This website serves both as a creative outlet and also a place for me to work on honing my writing craft. Beyond the practice this site encourages me to do, I will also take notes or note within books that I’m writing. Now, I don’t do this all the time, and certainly much of my reading is more about pleasure than a focus on leveraging it to better my craft. However, while recently reading through a book in this way I had a realization about limitations imposed when writing fantasy and, while I think it was something I knew, it wasn’t something I had articulated.

As an example let’s use a sentence from one of the micro-memoirs in Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating and Cooling:

He held it out to me, a tiny sword, cold as if pulled from the heart of a stone

The larger scene is about a man sneaking snacks of old McDonald’s French Fries (the tiny sword). The description of how cold, and thus likely how old, they are is well carried by description of the fry being as cold as if pulled from a heart of stone. However, the invocation of a sword pulled from a stone brings to mind the stories of King Arthur. That invocation then gives a certain reverence, a holiness, to this scene and how important this little indulgence is to the man.

It’s a beautiful scene and many of the micro-memoirs in the book are layered in this way where just a few paragraphs or even sentences create something much bigger.

Except we then come to my recent realization.  That reference to King Arthur wouldn’t make sense in a fantasy novel (or not at least one that doesn’t share some amount of Earth history). I could use a reference to King Arthur to help build reverence and the reader would likely know what I was getting at. Yet, at the same time that I was strengthening the emotions I was trying to invoke I would bring my reader out of their immersion. The reader would wonder how a reference to King Arthur could work when there is no King Arthur.

Writing non-Earth fantasy means losing useful short hands like that because there is no shared culture between reader and the text. Even if the author tried to have the text make a similar reference using the setting’s history it wouldn’t land as well because it isn’t foundational to the reader. It may have been setup and thus land like a callback in a good stand-up routine but for the reader it would only be something they learned earlier in the book, or in the series, and so not carry the same amount of weight as a folktale many of us grew up with.

“Fantasy can’t reference real world things,” isn’t a huge realization, but the depth of that limitation isn’t something I had thought about before.  I’m working hard to try and improve my descriptions and the images I invoke.  Not being able to make use of some of these short hand does limit my tool belt a bit.  Which really just helps me understand what I need to focus on to grow in this craft.

Regardless, always nice to see things in a new light. With any luck my writing will do that for someone one day.

Go forth and do good things,

Sean