Some random clicking today took to me this article by Alec Austin:
Quality in Epic Fantasy. It was written in 2002, but I did some searches through MR and couldn't find any previous discussion so thought it worth sharing. It says a lot that I found interesting. Including:
Quote:
Narrative Structure
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Truly bad ones are somewhat easier to pin down: Despite the claims of the disciples of Lucas and Joseph Campbell, the pattern of the Hero's Journey is a fairly bad narrative structure, if only because its rigidity makes it agonizingly predictable. Indeed, predictability is the greatest defect in the narrative structures common to epic fantasy. The average modern fantasy novel reeks of industrial mass-production. One can practically reconstruct the checklists and flowcharts which some authors were working from after a cursory examination of their work.
[...]
Le Guin argues in "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" that the products of such assembly-line literary production are not fantasy because their authors "use all the trappings of fantasy without ever actually imagining anything."
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But the article is not all flat criticism, there are some quite useful suggestions and thoughts within it.
Quote:
Setting
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Certainly some readers are content to read stories set in variations on the stock worlds of fantasy, with their romanticized versions of feudalism, but it is saddening that so many books fail to exploit the possibilities that even a cursory examination of actual medieval history reveals.
[...]
With the near-infinite variety of religious beliefs that people have held over the centuries, ranging from Gnostic heresies to all the varieties of Buddhism, why do fantastic religions invariably separate into familiar variants on Christianity, neo-paganism, and polytheism?
[...]
A little research will turn up an endless variety of governmental and religious practices: The electoral monarchy of the Spartans, the medieval commonwealth of Iceland, and the near-anarchic feudalism of the Holy Roman Empire spring to mind, as do the Hindu caste system, the original philosophy of Taoism, and the pseudo-magical religion that grew out of it.
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A lot of this article rang true to me. While self-publishing gets bad press for the quality of mechanical details, publishing of all sorts is guilty of turning out more of the same, leading to masses of websites citing trite formulae on how to create a story. As the article puts it, these are "about as immediately clear and helpful as a Zen koan."