Young Writers Society

So, I know I'm on here a lot asking questions and not really writing anything, but you'll just have to forgive me.

My most recent question is about fantasy, something that I rarely write. I had an idea for a sort of massive fantasy world that would I guess classify as "high fantasy" because of the different elements involved. Now the world that I've created and the coexisting story seem to clash a bit in the fact that the story, in order to be effective, would have to focus on one person and his struggles.

My question then is "is it ok for fantasy to be restricted in a way that you are only given a very small portion of the world, from only one person's view?"

In my opinion Fantasy is a genre created to allow authors to create fantastic creatures and people and then show them to the reader, so a very intimate story seems like it might contradict that idea a little. I'm not sure whether I should face the challenge, or wait until the two ideas seem to mesh more.

That's perfectly fine.

Fantasy is just as much about showing the world through one person's eyes as it is showing a full world in as broad a scope as possible. Pretty much every fantasy I've done has only shown a small portion of what goes on.

You might also be surprised at the amount of stuff you can fit in to even one small struggle. You'll discover this more as you write; hence why it's important to have such a large amount of detail in your world, just to know it. If you don't know it, your world comes off as flat.

The boundaries are endless. That is why fantasy was created, so that people may write whatever they want, without worrying about if what they're writing is true to the facts.

It is not restircited. Fantasy is endless, in the way that you can express your inner mind's creatures or the world that you would love to live in (: . Just because you make it from one person's point of view does not make it less imaginative. Face the challenge. You might find it easier than you think.

* I think a good example is Harry Potter. Although it's told in third person, you see everything Harry sees. I don't know if your a fan or not but there's no denying it. The plot of Harry Potter is not restricted because of the pint of view the story is told

Just because the fantasy genre has endless possibilities doesn't mean that you have to explore all of them. Sure, you could have swords and sorcerers and flying carpets and all that, but even if the only thing that makes your story fantasy is that some people are born without eyelids or there's three suns and an ocean deity, it's still fantasy.

I'm very much a character-oriented writer and so I'm all about narrowing the scope of the story down to one or two people's lives. You don't have to dazzle us with your world. We'll experience the world, however much or little of it, through your characters, and so we have to care about your characters so we'll continue to follow them.

You don't have to write about a massive world and everything contained therein. Part of writing is having a million ideas and figuring out which ones actually deserve attention. You might know that in some forgotten corner of your world, there is a sinkhole that leads down into the ruins of some past civilization, where the people have continued their way of life unchanged and have a prophesy that a hero will turn evil and end the world, but if that isn't part of your story, you don't have to write about it. You, the author will know about it, but that doesn't mean that the reader necessarily has to be told about it. Sort of like in character development, when you can know a million things about your character (like what their favorite food is, their greatest fear, etc.), but none of them are relevant to the story, so you don't bring them up. They add a great deal of richness to the writing process and that can shine through in the story because of them being there, but they don't have to be explicitly shown.

I hope this helps. Feel free to ask any more questions!