I'd never heard of the 'Lord of the Rings', actually. So I went to the bookstore and there it was, three shelves of books about Tolkien and Middle-earth, and I was like, 'Holy cow, what else am I missing out on?'
I've been watching 'Game of Thrones,' and I can't wait for 'Bored to Death' to come back, it's one of my faves.
Adult fantasy gets a bad name. You think of Xena - Warrior Princess. If you don't do it expensively, it becomes tacky and you end up just appealing to 45-year-old single men.
Don't use metaphors in fantasy; your readers will take them literally. Or they may take them figuratively - but if so, they'll also take your magics and transformations figuratively. Either way, you're in trouble.
Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The 'Lord of the Rings' template or the 'Gormenghast' mold.
The sad thing is that, for many writers of fantasy fiction, the inclusion of magic seems to mean that logical ramifications and real-world laws both go out the window.
Don't get me wrong, hard and soft fantasy stories can both be good. But you need to know which camp you're in. I'm into realism. I'm a hard fantasy guy.
Soft fantasy worlds have a much looser cause-and-effect relationship. Alchemists can turn lead into gold and nobody wonders about how it will impact the currency system. Someone waves a wand and turns an elephant into a mouse and nobody worries about conservation of mass.
Some books are serials, not to be mistaken for anything else. 'The Two Towers,' for example, ought never to be read in isolation.
When you're doing fantasy, you can get so caught up in the magic of it that you lose the humanity.
I've always really loved big worlds and the kind of worldbuilding where you can open a portal into a new realm that feels full and complete. At the same time, I also really love history. So the combination of big worlds and history draws me directly into fantasy. Well, it should turn me towards historical fiction but I'm such a perfectionist about research that I'm not sure I could ever write a book in that genre properly. In fantasy, you have to have the same level of precision, but it's not as research-based. Plus, I get to write my little info sheets and draw my maps.
When you're 14, anything with a sword and a dragon is pretty cool. But when you're 21 and you've read 2,000 fantasy novels, you start to realize that some of those books, well, they weren't really good. OK, let's be honest. A lot of them were crap.
I always try to have my supernatural or fantasy elements feel grounded in reality so they're easier for the reader to accept and digest.
I like high fantasy as much as the next guy, but I also like a bit of grit and grime with my faux-medieval trappings.
