by Jenna Kalinsky.
16 minute read
Fantasy novels provide readers with a wonderful escape into a fully realized other world rich with magic and supernatural elements. The reason fantasy novels are so popular—and inspire almost innumerable sub-genres and genre fusions—is the sky (or well beyond that!) is the limit, making fantasy novels a fun exploration into the unknown.
In these books, everything is new, and nothing can be taken for granted: paintings on walls can talk, cupboards lead to new universes, and creatures exist harmoniously or war on terms exclusively of the novel’s making.
(Remember the bread and butterflies in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? Lewis Carol’s 1865 classic is still a beautiful fantasy novel read today!)
All novels regardless of their genre require a lot of work, tenacity, and organization, but fantasy novels on top of that have their own specific needs, such as:
Our 10-step guide to writing a fantasy novel will ensure you are prepared for the exciting work ahead. Knowing what to expect at the beginning will help you feel a little freer to enjoy the process and have fun breaking new ground with your ideas- almost as much as your readers will once they have your book in their hands!
Like with any novel, it’s important that you arrest your reader’s attention by diving into the main problem or conflict of your story pretty much right away. The hook could be exclusive to a character, sparked by an event, or a “what if” question that must be answered.
Example: What if a young farm boy discovers he’s destined to overthrow an evil empire?
(Ooh, someone should totally write that!)
Consider things that automatically inspire action: a resource about to run out, a contest or a quest, the threat of war or a dictator gaining power, something has been lost that must be found, etc.
TIP: don’t beat around the bush by offering too much description of the world we’re in at the top of your story. While you do need to make sure your reader is happily ensconced in your world, your job is to do so while simultaneously presenting the tension of the primary problem. The sooner you introduce your hook, the faster you’ll invest your reader, and the longer you’ll hold their attention!
Fantasy readers love the genre because it provides escapism, complex lore, and fantastical elements. Fantasy novels can range from epic sweeping narratives (high fantasy) to having a grittier, more realistic tone with magical undercurrents (low fantasy). They can also merge into the now myriad sub-genres (such as urban fantasy, historical fantasy, romantasy, afro-fantasy, sci-fi fantasy, and so many others.)
When you’re writing your own fantasy novel, consider your target reader in order to meet them with level-appropriate content, tone, and themes.
Asking yourself these questions will help you hone in on your subject and both challenge and acknowledge your reader’s limits.
For example:
If they’re middle grade readers, you’d take a more wholesome approach, address scientific issues, or have a milder touch for the supernatural, and little to no kissing/sexy stuff (gross) —
Whereas if you’re writing for adult readers, you may include sexual content, literary elements such as elevated language and a more in-depth look into the characters’ struggles, backstories, and personalities, horror or graphic supernatural elements, or touch on more complex themes of philosophy, religion, or political symbolism.
[For further reference, check out our article “Sex and Swearing: How You Know You’re Writing YA Fiction” by brilliant OLP writing coach Rebecca Hales]
Indeed, while you may move into new territory with your work, your fantasy novel is still part of a canon of literature whose books all share common tenets. Consciously adhering to these will give your audience a framework of understanding the type of book they’re buying and about to sink into while giving you loads of room to innovate.
In the real world, we can take much for granted. When you grasp a doorknob and pull, you know the door will open. When you chew food and swallow, eventually you will feel full. Turning on the tap in the sink invariably leads to a clear liquid running out. Gravity. Your kid will 100% need a snack the second you get in the car.
And so on.
It’s the same for the fantastical world of your novel: everything the inhabitants touch, wear, eat, and do is also what’s normal for them. The one distinction is in the case of your book, you’re the one creating all the things your characters take for granted down to the tiniest detail. That’s a huge responsibility! (Erika Swyler, author of We Lived on the Horizon, calls it “set design.”)
The world of a fantasy novel must be thoroughly designed. When you begin what’s called “worldbuilding,” you’ll need to look at everything: the geography/topography, history, culture, politics, religion(s), economy, and transportation.
You’ll know how your characters receive nutrition, what their dwellings are like, and whether there are jobs or currency. How do they express emotions? What are their basic needs to stay alive? What happens in the sky? (Is there even a sky?) Who are their enemies? Do they have pets? Go to school? Do they sleep? The list is endless.
Already you can see that the options for worldbuilding are endless. And so, a word of caution: while you will do a great deal of worldbuilding for the purposes of writing your fantasy novel, not all of it can or should make it onto the page. Like with any novel, you want to give the reader enough of the world to feel secure in the environment, then you can drip out additional details throughout to make the surroundings richer and more known.
Even if the reader doesn’t see everything (and shouldn’t—otherwise your book could go on forever!), you will know how everything looks, smells, tastes, sounds, and appears. That awareness and intimate knowledge will influence your writing and ultimately make the world of your book that much more immersive and engaging.
Your world may have magical kingdoms (The Chronicles of Narnia), alternate realities (His Dark Materials), or be inspired by real history or mythology that veers into new directions (The Witcher). It could be the floating city of Laputa in Castle in the Sky or Hogwarts in Harry Potter or Oz in The Wizard of Oz.
What readers love is to be entirely transported into an imagined world far away from their sink full of dishes, their jobs and kids, and for the time they are in the pages of your book, fully submerged in a new and awe-inspiring place.
Your world’s fantasy can range anywhere from 1% to 100%. For example, your fantasy novel’s world may lean toward the truly fantastical such as N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series with its invented Middle-earth that has distinct regions, languages, and races. Or it can blend “reality” with the invented, such as in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.
How much or little you make up is totally up to you, but the one important rule is to be consistent.
For example, if your story includes magic, you’ll want to define the limits of the magic, the costs of using it, and how it fits into your world organically such as in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, where magic is based on burning metals to gain specific powers.
TIP #1: Use this list of 300 questions to help you world-build your fantasy novel. TIP #2: Use a Writing app such as Miro to help you with your worldbuilding, Evernote to house your notes, lists, and photos/illustrations, or keep a spreadsheet or a Word doc list.
TIP #3: Access our comprehensive (and reusable) Style Sheet to keep everything noted, so you can easily standardize details, proper names, settings, and so much more across your manuscript.
Now is your time to have some fun- as you develop your characters, you can imagine your greatest questions being answered (see #1). Your main character (the protagonist) will be your hero or anti-hero who will be challenged or tasked by an external force or event or by an internal desire to go on a journey and find what they are looking for or to solve a problem.
Like your world, you can decide how much human-type characteristics you want your characters to have. They may be extraordinary or possessing powers such as sorcerers, dragons, or immortal beings, like Kvothe in The Name of the Wind, or Daenerys Targaryen and her dragons in A Song of Ice and Fire.
They can also deviate entirely from human-normative and be monsters of any kind, animal hybrids, mythological creatures such as elves, or anthropomorphized nature (a talking tree that flies spaceships like Groot in the movie Guardians of the Galaxy? Why not?)
Protagonist: to ensure you have a dynamic and complex protagonist, atop their goal or challenge, you’ll want to create them from the ground up—like how you’ve done with your world—including their strengths, weaknesses, inconsistencies, and how they will change and grow over the course of the book, both from falling down, and from achieving their goals.
For example, not all heroes want to be heroes, such as Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, who comes to his journey reluctantly, and over the course of his quest, finds his inner strength and becomes a hero.
Antagonist: when you create the foil to your protagonist, you’ll again want to make sure they’re complicated. Dive into what makes them tick and motivates their actions, while also finding empathy for how they became so dark or scarred.
Example: The White Witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is driven by her desire for power and control or Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series was orphaned as a child and fearful, which drove him to seek control and power.
Supporting Characters: make sure the supporting characters have their own rich lives and depth and aren’t simply foils to serve the protagonist, which can feel flat and unsatisfying. For example, Hermione and Ron are well-drawn with their own backstories and character traits to round out the trio of friends in Harry Potter.
Again, as with your worldbuilding, you will also want to paint your characters so you can see them and get to know their physical bodies, habits, and behaviors. Stock or stereotyped characters are a lost opportunity in a fantasy novel to add more depth and innovation to a story. As a rule, if you’ve seen a character before, veer away to create something new.
In #1, you arrived at the premise for your story, or the “hook” (the problem or “what’s at stake”). The hook will drive the plot, or the causal relationships between events and characters, pushed forward throughout the book by the protagonist’s struggle to achieve, fix, or survive.
In the case of a fantasy novel, that struggle is often called the “hero’s journey” or “epic quest.” These plot frameworks propel your character(s) to go out into their world to find something, solve a problem, or save their people from danger. This presents the ideal structure for a fantasy novel because your protagonist or group of characters experience moral and physical challenges, often struggle between good and evil, and see themselves grow and change throughout the story, ultimately becoming entirely different by the end.
If you’re keen to upend traditional linear plot structure, you could also try:
An episodic approach (such as Martin Scott’s Thraxas series or Katherine Addison’s The Angel of the Crows)
A more modern structure such as linked short stories (The Dying Earth by Jack Vance, a “mosaic” collection of several authors such as George RR Martin’s Wild Card series, or a narrative with multiple protagonists, like C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia or Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife.
Good vs. Evil
The plot in a fantasy novel will often highlight a battle between opposing forces (typically good v. evil) which can symbolize larger philosophical or moral dilemmas readers face in their daily lives.
This addition to the plot can add greater stakes and ramp up the drama in a more global context than the plot being focused solely on the protagonist’s immediate journey.
Once the plot is in place, you’ll want to create a structure for your story (the individual events that happen across the book that serve to fulfill the plot). The most typical structure for any novel is the three-act structure, inside of which you can create the hero’s journey arc.
With the three-act structure, you will identify the major events or plot points along the arc of the work: the hook or inciting incident, rising action, climax, and resolution.
Example: In Eragon, the protagonist’s journey begins with discovering a dragon egg.
Next, weave in some subplots or secondary storylines, which deepens the characters and enhances the drama.
The Big Takeaway
Often, fantasy novelists will need to write a fair amount of the story before you see what your theme will be. The theme of the book is the “big idea” that underpins the story and leaves a lasting impression on the reader. Common themes in fantasy novels are:
Further, your story may comment on its theme (such as “the corrupt may triumph in the short term, but the good always win in the end”).
Examples: Ged’s journey to master his powers in A Wizard of Earthsea or Lyra’s moral and emotional growth in His Dark Materials.
Ideally the theme will creep up on the reader because of the characters moving through the story and events unfolding rather than from an overt reinforcement from you, the author, telling them what your theme is. This unconscious revelation for the reader is one of the most fun aspects of reading a novel.
Tropes
Fantasy novels explore universal themes through allegory or myth, such as the battle between good and evil, the hero’s journey, or the power of destiny. Common tropes include chosen ones, magical quests, or ancient prophecies.
If your fantasy novel has elements of the “real world” in it, you may also explore contemporary issues such as premarital sex, equality, racism, or relationships that may be shown through the metaphorical lens of magic.
Examples: Lisa Goldstein’s The Dream Years, which looks at “the complexities of attempting to alter history while questioning the role of destiny and the power of creative expression,” or Soul Eater by K. W. Jeter, which challenges the idea of good versus evil.
Mythical and Archetypal Themes
Like with tropes, fantasy novels also draw on myth and archetype, such as the chosen one, the wise mentor, or the dark overlord. These amplify the protagonist or antagonist’s struggle and offer opportunity for you to lean into their historical use such as with the reluctant hero in The Hobbit, the ancient prophecy in The Wheel of Time, or upend them in a more modern context.
There’s only so much you can prepare in advance. But that’s fine because once you get into the thick of the writing, you’ll organically come up with more detail to enhance the world and its operations.
And, as they say, the world is in the details:
☞ Map Creation: Draw a map of your world to keep track of locations and distances.
☞ Language Development: If your world includes unique languages, develop consistent naming conventions or linguistic rules. Dune, for example, includes an entire glossary!
☞ Mythology and Lore: You may rely on already-existing myths, but you may as easily veer off into new territory. Write background stories, legends, and histories to add depth to your setting and characters.
☞ Have an Engaging Opening: Start with a scene that hooks the reader and establishes the tone, stakes, or main conflict.
Example: The Hobbit begins with Bilbo’s peaceful life being interrupted by his having to go on an adventure.
Enjoy yourself- this is your chance to put all that worldbuilding into action!
☞ Show and Tell: Use short vivid descriptions mixed with action and dialogue to reveal the world and characters. Lengthy descriptions, while fun to write, and for some nerdy readers, fun to read, by and large are what people skip. Keep your details alive by sprinkling them to keep things moving.
☞ Balance Action and Reflection: Alternate between intense moments and quieter scenes to maintain a healthy pacing. Too much of a good thing becomes less good, so while you may have a blast writing a detailed fight scene that goes on for 18 pages, later in revision, you will want to either whittle it down to keep the plot “traveling” forward or intersperse the fighting with other narrative.
☞ Dialogue: Make conversations realistic, serving to develop characters or advance the plot, but not so realistic that the characters chat back and forth without purpose (like real life conversations about the weather!).
Knowing the different logistical stages you will go through to write your fantasy novel will show you what you can reasonably expect to accomplish at any given point in the writing.
Without being aware of what is considered “normal” to experience at different phases of the work, you may get overwhelmed and frustrated: perfect conditions for putting your book down and never going back to it.
☞ First Draft: Allow yourself to write imperfectly; focus on getting the story down. Yes, your writing will be messy, and misspellings and disjointed ideas will appear throughout. But the more you barrel ahead without looking back, the more you will have a completed draft that you can later edit and make as refined and perfect as you like.
☞ Revise: Revisit your draft to tighten pacing, clarify world-building, and strengthen character arcs.
☞ Feedback: Get a comprehensive manuscript evaluation from a professional editor that shows you exactly what your manuscript needs to become publishable. Or if an evaluation isn’t possible, share your work with trusted readers or a critique group for lighter constructive input.
☞ Polish: Refine your prose, ensuring grammar, spelling, and style are consistent.
☞ Editing: Have a professional editor help you ensure the story is lean, cohesive, and fluid; the characters’ development is well-paced, and they’re shown as fresh and dynamic; and the other elements are innovative and highly readable.
☞ Publish: Here’s where you’ll want to do a bit of legwork to understand the industry and get to know your priorities:
The #1 way to gas up your creative car as a fantasy novel author is to read and read widely. You’ll do this to bring in abundant ideas as well as to avoid inadvertently borrowing (or outright stealing) from one book or another. [If you’re too familiar with one book or one author, it’s simply too easy to parrot them.] It’s also helpful to do deep dives into the world histories, cultures, and myths your book addresses or that are your story-adjacent.
The best time to begin championing other authors’ fantasy novels is yesterday.
Why is supporting seemingly competing works important? When it’s time for you to publish yours, you will want to be part of a warm reciprocal relationship with other authors writing in the same area as you.
Share the books you’re reading on social media, have your book club read them (and invite those authors to join via Zoom for extra cool factor), request books from the library, and comment on other authors’ posts.
The more you engage, the more other writers will engage with you and help promote your books. These grassroots marketing tactics (which also feel nice) is how books make it into readers’ hands.
*Here’s a list of 20 book marketing techniques you can use to get your work out into the world.
Fantasy novels offer limitless creative possibilities. By combining strong storytelling, imaginative world-building, and relatable characters, you can craft a tale that resonates with readers and transports them to another world. How fun is that?
We are here to help you write your fantasy novel (and your next, and your next!)
Try our Write Your Novel in 4 Months Program to knock out your first draft in 4 short months or work one-on-one with one of our writing coaches to customize your support, get insights, guidance, and literary partnership, and see your book come to life!
Contact us any time to talk about your goals and how we can help ~
Our 4-month Mentored Book Programs, Online Courses, & Writing Coaching and Editing Hours. From November 21-27, 2023