider and getting spider powers he uses to fight crime. Heck, back to the first Final Fantasy, the one that started it all, there’s a sequence where you take a barrel-submarine down into a sunken city to save mermaids from a giant squid monster, and later you use a teleportation cube to warp into a city in the sky to save robots from an evil dragon, and for the finale you end a 2,000 year time loop to stop a time-traveling overlord of evil. And somehow, Final Fantasy games kept getting stranger from there.
Fantasy is freaking weird. Or, at least, it can be. And I like it when it gets weird. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are some of my favorite works of fiction — of fantasy — and boy, do they get weird. Is Alice just dreaming up these adventures? Do they actually happen? Either way, it’s all pretty far removed from the normal, stereotypical fantasy of knights and wizards and castles and all that.
But knights and wizards and castles (and dragons!) are cool! There’s nothing wrong with that kind of fantasy. There are so many fantasies in that vaguely medieval-European setting and aesthetic that tell their own marvelously imaginative stories. Tolkien and Lewis both created iconic works of fantasy with Tolkien’s entire Middle-Earth mythos and Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia that are so much more than just “ordinary fantasy.” Harry Potter takes place in the modern world, but you’d be forgiven for forgetting about that, since the students go to school at a castle, with no phones or computers or televisions. The Book of Swords takes one of the coolest inventions — swords — and centers around twelve completely unique swords of power and their wielders.
I just love fantasy (can you tell?). And what makes fantasy marvelous isn’t unique to fantasy. It’s what makes all great stories marvelous — a great story well-told, that transports you to another place, another time, to walk in the shoes of people unlike yourself, to experience things you wouldn’t experience in your own ordinary life, to widen your gaze of the world, of other people, of what life can be. It isn’t just fantasy that does this. Agatha Christie’s mystery and detective novels are absolutely captivating, drawing you into places and times with characters who aren’t real but who feel real. Anne Perry’s World War I novels create a startling, visceral sense of place and person, sweeping us away to a time and conflict far beyond our own lives, challenging our perception of humanity and calling on us to show empathy for these characters and their moral conflicts. Great classics like The Count of Monte Cristo or Brothers Karamazov do the same, capturing us in the high-emotion, heart wrenching drama of their stories and characters. They make us question ourselves, question our own narrow view of the world and people, and reveal just how vast and astounding and different the world really is beyond our own bubble.
So I just love a great story, well-told, about compelling characters. Why fantasy, then? Because that’s just… me. There’s never been a question, in every story I’ve written, about whether it should be fantastical or not. My primary focus in storytelling is character. Without compelling characters you don’t have a compelling story. So why fantasy? Because, as weird as it may sound, I love that fantasy stories don’t have to be defined by the fantasy of them. The fantasy is a way of expressing the mysteries of the world, of expressing the truth that we will never have all the answers, that there are wonders we can’t conceive of, mysteries we can’t fully decipher.
And through all of that, the fantasy doesn’t take over the story. It enhances it. Fae’s startling journey in Greysons of Grimoire, especially in the second half of the series, with an evil Dragon, and her mysterious connection to Olivia and Sonya, and the Echoes of Truth, and the Orphan of the Dawn…
All of that is about Fae. And about the people around her. And just about people. The fantasy isn’t the story. The fantasy helps reveal who these characters are, and helps them explore the depths of their hearts in ways that are practically impossible to do so without the fantasy, in the real world. And for the other characters, the fantasy helps Caleb learn a valuable lesson about control, it helps Chelsea come to terms with her grief and rage, it helps Delilah find where she belongs and take on a weighty responsibility, it helps Shana not just face her fears but look beyond herself and heal the wider world, and it helps Shias be the guardian and protector he is called to be.
The fantasy is just part of the world. Just like miracles, mysteries, the unknowable truths of the divine are part of our real world. Where there are things we can’t seem to express in our real worlds, the fantasy helps us explore the unexplorable, to express the inexpressible. And yet there’s still that air of mystery. Not everything can be explained. Not everything should be explained, not while we’re still in the mortal, the finite, the incomplete.
And also, I mean…
Fantasy’s just freaking cool.
How many times have I mentioned dragons in this post? And I can’t help myself from capitalizing the first letter of Dragons in Greysons of Grimoire, or in Project: Elysia, because Dragons are a big deal! They come in so many shapes and sizes, they can be HUGE AS MOUNTAINS or tiny as insects, they can breathe fire or ice or lightning or magical voodoo-whatever-stuff, they can be intelligent creatures or raging monsters, wise tortoise-Dragon guides or wicked scientist soul-eaters, and they’re always so awe-inspiring, so incredible, so impossible!
And magic’s just neat, and exciting, and it comes in so many different forms, and you get these super-cool action set-pieces and fights that you just can’t get with ordinary people with ordinary abilities, right? Chelsea just blasting fire in these huge explosions is a rush, and Lorelei’s Cold Snap is so amazing (instant-winter!), Caleb can slow time or even stop it entirely and phase through solid objects, and what about Summoners? Who doesn’t want a magical blue puppy, or magical Feline cat-warriors to protect them? Don’t say you don’t. You totally do. And if you don’t, your inner child definitely does. Also, go play Pokémon. It’s good for the soul.
And the worlds. Entering a world that doesn’t exist, can’t exist, in our own world is exciting, astonishing, amazing! From the modern-ish regions of Pokémon with their friendly Pokémon Center attendants and overarching competition that everyone is in on and united around and excited about, to the demolished battlegrounds of Dragon Ball Z and the astonishingly powerful warriors engaged in battle sometimes for friendly competition and sometimes to save the universe and sometimes both at the same time; from the dramatic relations between Earth and the space colonies in Gundam Wing and that desperate desire for peace in the face of seemingly unavoidable conflict, to the skyline of New York and our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man who swings through them saving the day; from the space wizards and aliens and laser swords of Star Wars, to the militaristic science fantasy of Final Fantasy VIII threatened by a body-hopping sorceress; from the quest of one boy and his courage saving the realm of Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda, to the heart-hopping, world-hopping adventure of a boy and his Disney friends in Kingdom Hearts…
There’s just so much! This breadth, and this depth, the incredible richness of character and narrative, the variety of stories to be told and the ways in which they can be told… And there’s just this appeal, this sense of childish awe and wonder and excitement, that fantasy contains. Especially for a little kid with a big imagination, who just can’t stop making stuff up. Fantasy can be anything, anything at all, as long as you can dream it.
Why fantasy?
Why not?