For me, before literature came horror, but before horror was fantasy (first qualifier — yes, both horror and fantasy can be ‘literary’): Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydian, the Christian propaganda that is Narnia, Alan Garner’s Wierdstone of Brisingamen, various iterations of the Sword in the Stone — British and American young adult fantasy fiction, and craploads of it. I’m talking hundreds of novels, and except for those devoured by fire or insect, not a single book ever thrown away. My bookshelf could be catalogued by the colour of the paper — white (literature), ivory (sci fi), cream (horror) and beige (fantasy) — their antiquity denoting all the baby-steps in my budding literary consciousness.
I started writing stories, like everybody else, when I was a stupid kid. You write what you read, so I wrote thinly-veiled Hobbit rip-offs, with the usual motley crew of dwarves, elves, dragons and impressively hirsute men in hooded cloaks blasting evil-doers with liberal doses of ‘magic’ — splashing happily in the turgid slurry of fantasy tropes curdling inevitably towards cliche — Tolkien fanboy that I became, even though he was dead by the time I was five, I’m sure he felt the love. Subsequent authors like Philip Pullman, Glen Cook, Joe Abercrombie, etc. introduced me to the elf-free zone that is adult fantasy fiction, and that is where I live now. But, holy shit, how hard is it not to throw in a dwarf-by-any-other-name, or two! Cynical bastards that we are, give a squat muscular bloke a beard and an axe and all you motherf*ckers immediately scream “Gimli!”
The modern fantasist need a checklist or some other mechanism by which to control our natural inclinations, to fend the beast of unwitting intertextuality aside. In addition to a very salutary post from the inimitable Chuck Wendig (here), here’s a borrowed anti-trope checklist for keeping my epic high fantasy honest. As the author instructs, answer yes to any of these, throw that shit away and start again:
- Does nothing much happen in the first fifty pages?
- Is your main character a young farmhand with mysterious parentage?
- Is your main character the heir to the throne but doesn’t know it?
- Is your story about a young character who comes of age, gains great power, and defeats the supreme badguy?
- Is your story about a quest for a magical artifact that will save the world?
- How about one that will destroy it?
- Does your story revolve around an ancient prophecy about “The One” who will save the world and everybody and all the forces of good?
- Does your novel contain a character whose sole purpose is to show up at random plot points and dispense information?
- Does your novel contain a character that is really a god in disguise?
- Is the evil supreme badguy secretly the father of your main character?
- Is the king of your world a kindly king duped by an evil magician?
- Does “a forgetful wizard” describe any of the characters in your novel?
- How about “a powerful but slow and kind-hearted warrior”?
- How about “a wise, mystical sage who refuses to give away plot details for his own personal, mysterious reasons”?
- Do the female characters in your novel spend a lot of time worrying about how they look, especially when the male main character is around?
- Do any of your female characters exist solely to be captured and rescued?
- Do any of your female characters exist solely to embody feminist ideals?
- Would “a clumsy cooking wench more comfortable with a frying pan than a sword” aptly describe any of your female characters?
- Would “a fearless warrioress more comfortable with a sword than a frying pan” aptly describe any of your female characters?
- Is any character in your novel best described as “a dour dwarf”?
- How about “a half-elf torn between his human and elven heritage”?
- Did you make the elves and the dwarves great friends, just to be different?
- Does everybody under four feet tall exist solely for comic relief?
- Do you think that the only two uses for ships are fishing and piracy?
- Did it not occur to anyone in your world to invent basic devices like hay balers, water pumps, or winches?
- Did you draw a map for your novel which includes places named things like “The Blasted Lands” or “The Forest of Fear” or “The Desert of Desolation” or absolutely anything “of Doom”?
- Does your novel contain a prologue that is impossible to understand until you’ve read the entire book, if even then?
- Is this the first book in a planned trilogy?
- How about a quintet or a decalogue?
- Is your novel thicker than a phone book?
- Did absolutely nothing happen in the previous book you wrote, yet you figure you’re still many sequels away from finishing your “story”?
- Are you writing prequels to your as-yet-unfinished series of books?
- Is your name Robert Jordan and you lied like a dog to get this far?
- Is your novel based on the adventures of your role-playing group?
- Does your novel contain characters transported from the real world to a fantasy realm?
- Do any of your main characters have apostrophes or dashes in their names?
- Do any of your main characters have names longer than three syllables?
- Do you see nothing wrong with having two characters from the same small isolated village being named “Tim Umber” and “Belthusalanthalus al’Grinsok”?
- Does your novel contain orcs, elves, dwarves, or halflings?
- How about “orken”, “fae” or “dwerrows”?
- Do you have a race prefixed by “half-“?
- At any point in your novel, do the main characters take a shortcut through ancient dwarven mines?
- Do you write your battle scenes by playing them out in your favorite Role Playing Game?
- Do your female characters inexplicably wear a lot less clothing than your males characters?
- Have you every typed the words ‘comely wench’?
- Do inns in your book exist solely so your main characters can have brawls or hire henchmen?
- Do you think you know how feudalism worked but really don’t?
- Do your characters spend an inordinate amount of time journeying from place to place?
- Could one of your main characters tell the other characters something useful in their quest but refuses to do so just so it won’t break the plot?
- Do any of the magic users in your novel cast spells easily identifiable as “fireball” or “lightning bolt”?
- Do you ever use the term “mana” in your novel?
- Do you ever use the term “plate mail” in your novel?
- Heaven help you, do you ever use the term “hit points” in your novel?
- Do you not realize how much gold actually weighs?
- Do you think horses can gallop all day long without dying?
- Does anybody in your novel fight for two hours straight in full plate armor, then ride a horse for four hours, then delicately make love to a ‘comely wench’ all in the same day?
- Does your main character have a magic axe, hammer, spear, or other weapon that returns to him when he throws it?
- Does anybody in your novel ever stab anybody with a scimitar?
- Does anybody in your novel stab anybody straight through plate armor?
- Is there a talking bloody tree in your novel?
- Does your hero fall in love with an unattainable woman, whom he later attains?
- Does a large portion of the humor in your novel consist of puns?
- Is your hero able to withstand multiple blows from a battleaxe yet feels seriously threatened by a small woman with a dagger?
- Do you really think it takes more than one arrow in the chest to kill a man?
- Do you not realize it takes hours to make a good stew, making it a poor choice for an “on the road” meal?
- Do you have nomadic barbarians living on the tundra and consuming barrels and barrels of mead?
- Do you think that “mead” is just a fancy name for “beer”?
- Does your story involve a number of different races, each of which has exactly one country, one ruler, and one religion?
- Is the best organized group of people in your world the thieves’ guild?
- Does your main villain punish insignificant mistakes with death?
- Is your story about a crack team of warriors that take along a bard who is useless in a fight, though he plays a mean lute?
- Is “Common” the official language of your world?
- Did you draw the complete map of your fantasy world before you wrote the first word of your novel?
- Is the countryside in your novel littered with tombs and gravesites filled with ancient magical loot that nobody thought to steal centuries before?
- Is your book basically a rip-off of of LOTR?
- Read that question again and answer truthfully this time.