Imported from The Editor’s blog…
I am a fantasy writer. I live in a world filled with dragons, knights, castles, and mages. Day and night I dream of battles and magical brewings, and heavy tomes of history and legend fill my bookshelf. I adore this genre. I love everything of it. And I love my role as a fantasy writer so much that I sometimes will prance about town in a Renaissance Fair dress for the heck of it, smiling at the people who stare. (What? Is my mantle falling down?) Many people also love fantasy, both reading and writing it, so I came to ask myself: why? Why do we love it so much? Why do I love it so much, so much that I spend hours penning thousands of words in this field?
Because fantasy is real, accessible, and fun.
Ask someone why they love fantasy. They’ll probably say it’s because fantasy allows us to escape our world and enter another one in which nearly anything is possible. But there’s more to it than that. Yes, it allows us to escape, but often what world are we escaping into? A world of terror and battle and frightening magic; maimed mages, lusty trysts, vengeful kings. You’d think if we were going to escape the realities of our world we’d hop on a plane to Happy Happy Land, but instead we go for the bloody, gritty truth of fantasy. Fantasy cuts to the quick of our human nature. It delivers tales of our essence—feuding kings, brave men and women trying to right wrongs, love, death, light, Gifts—with beautiful mystique and enchantment, enthralling us with admiration, wonder, and inspiration. The rawness and humanness of fantasy is believable. The characters’ pain and torment and sorrow and triumph, rendered even more delicious by magic and dragons, makes fantasy a seductive realm of intriguing, believable oblivion.
Despite the far-fetched spells and mystical conjurings of fantasy, the genre and its stories are grounded in reality. Often the realms are real places, medieval Britain, Renaissance Italy, the American Midwest. Or, if the author has invented a realm, the lands which these exciting adventures take place are based on our own; the realms could easily be behind my house, near your hometown, or just down the road. Think of the mountains of Gont from Le Guin’s Earthsea. The peaks are high and craggy, full of pines and streams. Those mountains sound very much like my native Rocky Mountains, and I feel, deep in my heart, that one enchanted day while wandering through my Rockies I could stumble upon a hidden path, walk down it, and emerge in Earthsea. It would be easy. Quick. Just one little jump into imagination, and I will find myself at Ogion’s cabin, amidst the trees. Thus, fantasy is not only believable but also accessible. It could be incredibly easy to find the realms the authors dream up if one is dedicated and imaginative enough, and this doubles the joy of reading fantasy, for we now can dream of one day finding this realm, and we hold onto that hope in some part of ourselves, the inner child that never really goes away.
Our inner child embraces and adores fantasy, jumps for joy while reading about the dragons, the magic stones, the adventures. Fantasy is, most importantly and foremostly, fun. We become key players in the fate and lives of kings, princesses, magicians. We become important, powerful, needed. We explore this realm right alongside our favourite characters, weeping with them, fighting with them, dying with them—but we know this realm is ours, and we can leave whenever we’d like, and we can return whenever we’d like, and we know our friends will always be there for us with a warm cup of mead, ready to share with us secrets round a fire beneath glowing stars. Fantasy allows us to live lives we never would otherwise have—a knight! A maid! A dragon!—and to live the lives with extreme abandon and utter joy, knowing that we can close the book, shut our eyes, and sleep peacefully in our beds while still living in spirit in a realm of spirited wonder.
Thus, fantasy is forever readable, inspirational, and relatable because it is these things. Believable, accessible, and fun. I’ll never forget the day I was inspired to begin writing fantasy when I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. It completely and univocally changed me and steered me down this path of writing fantasy, a path I immensely enjoy, and hope to always love.
These opinions on fantasy are, of course, only mine, and I realise not everyone likes fantasy as much as I do—let me know what you think of fantasy in the comments below!
Article © Belle DiMonté. All rights reserved.
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