The Key to Writing an Inspiring Fantasy Story
We love fake places.
I don’t smoke, but I can still picture myself with a long pipe and my feet up after a hard day of honest work tilling a field in the Shire.
(I’ll ignore the fact that I’m lucky if I can keep the lawn out front alive, let alone farm.)
And since you can take tours of the Shire set in New Zealand, I would guess I’m not the only one imagining myself in a different world...
...wandering into the majestic hidden refuge of Rivendell.
...sitting with friends in the common room of the Prancing Pony with a whole pint.
...riding over the open fields in Rohan out from a swift sunrise.
What is it about the fantasy genre that takes our imagination hostage?
It would be great to know so that we could turn around and write something as inspiring, right?
We’ve always loved fake places.
What inspired Lord of the Rings? Mythology.
Mythology is deeply seeded in every single one of us. Every generation. Every culture. We all explain the world around us with story.
From the time we could first communicate as a species, we took the opportunity to tell tales to each other. If it wasn’t painting on cave walls, it was stories passed down through spoken word from generation to generation.
An overwhelming amount of those stories revolve around a journey of some kind. Going into the unknown. We are driven by a need for constant discovery.
Sometimes it’s Jason on the Argo searching for something lost. Every corner of the world holds new wonders and new dangers.
Can’t tell if mythology or 2020
Or an exploration of the journey of death. More than one culture has a mythology about diving into the abyss of the afterlife. How could even the greatest hero return from a quest that takes them to a place so alien?
Speaking of aliens, fantasy doesn’t just have to be on solid ground. Do we think classifying a genre “science fiction” doesn’t make it fantasy?
As we grow technologically, we begin to wonder more about what lies out there across the stars. Again that sense of exploration drives us to imagine ourselves anywhere but here.
And it captivates us time and time again.
Why?
I ask genuinely. Why? The unknown is terrifying.
Every mythology and fantasy…every story ever worth telling has some kind of conflict. There’s something in the way of our heroes. And as much as I would have loved to see Jurassic Park be a successful business venture, it wouldn’t have made much of a story.
Evil stands between the characters and their goals. Noble people face that evil head-on, and the cowards flee, or worse, turn to join that evil.
Let’s jump back into Lord of the Rings because hey, I kinda got a theme going on here.
Sauron is the perfect example of the evil I’m talking about because he’s super evil. There’s no question about it. He will plunge the world into turmoil, leaving no good thing alive or free.
If you have breath in your lungs, it’s obvious that you should oppose him.
And that makes things nice and easy.
No, not easy to overcome him. But an easy decision on which side you should be on. To be “good,” you will stand and fight that darkness. Taking sides is a no brainer.
And we crave that.
We want clear cut good vs. evil. It keeps things simple. We don’t have to endlessly fight about what is right and wrong and instead dive into how we will face what’s wrong.
Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Elrond, Faramir, Galadriel–all face this evil together.
It’s a massive alliance of goodness that we get swept up in as we read.
It’s a common theme in our fantasy stories. Even our modern ones. It’s the Avengers teaming up and putting aside all their differences to face an evil far greater than themselves.
It’s Lando Calrissian saying, “there are more of us…” as the Millennium Falcon leads a thousand ships into battle.
It’s animated misfit toys banding together in Toy Story to overcome a brace-face asshole of a kid.
Dick
Our stories love a good team-up.
That’s because if we truly want to move forward. If we want to explore the stars and face the challenges that lie ahead, we must do so together.
We love the idea in stories that we overcome our differences, and history, and hurt, and mistakes, to unite.
If 2020 has proven anything, it’s that we do not live in a fantasy world.
We can’t even come together to fight a pandemic! What should be a great unifying event has only proven the deep canyons that have formed between us.
Protests have unveiled injustice that has always been there, whether we want to look at it or not.
We fear what terrible new thing awaits us around every corner. Not because we are exploring the mysterious unknown but because we hold our breath hoping it won’t reveal more divides that are already there.
But fantasy and storytelling are powerful tools to explore humanity in new ways.
What’s inspiring about fantasy is the conflicts show us a bit of ourselves underneath. That perhaps we can overcome our differences. That if things got worse and worse, we could come together.
If you want to write a successful fantasy story, you should keep human nature in mind.
Yes, you will need to build strange new worlds, people, cultures, cities, religions, and terrible things that lie in wait in the depth of the unknown places. But you will also need to reveal the secrets of what humanity brings to the table to overcome those challenges.
How will we stand together?
We love imagining living in a world where we stand and move forward together. A world where we can put our feet up after a long day, knowing that all of us are in this together.
We tell these stories generation after generation because we see ourselves in the characters. We want to believe that we are the ones that can face evil. We want to believe that we can come together and face the crushing oppression of anything that wants to take freedom away from good people.
Fantasy is inspiring because it does affect the real world. When we put the book down and head back into our lives, we see things a little differently. We have examples of how we need to act.
What is your fantasy story saying? What human virtue does your theme explore?
What will your reader feel when they have read the last page?
How will your story help us move forward together?
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