The only way to help your unique literary voice grow and eventually sing like a glorious creature of wonder is to write what you excites you into a creative passion and brings you pure unadulterated joy.
I am sure that inspiration will strike multiple times - it always does.
My advice for aspiring writers is threefold.First, read as much as possible, both within and outside the genre you arem working in. By reading you hone your internal ear for style. Second, write. Everything comes down to it; unless you write, you are not a writer. Third, submit your work. But - stop chasing every seductive new market out there, and stop trying to write for the tastes of specific established professional markets and editors. That way lies mediocrity and eventual dissolution of your true voice, no matter how embryonic or pronounced it may be now.
Fantasy, at its best, is balm for the soul. But it is faulty logic to assume that balm is necessarily mind-numbing anesthesia.
True balm [of fantasy] takes away the painful irritation of life and simply heals, allowing one to begin anew. And that is what fantasy can do for us.
Clad in metaphor, the world becomes newborn to our senses, like a phoenix. It is the most effective fresh presentation of the elements of our life for our jaded, numbed, even ailing sense of imagination.
Because without such a reprieve we cannot pause and regroup and with the newfound strength go on to initiate that very change which is sorely needed by all.
We don't need fantasy to mess with our minds to the point of rendering us insane - real life horrors do that already.
What we need in fantasy is the sudden balm of clarity - a temporary reprieve from life's white noise and clamor of pain, a kind of time-out. Such clarity, a new perspective, is made possible by fantastic metaphor.
Thus, true long-term change is brought about not by destructive passion of the moment but by well-reasoned constructive action. Violent shock of Armageddon that leaves nothing in its wake but a blank slate is not a solution, only a postponement of progress.
Fantasy is not the literature of subversion of the status quo but of 'awakening to' the status quo.
Consolation has been wrongly reviled. Consolation is not apathy or inaction. It is not closing one's eyes to the evils of the world. Rather, consolation is the first step in regaining personal equilibrium and strength, which necessarily precedes the ability to act.
Fantasy plunders the well of our deepest selves for existent truth instead of creating new truths out of the illusory fabric of recent events or the flow of society.
I see no profound progress taking place when there is no hope, no inspiration, only drastic overthrow and rebellion. Before having a revolution of thought there must be real ideals to aspire to, and they are only to be found within.
I think fantasy literature is the one true literature of hope and imagination.
Some writers whom I respect very much, like China Miéville and some others of the New Weird, consider the true role of fantasy to be not Tolkienesque consolation but subversion - a kind of rebe Ûllion from complacency. Yes, I can see what is meant here. And I also see the need to change, to fix, to drastically improve the human lot.
No waving of enchanted wands but heightened perception. No magic objects, but a transformed and enhanced reality. No spells or chants, but the raw power of the human will to enact supernatural change upon the universal fabric. This is the kind of "magic" that fills Lords of Rainbow - elemental, organic, humanistic - an extension of reality.
My brand of fantasy is completely devoid of the traditional notions of magic as ritual. Instead I see the fantastic as a meta-layer of existence beyond the real world.
When reviewing my novel Dreams of the Compass Rose for the Magazine of F&SF, master fantasist Charles de Lint called it "engaging and resonant, creating a new mythology that feels so right one might be forgiven for thinking that it's the cultural heritage of some forgotten country or people that have been lost to history." This of course I take as the highest compliment, since it was indeed my sincere intent.
Everything I write now might have roots in myths, often disguised,often dissolved into new multi-ethnic myths of my own making.
I was nurtured on Greek Mythology and the classical epics. I lived and breathed Homer. Other mythologies - the Russian, the Norse, the Persian, the Indian, Egyptian, etc. - all came later. First and foremost were the Greeks, and they were all living in my head as though I were Zeus and they were a clamoring Chorus of Athenas.
My characters often start out with a loss of some sort, usually a loss of emotion or purpose or hope. What I do in the course of my writing is weave a thematic arc of fulfillment. It is my constant theme as a creator.
I love to fool my readers, but in a good way. If you've read any of my work, there's a good chance that at some point I surprised you.
Seems to me that there is no better way to experience the depth of loss than after the fact. No more powerful instrument of imbuing value in an object than parting with it.
And it is a quiet terrible thing, too, to discover the value of love this way [after loss] - when the object of love is no longer there, when love dies or goes away or changes. When it is too late.
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