Most are common sense, but I thought it’d be a good exercise for me to sit down and think, ok, if I want to pick up a fantasy novel I’ve written, what do I want in it? This is from the approach of ‘write what you want to read’. My latest novel idea I believe will just be called Skylands, or at least that will be the working name. I want to write Skylands from a mix of perspectives/techniques I’ve read about:
*Write what you want to read
*Let your characters talk to you and come alive as they tell your story
*Write what your heart/soul really are just dying to tell
So, here’s a go at what I think should be in Skylands:
*Fun, fast paced adventure
*Spells, magic, and wizards
*Fantastical creatures (flying, swimming, magical, strange bodies and abilitites)
*Races with complex histories, religions, and rituals. I want them to have entire mindsets radically different from each other and humans. I yearn to create a race like the sharers from Joan Slonczewski’s Door into Ocean.
*Rawdy tavern scenes filled with drunken brawls and mysterious strangers in dark corners, huddling over ale as they tell tales and warm themselves by the fire against the howling wind and piercing cold rains
*Betrayals
*Traps
*Multiple storylines threaded together
*Unusual characters of a wide range of types (fighters, thieves, wizards, simple people, people driven by fears and passions)
*Good vs. evil
*Twists and turns in the plot that readers see coming, and some they don’t expect
*Multiple unusual, beautiful settings. Ancient ruins, castles in the clouds, Eternally dark, dismal, evil forests
*Cliffhangers/hooks for future stories
*Yet a good wrap up at the end that finishes most storylines
*A rich, complex history of the world that shows it has been very different in the past (dead gods and races)
*Religions (varied in their goals and beliefs and how their believers act)
*Heroes who raise above their meager beginnings and own limitations
*Let the reader know someone is evil ahead of time (foreshadowing)
*Failure, and later redemption