Link taken from... somebody....

[conuly]

Oh, my god. How wrong can she get?

Well, let's see. In the very first rule of fantasy she states that it must take place in a premodern world. Why?

Neither magic nor adventuring quests can be believably set in a modern, logical and scientific world (while science fiction can).

Young Wizards? Chrestomanci, which is close to modern? Harry fucking Potter, for god's sake?

My head is already hurting, yet still, I must read on....

It gets worse, if you can believe that. Oh dear. Is it all some sort of subtle joke I'm not catching?

Comments

[moggymania.livejournal.com]

If you want to be technical, at least one of the Chrestomanci books *was* modern when it was written. :-)

Her page in general makes no sense -- I wonder what would happen if we wrote her with counter-examples...

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

...so the 'fantasy' in 'urban fantasy' is just there for window dressing? Neil Gaiman and Charles DeLint will be disappointed, I think.

[conuly]

Bet she wouldn't add them to her FAQ...

I plan to, though. I'm coming up with more just off the top of my head - Artemis Fowl, Wrinkle in Time, this book I have called the Genie in... I don't know, Time Square? Whatever, point is it was written and set in the 60s - 70s. The Ogre Downstairs, at least a few of the books by Vivian Vande Velde....

[conuly]

Apparently.

[raleighj.livejournal.com]

Dear lord...

No, I don't think it's a joke. She manages to throw in some useful advice along with all the dreck, but this would do FAR more harm than good as a whole.

Another favorite: "There must be a significant population o 'have-nots', for it is from the have-nots that the hero (or the hero's motivation) will emerge."

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

Oh, she's got to be kidding. The first series that comes to my mind (besides the Harry Potter books) is the Dresden Files, but God knows there are other ones. Hell, I'm working on a fantasy series set in modern-day Scranton, for crying out loud. Works fine for me.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Her "workshop instruction" reminds me of the writers' guidelines from a genre publisher that I actually considered writing for years ago - until I saw their writers' guidelines, that is! Their definitions and expectations of horror and fantasy were so bad, so limited, so cliched and out-of-date that I realized they had no earthly idea about what they were publishing... except that it sold, and so they must be doing it "right."

Apparently, this is where the bad genre writers come from: publishers, authors and workshop leaders with ideas like these.

[fledchen.livejournal.com]

Oh, damn, I guess my story about werewolves and psychics at University must be science fiction...

[amarafox.livejournal.com]

What about things liek Shadowrun that some class as SF and I would class as Technofantasy because of the mix of dark future, cybernetics and magic?

oH NOES! We have been wronged!

[ril-chan.livejournal.com]

I like the part where she says dragons are overused....

As my girlfriend just said to me, dragons are overused because people LIKE them. I am MORE likely to read a book with dragons than one without. Seriously. Dragons are cool. They're just not cool if they're a carbon copy of someone else's dragons...but if you're writing a good fantasy story, you'll make all the elements your own anyway.

[maladaptive.livejournal.com]

The book writing "industry" has become just that-- like any other industry. Accomplished writers are given free reign because they make a lot of money, and this is why you see so many go down the drain plotwise and grammatically (nothing ticks me off more than seeing countless misspellings in a PUBLISHED NOVEL).

Most bigtime publishers don't want new and edgy, unless it's something that's been established as new and edgy (hip, gritty urban fantasy, for example). They want what they know will make money.

Guh.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

"Technofantasy"? That's a good name for it. I'll have to remember that.

[mortaine.livejournal.com]

Remind me to add that to the Fantasy World-Builder's Guide (http://www.web-writer.net/fantasy) under the "sometimes people have bad advice" links.

[conuly]

Okay.

Hey, mortaine! Remember to add this to your "bad advice" links in your FWBG.

[conuly]

Besides, if you're good at what you're doing, you can't be overusing the dragons. And if you're not, a lack of dragons won't help.

[conuly]

Well, it might be. There's a thin line between fantasy and sf in the best of times. If you fall down a well and enter medieval times, that's fantasy, but if you do it because there's a time-travel device there using scientific principles....

[conuly]

Dresden files...?

[conuly]

Well, no. It'll weed out the sillies and keep them from publishing - if they feel they need this advice, and then take it, I don't have that much faith in them to begin with. Perhaps this was her diabolical plan all along?

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a series by Jim Butcher about a wizard-for-hire in Chicago. It's great and terribly addictive. :)

[idonotlikepeas]

Not to mention War for the Oaks. Wow, what an amazingly clueless and horrible page.

Most of the time I see arguments like that from people who want to try to seperate off things they like so that they don't have to refer to themselves as Fantasy fans anymore. ("Oh... I like Neil Gaiman, but that's Magical Realism, not Fantasy! Only idiots read Fantasy!")

[marveen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. (I blush to admit that I read Laurell K. Hamilton, but her faery universe is set firmly and believably in modern America, with a few alternate-history flashbacks to explain why there's Sidhe royalty living on the north american continent at all. Someone said recently that "It's not that [Hamilton] puts a lot of sex in her plot, it's that she puts a little plot into her sex" and he/she was right.)

[l33tminion]

Incidentally, "The Wayfarer Redemption" series by Sarah Douglass is excellent (I've read the first four books so far). For all the good fantasy Douglass has written, I suppose she's been extremely remiss in reading it.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, etc. etc.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Well, they DO have to make money. That's not the point. Publishing is a high-risk low-profit business, as I know from experience. I don't begrudge any writer or publisher for wanting to make money.

What so few of them realize is a simple fact of market economics: following trends does not make you money. Making NEW trends makes you money.

I got into a huge debate a few months back (when the new Harry Potter book came out) with a person who said that Harry Potter was only successful because it was written for the market and built up by Big Media(TM). I pointed out (as someone who has worked in a bookstore since the first Harry Potter book broke Stateside) that there WAS NO MARKET for kid wizards at the time that Sorcerers Stone came out. Fantasy was a "niche" - it was considered dead weight in the publishing field, and no "Big Media(TM)" were even remotely interested in fantasy. Harry Potter's tropes may have seemed old hat to seasoned (or jaded) fantasy fans, but the combination of writing, concepts, imagination, characters, new ideas, and yes even cover art captured a whole new audience. Rowling made a new trend where no had existed. Why? Because J.K. Rowling loves her creations, and her audience now loves them too.

You can't make a new trend by following the old one. At best, you can craft marginally successful disposable entertainment. With occasional exceptions (like Terry Brooks' Shanarra series), knock-offs don't last long in the marketplace. They might generate a quick cash flash, but then they disappear... and both writers and publishers live on "backstock" - the titles that stay in print for years. To reach that point, a book (movie or whatever) must connect with both its creator and its audience. And maybe I missed it, but I saw not one word on emotional connection in those so-called "fantasy rules."

Workshops teach tools, but they cannot create success stories. The people who make a real impression (financial and otherwise) in a marketplace make it by combining technical skill (or at least raw talent) with something they truly LOVE, and hopefully hitting their marks in a familiar enough way that they connect with the zeitgeist ("spirit of the times") by coming up with what people want even if they didn't know what they wanted until they saw it.

George Lucas did not create the original Star Wars from a market formula. Stephen King did not whip out Carrie from some paint-by-numbers writing workbook. The daVinci Code is a dreadfully bad book, but Dan Brown obviously connected deeply enough with his ideas and other peoples' fascinations to electrify an international audience. These are the people who make the REAL money - the folks (creators and publishers alike) who ride the strange alchemy of imagination, communication, and the needs of both artist and their audience. It is the blockbusters that support the hacks, not the other way around. And you can't write a blockbuster from a fucking formula... especially not when you get half of the ingredients wrong!

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

I sold my first mass-market story - "Elynne Dragonchild" - to an editor who said that dragon stories were overdone(*). It's not the subject - it's what you do with it.

---------------
Marion Zimmer Bradly, for Sword & Sorceress #9 (1990)