According to the dictionary: Fantasy = hallucination, a creation of the imaginative faculty whether expressed or merely conceived, or the power or process of creating expressly unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need.
Wow, makes me sound like a hallucinating psycho. If that isn't bad enough, wait till you get in the middle of a discussion as part of a fantasy writers group. There are just as many opinions on what constitutes true fantasy as there are people participating.
I'm amazed at how adamant some folks are over whether or not dragons, elves, orcs, etc. belong in fantasy. Of course, fantasy has to have magic, doesn't it? Not according to certain members. Others felt that a fantasy had to be set on another world besides our own. What if your story has none of these things? Is it still considered a fantasy?
As far as I'm concerned, the sky's the limit when it comes to fantasy. Like the dictionary says, whatever you can create in your imagination is fantasy. It could include all of the things listed above, or none. I once had a judge for a short story contest mark me down because he couldn't place which country or time period my story occurred in. I was tempted to write him back and tell him I didn't know either. It only existed somewhere in the depths of my mind.
If you can imagine it, write it. Who knows what fantasy worlds are lurking in the infinite universe of our imagination.
Gotta go! I feel a hallucination coming on.
Thanks for reading.
You pose a good question. What is fantasy?
ReplyDeleteI can understand that the question might spark an in-depth debate. I tend to lean toward your assessment of it.
It is interesting that Science Fiction and Fantasy are grouped together in the same genre. I suppose there is a fine line between the two.
For instance, there could be a place where all the people are faery like, with all the trappings we normally associate with faeries. Start the tale there and we have a fantasy, then a spaceship from Earth lands and now it’s a sci-fi.
Someone made a comment that they didn’t have to be accurate because it’s a fantasy and they can make up their own rules. I think the person was speaking tongue-in-cheek, but did raise the question as to how many people that write in that genre are lazy?
Lazy in the way that they can defy rational laws of nature without justification. The fantasy market is saturated. It takes a clever mind to weave a fantasy tale in a new and different manner that holds the interest of the reader. It doesn’t take long into a book to tell the difference between a thoughtful writer and a lazy one. One writer will have legs and the other will drop away into obscurity.
Maybe because the Fantasy market is so saturated, people are desperate to find their own little space in the sea of stories and create sub-genres to fit into.
ReplyDeleteI just write my stories the way I enjoy and let them fit in where they may.