Easier, but harder

Having fewer restrictions can make writing more difficult.

Two weeks ago we ventured the opinion that fantasy is more prevalent now, in wargames as well as novel-writing, because there are fewer restrictions on it.  That is, you needn’t worry about historical accuracy (“There’s no way a 37mm gun can penetrate Tiger armor”) or science (“You would not survive a 3 kilometer per second impact”).  The implication is that writing fantasy is easier than writing science fiction.  Indeed, it should be easier than any genre trying to be realistic, including historical fiction as well as the everyday novel.  If you’ve written yourself into a corner, just pull out a convenient magic spell and get on with it.

But an authority whose opinion we respect has exactly the opposite view.  In The Spectator, No. 419, we find

This Mr. Dryden calls the fairy way of writing, which is, indeed, more difficult than any other that depends on the poet’s fancy, because he has no pattern to follow in it, and must work altogether out of his own invention.

This issue of The Spectator came out in 1712 (yes, fantasy is old!), and one might expect literary criticism to have been a little different three hundred years ago.  Indeed, in those days there were strict standards in the arts of what was good and what was not.  It was characteristic of the age that literary criteria were held to be immutable and obvious.  So the unstated assumption is that only good “fairy writing” was being considered here, nothing else being worth a reader’s time.  And doing good fairy writing is hard.

Why?  Well, somehow the author must construct a whole world that is believable, or at least plausible enough that the reader can enter into it.  There is some suspension of disbelief required in all fiction, but it must not be too strenuous.  With a novel set in the present day the whole structure is already here.  The author need not explain how cars work, or that cars work, or what’s available at the supermarket.  A science-fiction or fantasy author by definition is reaching beyond this level, and what results must have its own consistency in order to be believable.  Science imposes its particular sort; fantasy authors must construct theirs.

Believable does not necessarily mean true.  Pandering to readers’ stereotypes is a time-honored method of selling stories, as any survey of Victorian fiction will show.  (Not that current fiction is free of it!  It’s just harder for us to see.)  And fantasy is, by definition, in some sense not true.  But it must have consistency.

One way consistency can fail is by resolving a crucial dilemma or conflict by some completely unexpected event, “magical” in the sense of the plot.  This is ancient, having the Latin name deus ex machina, referring to the resolution of a tragic play by the sudden appearance of a god to set things right.  Ancient Greek tragedy works anyway; most fiction does not.  And it is a particular stumbling-block to good fantasy.

So writing good fantasy is hard, maybe harder than any other genre.  How much current fantasy counts as good is another question.