Character & Plot Development Articles

If you take out the detail of fantasy and boil it down to the skeleton of its plot, the result is nearly always a lot of unexplained magic. That has a quite a peculiar effect.

Game of Thrones: There was once a girl who raised three dragons and set out to conquer the world.

Lord of the Rings: There was once a hobbit who inherited a ring enchanted by a fallen spirit and destroyed it to save the world.

Harry Potter: There was once a young man who defeated an evil wizard.

The stories immediately begin to sound like fairytales. At its heart, high fantasy is what happens when a fairytale-style plot is sufficiently elaborated upon. The magic is explained and systematised; where a fairytale says, “there was once a witch”, fantasy explores what witches are and where they come from, how they live, the culture of witchcraft. It builds its reasoning from the ground up, brick by brick. It becomes sprawling and densely populated because often it isn’t about a unifying plot, but a common world. Everything else about high fantasy is shared with fairytales – settings, objects, stereotypical characters, stereotypical plots. It’s world-building that separates them – and, therefore, length.

To write short fantasy is very difficult. If the usual big-fantasy detail is taken out and you only sketch a plot, you get a fairytale. If you write real high fantasy in 4,000 words, details and all, it tends to be a snippet, not a story. If it’s something set in a basically real world but with a fantasy element, it’s not fantasy so much as speculative fiction, or alternative history, or a ghost story. That means that there is an incredibly narrow taxonomical window in which short fiction can be recognised as fantasy at all. What we recognise as fantasy is long. Sometimes really long.