Why I write fantasy
Was sort of thinking about why I like fantasy.
For a while, in college, I thought that I didn’t like fantasy much anymore. Despite the fact that I wrote it and that all my favorite stories were fantasy, I thought I couldn’t be specifically liking the fantasy of it because I’d ceased to be interested in magic. I didn’t have a particular inclination towards a medieval feel in stories more than I was inclined to any other atmosphere, and I didn’t have an attachment to any fantastic creatures other than as a means of making my characters worried and scared.
So I thought, “There is no excuse for this stuff I like to be fantasy.” I worried that it had the trappings of fantasy but not its heart, because I no longer liked magic or quests. I’d loved those things as a child and a young teenager, but then abruptly, and without wanting or trying to, I outgrew them and they began to bore me. I lost interest in that mystical “feel” that had once seemed like the coolest thing ever. I was now interested in thinking and in people and their minds and structures, and that became the coolest thing ever. But how was that still fantasy? And yet, everything I liked and everything I created was fantasy.
I started trying to up the “magical” factor on purpose. I tried to figure out how to put in more magic, more weird creatures, more things that could make my writing feel like it really belonged as fantasy rather than as realistic fiction. I’ve since lost that habit, because the more I try to make a story be about your typical fantasy trappings, the less interest I have in it.
I think, now at last, that what I like is freedom from factual constraints. I don’t want to write about Earth, now or in any historical period. I’m equally at home with a made-up medieval country I can be somewhat vague about or a through-the-looking-glass place with the rules suspended. Basically, I do not like to be forced to work with given facts. (And on a related note to that, I also don’t really like to worldbuild.) I have a terrible memory for random miscellaneous details of what happened or how things work. I don’t want to have to feel like there’s a specific truth that I have to get right. I want freedom and change in my writing.
Surrealism doesn’t cut it. For one thing, it doesn’t work well with the kind of things I write about and the way I want to write them. For another, it feels superpretentious to me, and even if I do have a good point to convey, unless I can hide it among story that’s worthwhile for its own sake, the point starts to feel ridiculous to me, like I don’t deserve to make it, or else everyone already knows it. And thirdly? I don’t need to be ANY more symbolic than I already am. I’m already at my own level of tolerance for confusingness and pretentiousness for a writer. My creative drive functions at a highly symbolic level, but if I get any more symbolic and referential and intricate, I will stop even being able to take myself seriously, because how could I ever expect anyone to get what I’m saying the way I curl in on myself. And I also feel like surrealism is a project that’s been done so many times that people are tired of having to slog through it. Like, the experiment’s over, and the world of fiction needs clarity now.
So basically, I like to have the rules suspended or be fictionalized. So, fantasy. And yet I always question my original writing: is this fantasy enough? Do I have to put in more magic? Will it seem to others like “my fantasy is pastede on yay?” I try to integrate and manage and juggle these things, but sometimes I just can’t help but wonder specifically what other people’s tolerance is for fantasy that doesn’t really care about being fantasy, or about being in any specific world either, but just kind of wants to dodge the complications of known facts.