EidenMyr.com:
Advice and Resources for Fantasists

Advice:

Apply butt to chair, fingers to keyboard/writing implement, and mind to task.

Read. GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. Immerse yourself in well-crafted works and inspired prose. Steep yourself in skilled writing. In an interview at the 2001 Readercon, Michael Swanwick said, "You can't write without food." He was speaking literally--but it's true metaphorically, too.

Read all the fantasy you can. Read one classic work for every work by a contemporary author. (My combination reading list and favorites list will be here.) Read the genre magazines (links below)--everyone tries to keep up with the magazines, and most of us fail, but the effort pays off.

Read outside the genre--hard science fiction, Westerns, mysteries, thrillers, contemporary mimetic works. Read classics outside the genre. Some people get the writing bug without being avid readers, but I contend that most fiction is in essence fanfic: we are compelled to write because we fell in love with works we read, and we want to reproduce that experience for ourselves, tailor-made to our own desires and interests. So read whatever you love to read, and then stretch yourself--pick up something you normally wouldn't, either because it's outside your area of interest or because it seems too "hard."

Read, judiciously, a couple of books about writing, and a couple of critical works analyzing some fiction you've read and loved. How-to-write books are a dime a dozen, and in my opinion you're better off spending your time writing than reading about writing. But a good how-to book can help you avoid the most common pitfalls, pick up useful techniques, and develop a critical vocabulary that will allow you to analyze your own work and figure out why it doesn't work when it doesn't work.

Emulate what you love to read--as a writing exercise. Type or write out passages by the authors whose work you most admire as another way of letting good writing soak into your bones. Use the critical tools you've acquired to analyze those passages, or the structure of stories or novels, so that you have some idea what makes them work so well. Something I've heard is useful but have never tried is to take an existing novel or story and model it: distill the plot elements into an outline, then create a new novel or story by inserting your own background, characters, and events. However you do it, find ways that go beyond reading itself to insinuate quality writing into your subconscious. And then put all of that out of your conscious mind--you don't want to copy or plagiarize, and you can now trust that what you've soaked up will be there in the background, informing what you do--and go back to your own work.

Apply butt to chair, fingers to keyboard/writing implement, and mind to task.

Emerge, now and then, from the natural isolation of the writer.

Live life. Don't underestimate your day job--your experiences there provide the proverbial grist for the mill. Go horseback riding or backpacking. Take archery lessons or an Outward Bound course. Haunt museums. Join a fencing class or a storytellers' group. Get (safe!) firsthand experience of the things you are writing about wherever possible. Consider all the SCA has to offer. Don't underestimate the usefulness of your own hobbies. "Write what you know" is a loaded and potentially misleading statement; to paraphrase Tim Powers, if writers wrote only what they know, all fiction would be about people sitting alone in front of typewriters. But use what you know. Just suffered through a hair-tearing bout of sickening political maneuvers in an organization you belong to? Good--you have that court-politics section to write. Dating somebody who likes skiing, when you think that going to the top of a frozen mountain and putting waxed fiberglass on your feet is possibly the most boneheaded thing you ever heard of? Good--you have that adventure-on-the-snowy-mountain scene to write. "You can't write without food," Michael Swanwick said; here's another interpretation of that statement. Crave and seek out and embrace experiences of all kinds.

Cultivate an educated reader, someone willing to "beta" your work when you're ready for it to be read. Orson Scott Card describes this well in his book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. It doesn't have to be someone with an English degree or a wad of critical papers stuck in his belt--in fact, it's better if it's not. Just someone who won't pat you on the head and say "This is great!" whether it is or not; someone who will tell you exactly where she got bored, where she was confused, and where she was riveted, delighted, moved.

Find other writers to talk to. Critique groups and writing courses work for some people and not for others; if you go that route, among others you can consider Clarion, Clarion West, Odyssey, and Viable Paradise (conducted in person), Dalton-Woodbury's Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop (conducted by mail), and Critters, Jeffrey A. Carver's course Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, AOL's Science Fiction Writers Workshop, and Holly Lisle's Forward Motion Workshops (conducted online). Outside of workshops and classes, it's just good for the soul to be around people who experience the same setbacks, distractions, challenges, and triumphs you do. Online communities are nice because they're available 24/7. SFF Net is an excellent place. So is Delphi's SF Literature Forum. So is the HollyLisle.com Community. Conventions are good because you get a concentrated hit of writerly and readerly folk over the course of a weekend, and will probably begin friendships that will continue in the real world when the convention is over. But...

Don't spend your writing time talking about writing. It's too easy to shoot your wad and have nothing left when you try to produce narrative. It's too easy to feel that you worked today because you talked about working. Apply butt to chair, fingers to keyboard/writing implement, and mind to task.

Reinvent the wheel.

You've read tons of fantasy, and you want to write beautiful, exciting books and stories like those. Don't. Write your book, your story. Go back to primary source material. If you're writing in a quasi-medieval-European milieu, don't rely on what you've learned from other fantasy novels about quasi-medieval-European societies; read up on how Europeans lived in the Middle Ages, and why, and extrapolate from there. If you're writing about nomadic tribal societies, read up on how real nomadic tribal societies have functioned in our world. Don't take anything for granted. Start from first principles. Do your homework, and then...

Go wild. This is fantasy--your imagination is the only limit. Don't constrain it. Let it free. Yes, internal consistency is (usually) important; yes, basic rules about logical extrapolation apply. Everything is a balance. But don't tie yourself down! (Here's the most inspiring statement I've seen on this recently, from China Miéville.) You've seen how other people applied their wild leaps of imagination; you've done your research and grounded yourself so you won't produce only an nth-generation Xerox of something else. Now let creativity take flight. Innovate. Build a unique world that will inspire a sense of terror and wonder in the readers you invite into it--a world unlike any other, real or imagined.

Apply butt to chair, fingers to keyboard/writing implement, and mind to task.

Resources:

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Life (mostly in Europe) in the Middle Ages:

Mythopoeic and fantastic:

Writing:

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Also useful:

Other lists of books about writing:

About fantastic fiction:

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Whimsical (but dead on target):

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About fantastic fiction:

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Writing:

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Fun and often useful: