One of the most frequently asked questions I am contacted about is what advice would I give to someone who wants to get into writing fantasy fiction. Well, I usually get a little facetious at around this point and I can email back laconic replies such as: “Don’t!” or semi-apocryphal ones such as “You can’t get into fantasy fiction, fantasy fiction has to get into you”, but I am writing this post which means I am now full of remorse and ready to put some things right so, please, all of you with whom I was a little high-handed (but for reasons which as you will see are entirely explicable), please forgive me.

I am a little comfortable in the knowledge that if any of you I have been sort of cavalier with do “get into Fantasy Fiction” and then get asked the same question by a million aspiring wannabes you will give them the same short treatment and probably feel a lot less remorseful than I do right now.

So, before the mood evaporates and my cynical muse alights upon my shoulder from on high let’s get into the meat which is how, when, where and why. Assuming that Fantasy Fiction is not the name of a girl, what you are then thinking of getting into is a career that can be as uncertain as it can lucrative and as restrictive as you might, right now, think it’s liberating.

This is the reality of it. Fantasy Fiction along with its sibling, Science Fiction are twin forms of niche publishing which means that here, editors, publishers and publishing house readers labour under the impression that the field has a certain formula that is, to a certain degree, inviolable, and which must be adhered to in order to satisfy the fans and make money which will return, at least, the initial return on the investment of the writer that’s been taken on.

The formula treats fantasy fiction as a field where three goblins, two fairies, one elf, a halfwit hero and a knowing wizard have to face an evil greater than all evils and find a way to beat it before it destroys the world. Ok, my cynical muse is back, but you are in luck, I know a spell that can keep it at bay long enough for me to finish this post so you will, at least, get an answer that does half-justice to your question.

Publishers will tell you that what they want is originality and freshness (this is like asking for a fresh lettuce salad at your local hamburger joint), but what they really mean is that they want exactly the same lettuce salad they have always had which sells incredibly well provided you do not use the exact same gone-past-its-sale-by-date lettuce in it. That means no blatant rip-offs (though paying ‘homage’ to is Ok), no sex, no violence which is too graphic (that’s why we have horror, another niche market), no spaceships (that’s SF), no angels (too religious), no damsels (too unsafe in the PC age) and no banalities (even the most rough-hewn diamonds must be polite and curiously innocent of life’s wiles).

Provided you can put all that together in a way that forms a plot a five-year-old could follow and you have the kind of knack for nomenclature that creates a following, you are onto a winner.

This leaves us to consider whether there is actually a market in terms of material that’s new, may be brave or experimental, will truly stretch the boundaries of the genre and may even produce a success that is simply itself and crosses all genre barriers to appeal to everyone.

Sadly this is not likely to happen on your first fantasy fiction novel (or even your third) unless you happen to be lucky enough to end up with a runaway success (like Harry Potter) and then you can pretty much do anything you like because you have shown that you are actually smarter than the editors editing you and bankable enough to have real clout with your publisher.

There are many, many reasons why editors working in this field are not brave enough to go up against their exec bosses and promote titles which might actually break the mould but the overriding one (and here I speak from direct experience) is the fact that those who end up in this field are spent forces no one really listens to and have usually been relegated to this area because no one really knows what to do with them and those who start out in this field are so worried about upsetting the apple cart that they even consult ouija boards (I kid you not!) to decide what to say and what not to safely say in the editorial acquisitions board meeting.

So. Why? Why should you bother at all? If money, fame and a million followers are what you’re after I suggest you gas yourself now, fail at it but film the whole episode and post it on YouTube and that will get you noticed.

If you are thinking of writing Fantasy Fiction and provided you are not one of those whose experience of the real world is so limited that they can only safely write about something they conjure up in their minds (and if that’s the case you will fail and really you deserve to), then you are a traveller following a road, Ulysses responding to an echo of the sirens’ song, a seeker looking for a deeper truth that exists so independently and yet so removed from us it can only be expressed through a fictional tale that turns into a fictional tale by adopting the tropes of a fantastical theme within a fictional storytelling framework.

Ok, I accept you will need time to think about what I just said (clever though it may sound) but really the thing is you should only think about writing Fantasy Fiction if you can really ‘see’ the world in your mind’s eye, taste its bitterness and feel its sweetness and then understand what makes it tick and what makes you tick within it.

If  that’s the case the only advice you need from me is “go and do it” and worry not about rules, limitations,  trends or editors. The whole point about these things is that you need to do what you feel is your vision and worry about the aftermath later, if it’s a career path you’re seeking try Tesco , I heard their canned beans isle now has a vacancy.

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