Authors are often encouraged to read voraciously, but it isn't just zeal that we are told to adopt: We are called to be omnivores. If a text is encountered along the road, we are not to question if we are hungry or whether we fancy the flavor, it us our duty to snatch it up in our jaws and guzzle it down, bones and all. But even the Eaters of All shouldn't just be mindless consumers.
Magic. A word associated with a sense of wonder, mystery, the impossible, strangeness, and power. Materialism. A worldview that sees reality as only being about the stuff that we can see, touch, and measure. It is the belief that everything can be reduced to physical processes. It would seem that never should the twain meet – but they often do in fantasy literature.
Ideas are the fundamental elements of stories, they are the kernels of worldbuilding. Herein we delve into how ideas become stories through creative dialogue. Here we can play: interrogate, explore, move inside out or outside in, collide idea with idea, bounce them around a matrix of our design – whatever it takes to keep the conversation going.
We love characters. We talk about them as if they really exist, as if their adventures and struggles really happen. But they don't walk around like you and me. They're artistic creations. Some even believe that characters are merely puppets. Yet there are authors who talk of getting to know their characters. Is this just idealistic fantasy?
What makes a literary form worthy of vocational pursuit? What is it about fantasy and fantasy epics in particular that fires the imagination and the desire to create? Yes, there is the aesthetic and the enchantment, but those are all bound up in the grand form itself. It is an art capable of symphonic width and breadth as well as a profound height and depth of register.