I Don’t Read Much Fantasy Anymore

Over the past 15 years or so, I stopped reading fantasy. One of the reasons for that is the advice an author acquaintance of mine gave me back in 2001 or so: “Read outside the genre you write in.” The reason why didn’t occur to me until a few years ago, even though I did follow it.

It’s simple, really. When you write songs, your lyrics will, usually, reflect what you’re listening to. If you write rap and listen to rap, your lyrics will be similar to those performers. I listened to a lot of Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath back during my stint as a singer, my lyrics reflected theirs. Had I listened to more Whitesnake, my lyrics would have looked more like tongue-in-cheek sex poems and love songs (“Slide it in,” anyone?).

A musician has the same problem. If you listen to early albums of bands, they always reflect the bands that inspired them. In some cases this amalgam doesn’t go away.

It’s the same with any art form.

Back when I wrote the first Drangar novel, it looked like the stuff I was reading. And what I read was straightforward, streamlined plots, and heroic characters, because that’s what most fantasy is: (super)heroes. Howard’s Conan breaks the mold, but even he is virtually immortal. Howard wrote for a specific market, and pretty much every story is open-ended, for the simple reason that a good cook always wants his customers to return. Howard didn’t know which character and story would definitely resonate with pulp magazine readers, so he made sure he could continue the tales.

Nowadays, in the age of franchises, this marketability is omnipresent. Especially in fantasy. Back in the early 2000s, the Lord of the Rings trilogy raked in billions, as did Harry Potter. Naturally publishers, or rather their CEOs, aim to increase the company’s stock prices, more bestsellers generate more profit, more profit generates more interest in the company, more interest in the company leads to rising stock prices, which in turn leads to the managers option portfolio (they get their bonuses in form of stock options) growing in value, plus bonuses. It’s in their interest to generate sales, popular series will be replicated in the hopes of replicating said success, until they chase the next fad.

Thus a lot of fantasy fiction is formulaic. “An evil threat arises; the good people need rescuing; a hero or group of heroes stand against the rising darkness.” Everything else is just bells and whistles. Hero’s journey…

Intro, verse, bridge, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, solo, verse, bridge, chorus. The progression of rock songs. And if there’s only one songwriter in the band, the structure will inevitably be similar in every song. In literature it’s called tropes. I had read so much heroic fantasy that I began to hate tropes with a passion. I still do.

In a way, porn is the same as well. And while either might be quite satisfactory, the repetition of trope after trope, even with some variation (“oh, new position”) still remains the same. In fantasy it’s Lord of the Rings, the hero who is called to save the world and sets off with a variety of different companions to do just that. Back story, intricate world building be damned! It’s that formulaic approach of far too many fantasy novels I read that turned me off from reading any more of them. I have dozens of unread, mint condition books in my shelves, books I tried to read and put away because they were the same as the ones I read before.

Please don’t get me wrong, I love the books I read, I love the memory of them, even if I wouldn’t touch them or books like them again today. This isn’t my deriding those who still read or write them, it just isn’t for me.

I strive for authenticity and originality, even though I realize that all truly original stories have already been told. Authenticity. It doesn’t suffice to read books with big battles, even if those battle scenes are executed masterfully. If I read only fantasy novels with big battles, my big battles would look the same, and most of those battles have about as much realism to them as a tabletop game. The same goes for combat. We can learn the terms: strike, parry, feint, riposte – that’s easy enough, but that’s about as authentic as World of Warcraft. Again, please don’t get me wrong, I played EverQuest and World of Warcraft, and a few similar games. But I would have never turned my (lack of) experience with these games into fiction. Karl May, one of Germany’s all-time bestselling authors wrote riveting adventure tales set in the Wild West. They all were in German, deeply detailed in terms of landscape etc. May had never been to the US until long after those tales were published. Given that he wrote in the late 1800s, his only access to such vistas was black and white pictures – if that – and descriptions written in travelogues. And he wrote page after page of scenery chewers. Second hand experience is irrelevant if you don’t understand the underpinnings. If you only read made up stuff, your authenticity is nonexistent.

Originality… here it goes back to the Hero’s Journey. If your structure is that of all the hero myths, your story will look similar to those, and everyone else’s stories based on them. If you only read derivates of derivates, your work will inevitably be derivative. Even if you switch up the authors, odds are you still read formulaic stories, better written, maybe, but still essentially the same.

I don’t want that. Ever.

So what do I read? Nowadays, history, mostly. It’s not that I don’t like reading thrillers, whodunits, horror, science fiction, and even historical fiction, but my focus is mostly on my work, my world, my stories, and I want authenticity, and originality. 

Do I adapt certain ideas almost verbatim? Yes, but I always strive to put my spin on them. The Library of Breiamhbéo is one of those ideas. I can’t express how much I love the idea of a library gathering knowledge from all corners of the world, and what Ptolemy did when he commissioned the Library of Alexandria is the most perfect example I can think of. So why not create my own, fictional version of it?

Gathran’s Leghans are based on Roman Legions, their gear differs, certainly, but why mess with the overall structure?

I don’t have a problem with basing my world off history, it’s not original, but why reinvent the wheel? An author’s attention should be on the originality of the story, the verisimilitude of their world.

Readers have said again and again that my world feels real. And it is, in my mind and yours, because of the historicity of it all.