Magick and Lipstick Blog

I have decided to start posting a few writing articles which may be of help to fellow authors or those who are thinking of starting to write.
My first article is a bit of a tongue in cheek, piece which I wrote myself several years ago. If you have any articles you would like to send me to post,  up to 3 links will be posted with your article.
 Articles can be sent to, julie(DOT)darcy3(AT)bigpond.com
cheers

How To write a Fantasy novel. A bit of fun.

By Julie D’Arcy

Hero, Heroine Setting. Quest, Subplots and secondary Characters and Villains.

And perhaps a magical animal or 2 :-)

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What is a Fantasy novel?

At the heart, despite its infinite variety, a fantasy novel is always a journey.

Your main characters consisting of a Hero and a Heroine always leave their ordinary surroundings to venture into a challenging unfamiliar world.  It may be an outward journey to an actual place: a labyrinth, forest or cave, a strange city or country, a new locale that becomes the arena for their conflict with antagonistic challenging forces.

You could use this world, an ancient culture or a parallel world as your setting, but your reader has to suspend disbelief. ­ You have to convince your reader that the world you create is real.

In my second novel, Silverdawn,  I brought my characters Silverdawn and Fallen Malaan from the Fantasy World Rastehm to present day London to battle my villain, Iraj of Istani.  However, I would advise you to wait until you have at least one other novel published before attempting to bring your Fantasy novels into the present world as some readers find it hard to suspend their disbelief and find it hard to believe magic and fantasy can live in this world.

As well as our practical setting there are as many stories that take the hero on an inward journey, one of the mind, the heart, the spirit.  In any good story the hero grows and changes, making a journey from one way of being to the next: from despair to hope, weakness to strength, folly to wisdom, love to hate, and back again.  It's these emotional journeys that hook an audience and make a story worth reading.

Now let us speak of our characters in general.

Our main characters job is to solve the quest, defeat the villain and live happily ever after, but it is your job to put them through enough hell to make them worthy of this eventual outcome.

So, what kind of hero and heroine do you have? I bet they won't be a pair of peasant kids who settle down to live as serfs and share their mud-floored hut with the livestock. They aren't going to have to worry about starvation, privation, pestilence, taxes, tyranny or vermin - at least not for very long.

No, whatever else may occur in the course of events, your hero and heroine are going to settle down in the nice, warm castle and take good care of the peasants down in those mud huts. You aren't going to dwell on the fact that your lord and lady live off the backbreaking labor and brutalization of the folks down in the village. We treat the feudal system much the same way Southern characters in pre-Civil War novels deal with slavery. Those characters don't own slaves, and yours will treat the serfs in a kindly, paternalistic fashion, if the peasants get mentioned at all.

If they do start out as commoners they will most likely end up a king or prince or at the very least with a knighthood. Why is that? Because reality has never been, nor will it ever be, sexy or romantic. Fantasy is about glamour and action. In fiction we live vicariously, and these imagined people had better be better than we are, and lead much more interesting lives, or we might as well read a literary work and be depressed.

Fantasy writing is not about reality, it's about having fun. Our knights and ladies get to play dress-up for us.

Our heroes are warriors, our heroines noble ladies.

We glorify men who killed people. That's the reality, but the men we love to write about aren't murderous, greedy, stinking, illiterate louts. Our heroes are defenders of good against evil - who just happen to lop off a few heads in the name of justice and saving the heroine. Our heroes are never going to be, say, a handsome warrior bishop who rules a city and has six kids by his beloved wife. Because our modern sensibilities don't deal well with that image of a medieval priest, not because there weren't plenty of handsome and far from celibate warrior bishops running around the Middle Ages.

We are dealing with images. Our image of a hero comes straight out of medieval fiction - he's a nobleman, a knight who does mighty deeds, holds great estates and loves a lady fair to distraction. That was the glamorous image then, and it's the glamorous image now. The fact that most knights never owned land, and hence, couldn't afford to get married, is neither here nor there. Our hero's going to get married, and he's going to get married to an heiress, our heroine.  Unless he is already rich.

Our hero is going to be a mighty doer of deeds. He's going to be handsome, kind, clean, honorable, rich, tall, broad of shoulder, well-dressed, probably somewhere in his thirties, ride a stallion, be an accomplished and creative lover, be named something like Kale or Garret instead of Otto or Cuthbert.

Handsome by who's standards you may ask?

Ours of course.

Now, a medieval woman might have thought a man handsome if he bathed once a month, had all his teeth, not too many smallpox scars, battle scars, lumps, limps, or skin diseases.

Or was Kind?

Well, a medieval lady might consider her lord kind if he didn't beat her too often, and let her out of the house once in a while. Honorable? Honor was very much a man's prerogative in the Middle Ages, and its definition was not the same as ours. Honor involved feudal obligations, not the Boy Scout Manual.

Rich.

Wealth was measured in land.  In most Fantasy novels the Villain is trying to steal the land.  Whether it be the heroines, or hero's kingdom or the whole realm. Or perhaps he is trying to destroy it.  Either way land usually comes into the story somewhere. 

Villains are really into real estate acquisition.

Our hero will be Tall  At least six foot.

Now, I would like to say that this would make him a giant in the Middle Ages, since it's well known that medieval people were short. However, since it's known that William the Conqueror was about six foot tall, that Charles the Great was probably about six four, and that the Plantagenets grew large men, let's say that our hero was lucky enough to have the same sort of genetics mixed with the excellent diet that those royals had.

Broad of shoulder is also acceptably period, as it took a lot of muscle to swing a broadsword - those suckers are heavy.

Well-dressed?

Well, if he had more than one wool tunic with a bit of embroidery on it to last his lifetime that would constitute splendor in the real Middle Ages. But in the Fantasy novel you will invariably find your hero dressed in black and carrying an array of weapons which he is well versed in using.

Being thirty did not make one young in any era but our own, but the point is, we are writing for our era, and romantic heroes in their teens or twenties tends to turn off modern readers. The stallion is optional except for your hero's war-horse, but since riding a stallion sounds exotic, you might as well substitute one for the more sensible gelding for his everyday mount.

Our hero will most likely be flawed. Possibly troubled and wracked with some sort of modern neuroses. Instead of turning to the Church and his confessor like a good medieval boy, he will turn to the love of a good woman to cure his ills.

Or otherwise he may have a scar down his cheek or is blind in one eye and wears an exotic eye-patch.

Heroines

Now, as for the heroine, she will, of course, be beautiful, young, sensual, clean, kind, accomplished, willful, independent, opinionated, clever, musically talented, literate, and the leader of her people.

She'll frequently have healing powers, the Sight, practice magic, or cross-dress in men's clothing. She'll drive the hero mad with desire at first sight, but of course he won't admit it.

As for beauty, she'll be beautiful by our standards, probably with large breasts and magnificent hair. She will be lush, when the actual fashion was for sway-backed, narrow-hipped females with tiny boobs and pot-bellies. Look at medieval nudes. The women portrayed in those paintings are not beautiful by our standards, but they were the ideal of the time. An ideal we rightly ignore. And her name will be Rhiannon, or Isabeau, not the more common Maude or Bertha or plain old Marie. And why should she be saddled with a dull, ordinary, ugly name? She's a heroine! Young? Well, yeah, but I don't think we'll be writing about eleven year old brides in our books. Sixteen for the age of the heroine is about the youngest our modern sensibilities will let us get away with. And to us sixteen still sounds like a child.

Now your average medieval woman was indeed downtrodden, her life incredibly circumscribed no matter what her social rank. She had to be very careful and canny to get what she wanted. However, medieval women were not generally indolent, and your heroine is bound to be one busy little bee. That will make her more valuable in the hero's, and in society's eyes. Women worked very hard in the Middle Ages, as women have worked in every age, to make the world a more comfortable place for their men and their children. Even the highest born ladies of the land spent a lot of time spinning flax or wool into yarn, weaving, knitting, sewing, embroidering. Medieval women made things because they had to, and providing their households with clothing, bedding, hangings, bandages, diapers, menstrual cloths and every other use for cloth was a survival function and it was almost exclusively women's work. Not just clothing, but everything in a medieval castle had to be made by the people who lived in the castle, and this work was done, and supervised by women.

Despite reality, the heroine of a fictional fantasy might not know anything about household work, though how she got out of learning it is your tale to tell. She might run wild in the woods, communing with the spirits. She might be a scholar, train horses or sit around all day playing her harp. She might have a career that seems more appropriate for our post-industrial, everything instant, fast food, convenience store sensibilities than practicing the complicated and worthy profession of housekeeper. This is, after all, fiction, and modern fantasy women do not wear aprons. We are feminists, and our noblewomen heroines are as well (though personally I've never seen anything wrong with a feminist doing woman's work…it's the work that should get respect). Our heroines get to do things that most noblewomen would have considered beneath them, and downright illegal or heretical in many cases.

Since we are writing from a modern perspective about our heroines, our job is to come up with reasons why they get away with doing interesting things.

Our heroines can usually wield a sword or dagger as good as any man, wear a velvet gown well enough to drive our hero to distraction, and be magical, besides.

In the late twentieth century we have an enormous interest in angels, ghosts, fairies, witches, old gods, fortune telling, and occult practices of all sorts. Since this interests us, we write about it. Many of the things we have our medieval characters do would get them excommunicated at the very least in the Middle Ages. It was not a time of religious tolerance, nor was the practice of magic looked upon as a harmless hobby. Alchemy and astrology were considered sciences, and frequently practiced by churchmen, but heaven help the civilians that experimented in such things. The Church came down very hard with both feet on anyone, especially women, who practiced magic. Heresy had a very broad definition, and being accused of it could get you killed. Just ask the Templars, or the Albigensians.

But we live in a secular time, a more tolerant time. We see unicorns and tarot cards as essentially harmless - because we don't believe.

Or do we?

Some of us like our heroines to have a magical gift. So, to get around the fact that the Old Religion and psychic powers were sternly frowned upon by the Powers That Be, we'll let our heroine keep her gift, but set the story off somewhere on the supposed fringes of the Christian world - Celtic settings are always good for this kind of story. Make her Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Cornish…you might possibly get away with Breton, and magical stuff is okay. We'll ignore the fact that Ireland, Scotland and Wales were converted long before the rest of Britain, and emphasize the strain of mysticism in Celtic culture instead. That is if we want to keep your Fantasy in the real world or likewise you could create your own world using your knowledge of the medieval world.

As for our heroine disguising herself as a boy for one reason or another, in the real Middle Ages there were laws against it. Technically, that's what got Joan of Arc burned at the stake. However, I say that if Patrick Swayze and Guy Piece can dress up as drag queens for our entertainment, our Fantasy heroine can run off disguised as a squire to follow her hero on his quest, or to run away from the pursuing villain who she has vowed never to wed.

Trouser roles are perfectly valid fictional conventions, and the danger of its being forbidden can add tension and conflict.

Secondary Characters .  Here you can have some fun.

You could make up some really great weird and wonderful Race.  Or you can use one of the already proven identifiable races, such as Elves, Dwarves, ghosts, werewolves, unicorns, vampires, (you could even have a hero who was a vampire if you were so inclined.  Many great books have been written about Vampire heroes.  Or we could have my favorite, the Mages or Sorcerers.  In Time of the Wolf, my first published novel, one of the main secondary characters was the Hero’s Liege man.  The story actually starts with this character telling the hero's story.

Villains

Villains, could have some sort of magical power.  Classic Evil Sorcerer or sorceress type villain.  Or he could be the King of a rival Kingdom or the leader of an invading army.  Or again, a vampire. 

Now that it has been settled for better or for worse who your Hero and Heroine will be,  and have some idea of your secondary characters and Villains, you are set to write your story. Good luck!

Julie A. D’Arcy