OR: PROLOGUE TO CHAPTER ONE OF ‘HOW TO WRITE FANTASY’ IN THE ‘YOU COULDN’T MAKE IT UP’ SERIES, THE FIRST IN A TRILOGY OF A WRITING ADVICE SERIES ENTITLED ‘LYING, IN STORY FORM’, WHICH IS THE PREQUEL TO THE SERIES ON WRITERS’ FINANCES CALLED ‘STORY-TELLING TO THE TAX MAN’ WHICH IS THE SISTER PRODUCTION OF A SERIES CALLED ‘HOW TO COPE WITH WRITING ADVICE SERIES FATIGUE SYNDROME’ (SEE ALSO EPISODE ON NEVER BEING KNOWINGLY UNDERTITLED)

There aren’t a lot of laughs in fantasy fiction. There’s quite a bit of description of characters we are told are funny, often large men with large beards who smite their fellows on the back and liken their visages to those of a horse with a hangover, or drink much ale from pewter tankards, light up long pipes and recite merry verses that have the clients of the Saucy Sailor in fits of laughter but leave the reader wondering if he’s accidentally wandered into a Christian summer camp where all the jokes are meaningful and curse-free.

The author may or may not consciously realise his fantasy comedy characters are about as effective as alcohol-free beer but the effect is often the same: he overcompensates by bulking up other aspects of them to intimate humour. Stupid is quite common. Hence, Hagrid is shown to be a bit on the thick side but underneath all that beard-interwoven-with-shirt beats a profoundly loyal heart. He also knows stuff which is of course handy for the author’s required plot shifts. So, all in all, while Hagrid never actually makes the reader laugh, he is the epitome of fantasy character inadequacy overcompensation syndrome, being large, bearded and oddly gentle, which means the reader will give him the benefit of the doubt and declare him to be a really funny character. Anyone wandering into the Harry Potter world for the first time may, however, need to be tipped-off on the joke, or non-joke, or joke about a joke, or the suspension of jokefulness necessary to join the gang.

Fantasy perhaps more than any other genre suffers from CIOS. This is because the author is responsible for making up the entire world of his story, including all the countries and towns, the folklore, the peoples, religions, types of beer – sorry, ale – even the animals (although horses for some reason seem to be ubiquitous in fantasy literature, possibly because without them novels would be even longer since all the questors would have to move around on foot or on the back of something similar to a horse – a forse, perhaps – but that would just confuse and irritate the reader (yeah, like that will), so you might as well just stick with horses; actually, you might just as well stick with medieval Europe but that’s another story, literally). Hence, while fantasy readers are keen to enter strange new worlds, the reach of those worlds is always restricted by the author’s character blank spots.

All in all, unless you the writer are Tolkien and have years of sponsored study into European folklore and history behind you, writing a fantasy novel for you is a bit like walking into the bar on the first night at your new college. It’s a world you don’t understand but very much want to join. Now, the right way to do that would be get around the room and adopt whatever role is required for each situation you find yourself in until you’re able to build your own character within it. But that’s the hard way. Much easier to invent a generic get-by character – maybe a ‘humorous’ one who slaps people on the back, metaphorically only these days of course – and hope that it will compensate for your general lack of insight into the new world you’ve entered. Or created, if you’re the author.

The end result of all this overcompensation is that very often all the characters in a fantasy novel are actually the same. They just wear things that separate them from the rest, like red pantaloons, or have a stu–stu–stu–TER! that appears throughout all their dialogue to hugely irritate the reader but at least make the book longer. In short, the author has to use every compensatory trick in the book (trilogy, never-ending series) – class, race, age, gender – to intimate character where little actually exists.

So, how does the author avoid CIOS? Perhaps he needs to challenge his world more. Of course, he may have invented his world in the first place in order to avoid the challenges of the real world. Like the guy who builds a model railway in his attic, complete with houses and grass and trees and people he’s made himself, with him in control. Having said that, anyone who is invited to view his railway world would, just like a reader, no doubt enjoy it more if a meteorite fell though the roof and smashed Littletown Halt to powdered fibreglass. But that’s not the kind of challenge we’re talking about, I don’t think.

In the Thomas Covenant books by Stephen Donaldson, Covenant literally challenges the fantasy world he finds himself in – challenges its very existence. But this kind of challenge is probably a bit too crude for our purposes, even if it can be effective.

Maybe we’re talking creative challenge. For example, the obvious way to challenge the creation of, say, a stereotypical medieval Europe-ish submissive, child-bearing, stew-cooking, beard de-lousing woman is to turn her into a bloke with boobs instead. One who can beat up men and therefore out-man them. A better challenge is to go sideways and produce a female character who is neither of these extremes. The trouble with that direction is that it’s leading out of fantasy into creative reality.

Hmmm . . . this problem is beginning to look similar to the view expressed by fantasy editors to aspiring writers: that they should make their books different but the same.

And with that closing of the syndrome circle, I’m signing off episode one in order to go run around the woods a bit more, trying to distract anyone reading this from the absence of any plot movement behind this series.