Blog

On Writing Fantasy: A Swashbuckling New Adventure

Blog, On Writing, What I'm Thinking

Why did William Faulkner write 14 novels that occur in an imaginary place he named Yoknaphatawpha County? I can’t speak for Faulkner, but after writing several historically accurate novels, I have my own reasons for wanting to try my hand at writing about places that might exist, but don’t.

For better or worse, my stories have always been inspired by geopolitical events and family history. As a result, I’ve ended up writing stories that fall into the category of historical fiction. They take place in real countries—South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Latvia and Russia—and include particular historical events. Many of the characters are fictional, but in writing about the apartheid era in South Africa, or World War I and the Soviet Union under Stalin, I’ve had to familiarize myself with those historical times and places. To my surprise, that wasn’t a problem. I enjoy the research process, and I love talking to people about events I never experienced. It’s particularly fascinating to discover how differently people who lived through the same historical event can perceive it.

The problem for me as a writer is not learning about the history of a place; it’s the feeling of being constrained by a historical framework. For example, imagine I create a character who serves in the Napoleonic War in 1812. After the war, he marries an American and moves with her to the Wild West. Does it work for him to have a daughter who leaves for the West Coast on her 21st birthday and falls in love with her father’s distant cousin two weeks before the San Francisco earthquake? No, because the San Francisco earthquake occurred in 1906. Scratch that story.

But what if my character serves in a war that didn’t actually happen, and his daughter moves to a city that doesn’t actually exist? I am free to make the war whenever and wherever is convenient to the story. It can be fought with swords or muskets, bows and arrows, tanks or laser sabers. Or all of the above. My city can be anywhere in the world, and my earthquake can be a typhoon or a landslide or an avalanche. My heroine can be a titled lady or an escaped slave or a high-tech billionaire. I can even—if I’m sufficiently skilled—make my highly educated power-broker heroine fall in love with a sword-wielding, armor-clad warrior of the Ming Dynasty. All I have to do is provide enough detail so that the reader believes it to be real, and provide enough depth of character and emotional truth to bring my characters to life.

Faulkner did it his way; so did J.R.R. Tolkien in the Hobbit, and J.K. Rowling in the world of Harry Potter. Writing about make-believe places, whether they are based on reality or complete fantasy, has its own challenges. For one, the world a writer creates needs to be internally consistent — it needs to follow its own logic, its own laws of physics if you will. But, at least it doesn’t have to be externally consistent with historical fact, as well.

This new adventure in writing is turning out to be a lot of fun for this writer. Stay tuned to this page for updates!

Photo: Nick Kenrick/Flickr CC