Writing Fantasy:A Published Author's Perspective©-part 1
Once at a convention, Lunacon, I think, I attended a panel during which a number of editors told would-be writers what they wanted - and, more importantly, what they didn't want.
"We want something new," one said, the rest agreeing. "Something we haven't seen before, something different. And above all: no adorable elves."
"Unless they're different," another qualified, which everyone on the panel also agreed with.
In other words, editors don't know what they want any more than writers do. Every person on that panel was ready to swear that they wanted something different, but if they got something too different they all would have rejected that something. But does that mean you can never satisfy an editor with what you write? Not at all.
I'll be the first one to admit that getting acceptance used to be easier. Right now most editors want someone with a track record, but even that doesn't always do it for you. What you need is a fresh approach to what's been done before, a different slant on what's already been half done to death. How do you get that fresh approach? First you sit down and think about the matter.
Since you have to read this stuff in order to write it, the first thing you think about is what you've read. Did you, at any point during your reading, have the thought that something touched on only lightly would make a really good book? If five hundred other writers haven't already tried their own hands at the idea, it's worth exploring.
Or, you might simply get inspiration from something you've read. My Blending series seems to be doing fairly well, and the idea for that series came from thinking produced by reading Roger Zelazny's Madwand books. For those who haven't read the books, I'll just say that Zelazny's character is a magician who gestures just the way typical magicians are supposed to do - but not for the same reason. The magicians in his universe can see threads of different colors everywhere, each color thread causing something else to happen. The gesture is actually the magician pulling one or more threads to accomplish what he or she wants to do.
When I read that, my first reaction was, "Wow! Now that's what I call clever!" It was a really different way of looking at something that's been used over and over up to and beyond death by repetition. The point I used was that all other books have only a select few members of a population who can do magic. What would happen if everyone could do magic? What would the society be like?
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