Dear Fantasy: It's Not Me, It's Your (Lack Of) Setting

From Author Pat Kirby:

I've fallen out of love with epic fantasy. To some extent, also urban fantasy, because the embittered, ass-kicking woman who is estranged from her family, and has more issues than a magazine just isn't blowing my metaphorical skirt up anymore. The thing is, a quick glance at my Goodreads account reveals that I am still reading fantasy, or at least novels with a significant speculative fiction element. But gone are the days when I would devour tome after tome of McGuffin-driven quests, featuring earnest young farm boys with Luke Skywalker-esque destinies. And it's not just a gender issue, since similar plotlines featuring the rare female heroine usually don't do it for me, either.

It would be easy to blame the problem on time. As in, a whole lot of it has elapsed since I've been born and consequently, "been there, read the hell out of it" describes my attitude to most plots.

Except, I totally dig tropes, stereotypes, and well-worn narrative elements. I'm a big believer in the idea that there aren't any new stories, and I've got no quarrel with "derivative." Love derivative; done right, it's like crack, or Oreo cookies.

So what gives?

The issue is that it takes more than an otherworldly setting to sell me on a story. Because I've seen just about every variation of magical land, extraordinary creature, weapon of destiny, etc.

For all their exhaustive world building, I find that some epics have a poorly developed sense of place. I mean, yeah, these stories contains words, piled on words, and more words, some of them quite pretty, devoted to describing the author's shiny new land. Flora, fauna, culture, etc.

For all that meticulous detail, however, it doesn't feel like the characters really live there.

Unlike, say, characters in many mystery novels. For example, the novels penned by the late Tony Hillerman. Hillerman's novels are vibrant with the colors, textures and flavors of life in the desert southwest, in particular, the lands of the Navajo Nation. He was writing as someone who had an inside track into the good, bad, and ugly of the landscape and culture of the region. As opposed to a tourist who gawps at the majestic mesas and buys cheap, knock-off Kokopellis and coyote-howling-at-the-moon chachkes sold in souvenir shops. He saw New Mexico and Arizona as you see the place where you live.  And his experiences and perceptions were filtered through his characters, grounding them and their setting firmly in my mind. The settings aren't just described; they are described through the characters' eyes. In turn, the novels' settings shape and deepen the characterization.

Some fantasy novels, on the other hand, read like a travel guide to a mystical land. Great detail, with handy info, like which inns serve the best ale, and yet, rather superficial. The settings are like painted backdrops in a stage production, set up to hide stuff backstage and give the audience a vague sense of place. And, why not? Often that spare set design is just the ticket. In. A. Stage. Production.

Fantasy novel? Not so much.

I guess what I'm saying is that if the author of Big Fantasy Epic wants me to click Buy, he or she needs to give me the same intimate sense of place that I find in a good contemporary mystery novel. Honestly? I don't need to know a detailed history of the gods or the founding of the current dynasty. Especially, not as an info-dump in a prologue (insert teenage eye roll). If, however, your novel begins with the protagonist ranting about the idiotic practice of banning the sale of swords on Tuesdays in your land of make believe, I'm sold. Because that's that kind of stuff real people do. Everywhere.

So, what about you, folks? Any genre or genre trope that makes you want to jab red hot needles in your eyes? Conversely, what do you love?

Author Pat Kirby & Confessions of a Fan Fic Writer

Author Pat Kirby ("The Canvas Thief" and "Music of Chaos") discusses why she currently writes fan fic:

My name is Pat Kirby and I'm...a fan fiction writer. It's been a day, okay, half an hour, since I last took someone else's characters and wrote the hell out of them.

This confession is brought to you by an eff-load of personal drama over the last year, which obliterated the desire to write original fiction, and the realization that even in the midst of absolute pathos, I've strung words into sentences, scenes and, glurk, written nearly 200K words worth of fan fiction.

Truth? The first thing I ever wrote, a Legolas and Mary Sue love story, penned when I was eleven, was fan fiction. This was followed by dabbling in Buffy-verse and Babylon 5, featuring more embarrassing self-insertion characters. Fortunately, I was too self-conscious to post that crap anywhere and it all vanished several computers ago.

Eventually, I decided to be a "real" writer, fell in with a crowd of writers who believed that fan fiction made the Baby Jesus cry, and gave up my fannish ways.

I was clean and fic-free for nearly a decade until I hit a creative dry spell. Think Sahara Desert. My muse was a tinder-dry mummy, so friable it collapsed into dust in the lightest breeze. This muse-killing heat wave powered by a combo of personal crisis and crippling self doubt that assured me that everything I wrote had more suck than a Dyson vacuum.

One day, for old times' sake, I wandered over to a fan fiction site and perused the movie-based archives, ending up in the one for Marvel's Thor. And there, I fell face-first into a non-canon pairing that was so ridiculous, it made total sense. Then, like all characters, borrowed or otherwise, these two crazy kids started a conversation in my head. I wrote down that dialogue. Added some description. Tripped over a plot.

And, holy jalapenos, Batman, I had the beginning of a story! Uploading that beginning made for a kind of online field of dreams: if you post it; they will come, and read.

I was writing again. Not my world. Not my characters, but words. Some pretty awesome (and destined to be reused in something original). Even when shit continues to go splat on my fan, my borrowed characters keep yapping at each other, and the story grows.

I have no idea why.

Maybe it's because someone is actually reading the fracking thing. Last I looked, it had well over a thousand followers. Which, sadly, or amusingly, (depending on how sober I am) is many times the amount of people who have read my original fiction.

Mostly, I think it's because it is fan fiction. No pressure (except for those thousand followers--Yikes!), no worries, no editors--"Look Ma, I makes typos and errors in the subjunctive tense," no chance of pissing off paying readers. I suppose, if I were inclined to brave the wrath of Marvel and go all 50 Shades, doing the search-replace thing and swapping "Thor" for "*Todd," the potential exists for a making a few pesos off a self-pubbed thing. But, you know...ethics?

The fact that my fic will never be anything more than a glorified writing exercise is very freeing. It's a public work-in-progress and Jackson Pollock-like, I'm splattering words on the page, sometimes with a plan, sometimes just for the sheer joy of letting this character say something appalling to that character.

As I write this, my overwritten tome of dubious legal provenance is two chapters away from being done and my feelings range from vaguely sniffly (I'll miss you, misused characters not mine) and Halle-fracking-luiah, I Finally Finished Something.

As habits go, fic writing hasn't been that destructive. Awoken by jealousy and a sense of neglect, my original characters have started muttering in the background. Perhaps 2014 will be the year of 200K words in an original work.

Or maybe I'll fall off the wagon and play with more borrowed characters and worlds. It's all words; it's all good.

Happy New Year!

*The Mighty Todd. Therein lies some fabulous parody potential. There's your writing prompt; have at it kids!