Why I Don't Write Fantasy (and Why I Do)

I have a complex relationship with fantasy.

For years, I skirted around that section of the bookstore—those dense shelves of mass-market paperbacks—if not with contempt, then with the same sort of disinterest I felt towards books detailing the rules to obscure sports or books intended to teach the colluded grammar of programming languages. My books were in the other sections—the ones labeled, generically, “Fiction” and “Biography” and “Poetry.” Sure, I read the whole Wrinkle in Time series as a kid and, being raised Christian, I grew up with The Chronicles of Narnia. I even read The Hobbit at an impressionable age (though I’ll confess, Gone With the Wind made a bigger impression at the same age). But, when it came down to it, I would say I wasn’t a fantasy reader.

I especially wasn’t a fantasy reader when I struggled through The Lord of the Rings trilogy, finally giving up halfway through the second book. I definitely wasn’t a fantasy reader when, after devouring the entire Incarnations series, I read one of Piers Anthony’s misogynistic author’s notes and connected the dots to the subtext in his books. And I won’t even get into how little of a fantasy reader I became after my attempts to read several of the great science fiction classics (certainly, fantasy’s sibling genre), when I decided, once and for all, to wash my hands of the whole nonsense.

And yet, fantasy is a huge part of my life. I play Dungeons & Dragons at least twice a month. I attend gaming conventions several times a year. My walls are decorated with a variety of signed artwork depicting wizards and monsters and humanoids with pointy ears. Plus, I watch movies in just about every genre. I read almost every sort of fiction imaginable. More often than not, both of those things are willing acts of participation in fantasy.

When he published my story, “Gone,” Jake Freivald, the editor of Flash Fiction Online commented on my remark that I don’t generally lean toward speculative fiction, saying, “Well, you can't get more speculative than having everything mysteriously vanish from your house, so I don't know that she'll be allowed to keep saying that.”

He was right, of course. Nothing's as clear as it seems. I spent two years editing those obscure sports books, I became infinitely more interested in dense programming tomes after my husband wrote one, and my relationship with speculative fiction isn’t nearly as simple as not being a fantasy reader.

Yesterday, I did an exercise from The Right to Write that asked me to list my favorite books and movies and to think about the common threads between them. I dutifully listed five movies and five books. None of the ten had dwarves, used made-up languages, or took place anywhere besides Earth, but once I started analyzing, the trends were undeniable. Six of the ten had fantastic elements. Four of those had either hidden worlds existing alongside ours or pockets of magic within the mundane world. Four of the ten involved spirits moving between bodies. These weren’t books or movies that would normally be shelved in the “Fantasy” section, but there it was. Even if they weren’t fantasy, they were, at the very least, fantastic.

I told a friend the other day that part of why I love the Japanese author, Haruki Murakami so much, is that he can make it rain fish from the sky and leave me thinking that not only is such an event is possible, but that it’s beautiful. I believe in that kind of fantasy, in the surreal and the bizarre, in the magic of an unexplained moment. That’s what I want to capture when I write.

I don’t want to write fantasy as I know the genre... and I’ve read enough to know that its conventions don’t make me feel at home. What I’m realizing, though, is I don’t want to write realism either. I’ve been stuck for a long time wondering where that left me, but now I know. I inhabit the grey area between the two, the place that’s right here on Earth, but where magic is possible. I guess the only reason I never called it fantasy before is because, in my mind, that place is very real.

1000 Actions
213. Wrote morning pages (MP), plus 45 minutes.
214. MP, plus 75 minutes.
215. Read a chapter in The Right to Write.
216. Read and commented on a piece.