Following the cinematic success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Harry Potter, the Narnia Chronicles and, now, the Philip Pullman novels would-be fantasy authors are busy redusting their manuscripts in the hope they will be the next thing to be discovered. Theoretically fantasy fiction should be easy to write. As an author you have little factual research to do, the members of your target audience are already predisposed to the suspension of disbelief that's required of readers, your plot line is not hampered by real-world limitations and your characters do not even have to be human.
By all accounts fantasy fiction should have a huge volume of work and a huge number of writers and yet the fact that it is still considered niche publishing indicates that it is neither easy to write nor can it be always written well. This also means that the current success of Tolkien, Rowlin and Pullman notwithstanding fantasy fiction is still regarded as science fiction's, let alone mainstream fiction's poor relation.
It was in search of answers to these questions that I spoke to Thoma Hunt via email in what is probably one of the rarest exchanges in fantasy fiction. Those who know Thomas Hunt, know he wrote The Shade and know that he does not do media interviews. He is, however, never short of answers when it comes to either writing fiction or talking about the publishing industry and the way it is evolving which is how him and I got going in the first place.
Fantasy fiction, Hunt says, is more about writing about mythical universes. Its appeal harks back to fairy tales and the Jungian archetypes within each culture and each person. Because the appeal occurs at a basic and largely subconscious level it is exceedingly hard to write Fantasy Fiction that reiterates the things we find familiar and comforting in fairy tales and yet breaks new ground in a way that is fresh without being disturbing.
"It's a little like sex," says Thoma Hunt rather disingenuously, "in order for it to work it has to have a certain familiar structure in the sense that we need to roughly know where we are going and what we should expect on the way there. It really does not matter if the payoff is exactly what we expect or something that totally surprises us or even disappoints us. What is important is that the tropes work in such way that they achieve two things: 1. They prepare us, mentally and psychologically, for the journey ahead 2. They make us, through the process of subconscious expectation and mental and psychological preparation, whole-hearted participants to the enterprise. Then the fantasy novel becomes a shared journey of discovery between the author and the reader and a masterpiece is born."
Thomas Hunt makes it sound easy because he's an expert and knows the genre inside out. His novel, The Shade, treads much of the territory. In his analysis of literature, culture and archetypes Jung laid out four main archetypes:
The Self, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation. The Shadow, the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possess nonetheless
The Anima, the feminine image in a man's psyche
The Animus, the masculine image in a woman's psyche
Although the number of archetypes is limitless, there are a few particularly notable, recurring archetypal images which appear again and again in fairy tales, epic poems, parables, stories, novels and great literature:
The Syzygy
The Child
The Hero
The Great Mother
The Wise old man
The Trickster or Ape
The Puer Aeternus (Latin for "eternal boy")
The Cosmic Man
The artist-scientist
These archetypes appear with such consistency that it is evident that there is a lot more than mere assumption to the theory. Fantasy Fiction writers who embark upon a tale without an awareness, at least, of the way these archetypes work on the reader's imagination and the reader's expectation are doomed to fail.
"Fantasy fiction has a lot in common with fairy tales," says Thomas Hunt, "it needs to have a message and a moral and it needs to be clear-cut." Which is why, I suppose, sex is such a taboo subject in the genre. "There is very little Fantasy fiction written which actually depicts sex in anything more than hints," says Hunt, "this is one of the conventions of the genre which means that, depending on how you look at it, the time has come to either make it a sacred cow and never question it, or prick the bubble and see what happens."
In The Shade Thomas Hunt has chosen to do the latter depicting sex between adults in a way that makes the story feel claustrophobic almost and makes the almost inhuman protagonist seem, suddenly, very vulnerable and very human.
Is that enough to make a Fantasy novel stand out from the crowd?
"Absolutely not!" says Thomas Hunt, "if you approach writing this way you may as well start believing that changing the font is enough to make a badly written book, good. When I was writing The Shade I had to make a conscious choice whether to stick to the accepted norm regarding sex in Fantasy fiction or stay faithful to the story. I chose to go with the latter conscious of the fact that I was breaking with convention but really wanting to tell the best tale possible."
So writing great Fantasy fiction requires an awareness of the tropes of the genre plus the necessary strength of vision to know when to stay faithful to the story and depart from convention. It requires a story which taps into the arcane archetypes of our psyche and it requires characters which are also reflected by these archetypes. Put all these elements together, allow them to percolate and what you end up with is a tale that is powerful, memorable and fun to read.
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