I Don’t Know if I Can Write Fantasy: an introspection through the research of the genre’s most prolific writers and their philosophy

In the last few years a question in the space of fantasy books has arisen, a question about the artist creating the art we consume. After many unsavory comments from a contemporary fantasy made their way across social media, the question of separating them from their art has come up a lot. I am not here to answer the existential question of separating the art from the artist, but this grand realization made me question many of the other pillars of the fantasy genre. Was there something about fantasy that attracted a certain kind of people? How did their pasts and ideals affect their art? And can I learn anything I can apply to my own art? This quest for answers was entirely for myself, it was an unabashedly selfish pursuit. I love fantasy. I love reading. Furthermore, I love these works of art, but not only that, I want to be one of those creating them. Any crack in the armor of my passion makes me wholly uneasy, but you can’t just fill the void and move on. The root of the cause needs to be addressed, it needs to be researched, deliberated upon, and ultimately, a thought on the matter needs to be formed.

I started this mostly emotional, slightly academic driven escapade by picking out some authors that have had a substantial effect on me throughout my life. I was combing through interview after interview for authors I could spot the names of with a glance over to my shelf. Trying to get a good prospect on the types of people these authors were. Failing that, I hoped can use these snapshots of behavior and philosophy to form some semblance of a profile detailing how they see writing and their place as writers. Luckily for me, it seems authors aren’t as good at acting as they are at writing, none of the authors I researched seemed to display any signs of lying, not that I thought that would be a prevalent theme. I walked away knowing these authors were sincerely people, they had little personal mannerisms, they misspoke and corrected themselves, they weren’t perfect. This was initially very comforting to me. Of course, I knew you could be a “real” person and be a popular fantasy author, but anxiety about our futures never limits itself to rational thoughts, and when you gaze upon giants, you get used to feeling small. Even this small amount of reassurance steadied me and urged me to continue my research. Now not in an, admittedly, slightly desperate clamber for reinforcement, but in a more methodological, curiosity driven extrospection to fuel my own introspection. So I dove back in, returning to the words of perhaps the most famous fantasy writer in history, JRR Tolkien.

Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit have disseminated themselves into the larger world, it's a franchise with 17 Academy Awards, over 150 million books sold, and a dedicated fan base all around the world. Tolkien was famous for the sheer amount of writing he created for Middle Earth, not only that but he was a person to always have things planned out. He said to Denys Geroult during a BBC interview “I had maps of course. If you're going to have a complicated story you must work to a map, otherwise you can never make a map of it afterward.” Soon after he told Geroult that he started writing Lord of the Rings directly after The Hobbit, and he wouldn’t be done for over a decade. I believe that not only the words themselves, but his casual cadence he uses during this interview to speak a lot towards how he sees his effort. He put more work and reverence into the fictional world he created than many would even think of doing. It all seemed very real to him, like he was building this world brick by brick. Twelve years of writing followed by five years of editing is a large part of someone’s life, but it was worth it for him, he utterly respected the work he was doing. This left me thinking about if I could dedicate myself like he did. For context, another author I looked at, George RR Martin, released his Game of Thrones series with an average of three years in between books. A Clash of Kings even released in 1999 with A Storm of Swords coming out the very next year. Even if you add his lengthy pause between A Dance with Dragons and the still unreleased The Winds of Winter he still averages under five years in between books, the same time Tolkien spent purely after writing his series. Even factoring in that Tolkien split his work into 3 books, he still is outpaced by the newer “RR”, though it's now much closer. Tolkien didn’t write until he got to a point where he could publish, he wrote until he was done.

This contrasts Martin, who seems to always be adding to his world as he goes. Its become a point of contention with fans that he seems to want to write everything about all the history of the world he's built in A Song of Ice and Fire, just not the next book in the main series. Having released eight books in the series and many other projects since his last main ASOIAF entry, Martin follows a very different writing philosophy to Tolkien. They appear to fall at two ends of a wide spectrum, but to say for sure we need more data points. To accomplish this, I searched my shelves, I would pull in CS Lewis, Brandon Sanderson, or any other number of authors, but one jumped out to me as a great example. Andrzej Sapkowski is an enigmatic writer. Initially I thought it could be because of cultural and language context not translating well, but he always seemed to be a different kind of writer compared to those we’ve looked at so far. Maybe it’s because I first learned of his work through an adaptation, being the video game series by CD Projekt Red, or maybe he is just different. Perhaps both are true, but I suspect the latter to a much larger part of the pie. Sapkowski didn’t have the academic background of Tolkien, or the sheer volume of writing that fills Martin’s career, but has reached a level of fame comparable nonetheless.

Personally, I find his story the most relatable, someone who had tried other things, but his passion returned him to writing. He took a chance on a 30-page short story contest for Fantastyka magazine in his homeland of Poland while he was a fur salesman. This one-off short story, after a year of waiting, and a third place in the contest, turned into a career of writing fantasy. This career has been spent mostly engrained in his The Witcher series, always returning to it, even releasing another novel just last year. His body of work is certainly more focused than Martin’s but his philosophy for world building and detail fall opposite of Tolkien’s. When asked about how much of the world did he know about before he wrote about them, he said: “Nothing at all… You don’t create universes in short stories… It plays a secondary role in the story” He would go on to quote Isaac Asimov’s quote “A story is a straight line; a novel is a plane”. This almost disregard for the state of his world hit me hard. The frankness he spoke with was welcome but still surprising. This also isn’t a rogue day, his pragmatism extends to almost every quote you can find from him, especially regarding the adaptations of his work, referring to them as “bags of money” regularly. If Tolkien was dedication, and Martin was freedom, and Sapkowski was a pragmatic passion, were any of them really on any end of a spectrum? Was it foolish of me to even attempt to categorize them in such simple terms?

I sat for a long time pondering these differences and questions in an almost melancholy haze. I love writing, I really do. I love reading, I always have, but was I like any of these authors? Did I need to be? I honestly still don’t have an answer. I think I could study every author in the world and still not have that answer. And I’m coming to terms with that, slowly, but steadily. I don’t know if I can be like the greats I’ve idolized, but I know that I know that those sorts of worries didn’t stop them from doing what they love. Maybe I am all I need to be, maybe I’m good enough to write fantasy as I stand, as I write this conclusion. I end this journey with only one sure thing, I need to write. It's what they did, no matter what they had trying to stop them, they wrote, and people read. Passion for the arts is infectious, like a weed, and has a way of growing over past all the walls we’ve built up. All our insecurities lay like cinder blocks, powerless against the creeping vines of what drives us. One step at a time, I’ll work on climbing those walls, hanging on those vines. Each wall summited will be marked by my words like a flag planted at the peak of a mountain. This very analysis stands at one of summits, and I know there are many more to come.