The Best of ‘… on Anything Really’ 2011: “Why Write Epic Fantasy?”
This year I’ve completed a number of posts on epic fantasy, which you will find collected under Categories: Epic Fantasy in the right hand side bar. But this is one of the early posts, from April 16, and I feel worthy, on behalf of what has become a series, for a place in “… on Anything Really’s” the ‘Best of 2011’ pantheon
So without further ado, here it is:
“Why Write Epic Fantasy?
Having started to reflect on epic fantasy here on the blog, particularly what the “core” of the genre is, I’ve also started looking around on the internet to see what other folk are thinking or saying. And I have to say, as an epic fantasy lover and author myself, I potentially found it quite depressing. To understand why, here’s a sample of some of the things I read:
🙁 epic fantasy as a genre is misogynist, both in the storytelling and the attention paid to female authors of the genre (i.e. your chances of being a successful epic fantasy author are considerably reduced if you’re a gal);
🙁 epic fantasy glorifies violence for its own sake;
🙁 epic fantasy in particular (and fantasy in general) is reactionary and about denying change, growth and/or renewal;
🙁 other genres, such as romance, paranormal urban fantasy, crime and YA generally all sell a lot better than epic fantasy, so a writer has a considerably enhanced chance of a successful career if s/he switches to one of these genres.
Depressed, ‘you won’t be after the next exciting instalment of …’ But you may recall that I said “potentially” depressed, because I refuse to be actually depressed even if all this is true. So why is that?
Firstly, I love epic fantasy as a genre. Not necessarily every example that’s ever been penned, especially if the stories are misogynistic, reactionary and glorify violence (which sadly, I feel some do), but the genre itself. Remembering that epic fantasy at its best is all about the ability to address the grand sweep of events, in many cases world altering, ask the big questions and use the play of those events to examine the internal conflicts they generate within the protagonists. Great stuff, in my opinion—I love reading it, so it’s perhaps not surprising that I write it as well.
But there are other reasons, I believe, for choosing to write epic fantasy.
- epic fantasy is also high fantasy (I note that one commenter suggested these can also be separate genres in their own right, but I will explore that point further another time) and allows the author to write stories that operate at the mythic and legendary level of storytelling, in the same way as the epic sagas such as the Argonautika, Beowulf and the Morte d’Arthur, to name just a few;
- All SFF allows the author to explore ‘what if’ and ‘wonder’ and to speculate on the how and why of other worlds, but because of its grand sweep and focus on world altering events, epic fantasy—more than any other in my opinion—allows the author to speculate on the behaviour of characters and societies. Several reviewers have already commented on the matter-of-fact equality of men and women in the Derai society of The Heir of Night. The opportunity to “just do” this, without either “discussion or worthy treatise” (SFX) is part of what it means to write speculative fiction.
All SFF requires the writer to do a certain amount of world building, but while urban fantasy is almost-but-just-not-quite-our-everyday-world (Robin McKinley’s Sunshine is a great example of this) and steampunk draws heavily on what we know of late 18th-19th century history, epic fantasy requires world building on a, well, epic scale. The world is usually completely alternate to ours and has the possiblity of other beings, cultures, societies, and ways of doing things: fan-tastic.
In the end all fiction is about storytelling and in my experience epic fantasy, contains some of the very best stories, with grandeur and sweep, “what-if” ideas, a sense of wonder, intriguing worlds and tremendous passion and heart. Put quite simply, a significant number of epic fantasy stories rock! I love them—and that’s why I write them, too.”