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How to Write Fantasy Fiction: Examples of Characters, Tropes, and Plots

February 28, 2022

book, creativity, fantasy, fiction, genre, literature, writing

As you might know, I don’t write genre fiction; I write literary fiction. My books – as you can see on the relevant page of the main site – are about “ordinary” people in “ordinary” circumstances (I let you interpret the quotation marks the way you want). However, my academic expertise is on nonrealist fictions: Gothic/horror, science fiction, fantasy. So let’s put this expertise to good use (it doesn’t seem to have its own space in the academic world) and see how to write fantasy fiction, with examples on characters, tropes and plots.

I’ll try to make this post as detailed and useful, but at the same time as accessible as possible. Personally, I’m a great fan of simplicity. I believe that if you can’t explain a concept – no matter how complex – in a way a 10-year-old could understand it, it means you haven’t fully understood it yourself.

With this in mind, here’s a quick outline of what I’ll show you in this post:

How to write fantasy fiction characters. In particular, what is the role of characters in fantasy fiction
Examples of tropes. That’s a somewhat fancy way of saying how to write fantasy fiction in a way your intended audience can relate to it. In a sense, it’s a marketing consideration, but also with artistic dimensions.
What kind of fantasy fiction plots are worth pursuing and what are best left alone. And why.

I don’t have all the answers. Heck, I don’t even have all the questions. But whatever I know and share with you, I genuinely hope it can help you!

One misconception about how to write fantasy fiction is that fantasy allows you to write pretty much anything you want. Technically true, practically false

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How to Write a Synopsis for Your Novel: Overcoming the Disconnect

January 31, 2022

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

book, literature, marketing, publishing, writing

As a writer, I’ve had to write a synopsis for every novel I’ve written. Some of them were written for a literary agent or publisher and were lengthy, others were just a blurb meant to explain what the book was about. In any case, I had to find a way to drastically condense the narrative so that it would fit the given spatial constraints.

I bet you’ve been there yourself, as a writer.

You’ve struggled, perhaps even agonized for hours, days, weeks trying to come up with the perfect text that would summarize your novel. So, here’s a little secret:

It’s impossible.

Nobody can ever fit a narrative requiring the length of a novel in a paragraph, page, or even ten pages. If that were the case, it’s self-evident that the novel wouldn’t exist. Why writing 80,000 words when you can express the same thing in 1000?

The reason a synopsis can never be perfect is based on this. However, with this out of the way, we could perhaps rephrase the question and ask: How to write a synopsis for a novel, making it the best it can be?

This is the topic of today’s post. As the title suggests, in order to learn how to write a synopsis for a novel – in a way that serves its purpose – we must learn how to overcome a certain disconnect; a paradox, caused by the inherent nature of a novel.

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Every Book Is Autobiographical – or Should Be

January 3, 2022

Experiencing, Writing

creativity, experiencing, imagination, literature, memory, writing

(Auto)biographies, autobiographical novels, “based on a true story”… There seem to be many ways of more or less describing the same thing. At least that’s what one may think. However, in actual fact, all these are very different modes of writing, with unique requirements. More importantly, for the purposes of this post, most people seem to ignore a very crucial thing: Every book is autobiographical!

This might feel an obviously wrong thing to say. “Hang on, Chris”, you might think. “How on earth can every book be autobiographical? What about American Psycho, or even some science fiction – say, Solaris? Surely, you’re not claiming that Bret Easton Ellis has killed people or that Stanisław Lem traveled to another planet?”

The answer is – to the best of my knowledge – no. Yet both these two examples, just like every other book ever written by any human is deep down an autobiographical book. The reason?

Because every author, even when writing fiction, puts a piece of themselves in it.

Or at least, they ought to! Because about the only way to fail entirely at writing fiction is to not allow yourself – your subjectivity, your experiences, your flaws and vices and insecurities – to become part of the narrative. Writing an autobiographical book the way I just defined it is the easiest way for any author (and especially so for less experienced ones) to introduce affect in their narratives.

Let’s see why that happens and how to control it.

autobiographical book — When it comes to all books being autobiographical, it’s not out experiences that are important, but *remembering* and *reflecting on* our experiences

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