Fantasy Writing Tips

Fantasy Writing is one of the most magical genres to write in. It features unicorns and dragons, wizards and goblins, witches and kings.

As someone wanting to write fantasy, you must know it is one of the most fun genres to write in. It feels magical, and that’s important, because readers will be able to tell if you enjoyed writing it.

And so, here are the steps to fantasy writing.

Defining Fantasy

To start, you are going to want to define fantasy. This is the first step in writing it, after all, knowing exactly what fantasy is helps to write it well.

The definition of fantasy is: Fantasy is a genre of fiction set in a fictional universe, often, but not always, without any locations, events or people referencing the real world. Most fantasy uses magic or other supernatural elements as a main plot, element, theme, or setting. Magic and magical creatures are common in many of these worlds.

That’s a very long definition, but it gives you what you are aloud to work with.

Study Classic Fantasy for Useful Insight

To become a good fantasy writer, it’s important to read and learn about fantasy stories. Doing so helps to keep your mind open and helps you to come up with new ideas.

Of course, you don’t need to spend every waking moment before you start to write studying. Make sure to take it slow. It’s not a race.

Once you have everything you want to study done, start to come up with a basic plot for your fantasy story.

Make Sure Your Fictional World Offers a Strong Sense of Place

If you are writing a fantasy story, chances are that you have a whole fictional world that goes with it. As a fictional world in a story, you’ll need to make sure it sounds and feels real to readers.

A very good way to build up your world before you start any major writing is to draw a rough map. It doesn’t have to be a very good map, or one that’s even going to be seen by anyone but you. The way the map will help is to give you a way to keep track of where towns and cities are, mountains and deserts, and where the ocean is.

Once you know all that, and you have a plot figured out, you can start writing.

Avoid Fantasy Cliches

We all know what a cliche is, and we all know how irritating they are. That’s why it’s important to avoid them as much as possible. Always try to find something not cliche to write about.

Of course, it doesn’t help that so many cliches seem to be true. So that is where you’ll need to become creative.

In fantasy, a major cliche is stereotyped characters. There’s the chosen one. A wise old mentor. A woman who surprises men by actually fighting. A lowly servant who rises to greatness. And we mustn’t forget about an orphan whose parents were actually rich and they never knew.

A good way to rise above these character cliches when writing is to put a twist on said cliched character. The chosen one is just a fake myth, and only used to make people feel safer. The wise old mentor is really the villain. The woman who fights is actually not very pretty. The lowly servant rose to a position of power through the use of poison, and not honorable means. The orphans’ parents were nobody important.

By taking any cliche and writing it by changing small parts of it, it ceases to be a cliche and instead becomes a fresh and new idea.

Make Your Character Complex

In any story it’s important to have complex characters. They add interest, seem more realistic, and will make more people become emotionally invested in the characters. But how do you make characters complex?

well, there are many different ways to do this, from planning every action they take and a logical reason for it, to the characters whole backstory. The simplest method to start with though, is the ‘For every action, there is equal and opposite reaction’ method.

This method relies upon the idea that every action a character takes will have a reaction, and that reaction will cause the character to take a new action. To use this method, you plan out how your characters will react to different scenarios realistically, and how they will continue to have these scenarios affect them later on.

The scenarios that you have written characters for your characters don’t have to be true, they just have to handle a variety of different situations that might be dealt with by the characters or might be similar to situations the characters will deal with.

Plan Ahead

As always when writing a story, it’s important to plan ahead. You need to know where you’re going, where you start, and how you’re going to get where you’re going.

To plan ahead is simple really. Take a few days or however long you feel like to plan your story. It doesn’t need to start as a complex plan. It can start as a simple idea and move from there.

Once you have the basis of your story, build it up. Start to figure out what characters will be in your story, what the end goal is, and if the end goal will ever be reached.

That may sound like a very silly question to work on, but many fantasy stories have been written to leave it open ended, where the goal may not have been reached, and it may have been reached.

Write Fitting Dialog

Dialog is an important part to every story, especially in fantasy. This mostly has to do with fantasy taking place in a medieval style world, where speech patterns are different.

So when writing fantasy, it’s important to always keep in mind how speech patterns will appear in your story, and weather you do want them to mimic a medieval world. Not every fantasy does happen in the past after all.

There you have it, the 7 steps to writing fantasy. You are now ready to write your own story. So go ahead, create your masterpiece.