Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
I think that predictability is a problem with most fiction really, not just epic fantasy. I mean we all know that the heroic cowboy will save the town school teacher from the evil land baron or that the detective will bring the killer to justice by the end of the book for example. It's how the events are portrayed that makes the story original.
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Predictability was only one aspect addressed in the article, but I do think that it is one that is particularly susceptible to blindly following a set of rules. It is not that the rules are wrong (like Zen, it is difficult to be wrong when you say so little), but the rules may be better used at the editing stage to help you assess your story, and to adjust obvious deficiencies, rather than as constraints during story creation.
And there are some differences between Epic Fantasy and other genres...
Westerns don't often run off over a thousand pages, and the reader doesn't come to a western expecting much in the way of setting or story originality; it all comes predefined in the name of the genre, anything else just isn't a "western". (I do realise this is an over simplification, I've enjoyed a great many westerns, and not all of them were identical.)
Whereas Epic Fantasy is almost wide open - it only really excludes anything adhering to reality (and possibly anything short
), and that would seem to leave a very large field of possibilities. That, to me, is largely the author's point in that article: in such a wide field it is disappointing that there aren't more author's trying to take advantage of it.
It might be said that if an author intends to re-use what has become the standard in fantasy world designs then they might be best advised to take their example from the Western genre and keep it short.
* As a writer of a (contemporary) fantasy trilogy (written but not yet all published) that goes well over a thousand pages (and so may be accused of being epic) I realise that expressing such views could turn out to be counter productive. 