Writing Fantasy/Sci Fi Novels!?
Hi there, Yes, I have written a fantasy novel. It took me ten years to write, revise, and finally sell it. I had a great time. I started with an idea. I created the main characters. I wrote a short story based on my idea and characters. But the story kept growing and growing, and soon I realized that I had enough material for a novel. So I began to outline. I detailed every chapter, and the outline kept growing, until finally it was fifty pages long. Then one day, I put a good CD into my portable CD player, took my laptop out into the garden, and began to write. I wrote based on my outline, following the plot, changing things as I went along. I kept writing until the novel was finished. The first draft was a mess. I revised, rewrote, polished, revised again, rewrote some more. I ran the book through a writers' workshop. This was my first novel, and I learned a lot during each rewrite. At the same time, I began writing and selling short stories, which further helped me learn the craft. Finally the novel was done. I sent it out to publishers, one bought it, and there you go. Good writers, I believe, write because they're passionate about their stories, and because they love good books. Find that story you really want to tell, and you'll learn the rest along the way. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask me! Thanks, and good luck with your novel. Daniel Arenson "Discover a world at the edge of imagination..." Firefly Island, a fantasy novel www.DanielArenson.com
Who do you think is the most cliched main bad guy of fantasy stories, evil warlord, evil scoundrel, or evil mage?
I think these three overlap quite a bit. They each have different styles and goals.The evil warlord collects political and military power. They often have a band of troops who do their bidding, and they often come into direct physical contact with the protagonist.The evil scoundrel is sneaky. They are looking to achieve more personal goals, and often go about it using ways that are considered dishonorable. They tend to try to avoid direct physical contact with the protagonist, but they often do come into direct physical contact with the protagonist.The evil mage uses mystical power to advance their own goals. They often are a social outcast for some reason, but not so outcast that they can't blend in with the crowd. They also avoid direct contact, but are also brought into direct contact with the protagonist by the story.The most cliche of these is the "overvillian" (a combination of all three of these archetypes). Their evil is driven by their scoundrellous lifestyle. They are dishonorable, as is shown by their delving into evil magics best forgotten. They use these magics to create an army (maybe an evil race of abominations against nature). They use their army, their magic, and their treachery to create a condition of insurmountable personal victory.That is until they are stopped by an orphan wielding the power of hope and friendship. Perhaps with a mismatched, ragtag band of outsiders, who don't get along at first, but come together after a journey that teaches them an important life lesson.
How do you create new races in fantasy world without falling into template?
A lot of it comes from deciding on a concept first before going into specifics. If you take this approach, there is a lot you can do.For example, say that you want a tyrannical race that lives underground. The most obvious inspiration would be dwarves, drow, or goblins, but these are far from the only paths you could take.For example, naked mole rats are an interesting animal that lives underground, so you could use them as a basis. Maybe start with thick-skinned, disease-resistant, incredibly durable creatures which cultivate tuber farms and build their society in a network of tunnels. Maybe their government is a repressive police state run by the queen, mirroring not only the social structure of the animals but also the structure of many real-world mining colonies.From there, you can fill in the blanks, maybe start figuring out their relationships with other races. History and nature alike are filled with all sorts of strange elements which you can pull from.
What would you say are the fantasy equivalent of the Time Lords?
Time Lords are pretty fantastical beings themselves, but they are rather close to another fantasy Archetype: that of the Elder Folk, also known as the Fae.Functionally immortal, impossibly advanced, with science that seems outright magical even to species fairly close to their level of advancement, often regarding the lower races (i.e; everyone else) with a haughty and arrogant sense of disdain, the Time Lords are very much like classical depictions of Fae in their status as a race of lesser gods seemingly above the rules of reality everyone else must abide by. For all their high and mighty notions of “not getting involved”, they often do so with impunity while taking care to cover their tracks with plausible deniability, or cause the evidence to be so easily misconstrued as something else no one who did not know of their existence would be able to recognize it.It is worth noting that Fae do exist in the “Whoniverse”, and that Captain Jack Harkness describes their natures and abilities in great detail, and they closely resemble Time Lords in their capabilities, but somehow even more advanced in that they no longer need technology to travel through or affect history, passing one way or the other through time and space as they please. Perhaps the Fae we see in Torchwood are an offshoot of Time Lord development, or a separate species that arrived at similar results via convergent evolution.No matter the answer, the Fae and the Time Lords are VERY similar, both on and off the screen.
Is Shrek a metaphor for black people?
Shrek is an 'Ogre', pretty much a variation on Orc/Trolls, and other such mythic creatures. These have their origins in Northern European folklore, and were adapted by 19th and 20th century writers like Tolkien in similar ways,and popularized by more recent fantasy writers and games into the form common now. Some might argue that the outcast figure portrayed in the film, a variation on already extant appearances, has a significance, archetypal or otherwise, in the outcast paradigm and intolerance, one form of which is racism and segregation. It's also reasonable to at least consider the portrayal of fantasy races in literature and film in social/moral, class and racial terms, without making simple assumptions about this. (The brigand-like industrial working class paradigm of the orcs in the Lord of The Rings might be taken as a good example, contrasted with the aristocratic blond elves; the presence of actual tribes who aid the advancing armies on Isengard offsets this assumption, but Tolkien use of this took on an industrial character particularly strong in the film due to his own dispositions.)
Name as many legendary and mythical places as you can?
I am creating a world similar to Middle Earth and Narnia, please help me name some places for example: The Sea of Boiling Blood or Plains of Bloodshed. go from mountians to sea to land any geographic thing you like One answerer named Sea of No Return, Burning Forest, Devil's Glutch etc, can you beat that? 10 pts with the most names and most creative names name as many as you can, thanks