by Lisa Hiton
From Shakespeare, to Alice in Wonderland, to Game of Thrones, the use of magic—a kind of unreality—has been a driving force in so many of our storytelling traditions. While we often look to how fiction can most realistically embody the human consciousness, fantasy reminds us that our consciousness can be complex and infinite—that in the mind, we can fashion and believe in worlds very unlike our own.
On Building Wonder
Fantasy writing is a hefty undertaking. For those of us who love and hope to write works in the tradition of, say, C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, or Lewis Carroll, we have to accept the exhilarating yet somewhat daunting duty to invent an entire world. J.K. Rowling brought us to Hogwarts. And for us to believe it, she addresses how it covertly coexists with it’s real and contemporary counterpart, the city of London. From teaching us magic, to developing the details (down to the butter beer) of Harry Potter’s reality, we are able to erect an entire and clear vision of this world in our mind’s eye. This is no easy task. Some fantasy writers invent whole languages, futures, and technologies to build a world from scratch.
“CURIOSITY. Nothing is more essential to a writer than sustaining an inquisitive nature—being actively interested in the world and the people in it. Curiosity reflects a willingness to be disappointed in a search for knowledge. Curiosity sends out a series of queries that exist for their own sake. And curiosity gathers back into itself anything that it finds, transforming what’s found in the process. Truly try to see everything as freshly as a child with an adult’s mind. The gathering of information—of textures, of anecdotes, of smells, of histories—should be non-judgemental and find pleasure in seemingly disparate, often contradictory elements. From the fusion of the elements comes an essential aspect of creativity. Curiosity is in a sense allied with qualities such as cleverness and with random collection—like a pack rat that accumulates buttons and bottle caps and scraps of paper without caring about the source of such items. Just because you’re busy or you’re convinced your daily environment no longer holds any surprises, don’t forget to be curious about the world around you.”
(p. 13)
Curiosity can be placed onto the most normal experiences of your own life. The stuff of our real lives can be molded into something far more fantastic, if only we look at such moments in life with wonder and a penchant for curiosity.
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff Vandermeer: Vandermeer’s guide offers hopeful writers of fiction (especially fantasy) a wider spectrum of what qualifies as “fantasy” than we’ve seen before—literally, as much of the book pairs ideas about writing and the fantasy genre with illustrative diagrams and images, thus creating a map of imaginative fiction.
Worldbuilding Inspiration
From Ancient times, to the Middle Ages, to our contemporary longing for those older times, fantasy and imagination have led writers down curious paths. A closer look at some of our most beloved fantasy texts can teach us how these writers have a perpetual sense of wonder about the world—the one around them and the one of their own imagining.
The Odyssey by Homer: Homer’s Odyssey is the epic poem sequel to The Iliad—an epic poem about the Trojan War. In The Odyssey, Odysseus has not yet returned from war because he has upset the god, Poiseidon. Odysseus has a wife, Penelope, and a son, Telemachus, who wait for him at home, where, year after year, suitors try to convince Penelope to betray him. His journey to return is rife with mythology, fantastic gods, and terrors of the sea.
- What in The Odyssey is “fantastic”?
- What about Homer’s text is “real”?
- What literary devices does Homer use to take the “real” and turn it into something “fantastic”? What about the reverse?
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski: This book addresses the lives of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams—four of the great fantasy writers in the English language. In a review of the book for the Washington Post, Michael Dirda remarks that:
“The group [of writers] shared a longing for that half-imaginary time before man’s alienation from God, nature and self, the time before the chaos and materialism of the post-industrial era had displaced the elegantly organized cosmos of the Middle Ages. In their various ways, each hoped to spearhead a rehabilitation, a re-enchantment of our fallen world.“
Using this quote from the Washington Post answer the following:
- Why is the aesthetic of the Middle Ages resurfacing in our contemporary fiction texts (eg, Game of Thrones)? What about our time or culture mimics this time? What about it has evolved from this time? What are the markers of the Middle Ages?
- What about the Middle Ages appeals to the contemporary psyche? What about it is better than our reality? What is worse?
Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling: The fifth book in the Harry Potter series sees Harry and his friends fighting new regimes at Hogwarts—namely, Professor Umbridge who has come to serve the darker efforts of Voldemort and his followers.
- The world of Hogwarts is very different than our own. What are some inventions in this book that are ingenious? Why?
- While none of us can ever know the magic of the wizarding world, there are some elements of this book that mirror our reality. What are they? How do the adults in the book participate in the world’s more fantastical elements? What about the more “real” aspects?
So, dear writers, take the curiosities from the world around you (no matter how ordinary it might first appear) to launch you into the wonder filled worlds of your dreams and imaginings.
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About Lisa
Lisa Hiton is an editorial associate at Write the World. She writes two series on our blog: The Write Place where she comments on life as a writer, and Reading like a Writer where she recommends books about writing in different genres. She’s also the interviews editor of Cosmonauts Avenue and the poetry editor of the Adroit Journal.
