September 13, 2025 • 55 mins
I'm delighted to be joined by bestselling fantasy authors Lucy Holland and Dan Coxon for an all-encompassing discussion on writing fantasy.
Dan has curated and co-edited a brilliant new craft book called Writing The Magic, published by Dead Ink, and Lucy has contributed an excellent chapter on Ursula Le Guin's magic system in Earthsea.
We delve into worldbuilding, creating magic systems, explore Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series and Michael Moorcock's stories, and discuss why we all love the genre so much.
You're bound to learn something new!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:11):
Welcome to another episode of the Fancy Writers Tool Shed.
I'm your host, Richie Billing, and today I'm delighted to be
joined by two brilliant writers,Dan Coxon and Lucy Holland.
Dan Lucy, welcome to the show. Hi there.
Hi, thanks for having us. Oh, it's an honor to chat with
you both, the talented writers working hard on a new book
(00:34):
that's coming out very soon and it's all about writing fantasy.
It's called Writing the Magic. But Dan, you've been the the
curator of these brilliant essays on the different aspects
of writing fantasy and we see you've contributed a fantastic
chapter reading just before looking at Ashley Lewin's
Absence FC series and the magic system in particular.
(01:00):
A lot of pressure on that chapter with, albeit with the
book titled Being Magic, but I loved it and so many interesting
new ways to look at building themagic system.
And so we're going to talk aboutthe book today.
There's lots of different topicsthat it covers.
We all love writing, talking about writing fantasy.
(01:20):
We all know doubt about it, don't we?
So it's going to be nice and broad and then we'll dive into
the subjects there. You guys are a specialist in
Dan. We've already mind your brain
for short story concepts. So we're going to we're going to
look more broadly at writing fantasy.
But first, before we dive into anything, let's do some intros.
(01:44):
So Lucy, you're new to the show.You'd like to tell us a bit
about you. You're writing your your
journey. Yeah, sure.
Well, I'm Lucy Holland. I'm the author of two historical
fantasy novels, Sister Song and Song of the Huntress.
They're both set in early medieval Britain, and they
reimagine various myths and ballads.
(02:07):
I work quite closely with Celticmythology before that and my
actual name, Lucy Hanson, I wrote a epic fantasy trilogy
called World Maker that was out in 2015.
So yeah, I've been around for 10years.
In that time, I've also been 1/3of a intersectional MNS podcast
(02:27):
called Breaking the Glass Slipper, which I'm sure quite a
few listeners will have heard of.
We've been around the block a bit.
That's been great. That was great fun.
And I, yeah, I now teach creative writing for Curtis
Brown. So I've got a, a fairly, yeah,
broad, broad range of activitieswhen it comes to fantasy.
(02:47):
Very. Nice and done.
What about yourself and your relationship with the fantasy
genre? Yeah, it's interesting actually,
because I my, my kind of first foray into fantasy, I had to, my
very first book was much of the literary fiction anthology about
the fatherhood, because I've recently become a dad and I it
(03:08):
was, it was a bunch of people writing stories about
fatherhood. But my first kind of foray into
fantasy was this Dreaming Isle, which was about nine years ago.
So it looks like 9 or 10 years is how long it takes someone to
get onto your podcast. Clearly.
But after this Dreaming, I had acouple other anthologies and
then I think we talked before about kind of quite a lot of
(03:30):
those. But most recently I've had
Hartwood, which was the Nostalgia Wood anthology, which
Lucy had a story in and which isup for a World Fantasy Award
now. So that's been going really
well. Couldn't be happier really with
that. And then I've been doing the
writing books with Dead Ink. So this is now the 4th one
Writing the Magics We've had Writing the Uncanny, Writing the
(03:52):
Future, writing the Writing the Murder, and now Writing the
Magic, all Co edited with Richard V Hurst and yeah, all
just compiling essays by variouswriters on how they approach
writing their particular genre. And everyone approached it from
really different directions. So it's a whole bunch of
different essays. I also have another anthology
(04:13):
coming out with Dead Ink in October, which is very much kind
of recent news. We only announced it quite late,
but I have a haunted house anthology coming out in October,
which I'm very excited about because obviously it's the it's
coming out like a day before Halloween, which is perfect.
And then as soon as Halloween's over, it's going to pivot into
being a Christmas ghost story anthology.
(04:34):
So we're really hoping people get behind that.
It's called Unquiet Guests. I'm very excited about that.
Yeah, well, if anyone hasn't listens, you have to go back and
check out Dan's previous appearance on the show.
We talked about short stories and Dan, fantastic short story
writer, one of the best short story writers I've ever read.
(04:55):
And I've learned so much from you as well.
Like the tips that you shared. They've made massive difference
to my my short story writing. So yeah, go check that.
I wasn't all the best with the new anthologies and I'll be
getting copies of them. So I suppose one of the best
places to start then is why fantasy?
Like what? What is it about the genre that
(05:17):
has brought us all together tonight as inspired dancer to
put this book together and Lucy said so right, I really sort of
interesting take on on one of your most beloved fantasy books.
So what? What is it about the genre?
(05:37):
Do you know what, though? The the so we brought out
writing Uncanny first was the original idea we had for these
writing books was writing the Uncanny.
And it seemed good that Uncanny was having a bit of a moment of
the time and we thought it'd be really interesting to explore
that. And as soon as that came out,
people started haranguing me, saying when are you going to do
a fantasy? And we'd already planned the
science fiction one at that point.
(05:58):
And then we kind of felt we wanted to move away from kind of
fantastical genres. So we did the crime one.
But from very early on, it was always the case that people were
saying to me that they wanted a fancy 1.
And I'm, I mean, I'm not entirely sure what that is.
I don't think it's necessarily the that there are people need
kind of more guidance when it comes to fantasy.
They have more questions about fantasy than they did about
(06:19):
other genres. I think it's just that it's a
genre that's close to so many people's hearts, Mainly because
I think we grow up with it so often when we're young and we're
reading like kind of not honestly adult books, but
certainly more complex books forthe first time.
So you're moving away from kind of picture books and simplistic
books. You're quite often moving to
fantasy. I can see it.
My 10 year old's doing it at themoment.
He's just got into a fantasy series for kind of for the first
(06:41):
time, and he's absolutely lovingjust the imagination of it.
And I think a lot of us, becausewe grow up with that, it's
something that's just very dear to us and something that we
still really enjoy, at least forme.
I don't know if it's the same for you, Lucy.
Oh, absolutely. For me, I can't really ever
imagine myself writing outside of fantasy.
(07:03):
I mean, I've read OK, epic fantasy, which I've written is
very, very fantasy. I mean, that's probably like
the, the, the hardcore fantasy. And I'm, I'm sort of writing in
a sub genre of which I historical fantasy.
But the, but I mean, it's still,it's, it's a fusion of history
and fantasy and the fantasy is still very present in it.
(07:24):
And I, I did, I get this question.
I think it's somebody sent a, a fantastic like response that
Terry Pratchett got asked when he was alive.
Someone said, like, you're brilliant.
You could write any book you wanted.
You're such a fantastic, why areyou writing fantasy?
And he was like, I'm gonna pretend you didn't ask that
question because it's so offensive as in, and I just, I
(07:49):
don't know, I guess it's, it's so much a part of me.
It's so much a part of where I came from.
My dad read to us as children. He read The Lord of the Rings
when we were probably far too young to really appreciate it.
He read all this. He had, you know, we, we walked
away through sort of the, the greats of, of the fantasy and
science fiction genre. And, and so I sort of grew, I
(08:11):
grew up thinking that fantasy and writing, but made him rather
synonymous for me. So it's very hard for me to sort
of write, think about concept, actualising a book that sits
outside of fantasy as as a genre, because for me, writing
is magic. Magic is writing.
It's all. And it's why it was, you know,
when Dan asked me to contribute to this, I was like, yeah, of
(08:31):
course. See, this is this is, you know,
magic is a core element of fantasy.
I suppose if you asked somebody,you know, just a layperson on
the street, like about fantasy and and to define fantasy, you
know, OK, maybe they'd say Dragons.
I would say Dragons, but the second thing they would say is
magic. Magic is, is such a core part
(08:52):
of, and I think it picks up on what Dan was saying about
childhood as well. And the fact that we, it's,
perhaps it's, it's comforting somewhat that we, we can take
the magic of our childhood forward into our, you know, into
our adulthood to, you know, I'vealways been a great believer in,
in fantasy as a sort of arena to, to explore real world issues
(09:12):
that could be quite uncomfortable and set in a sort
of contemporary or real world context.
And I think fantasy as an archetypal genre is just
perfectly suited to to exploringall sorts of of contemporary
concerns. Yeah, it's it's a great point to
tell you both make and I think what I would, I would probably
say is that it's it's sort of brings in so much from the whole
(09:37):
spectrum of fiction, doesn't it?That, like you say, you can
explore these real world issues and you can put them into more
relatable ways of ways that people can engage with more
because it's not just like the same thing should have done the
throws. It's amazing that what you has
changed. Like you think back to sort of
like classic fantasy and it was all a bit like a bit bit bit
(10:00):
cliche for a while. But now it's it's, it's really
like grown in its depth and it'sit's almost philosophical.
I think, I think actually in thelast kind of 10 years or so, in
particular, I think both horror and fantasy have really thrived.
Science fiction, not necessarilyto such an extent.
(10:21):
I think partly because of the science aspect and because
science seems to be moving so fast at the moment.
I think sometimes it's quite difficult for writers to to try
and imagine what what happens beyond that.
Because things are moving so quickly that if you're not
careful, like ideas catch up with you in the real world
before you've even made it out into print.
But I think particularly with fantasy and horror, they seem to
(10:42):
have had a real, as you say, kind of an expansion in terms of
what they can do over the past sort of 1015 years.
I remember kind of back in the what, in the late 90s, early
2000s when I was working in a bookshop, both horror and
fantasy were very much seen as, and how to put this, pretty
trashy genres. They were seen very much as Pulp
(11:05):
Fiction still in a way that science fiction wasn't actually.
People would read science fiction and feel there was a
seriousness to it because they had the science aspect to it,
whereas they felt those were very kind of light and frothy
fantasy romance rather than anything else, it was seen as an
offshoot of romance. And again, horror was seen as
just being something that was just there to scare people and
that was the only point of it and it was all it could do.
(11:26):
And I think in the last kind of 15 years or so, we've really
seen actually, there's so much more you can do within those
genres. You can do anything you can do
in those genres that you can do in any other book, in any
literary novel, that you can cover the same topics and go
into them in the same depth and sometimes approach them in more
interesting ways. Which I think is why it's not
unusual nowadays for literary writers and inverted commas
(11:48):
like, say, Ian McEwan or Kajuishi Guru to, to decide to
write a fancy or science fictionnovel because they they it
allows them to approach ideas inan interesting and novel way
rather than just in a kind of purely realistic,
straightforward way. And I think, yeah, fantasy in
particular, I think has really embraced that going forward.
(12:10):
And I think we see that in the essays in the book.
To be honest, there's kind of a excitement and effervescence to
some of the essays. You can tell people are just,
we're just thrilled to be asked to write something.
Well, it's because we, you know,as fantasy writers, we produce
creative work and very rarely are asked to produce critical
(12:31):
work. I mean, as far as it goes, we,
we might write, you know, a small article on one of the
themes that we've explored in our books for promotional
reasons. So it's, it's, it's really quite
rewarding when someone says, OK,well, write something that sort
of looks at your art and your practice critically.
(12:52):
And, and you know, when I, when I was looking at Le Guin it,
that was very interesting because it's sort of, well, it,
it forces me to read with a, a slightly more critical eye, but
also to read my work and my approach to writing fantasy with
a critical eye. And that is, I, I think that's,
you know, an offshoot of, of fantasy sort of being dismissed
as, you know, a sensational genre for, for, for the mass
(13:13):
market. You know, it, it's a quick read.
It's, you know, sort of trashy food, that kind of thing.
And I, I find that it's, it's very, it's had that round its
neck for a very long time. So the more, the more critical
work we can do with the genre, the more we can sort of open it
up to, you know, to, to, to lookat it sort of more more
(13:36):
analytically and, and to, to look at it as a, as a, you know,
as, as a living, breathing pieceof, because of academia, really.
Because I mean, like, it's, it'sgot ancient, ancient roots and
it goes it you, you could very well argue that the oldest
literature we have is fantasy. I mean, the epic of Gurgamesh,
for instance. You know, this, this, it is, it
(13:58):
is an archetypal genre that has existed forever.
So, you know, I, I, you know, I'm a great proponent of trying
to sort of better its appearance, you know, in, in a
sort of more mainstream literaryspace.
It's funny you mentioned Ian McEwan and Ishiguru, because
when they write a science fiction or or a fantasy novel,
it's literary. It's interesting actually
(14:23):
mentioning that. So I I discovered this
completely coincidentally when Iwas working on this book.
I got handed like three boxes ofstuff out of my dad's loft that
had a load of my books from whenI was about 15 or 16.
And I was really into trying to read kind of critical works on,
on genre fiction at that time because I was looking into, you
know, wanting to write things myself.
And I could only find 2 on fantasy, which I, I discovered
(14:45):
in this box in slightly kind of stained and muffied copies.
So there's Hopkins Tree and Leaf, which is, it's obviously
still widely available. And then one by Michael Moorcock
called Wizardry and Wild Romance, which is very
interesting. And again, an overview of the
genre. But those were the only two I
could find when I was about 15-16 years old.
That was all I could find anywhere.
(15:07):
And because of that, they becamelike a basis of of what I
thought was kind of critical study of fantasy when I was that
age. And it is just, it's so much
deeper than that now, isn't it? Like you say, you can, there's
discussion of not just like the history of the genre in a very
kind of dry literary sense, but also the creative process, the
different ways it can be approached, the different things
it can do, the different modes you can write in.
(15:30):
It's been fascinating to me writing, working on these
writing books, the ways in whichthe, the genre lines are
constantly crossed as well. The way you get, you know,
fantasy crime books nowadays andyou get kind of fantasy horror
books and it's just, it all kindof intersects in interesting
ways nowadays. And I have a whole subgenre on
that on my on my course. It's about let's talk about
(15:51):
subgenres and how they intersectbecause they really do.
It's fascinating. It's always slightly more
interesting to me, to be honest.I always love those.
I love those books that kind of slowly defy genre.
I think partly from having worked in book shops for 10
years, you kind of get very usedto your standard kind of sits in
the middle of a genre shelf kindof novel.
So anything that kind of veered outside of that was always a bit
(16:12):
interesting and exciting. So I think because of that, I
kind of still veer towards that kind of thing.
I mean, even with fantasy, I do prefer it.
I prefer kind of slightly weird fantasies, things that gets
taken to new and different areas, but that itself can then
be within a subgenre or sometimes in two subgenres, or
it can crossover genre boundaries.
Or, you know, I think people arejust much more open to
(16:33):
experimenting and doing different things rather than
just churning out the same kind of book over and over again.
This is why we love small presses.
And that's, that's great. The only downside I've sort of
to, to the sort of experimentation that sort of the
liberty out with it is that it could be so hard to pin yourself
(16:56):
down as a writer and say, oh, ifyou, if you like this person,
then you know like this because you could put, you could put
like 3 different, completely different comparisons in there.
And it's going to be so hard to nail down that one reader.
And that's the problem I've found anyway.
But. There was always that advice, I
mean, I don't know if it's so prevalent nowadays, but there
(17:18):
was always that advice when I was kind of starting out in
writing that kind of know your market advice.
So work out which market you're pitching to and then pitch it
squarely at that market and write for that market.
And I think what I've seen over the years is that can be quite
productive in terms of getting acontract and book sales, but it
(17:39):
doesn't necessarily produce the most interesting work.
And therefore it doesn't necessarily produce the things
that actually last and stand thetest of time and that people
will still be reading 1520 yearsdown the line because you're
just producing more of the same.Whereas I think, you know, it's
a more difficult route. I think kind of just following
(18:00):
your instinct and then trying towork out afterwards how you
could possibly sell it to a publisher.
But as Lucy said, small press publishers are definitely the
way forward on that these days. I feel small press publishers
will take bigger risks. They tend not to sell so many
books through book shops. It tends to be much more kind of
conventions and word of mouth and online sales.
So it doesn't have to fit squarely into a particular genre
(18:23):
section in the shop in the way that other books do.
And it kind of gives you that freedom to just go with stuff
that's great stories and interesting and not worry so
much about marketing. Nice recent voice, Recent voice.
So you mentioned that like when you were starting out, those not
many, not many sorts of handbooks that you could call
upon to learn more about writingthe genre.
(18:46):
And what was it like in those early days and what were the
biggest lessons that you learnedback then?
I just became a voracious reader, to be honest.
Yeah, same. I mean, Waterstones used to have
these free bookmarks that were like, white on the backside of
them with the Waterstones logo on the front.
And I used to take fistfuls of those and just use the back to
(19:07):
write out long lists of the names of books that I came
across. So I'd read things like the two
books I mentioned and Stephen King's On Writing and stuff like
that. And just every time a book was
mentioned, I'd be jotting them down, be like, oh, I need to
read this and I need to read this and I need to read this.
And I ended up with just these enormous lists of kind of like
both kind of classics and also kind of forgotten classics and
kind of minor classics of the genre that were just being
(19:27):
championed at the time. I remember that was how I first
came across Ramsey Campbells work was reading Stephen King's
On Writing, and he mentions Ramsey in there.
So it's like it was just all of these kind of influences.
And then, yeah, if I could get my hands on any of those, that
was great. Of course, in those days we
didn't have eBay, so it was muchmore difficult getting your
hands on weird out of print books.
So I constantly had these enormous long lists that I'd
(19:50):
hand to my parents around birthday and Christmas times,
and they'd be given the impossible task of like,
tracking down these fifty books that were probably all out of
print. But that's where all my reading
came from. I mean, I think it's how I
started reading Pratchett and things as well.
It's just they were recommended somewhere and they went on my
list and then then that was it. Yeah, you don't really, I, I
(20:10):
don't remember there being, you see now it's completely
different. And this is the same with, with
creative writing actually as, asa, as a, as an academic subject.
When I, when I went to university, and this is quite
scary about, I mean, I enrolled 20 years ago this year, there
were very few creative writing courses and 0 fantasy or, or
(20:32):
genre creative writing courses. Now there are, you know, OK,
there's not loads and loads of them, but they're, they're, they
exist now there's even a course at my local university, Exeter,
that's on, on you can do a, you can do an MA in, in magic
studies. And it's, it's really amazing.
It's like a kind of fusion across several, several
(20:53):
departments. So, yeah, I mean, when I, when I
started out like thinking about how do you go about writing a
fantasy book? I mean, I, I just read, I've
read lots and lots of fantasy and I wanted to write fantasy
from quite an early age. And I wrote my first fantasy
fantasy novel at 14. It was a fusion of Harry Potter
and The Lord of the Rings. It is as bad as it sounds, but
(21:16):
you know, it did teach me about 10.
God, I do need poor practice. But two, this is really what I
want to do and I'm going to try and make it happen.
And I the, the only, the only sort of teachers I had were,
were the books that I found in shops, fantasy books and
eventually, you know, going to university and then learning
sort of more about how to sort of craft a novel and, and what
(21:39):
sort of things go goes into a novel.
But, you know, Curtis Brown approached me last year to, to
create a fantasy, a writing fantasy course.
And that's what the, the title of the course is.
And I think clearly, because there's this been a very recent
upsurge in interest in fantasy, I suspect driven by romantic,
which I suspect is also driven by being in a post pandemic
(22:02):
world. Grim dark was all the rage in
2015. But nobody wants nihilistic
fiction now. They want shadow daddies and and
cozy, cozy fantasy. So yeah.
So I'm I'm here to like, say, OK, well, how do you, how do you
write? It's not just a writing course,
it's writing fantasy. So that was so interesting
because I had to interrogate my own practice.
(22:24):
I'd never interrogated my practice before when I, you
know, I've now written 7 novels or so and, and I, I guess it's
like you open the Microsoft Worddocument, it's blank and you
just start, but you think, how am I doing this?
And I've never really stopped tothink, how am I crafting this?
When does my magic system come into play?
(22:44):
How much work do I do beforehand?
Where is my research sitting? What's the balance of time
between, you know, writing and researching?
How does the how does the seconddraft come together and all of
this? So I had to, you know, it was
such an interesting, I was, you know, flattered and to be asked
to do it. And also just it was extremely
rewarding for me because it enabled me to sort of
(23:06):
deconstruct my own approach to, to writing and specifically
fantasy writing and how that might differ from, say, romance
writing or crime writing. You know, in essentials, writing
is writing, but fantasy does come with a host of other sort
of interesting and necessary things like, you know, a reader
(23:27):
contracts as there's a social contract that you make with with
a reader when you write fantasy,rather like, you know, similarly
when you write romance and this it's, it's such a, it's such a
vast, such a vast genre, you know, like when you think, well,
how on earth do you teach this? You know, what can I cover?
But just having that opportunityto, to sit down and, and work
(23:49):
out what I do as a writer when Istart to write a book that was
that, you know, showed me quite a lot about, about how I work
and, and, and how actually how that differs to a bunch of other
fantasy writers out there. Because there's no one way to go
about writing, as I'm sure Dan will agree.
But yeah, I mean, that was that was the one, the one thing that
we said when we were doing, we started thinking about doing
(24:11):
writing the magic was we need tohave something on world building
because it's such a fundamental bit of fantasy and it wasn't
really covered in the other books as well.
So it was like, you know, this is something that's fairly
unique, not entirely unique, butfairly unique fantasy.
So we need to look at it. And what was really interesting
is, yeah, we got very conflicting essays as we have
done in the past. We had two conflicting essays in
writing the future as well wherewhere people disagreed with each
(24:31):
other and we had disagreement onworld building.
Jen Williams very much argues that she kind of makes a lot of
it up as she goes along and thenmakes it work afterwards in the
edits. Whereas Jeff Noon's essay, he
pretty much spent 10 years building the world and then
eventually came round to writingsomething in it and didn't use
the only use kind of a fraction of the world that he built in,
(24:53):
in the actual book. And the fun, at least in the
first instance, was in the worldbuilding side of it.
Apparently they actually considered turning into a
role-playing game at one point because they'd done all this
background world building. But in the end it became a
series of two novels. But it is interesting.
Like you say, it's not the same.There's not a kind of
one-size-fits-all thing where you can just say this is the way
(25:16):
it works and this is how you have to do it.
This is what I found more and more of the more I kind of talk
about writing and work with writes on these kind of essays
is that a lot of it is just trying different things and
finding out what works for you personally.
And then sometimes not even sticking with that.
Because sometimes people find something that works for them.
(25:36):
And then five years down the line or a couple of books down
the line, they suddenly try something else and find that
works just as well, if not better or changes their outlook.
And so they get a different result at the end.
And I mean, as you know, I work my knee in short stories.
And I think I said to you before, Richie, that I just, I
pretty much changed my method with each story depending on
what the the needs of the story are.
(25:57):
I don't really have a process that's the same every single
time. I kind of, I think it's partly
because I have a really short attention span, which sounds
weird for somebody who sits staring at a screen all day
long. But I do think I get bored with
things quite quickly. So I think if I was writing the
same thing over and over again, I would get very bored.
So I do mix up kind of techniques and things and I
think that's that's part of the as much as you can teach these
(26:20):
these things, I think you can teach different approaches.
But then it's it's up to people to try them out themselves and
see what works for them, what produces good writing, what
makes their writing easier and what makes the writing harder.
And then at the end to decide what the way that they're going
to do it and what's what's working.
I think that's what these books do as well, actually.
I mean, you know, there's one thing I'm really proud of with
these writing books. I think that's what they do is
(26:41):
they give you lots of different perspectives.
It's not like a prescriptive ABC.
This is how you write a book. It's much more.
Here are 13 different writers opinions on writing books.
Maybe go away and try some of them and see how you get on.
I think it's great that you've got 2 essays that contradict
each other or because I think well building is, it's like a
(27:02):
spectrum. And like like you said,
sometimes you need to do more well building if it's a
particularly like unique place with like a difficult concept
behind it and you need to sort of go into that depth.
But I I am very much with Jen Williams in that.
Me too. Let's.
Just go with the flow. Let's see what we need.
Because if being in that situation where you've spent
(27:24):
years building stuff and then you've not used any of it, it's
like, oh, I get why it probably started out like as a passion
project and it's exciting building worlds.
But I suppose we know as writersthat like, time is precious and
there's deadlines involved as well.
We can't be. Well, if you want to be, if you
want to work in the commercial space.
(27:46):
So that's what it comes down to,you know, and, and that's what
I'm, I'm trying to, yeah, I'm, I'm assuming that most of the
people who come on the course are interested in finding an
agent and going down the traditional publishing route.
And so, you know, I have to incorporate that side of it as
well, which is, you know, it's, that's the business side as well
as the creative side. But it was really, Richie, you
(28:06):
talked about a spectrum there about a spectrum of experiences.
And that just reminded me of a post that popped up on Instagram
the other day on magic itself. It was by MHI Indy, who was
who's an author of the song Songof Legends lost.
She was saying that she was talking about magic systems and
hard magic versus soft magic andsaying that she she was arguing
(28:29):
that it's not a binary, it's a spectrum.
It's all you know, But because otherwise if it was a binary,
there must be some sort of pointin the middle where a soft magic
system morphs into a hard magic system.
And how on earth do you break that down?
And that's something that, you know, I get obviously I focused,
I've got a whole sort of mini world building unit on magic and
(28:50):
magic systems in my course. And it is something that the
students are always so keen to talk about with each other as
well as me, because it is, you know, it is quite, it's quite,
it can be quite divisive. People have these, these
opinions about what, what magic system should I create, what
works? I, I think magic should have
(29:12):
rules or I think magic shouldn'thave rules.
And, and what I just say to themis, is that your magic system
has to be, it's a fundamental part of your world and your
world building. It's, it's got to be as integral
as mountains and trees as, as, as the society, as the economy,
as, as basically everything elsein your world.
It's got to have, it's got to feel natural and it's got to
(29:34):
spring naturally from the world and the story that you're
telling. So it's interesting that you
were talking about spectrum because this is exactly, you
know, pulling it back to magic, magic and creating a magic
system is also sort of sits on aspectrum.
I think it's, you know, I I've done hard, hard system.
I've not done a very hard, I'm not a Brandon Sanderson.
(29:55):
I have to say I've never done a super, super hard system, but I
have done harder systems. And, and you know, where I'm
sitting now is in absolutely on the far end of the soft system
spectrum because I just, you know, I just love giving magic
that sort of ineffitability and this, this, this mystery system
it has. But it is so fascinating that
(30:16):
that people have these, these, you know, I, I need a magic
system for my book. Tell me how to do a magic
system. Yeah.
I mean, I think with magic systems like the more you define
it, the less magic it is. That's right.
I I agree. I think with with magic, you've
got one side that's pure magic, who knows what's going on.
And then the other side it's more like a science and the more
(30:40):
defined it is. So I don't know.
It's it's great. So I mean, magic is the title of
the book. So what like you say, if someone
asks you what, what are the final features of fantasy,
they're likely to say magic or Dragons.
And so talk to us about your views on magic.
I mean, Lucy, you, you wrote thechapter on Ashley Lewin's magic
(31:04):
system and it was a really interesting deep dive into like
the different ways, like you said there, the magic should be
part of every facet of the worldand they're like going on about
spirituality and stuff like that.
So talk to us about your views on magic and how to build a
magic system. That's a rather large question.
(31:27):
You can be here all night. How to build a magic?
Well, I mean, as I said before, like the most important rule,
and this goes for everything, isthat whatever you do from
character through to world building, it has to be in
service of the story. The story is all.
And I actually use a lot of the Guins trick like writing
(31:52):
techniques, you know, in, in my course because I think she's
just, she nails it so many times.
She's just extremely, an extremely, was an extremely
observant writer and is very good at sort of expressing what
she means when you know, becauseteaching writing and especially
when you're writing in a, in a space like fantasy, it can be
quite overwhelming. There's a, there's a lot to do
(32:16):
at the start of, at the start ofyour kind of novelistic journey.
So, yeah, I mean, magic doesn't have to be just one thing, I
think. And that's why what I like about
Earthsea, and if you read my essay in in the in the book,
you'll see that I approach it sort of thematically.
I think that magic in Earthsea serves many purposes.
(32:40):
It's not just the, you know, sort of get out of jail free
card that it, you know, is in a lot of books.
It's not just a the, the, the amazing sparkling thing that
makes a book into a fantasy book, You know, it, it does all
sorts of things. It's part of the economy, it's
part of society. It's part of her, her entire,
(33:02):
you know, she has a very long discussion on gender.
She sort of carries all the way through the sort of five or or
so earthy books. It's, it's very, it's integral
to, to the main character's journey of, of self and
exploring who he is. And then it's also tied very
closely into his sort of loss ofit.
(33:24):
There's a sort of castration narrative at the end.
She, she taught, she, she links magic to sort of masculinity, or
at least the wizard's version ofmagic to masculinity.
There's so much going on there. So, you know, I, I, I mentioned
before that, you know, when I was, I was researching this,
this topic, I found an essay written by somebody else who I,
(33:46):
I can't remember anyway, so thatI can't name any names.
But who was, you know, who was taking down Le Guin's magic
system in as being flabby and, and, and chaotic and
overpowered. And it was all the women didn't
have anything to do. And the magic was all men's
magic. And I just wanted to write
(34:07):
something that sort of refuted that to say like, you know,
you're oversimplifying here. Magic is so integral to
Earthsea, but it isn't just, youknow, and actually the, the, the
time, you know, when it, when it's used as magic, like when,
you know, you raise a wind or call a storm, Those are the
times when it's actually, it's less frequent.
(34:27):
It's much more, it appears much more frequently, you know, in,
in, in a sort of figurative sense or, or it serves a purpose
to, to, to talk about the sort of, well, all sorts of things.
I think you have to read the essay to to see what I mean,
because I do go into this in some detail, but it's what I
think my point is, is that it's easy to oversimplify magic as as
(34:52):
a sort of a force of nature, as a, as a force for good or as a
force for evil. But I think Le Guin is a perfect
example of somewhere, someone oras a writer who can take
something such a fundamental part of the fantasy genre and,
and and and weave it throughout her entire, over her entire
(35:14):
world building. And everything in Earth Sea is
underpinned with magic in some sense, and magic very rarely
takes the same form. Nice.
It's interesting. I was, I was reminded earlier
actually, when we were talking about I was on a panel once and
I can't for the life of me remember who was on this panel
or even what the main theme of the panel was.
(35:34):
But somebody asked a question about about world building and
basically said that they'd done a whole ton of world building
and they'd put up like all thesefolders full of world building
and things and now they need to get right on the story, but
didn't know where to begin. And someone on the panel said to
them, have you ever considered that maybe you don't want to be
a writer? Maybe you should be.
Maybe you'd be better off writing role-playing games.
(35:55):
And what? Because it sounds like what
you've written is like a manual for a role-playing game.
And I think this often happens in the fantasy genre in a way
that it doesn't in other genres.And the people come to it from a
role-playing point of view quiteoften, because that's quite from
one of the first ways they experience the fancy genre when
they're kind of in their teens or whatever, they get into
role-playing. And so they approach things like
magic like they're writing a role-playing system.
(36:17):
So it mustn't be overpowered. It's got to be balanced and it
has to have a structure and a system and all these things that
work. But as writers of novels or
short stories, you're not writing a role-playing system.
And what you need to do instead is, as Lucy was saying, you need
something that works thematically and works with the
characters and works with your narrative.
(36:38):
It doesn't have to be something you could pluck out and play a
game and have people be actuallybe kind of like equally powered
against each other and things because that's not what you're
doing. What you're doing is creating
something that creates an interesting theme and an
interesting story and an interesting narrative.
And that's a different job to creating a balanced, workable
(36:58):
magic system that you could playa game with.
And I think people sometimes lose that.
You can enjoy both things and lots of people that play both
role-playing games and are writers.
You can do both, but I think thejobs are different.
I think it's it's kind of important for fantasy writers
more than there probably any other genre writers to just
remember that that's what they're doing is they're working
(37:20):
on a narrative and they're working on a book.
They're not trying to create a world system that's going to be
used in any other context other than that narrative.
Very often these things are icebergs, aren't they?
You only really ever see the the.
Top. 10%. And like I said, and that was
what happened with Geoffrey needs book that he they actually
been working for about 10 years and building the back story just
(37:42):
for fun. They were just doing it as like
a fun exercise. And after 10 years of it, they
built this really cool world up and then had to decide what they
wanted to do with it. And they almost decided to turn
it into a role-playing game justbecause, again, you had that
that kind of depth of backgroundand kind of workable world and
economy and society and all thatkind of stuff.
(38:03):
And when it came to writing the book, they used a fraction of
it. They used like maybe 10% of it.
And the rest of it is just kind of still sitting in a folder
somewhere. Because you didn't need all of
that in order to write a book. You just need what drives the
narrative and what makes the story interesting and
thematically unified and things like that.
Yeah, what advice to you was youhave for writers who aren't
(38:25):
quite sure how much they need todo?
I don't know. I'm very lazy.
So I'd probably say do less thanyou think you need to do, do
less than you think you need to do, and then start writing.
Because it's very easy to get caught in the trap of just
expending all of your energy andall of your enthusiasm in
building a world and then never actually getting around to
(38:47):
finishing a story based in that world because you've kind of
burnt out already. You've kind of burnt out all
that enthusiasm too early on, but again, maybe that's me.
Completely agree. It's what it's what I, I tell my
students as well is that look, you know, you're here to write a
book, you're here to write a novel, you're here to tell a
story. So start writing fine, you know,
(39:10):
if, if, if it's if you've got a complex world, if you've got a
lot of societies and, and, and cultures clashing and you've
got, you know, various power struggles happening, you know,
OK, set out some of the main points so you they're clear in
your head. But really, you, you couldn't
easily, as Dan says, you can easily spend years sort of
(39:31):
playing in the sand pit without actually sculpting your, your,
your beautiful castle that you can sell to a publisher.
So I do, I do think there is a danger there absolutely in, in
getting carried away with, with getting it all right.
I must have all the pieces in place.
You don't need all the pieces inplace.
(39:51):
Like the, the part, the fun partof writing is that you don't
know, I, I, I love that. I love opening my document.
I mean, OK, I have a, a, a vagueidea of how this scene is going
to go or, but you know, sometimes it doesn't go that way
and that's fine. And that's part of the, the joy
of creation. If you planned it all out in
(40:12):
advance, I feel like it would bequite a dry and sterile process.
It wouldn't, it wouldn't leave so much room for your, for your,
your own creations to, to turn around and surprise you.
But I I do understand where. You know, new writers are coming
from because it is it is a a concern that you know, how much
(40:32):
do I have to do? How much world building is, you
know, and and you when you're writing fantasy, you do have to
do a lot of world building. I just find that it's so much
more organic to world build as you go along it.
It feels, you know, otherwise you do tend to stray into the,
you know, the, the omniscient narratorial thing where you're
(40:52):
kind of looking down on it and moving pieces around the board
as opposed to being in your character's head discovering the
world as they discover it. I feel like there's just a, you
know, it's, it feels more organic.
It feels more true, true to lifeto do it that way.
And you feel much more rooted inthe story.
I am an editor as well, so I'm a, I'm a firm believer in the
(41:13):
editorial process. So a, a first draft is very much
a first draft and you can go back in and fix things and
change things and rework things retrospectively because you've
suddenly introduced something inthe second-half that wasn't
mentioned at all in the first half.
You can just go and put it in very.
Easy. Nowadays, so you know, you can
even I've been known to just leave myself little notes in
(41:33):
places as well, like not sure how this will work later on or
come back to this once we've gota bit further kind of thing.
It's like, you know, I you can go back and rework it all.
You can work all that kind of stuff in later.
Once you've got to the story that you wanted to tell, you can
then make sure of all of the aspects of working together and
everything's fitting together again.
I think this is something that especially starting out, writers
(41:57):
kind of unaware of, I guess, notnecessarily ignoring it.
I don't think they even necessarily know it is the fact
that your first draft doesn't have to be your complete
finished story. It's not where it ends.
The process ends. It's just like the beginning.
It's the first sketch that you're doing.
It doesn't mean that it's going to be the finished artwork.
It's just, you know, you do thatfirst sketch and then you can
work from there and build it up or build it down or break it
(42:18):
into different parts or whateverit is you feel it needs to doing
to it. So yeah, I'm a big believer in
that. I also am a big believer in the
fact that I think after a certain point, excessive world
building just becomes procrastination.
I also think that, yeah. It's much easier than sitting
down and having to actually write the story.
You can do. It it is easier, it is easier.
(42:38):
Writing's hard, you know, right.And, and telling a story.
So what I like to say is think of the first draft as you
telling yourself the story, the second draft as you sort of you
and your agent sort of telling it to an editor.
And then the third draft is the editor and you telling it to a
reader. So you just have to keep on
(42:59):
building on what you've got until because what what you're
trying to do is actually quite complex.
You are you're trying to invite the greatest number of people
into your your mind, your spirit, your soul, your world
space that you have created fromyour unique life experience.
And you're trying to make this place as welcoming as possible
(43:23):
to as many people as possible. And sometimes that takes a lot
of editing. It takes a lot of work to sort
of realize how can I do this? You know, how can I make this
this world as as as welcoming toas many people?
I mean, I'm not saying that that's the be all and end all of
writing, but the point is you, you write books that people for
people to you, you want to, you want your storytelling to be
(43:46):
accessible. You want, you know, to to people
to, to empathize with your characters and that you know
that doesn't happen overnight. That's that take.
It can take quite a few drafts and it's all a very delicate
balance of, of, of getting your characterization right.
But also, as you we've been saying, the world building and
the magic system, all of this has got to sort of work.
(44:07):
It's a bit like a Jenga tower. It's all got to sort of go up
together and work together and yeah, like there's, it's a long
process, but you know, it's alsoa fun process, so.
Yeah, yeah. As the editor of the book, have
you got any particularly favorite chapters?
(44:28):
Well, I have to ask that question.
There you go. I tell you, what I think really
like was that so every time we do our three spotlight pieces,
which is specifically on individual authors.
So obviously Lucy's is on UrsulaLe Guin when we have the
discussion. So obviously we thought we had
to have Tolkien. We couldn't get away without
having Tolkien in there, but then we had discussion.
We like, we don't want to just have like Tolkien and CS Lewis
(44:50):
and, and then possibly Pratchettor someone because it's suddenly
you've got 3 white male writers from very similar backgrounds
really. And it was just, it's always one
of my favorite bits of the book is you get to kind of throw up
and say, OK, well, there's probably someone we have to have
there. In which case it was this case,
it was Tolkien. But then it's like, well, how do
we push the margins a bit more on that?
(45:10):
So one was having Le Guin, whichI, I grew up reading the
Earthsea book. So the fact that we, we've been
able to include that in a major way in the book is massive to me
because I feel like they, they're just incredible.
Even today, they're just incredible.
I don't my, my wonder at them has not lessened over the years.
But the other one that I was really pleased putting was
Michael Moorcock, partly becauseI think he's the first one we've
(45:32):
done a spotlight piece on who isstill alive and certainly the
first one who I've actually worked with.
So that was very nice to be ableto include someone.
But also his Elrich books in particular were fundamental to
me when I was growing up, when Iwas like 1516 years old.
And their vision of a fantasy world, like in retrospect now
looking at it as kind of older me, I felt was, was really
(45:54):
important to the direction that that fantasy went in, especially
British fantasy went in. He took it in a much darker,
more gnarly direction that it had been before and challenged
the boundaries of what you coulddo with it and couldn't do with
it. Partly because he used to churn
out like 5 books a year. So that that I think gave him
the freedom to to experiment. And if a book failed, it didn't
(46:14):
matter because he had another 4 coming out that year.
So it was fine. But yeah, just for me growing
up, I was like, they, they literally blew my mind.
At the age of about 15 or 16. I was like, I'd never read
anything like them in terms of kind of darkness and intensity.
I think in fantasy at the time, we were very used to kind of big
sprawling fantasy epics. The Arabic books were generally
(46:37):
pretty short and pretty violent and dark and quite intense.
And quite often you kind of, youcame out the back of one of them
and felt like you had to like have a bit of a breath of fresh
air and read something else afterwards for a while before
you came back to them. So being able to include that as
well. And I think like very different
facets of the fantasy genre thatI personally had enjoyed because
(46:59):
the Gwyn, Moorcock and Tolkien were all a big part of my
reading when I was younger. Being able to include those
three, I was really exciting to me.
I really liked that. There's always the surprise
essays as well. You always get surprised to say
RJ Barker's is probably the surprise essay this time.
Around that doesn't surprise me,but.
Just because it's completely bonkers.
Yes, of course. Yeah, I remember, he remember he
(47:21):
first week, he wasn't sure if hecould write anything.
And so we had a discussion. I said, well, you know, just try
and see how you get on and we can always have a chat about it.
We'll come up with it. And then literally about a week
later, he's like, I've written something.
I don't know what it is. It might not even work.
It might just be a collection ofblog posts.
I don't know. But I'm working on it.
We'll see how it comes out. And when it came out.
It's fantastic. It's actually more on just the
(47:43):
process of writing itself almostmore than it is about fantasy
fiction and what writing means to him.
But probably more than any otheressay we've had in these books,
I think it is very much just a pure expression of what the hell
am I doing? Feeling of writing, which I
think I've ever seen anywhere else, is the idea that even as
an experienced writer with lots of book books under your belt,
(48:05):
you can still be in that place where you're like, how does this
work? What am I even doing?
I don't really understand how all of this comes together.
It just seems to somehow. I think that's great.
I'm really happy that I'm looking forward to reading that
because that is exactly, Yeah, that's when someone, when
someone asks you like how, how did you do this?
How did you do that? And I'm like, I, I don't know
(48:27):
how I did that. Like it was all, it's about
balancing all of this stuff in your head and it all sort of,
it's all in there and it all sort of makes sense in a way.
And sometimes it doesn't. And it's very, you know, I, I
think people, we, we like to be able to, I think people like to
think we can teach writing. Like you can, you know, you
start out one day and you're nota writer and then you do a
(48:47):
course and you're a writer at the end of the course and you
can do it. And it's, and it like, like,
like learning to drive, you know, but you, it's not the
same. I mean, it's, it's a constant
journey of evolution. Like I'm hoping that I will
become better and better and better as I continue writing
and, and developing as a person,because it's also very deeply
(49:09):
personal expression of Salford writing in, in any, any form of
writing. And so it's, and it's, it is
hard to express that. And I don't think people talk
about it enough. I think we sort of like to
simplify the process and break it down into manageable chunks.
And while that's helpful, you know it and it gives people a
(49:30):
sort of an, an opening actually the, you know, I think what,
what RJ was probably trying to express is, is the, it's the
wonder of it, the wonder that itcan be done at all.
That was, I mean, actually when we came up with the title
writing the magic. I mean, obviously, as we've,
we've talked about, like magic is a fun fundamental part of the
(49:51):
fantasy genre, but we did kind of we settled on that title in
the end because the, the workingtitle was just writing fantasy.
We had to probably something slightly more interesting, but
we settled on that one in the end just because it we found it
kind of encompassed both sides of it.
So it encompasses the the writing magic in a literal way,
but also just the magic of the writing process.
I do often feel like more than any other kind of artistic
(50:12):
endeavour, there's this kind of weird expectation when people
start out writing, like you say,they can somehow just be taught
it and then they'll be a writer and they can go away and do it.
And you wouldn't expect someone to take some guitar lessons and
suddenly be able to go and be a rock musician or take some
painting lessons and suddenly have artworks in the take
gallery or something. It's just like it takes work.
(50:33):
It becomes your life's work if you know if you wanted to.
And you just chip away at it andwork at it and change and evolve
and develop new skills and maybelearn these new things and lose
old bad habits that you may be picked up along the way.
But it is that constant kind of progression and evolution.
I think that it is interesting. So you can learn the craft, you
(50:57):
can learn to play a guitar, you can learn to to write sentences
on a page. But to take it to that next
level and be someone who's successful as a musician and
lauded as a musician, you need to do more.
And it's the same with writing, I think.
In order to write the magic, in fact.
You said that last year I had, I'd written myself in a very
cheesy way. I'd written myself like, I think
(51:19):
3 or 4 like motivational sentences.
It was like a New Year's resolution thing.
I was like, OK, I'm not going todo a New Year's resolution, but
I'm going to just like write kind of like some guiding
principles, what I want to do this year.
So that one of them was like always lift other people up
where you can because I feel like that's important in terms
of community and things. But one of them was, was to keep
learning, to keep learning and keep learning new things.
(51:41):
There shouldn't, I don't think, be a point as a writer where you
feel like you know it. Now you know writing.
You don't need to learn. Everything.
Else you should constantly be learning and developing.
And so I think sometimes it's important to remind ourselves of
that, that if you're still learning new things, it doesn't
mean that you've fallen short oryou've failed before.
(52:02):
Now it it's just natural that you keep progressing and keep
changing and developing and refining what you're doing.
Yeah, couldn't, couldn't have said that any better.
Amazing. Well, I think that's a brilliant
way to to bring it all to a conclusion.
And yeah, Dan, Lucy, thank you so much.
It's been fantastic when you both have learned loads.
(52:22):
I'm sure everyone listening to home has learned an awful lot as
well. Best of luck with the book.
It'll be out very soon. There's going to be a bit of a
tour, isn't? There, Yeah, Yeah.
So it's officially out on the 18th of September, but we have
got events lined up for it, which is kind of exciting.
There are two officially announced ones, which is there's
(52:45):
one Liverpool on the 18th of September and then one at
Edgelit. But then also it's not
officially announced yet, but itis going to be at MCM Comic Con
in London. We're going to have a panel on
the Saturday at MCM Comic Con London and I can't reveal who's
going to be on the panel becausethey haven't announced them yet,
but they have announced me. So I think I'm allowed to say I
(53:06):
will be heading the panel and there will be people on it on
the Saturday MCM Comic Con. I'm amazing.
And if anyone wants to learn more about both of your books
and your writing, where's the best place to go?
Lucy, What about yourself? Well, you can follow me at
Sylvan historian and that's SILVAN on Instagram and that's
(53:30):
pretty much my handle across allsocial media.
Have a sub stack. Please join my sub stack.
I write a lot about medieval things and hearts and, and the
book that I I can't talk about yet, but it's coming in 2027.
Wait, what? Watch this space for watch.
Watch that for October. I should be able to talk about
(53:50):
it come World fantasy in October.
Yes. Or of course you could check my
website out, which is just Lucy hansom.co.uk.
Nice. What about yourself then?
Easiest price is probably Dan coxon.com, which is the website,
but I don't always update that as much as I should.
(54:10):
So there is a newsletter that you can sign up to on there,
which is a good way to get this kind of monthly updates on kind
of new releases and events and stuff.
Or I am on Instagram at Dan dot Coxon dot author and I'm on Blue
Sky as well now, but I can't quite remember what I am on Blue
sky. I don't go on Blue Sky often
enough really, but I'm just kindof there floating in the sky
somewhere. I've got links for everything in
(54:33):
the description. Thank you again both.
It's been a fantastic shot with you.
Good luck again with the book and thank you everyone home for
listening. Thank you for listening to the
fantasy writers tool shed. If you'd like to join our
writing community on Discord andget access to fantasy writing
classes and books on Patreon, check the links in the
description. And if you don't want to miss
(54:55):
any future episodes, be sure to follow or subscribe.
And to support the show, leave aquick rating on Spotify or
iTunes and share this episode onsocial media or with anyone who
you think may be interested. Thank you very much for
listening. Enjoy the show.
Welcome to another episode of the Fancy Writers Tool Shed.
I'm your host, Richie Billing, and today I'm delighted to be
joined by two brilliant writers,Dan Coxon and Lucy Holland.
Dan Lucy, welcome to the show. Hi there.
Hi, thanks for having us. Oh, it's an honor to chat with
you both, the talented writers working hard on a new book
(00:34):
that's coming out very soon and it's all about writing fantasy.
It's called Writing the Magic. But Dan, you've been the the
curator of these brilliant essays on the different aspects
of writing fantasy and we see you've contributed a fantastic
chapter reading just before looking at Ashley Lewin's
Absence FC series and the magic system in particular.
(01:00):
A lot of pressure on that chapter with, albeit with the
book titled Being Magic, but I loved it and so many interesting
new ways to look at building themagic system.
And so we're going to talk aboutthe book today.
There's lots of different topicsthat it covers.
We all love writing, talking about writing fantasy.
(01:20):
We all know doubt about it, don't we?
So it's going to be nice and broad and then we'll dive into
the subjects there. You guys are a specialist in
Dan. We've already mind your brain
for short story concepts. So we're going to we're going to
look more broadly at writing fantasy.
But first, before we dive into anything, let's do some intros.
(01:44):
So Lucy, you're new to the show.You'd like to tell us a bit
about you. You're writing your your
journey. Yeah, sure.
Well, I'm Lucy Holland. I'm the author of two historical
fantasy novels, Sister Song and Song of the Huntress.
They're both set in early medieval Britain, and they
reimagine various myths and ballads.
(02:07):
I work quite closely with Celticmythology before that and my
actual name, Lucy Hanson, I wrote a epic fantasy trilogy
called World Maker that was out in 2015.
So yeah, I've been around for 10years.
In that time, I've also been 1/3of a intersectional MNS podcast
(02:27):
called Breaking the Glass Slipper, which I'm sure quite a
few listeners will have heard of.
We've been around the block a bit.
That's been great. That was great fun.
And I, yeah, I now teach creative writing for Curtis
Brown. So I've got a, a fairly, yeah,
broad, broad range of activitieswhen it comes to fantasy.
(02:47):
Very. Nice and done.
What about yourself and your relationship with the fantasy
genre? Yeah, it's interesting actually,
because I my, my kind of first foray into fantasy, I had to, my
very first book was much of the literary fiction anthology about
the fatherhood, because I've recently become a dad and I it
(03:08):
was, it was a bunch of people writing stories about
fatherhood. But my first kind of foray into
fantasy was this Dreaming Isle, which was about nine years ago.
So it looks like 9 or 10 years is how long it takes someone to
get onto your podcast. Clearly.
But after this Dreaming, I had acouple other anthologies and
then I think we talked before about kind of quite a lot of
(03:30):
those. But most recently I've had
Hartwood, which was the Nostalgia Wood anthology, which
Lucy had a story in and which isup for a World Fantasy Award
now. So that's been going really
well. Couldn't be happier really with
that. And then I've been doing the
writing books with Dead Ink. So this is now the 4th one
Writing the Magics We've had Writing the Uncanny, Writing the
(03:52):
Future, writing the Writing the Murder, and now Writing the
Magic, all Co edited with Richard V Hurst and yeah, all
just compiling essays by variouswriters on how they approach
writing their particular genre. And everyone approached it from
really different directions. So it's a whole bunch of
different essays. I also have another anthology
(04:13):
coming out with Dead Ink in October, which is very much kind
of recent news. We only announced it quite late,
but I have a haunted house anthology coming out in October,
which I'm very excited about because obviously it's the it's
coming out like a day before Halloween, which is perfect.
And then as soon as Halloween's over, it's going to pivot into
being a Christmas ghost story anthology.
(04:34):
So we're really hoping people get behind that.
It's called Unquiet Guests. I'm very excited about that.
Yeah, well, if anyone hasn't listens, you have to go back and
check out Dan's previous appearance on the show.
We talked about short stories and Dan, fantastic short story
writer, one of the best short story writers I've ever read.
(04:55):
And I've learned so much from you as well.
Like the tips that you shared. They've made massive difference
to my my short story writing. So yeah, go check that.
I wasn't all the best with the new anthologies and I'll be
getting copies of them. So I suppose one of the best
places to start then is why fantasy?
Like what? What is it about the genre that
(05:17):
has brought us all together tonight as inspired dancer to
put this book together and Lucy said so right, I really sort of
interesting take on on one of your most beloved fantasy books.
So what? What is it about the genre?
(05:37):
Do you know what, though? The the so we brought out
writing Uncanny first was the original idea we had for these
writing books was writing the Uncanny.
And it seemed good that Uncanny was having a bit of a moment of
the time and we thought it'd be really interesting to explore
that. And as soon as that came out,
people started haranguing me, saying when are you going to do
a fantasy? And we'd already planned the
science fiction one at that point.
(05:58):
And then we kind of felt we wanted to move away from kind of
fantastical genres. So we did the crime one.
But from very early on, it was always the case that people were
saying to me that they wanted a fancy 1.
And I'm, I mean, I'm not entirely sure what that is.
I don't think it's necessarily the that there are people need
kind of more guidance when it comes to fantasy.
They have more questions about fantasy than they did about
(06:19):
other genres. I think it's just that it's a
genre that's close to so many people's hearts, Mainly because
I think we grow up with it so often when we're young and we're
reading like kind of not honestly adult books, but
certainly more complex books forthe first time.
So you're moving away from kind of picture books and simplistic
books. You're quite often moving to
fantasy. I can see it.
My 10 year old's doing it at themoment.
He's just got into a fantasy series for kind of for the first
(06:41):
time, and he's absolutely lovingjust the imagination of it.
And I think a lot of us, becausewe grow up with that, it's
something that's just very dear to us and something that we
still really enjoy, at least forme.
I don't know if it's the same for you, Lucy.
Oh, absolutely. For me, I can't really ever
imagine myself writing outside of fantasy.
(07:03):
I mean, I've read OK, epic fantasy, which I've written is
very, very fantasy. I mean, that's probably like
the, the, the hardcore fantasy. And I'm, I'm sort of writing in
a sub genre of which I historical fantasy.
But the, but I mean, it's still,it's, it's a fusion of history
and fantasy and the fantasy is still very present in it.
(07:24):
And I, I did, I get this question.
I think it's somebody sent a, a fantastic like response that
Terry Pratchett got asked when he was alive.
Someone said, like, you're brilliant.
You could write any book you wanted.
You're such a fantastic, why areyou writing fantasy?
And he was like, I'm gonna pretend you didn't ask that
question because it's so offensive as in, and I just, I
(07:49):
don't know, I guess it's, it's so much a part of me.
It's so much a part of where I came from.
My dad read to us as children. He read The Lord of the Rings
when we were probably far too young to really appreciate it.
He read all this. He had, you know, we, we walked
away through sort of the, the greats of, of the fantasy and
science fiction genre. And, and so I sort of grew, I
(08:11):
grew up thinking that fantasy and writing, but made him rather
synonymous for me. So it's very hard for me to sort
of write, think about concept, actualising a book that sits
outside of fantasy as as a genre, because for me, writing
is magic. Magic is writing.
It's all. And it's why it was, you know,
when Dan asked me to contribute to this, I was like, yeah, of
(08:31):
course. See, this is this is, you know,
magic is a core element of fantasy.
I suppose if you asked somebody,you know, just a layperson on
the street, like about fantasy and and to define fantasy, you
know, OK, maybe they'd say Dragons.
I would say Dragons, but the second thing they would say is
magic. Magic is, is such a core part
(08:52):
of, and I think it picks up on what Dan was saying about
childhood as well. And the fact that we, it's,
perhaps it's, it's comforting somewhat that we, we can take
the magic of our childhood forward into our, you know, into
our adulthood to, you know, I'vealways been a great believer in,
in fantasy as a sort of arena to, to explore real world issues
(09:12):
that could be quite uncomfortable and set in a sort
of contemporary or real world context.
And I think fantasy as an archetypal genre is just
perfectly suited to to exploringall sorts of of contemporary
concerns. Yeah, it's it's a great point to
tell you both make and I think what I would, I would probably
say is that it's it's sort of brings in so much from the whole
(09:37):
spectrum of fiction, doesn't it?That, like you say, you can
explore these real world issues and you can put them into more
relatable ways of ways that people can engage with more
because it's not just like the same thing should have done the
throws. It's amazing that what you has
changed. Like you think back to sort of
like classic fantasy and it was all a bit like a bit bit bit
(10:00):
cliche for a while. But now it's it's, it's really
like grown in its depth and it'sit's almost philosophical.
I think, I think actually in thelast kind of 10 years or so, in
particular, I think both horror and fantasy have really thrived.
Science fiction, not necessarilyto such an extent.
(10:21):
I think partly because of the science aspect and because
science seems to be moving so fast at the moment.
I think sometimes it's quite difficult for writers to to try
and imagine what what happens beyond that.
Because things are moving so quickly that if you're not
careful, like ideas catch up with you in the real world
before you've even made it out into print.
But I think particularly with fantasy and horror, they seem to
(10:42):
have had a real, as you say, kind of an expansion in terms of
what they can do over the past sort of 1015 years.
I remember kind of back in the what, in the late 90s, early
2000s when I was working in a bookshop, both horror and
fantasy were very much seen as, and how to put this, pretty
trashy genres. They were seen very much as Pulp
(11:05):
Fiction still in a way that science fiction wasn't actually.
People would read science fiction and feel there was a
seriousness to it because they had the science aspect to it,
whereas they felt those were very kind of light and frothy
fantasy romance rather than anything else, it was seen as an
offshoot of romance. And again, horror was seen as
just being something that was just there to scare people and
that was the only point of it and it was all it could do.
(11:26):
And I think in the last kind of 15 years or so, we've really
seen actually, there's so much more you can do within those
genres. You can do anything you can do
in those genres that you can do in any other book, in any
literary novel, that you can cover the same topics and go
into them in the same depth and sometimes approach them in more
interesting ways. Which I think is why it's not
unusual nowadays for literary writers and inverted commas
(11:48):
like, say, Ian McEwan or Kajuishi Guru to, to decide to
write a fancy or science fictionnovel because they they it
allows them to approach ideas inan interesting and novel way
rather than just in a kind of purely realistic,
straightforward way. And I think, yeah, fantasy in
particular, I think has really embraced that going forward.
(12:10):
And I think we see that in the essays in the book.
To be honest, there's kind of a excitement and effervescence to
some of the essays. You can tell people are just,
we're just thrilled to be asked to write something.
Well, it's because we, you know,as fantasy writers, we produce
creative work and very rarely are asked to produce critical
(12:31):
work. I mean, as far as it goes, we,
we might write, you know, a small article on one of the
themes that we've explored in our books for promotional
reasons. So it's, it's, it's really quite
rewarding when someone says, OK,well, write something that sort
of looks at your art and your practice critically.
(12:52):
And, and you know, when I, when I was looking at Le Guin it,
that was very interesting because it's sort of, well, it,
it forces me to read with a, a slightly more critical eye, but
also to read my work and my approach to writing fantasy with
a critical eye. And that is, I, I think that's,
you know, an offshoot of, of fantasy sort of being dismissed
as, you know, a sensational genre for, for, for the mass
(13:13):
market. You know, it, it's a quick read.
It's, you know, sort of trashy food, that kind of thing.
And I, I find that it's, it's very, it's had that round its
neck for a very long time. So the more, the more critical
work we can do with the genre, the more we can sort of open it
up to, you know, to, to, to lookat it sort of more more
(13:36):
analytically and, and to, to look at it as a, as a, you know,
as, as a living, breathing pieceof, because of academia, really.
Because I mean, like, it's, it'sgot ancient, ancient roots and
it goes it you, you could very well argue that the oldest
literature we have is fantasy. I mean, the epic of Gurgamesh,
for instance. You know, this, this, it is, it
(13:58):
is an archetypal genre that has existed forever.
So, you know, I, I, you know, I'm a great proponent of trying
to sort of better its appearance, you know, in, in a
sort of more mainstream literaryspace.
It's funny you mentioned Ian McEwan and Ishiguru, because
when they write a science fiction or or a fantasy novel,
it's literary. It's interesting actually
(14:23):
mentioning that. So I I discovered this
completely coincidentally when Iwas working on this book.
I got handed like three boxes ofstuff out of my dad's loft that
had a load of my books from whenI was about 15 or 16.
And I was really into trying to read kind of critical works on,
on genre fiction at that time because I was looking into, you
know, wanting to write things myself.
And I could only find 2 on fantasy, which I, I discovered
(14:45):
in this box in slightly kind of stained and muffied copies.
So there's Hopkins Tree and Leaf, which is, it's obviously
still widely available. And then one by Michael Moorcock
called Wizardry and Wild Romance, which is very
interesting. And again, an overview of the
genre. But those were the only two I
could find when I was about 15-16 years old.
That was all I could find anywhere.
(15:07):
And because of that, they becamelike a basis of of what I
thought was kind of critical study of fantasy when I was that
age. And it is just, it's so much
deeper than that now, isn't it? Like you say, you can, there's
discussion of not just like the history of the genre in a very
kind of dry literary sense, but also the creative process, the
different ways it can be approached, the different things
it can do, the different modes you can write in.
(15:30):
It's been fascinating to me writing, working on these
writing books, the ways in whichthe, the genre lines are
constantly crossed as well. The way you get, you know,
fantasy crime books nowadays andyou get kind of fantasy horror
books and it's just, it all kindof intersects in interesting
ways nowadays. And I have a whole subgenre on
that on my on my course. It's about let's talk about
(15:51):
subgenres and how they intersectbecause they really do.
It's fascinating. It's always slightly more
interesting to me, to be honest.I always love those.
I love those books that kind of slowly defy genre.
I think partly from having worked in book shops for 10
years, you kind of get very usedto your standard kind of sits in
the middle of a genre shelf kindof novel.
So anything that kind of veered outside of that was always a bit
(16:12):
interesting and exciting. So I think because of that, I
kind of still veer towards that kind of thing.
I mean, even with fantasy, I do prefer it.
I prefer kind of slightly weird fantasies, things that gets
taken to new and different areas, but that itself can then
be within a subgenre or sometimes in two subgenres, or
it can crossover genre boundaries.
Or, you know, I think people arejust much more open to
(16:33):
experimenting and doing different things rather than
just churning out the same kind of book over and over again.
This is why we love small presses.
And that's, that's great. The only downside I've sort of
to, to the sort of experimentation that sort of the
liberty out with it is that it could be so hard to pin yourself
(16:56):
down as a writer and say, oh, ifyou, if you like this person,
then you know like this because you could put, you could put
like 3 different, completely different comparisons in there.
And it's going to be so hard to nail down that one reader.
And that's the problem I've found anyway.
But. There was always that advice, I
mean, I don't know if it's so prevalent nowadays, but there
(17:18):
was always that advice when I was kind of starting out in
writing that kind of know your market advice.
So work out which market you're pitching to and then pitch it
squarely at that market and write for that market.
And I think what I've seen over the years is that can be quite
productive in terms of getting acontract and book sales, but it
(17:39):
doesn't necessarily produce the most interesting work.
And therefore it doesn't necessarily produce the things
that actually last and stand thetest of time and that people
will still be reading 1520 yearsdown the line because you're
just producing more of the same.Whereas I think, you know, it's
a more difficult route. I think kind of just following
(18:00):
your instinct and then trying towork out afterwards how you
could possibly sell it to a publisher.
But as Lucy said, small press publishers are definitely the
way forward on that these days. I feel small press publishers
will take bigger risks. They tend not to sell so many
books through book shops. It tends to be much more kind of
conventions and word of mouth and online sales.
So it doesn't have to fit squarely into a particular genre
(18:23):
section in the shop in the way that other books do.
And it kind of gives you that freedom to just go with stuff
that's great stories and interesting and not worry so
much about marketing. Nice recent voice, Recent voice.
So you mentioned that like when you were starting out, those not
many, not many sorts of handbooks that you could call
upon to learn more about writingthe genre.
(18:46):
And what was it like in those early days and what were the
biggest lessons that you learnedback then?
I just became a voracious reader, to be honest.
Yeah, same. I mean, Waterstones used to have
these free bookmarks that were like, white on the backside of
them with the Waterstones logo on the front.
And I used to take fistfuls of those and just use the back to
(19:07):
write out long lists of the names of books that I came
across. So I'd read things like the two
books I mentioned and Stephen King's On Writing and stuff like
that. And just every time a book was
mentioned, I'd be jotting them down, be like, oh, I need to
read this and I need to read this and I need to read this.
And I ended up with just these enormous lists of kind of like
both kind of classics and also kind of forgotten classics and
kind of minor classics of the genre that were just being
(19:27):
championed at the time. I remember that was how I first
came across Ramsey Campbells work was reading Stephen King's
On Writing, and he mentions Ramsey in there.
So it's like it was just all of these kind of influences.
And then, yeah, if I could get my hands on any of those, that
was great. Of course, in those days we
didn't have eBay, so it was muchmore difficult getting your
hands on weird out of print books.
So I constantly had these enormous long lists that I'd
(19:50):
hand to my parents around birthday and Christmas times,
and they'd be given the impossible task of like,
tracking down these fifty books that were probably all out of
print. But that's where all my reading
came from. I mean, I think it's how I
started reading Pratchett and things as well.
It's just they were recommended somewhere and they went on my
list and then then that was it. Yeah, you don't really, I, I
(20:10):
don't remember there being, you see now it's completely
different. And this is the same with, with
creative writing actually as, asa, as a, as an academic subject.
When I, when I went to university, and this is quite
scary about, I mean, I enrolled 20 years ago this year, there
were very few creative writing courses and 0 fantasy or, or
(20:32):
genre creative writing courses. Now there are, you know, OK,
there's not loads and loads of them, but they're, they're, they
exist now there's even a course at my local university, Exeter,
that's on, on you can do a, you can do an MA in, in magic
studies. And it's, it's really amazing.
It's like a kind of fusion across several, several
(20:53):
departments. So, yeah, I mean, when I, when I
started out like thinking about how do you go about writing a
fantasy book? I mean, I, I just read, I've
read lots and lots of fantasy and I wanted to write fantasy
from quite an early age. And I wrote my first fantasy
fantasy novel at 14. It was a fusion of Harry Potter
and The Lord of the Rings. It is as bad as it sounds, but
(21:16):
you know, it did teach me about 10.
God, I do need poor practice. But two, this is really what I
want to do and I'm going to try and make it happen.
And I the, the only, the only sort of teachers I had were,
were the books that I found in shops, fantasy books and
eventually, you know, going to university and then learning
sort of more about how to sort of craft a novel and, and what
(21:39):
sort of things go goes into a novel.
But, you know, Curtis Brown approached me last year to, to
create a fantasy, a writing fantasy course.
And that's what the, the title of the course is.
And I think clearly, because there's this been a very recent
upsurge in interest in fantasy, I suspect driven by romantic,
which I suspect is also driven by being in a post pandemic
(22:02):
world. Grim dark was all the rage in
2015. But nobody wants nihilistic
fiction now. They want shadow daddies and and
cozy, cozy fantasy. So yeah.
So I'm I'm here to like, say, OK, well, how do you, how do you
write? It's not just a writing course,
it's writing fantasy. So that was so interesting
because I had to interrogate my own practice.
(22:24):
I'd never interrogated my practice before when I, you
know, I've now written 7 novels or so and, and I, I guess it's
like you open the Microsoft Worddocument, it's blank and you
just start, but you think, how am I doing this?
And I've never really stopped tothink, how am I crafting this?
When does my magic system come into play?
(22:44):
How much work do I do beforehand?
Where is my research sitting? What's the balance of time
between, you know, writing and researching?
How does the how does the seconddraft come together and all of
this? So I had to, you know, it was
such an interesting, I was, you know, flattered and to be asked
to do it. And also just it was extremely
rewarding for me because it enabled me to sort of
(23:06):
deconstruct my own approach to, to writing and specifically
fantasy writing and how that might differ from, say, romance
writing or crime writing. You know, in essentials, writing
is writing, but fantasy does come with a host of other sort
of interesting and necessary things like, you know, a reader
(23:27):
contracts as there's a social contract that you make with with
a reader when you write fantasy,rather like, you know, similarly
when you write romance and this it's, it's such a, it's such a
vast, such a vast genre, you know, like when you think, well,
how on earth do you teach this? You know, what can I cover?
But just having that opportunityto, to sit down and, and work
(23:49):
out what I do as a writer when Istart to write a book that was
that, you know, showed me quite a lot about, about how I work
and, and, and how actually how that differs to a bunch of other
fantasy writers out there. Because there's no one way to go
about writing, as I'm sure Dan will agree.
But yeah, I mean, that was that was the one, the one thing that
we said when we were doing, we started thinking about doing
(24:11):
writing the magic was we need tohave something on world building
because it's such a fundamental bit of fantasy and it wasn't
really covered in the other books as well.
So it was like, you know, this is something that's fairly
unique, not entirely unique, butfairly unique fantasy.
So we need to look at it. And what was really interesting
is, yeah, we got very conflicting essays as we have
done in the past. We had two conflicting essays in
writing the future as well wherewhere people disagreed with each
(24:31):
other and we had disagreement onworld building.
Jen Williams very much argues that she kind of makes a lot of
it up as she goes along and thenmakes it work afterwards in the
edits. Whereas Jeff Noon's essay, he
pretty much spent 10 years building the world and then
eventually came round to writingsomething in it and didn't use
the only use kind of a fraction of the world that he built in,
(24:53):
in the actual book. And the fun, at least in the
first instance, was in the worldbuilding side of it.
Apparently they actually considered turning into a
role-playing game at one point because they'd done all this
background world building. But in the end it became a
series of two novels. But it is interesting.
Like you say, it's not the same.There's not a kind of
one-size-fits-all thing where you can just say this is the way
(25:16):
it works and this is how you have to do it.
This is what I found more and more of the more I kind of talk
about writing and work with writes on these kind of essays
is that a lot of it is just trying different things and
finding out what works for you personally.
And then sometimes not even sticking with that.
Because sometimes people find something that works for them.
(25:36):
And then five years down the line or a couple of books down
the line, they suddenly try something else and find that
works just as well, if not better or changes their outlook.
And so they get a different result at the end.
And I mean, as you know, I work my knee in short stories.
And I think I said to you before, Richie, that I just, I
pretty much changed my method with each story depending on
what the the needs of the story are.
(25:57):
I don't really have a process that's the same every single
time. I kind of, I think it's partly
because I have a really short attention span, which sounds
weird for somebody who sits staring at a screen all day
long. But I do think I get bored with
things quite quickly. So I think if I was writing the
same thing over and over again, I would get very bored.
So I do mix up kind of techniques and things and I
think that's that's part of the as much as you can teach these
(26:20):
these things, I think you can teach different approaches.
But then it's it's up to people to try them out themselves and
see what works for them, what produces good writing, what
makes their writing easier and what makes the writing harder.
And then at the end to decide what the way that they're going
to do it and what's what's working.
I think that's what these books do as well, actually.
I mean, you know, there's one thing I'm really proud of with
these writing books. I think that's what they do is
(26:41):
they give you lots of different perspectives.
It's not like a prescriptive ABC.
This is how you write a book. It's much more.
Here are 13 different writers opinions on writing books.
Maybe go away and try some of them and see how you get on.
I think it's great that you've got 2 essays that contradict
each other or because I think well building is, it's like a
(27:02):
spectrum. And like like you said,
sometimes you need to do more well building if it's a
particularly like unique place with like a difficult concept
behind it and you need to sort of go into that depth.
But I I am very much with Jen Williams in that.
Me too. Let's.
Just go with the flow. Let's see what we need.
Because if being in that situation where you've spent
(27:24):
years building stuff and then you've not used any of it, it's
like, oh, I get why it probably started out like as a passion
project and it's exciting building worlds.
But I suppose we know as writersthat like, time is precious and
there's deadlines involved as well.
We can't be. Well, if you want to be, if you
want to work in the commercial space.
(27:46):
So that's what it comes down to,you know, and, and that's what
I'm, I'm trying to, yeah, I'm, I'm assuming that most of the
people who come on the course are interested in finding an
agent and going down the traditional publishing route.
And so, you know, I have to incorporate that side of it as
well, which is, you know, it's, that's the business side as well
as the creative side. But it was really, Richie, you
(28:06):
talked about a spectrum there about a spectrum of experiences.
And that just reminded me of a post that popped up on Instagram
the other day on magic itself. It was by MHI Indy, who was
who's an author of the song Songof Legends lost.
She was saying that she was talking about magic systems and
hard magic versus soft magic andsaying that she she was arguing
(28:29):
that it's not a binary, it's a spectrum.
It's all you know, But because otherwise if it was a binary,
there must be some sort of pointin the middle where a soft magic
system morphs into a hard magic system.
And how on earth do you break that down?
And that's something that, you know, I get obviously I focused,
I've got a whole sort of mini world building unit on magic and
(28:50):
magic systems in my course. And it is something that the
students are always so keen to talk about with each other as
well as me, because it is, you know, it is quite, it's quite,
it can be quite divisive. People have these, these
opinions about what, what magic system should I create, what
works? I, I think magic should have
(29:12):
rules or I think magic shouldn'thave rules.
And, and what I just say to themis, is that your magic system
has to be, it's a fundamental part of your world and your
world building. It's, it's got to be as integral
as mountains and trees as, as, as the society, as the economy,
as, as basically everything elsein your world.
It's got to have, it's got to feel natural and it's got to
(29:34):
spring naturally from the world and the story that you're
telling. So it's interesting that you
were talking about spectrum because this is exactly, you
know, pulling it back to magic, magic and creating a magic
system is also sort of sits on aspectrum.
I think it's, you know, I I've done hard, hard system.
I've not done a very hard, I'm not a Brandon Sanderson.
(29:55):
I have to say I've never done a super, super hard system, but I
have done harder systems. And, and you know, where I'm
sitting now is in absolutely on the far end of the soft system
spectrum because I just, you know, I just love giving magic
that sort of ineffitability and this, this, this mystery system
it has. But it is so fascinating that
(30:16):
that people have these, these, you know, I, I need a magic
system for my book. Tell me how to do a magic
system. Yeah.
I mean, I think with magic systems like the more you define
it, the less magic it is. That's right.
I I agree. I think with with magic, you've
got one side that's pure magic, who knows what's going on.
And then the other side it's more like a science and the more
(30:40):
defined it is. So I don't know.
It's it's great. So I mean, magic is the title of
the book. So what like you say, if someone
asks you what, what are the final features of fantasy,
they're likely to say magic or Dragons.
And so talk to us about your views on magic.
I mean, Lucy, you, you wrote thechapter on Ashley Lewin's magic
(31:04):
system and it was a really interesting deep dive into like
the different ways, like you said there, the magic should be
part of every facet of the worldand they're like going on about
spirituality and stuff like that.
So talk to us about your views on magic and how to build a
magic system. That's a rather large question.
(31:27):
You can be here all night. How to build a magic?
Well, I mean, as I said before, like the most important rule,
and this goes for everything, isthat whatever you do from
character through to world building, it has to be in
service of the story. The story is all.
And I actually use a lot of the Guins trick like writing
(31:52):
techniques, you know, in, in my course because I think she's
just, she nails it so many times.
She's just extremely, an extremely, was an extremely
observant writer and is very good at sort of expressing what
she means when you know, becauseteaching writing and especially
when you're writing in a, in a space like fantasy, it can be
quite overwhelming. There's a, there's a lot to do
(32:16):
at the start of, at the start ofyour kind of novelistic journey.
So, yeah, I mean, magic doesn't have to be just one thing, I
think. And that's why what I like about
Earthsea, and if you read my essay in in the in the book,
you'll see that I approach it sort of thematically.
I think that magic in Earthsea serves many purposes.
(32:40):
It's not just the, you know, sort of get out of jail free
card that it, you know, is in a lot of books.
It's not just a the, the, the amazing sparkling thing that
makes a book into a fantasy book, You know, it, it does all
sorts of things. It's part of the economy, it's
part of society. It's part of her, her entire,
(33:02):
you know, she has a very long discussion on gender.
She sort of carries all the way through the sort of five or or
so earthy books. It's, it's very, it's integral
to, to the main character's journey of, of self and
exploring who he is. And then it's also tied very
closely into his sort of loss ofit.
(33:24):
There's a sort of castration narrative at the end.
She, she taught, she, she links magic to sort of masculinity, or
at least the wizard's version ofmagic to masculinity.
There's so much going on there. So, you know, I, I, I mentioned
before that, you know, when I was, I was researching this,
this topic, I found an essay written by somebody else who I,
(33:46):
I can't remember anyway, so thatI can't name any names.
But who was, you know, who was taking down Le Guin's magic
system in as being flabby and, and, and chaotic and
overpowered. And it was all the women didn't
have anything to do. And the magic was all men's
magic. And I just wanted to write
(34:07):
something that sort of refuted that to say like, you know,
you're oversimplifying here. Magic is so integral to
Earthsea, but it isn't just, youknow, and actually the, the, the
time, you know, when it, when it's used as magic, like when,
you know, you raise a wind or call a storm, Those are the
times when it's actually, it's less frequent.
(34:27):
It's much more, it appears much more frequently, you know, in,
in, in a sort of figurative sense or, or it serves a purpose
to, to, to talk about the sort of, well, all sorts of things.
I think you have to read the essay to to see what I mean,
because I do go into this in some detail, but it's what I
think my point is, is that it's easy to oversimplify magic as as
(34:52):
a sort of a force of nature, as a, as a force for good or as a
force for evil. But I think Le Guin is a perfect
example of somewhere, someone oras a writer who can take
something such a fundamental part of the fantasy genre and,
and and and weave it throughout her entire, over her entire
(35:14):
world building. And everything in Earth Sea is
underpinned with magic in some sense, and magic very rarely
takes the same form. Nice.
It's interesting. I was, I was reminded earlier
actually, when we were talking about I was on a panel once and
I can't for the life of me remember who was on this panel
or even what the main theme of the panel was.
(35:34):
But somebody asked a question about about world building and
basically said that they'd done a whole ton of world building
and they'd put up like all thesefolders full of world building
and things and now they need to get right on the story, but
didn't know where to begin. And someone on the panel said to
them, have you ever considered that maybe you don't want to be
a writer? Maybe you should be.
Maybe you'd be better off writing role-playing games.
(35:55):
And what? Because it sounds like what
you've written is like a manual for a role-playing game.
And I think this often happens in the fantasy genre in a way
that it doesn't in other genres.And the people come to it from a
role-playing point of view quiteoften, because that's quite from
one of the first ways they experience the fancy genre when
they're kind of in their teens or whatever, they get into
role-playing. And so they approach things like
magic like they're writing a role-playing system.
(36:17):
So it mustn't be overpowered. It's got to be balanced and it
has to have a structure and a system and all these things that
work. But as writers of novels or
short stories, you're not writing a role-playing system.
And what you need to do instead is, as Lucy was saying, you need
something that works thematically and works with the
characters and works with your narrative.
(36:38):
It doesn't have to be something you could pluck out and play a
game and have people be actuallybe kind of like equally powered
against each other and things because that's not what you're
doing. What you're doing is creating
something that creates an interesting theme and an
interesting story and an interesting narrative.
And that's a different job to creating a balanced, workable
(36:58):
magic system that you could playa game with.
And I think people sometimes lose that.
You can enjoy both things and lots of people that play both
role-playing games and are writers.
You can do both, but I think thejobs are different.
I think it's it's kind of important for fantasy writers
more than there probably any other genre writers to just
remember that that's what they're doing is they're working
(37:20):
on a narrative and they're working on a book.
They're not trying to create a world system that's going to be
used in any other context other than that narrative.
Very often these things are icebergs, aren't they?
You only really ever see the the.
Top. 10%. And like I said, and that was
what happened with Geoffrey needs book that he they actually
been working for about 10 years and building the back story just
(37:42):
for fun. They were just doing it as like
a fun exercise. And after 10 years of it, they
built this really cool world up and then had to decide what they
wanted to do with it. And they almost decided to turn
it into a role-playing game justbecause, again, you had that
that kind of depth of backgroundand kind of workable world and
economy and society and all thatkind of stuff.
(38:03):
And when it came to writing the book, they used a fraction of
it. They used like maybe 10% of it.
And the rest of it is just kind of still sitting in a folder
somewhere. Because you didn't need all of
that in order to write a book. You just need what drives the
narrative and what makes the story interesting and
thematically unified and things like that.
Yeah, what advice to you was youhave for writers who aren't
(38:25):
quite sure how much they need todo?
I don't know. I'm very lazy.
So I'd probably say do less thanyou think you need to do, do
less than you think you need to do, and then start writing.
Because it's very easy to get caught in the trap of just
expending all of your energy andall of your enthusiasm in
building a world and then never actually getting around to
(38:47):
finishing a story based in that world because you've kind of
burnt out already. You've kind of burnt out all
that enthusiasm too early on, but again, maybe that's me.
Completely agree. It's what it's what I, I tell my
students as well is that look, you know, you're here to write a
book, you're here to write a novel, you're here to tell a
story. So start writing fine, you know,
(39:10):
if, if, if it's if you've got a complex world, if you've got a
lot of societies and, and, and cultures clashing and you've
got, you know, various power struggles happening, you know,
OK, set out some of the main points so you they're clear in
your head. But really, you, you couldn't
easily, as Dan says, you can easily spend years sort of
(39:31):
playing in the sand pit without actually sculpting your, your,
your beautiful castle that you can sell to a publisher.
So I do, I do think there is a danger there absolutely in, in
getting carried away with, with getting it all right.
I must have all the pieces in place.
You don't need all the pieces inplace.
(39:51):
Like the, the part, the fun partof writing is that you don't
know, I, I, I love that. I love opening my document.
I mean, OK, I have a, a, a vagueidea of how this scene is going
to go or, but you know, sometimes it doesn't go that way
and that's fine. And that's part of the, the joy
of creation. If you planned it all out in
(40:12):
advance, I feel like it would bequite a dry and sterile process.
It wouldn't, it wouldn't leave so much room for your, for your,
your own creations to, to turn around and surprise you.
But I I do understand where. You know, new writers are coming
from because it is it is a a concern that you know, how much
(40:32):
do I have to do? How much world building is, you
know, and and you when you're writing fantasy, you do have to
do a lot of world building. I just find that it's so much
more organic to world build as you go along it.
It feels, you know, otherwise you do tend to stray into the,
you know, the, the omniscient narratorial thing where you're
(40:52):
kind of looking down on it and moving pieces around the board
as opposed to being in your character's head discovering the
world as they discover it. I feel like there's just a, you
know, it's, it feels more organic.
It feels more true, true to lifeto do it that way.
And you feel much more rooted inthe story.
I am an editor as well, so I'm a, I'm a firm believer in the
(41:13):
editorial process. So a, a first draft is very much
a first draft and you can go back in and fix things and
change things and rework things retrospectively because you've
suddenly introduced something inthe second-half that wasn't
mentioned at all in the first half.
You can just go and put it in very.
Easy. Nowadays, so you know, you can
even I've been known to just leave myself little notes in
(41:33):
places as well, like not sure how this will work later on or
come back to this once we've gota bit further kind of thing.
It's like, you know, I you can go back and rework it all.
You can work all that kind of stuff in later.
Once you've got to the story that you wanted to tell, you can
then make sure of all of the aspects of working together and
everything's fitting together again.
I think this is something that especially starting out, writers
(41:57):
kind of unaware of, I guess, notnecessarily ignoring it.
I don't think they even necessarily know it is the fact
that your first draft doesn't have to be your complete
finished story. It's not where it ends.
The process ends. It's just like the beginning.
It's the first sketch that you're doing.
It doesn't mean that it's going to be the finished artwork.
It's just, you know, you do thatfirst sketch and then you can
work from there and build it up or build it down or break it
(42:18):
into different parts or whateverit is you feel it needs to doing
to it. So yeah, I'm a big believer in
that. I also am a big believer in the
fact that I think after a certain point, excessive world
building just becomes procrastination.
I also think that, yeah. It's much easier than sitting
down and having to actually write the story.
You can do. It it is easier, it is easier.
(42:38):
Writing's hard, you know, right.And, and telling a story.
So what I like to say is think of the first draft as you
telling yourself the story, the second draft as you sort of you
and your agent sort of telling it to an editor.
And then the third draft is the editor and you telling it to a
reader. So you just have to keep on
(42:59):
building on what you've got until because what what you're
trying to do is actually quite complex.
You are you're trying to invite the greatest number of people
into your your mind, your spirit, your soul, your world
space that you have created fromyour unique life experience.
And you're trying to make this place as welcoming as possible
(43:23):
to as many people as possible. And sometimes that takes a lot
of editing. It takes a lot of work to sort
of realize how can I do this? You know, how can I make this
this world as as as welcoming toas many people?
I mean, I'm not saying that that's the be all and end all of
writing, but the point is you, you write books that people for
people to you, you want to, you want your storytelling to be
(43:46):
accessible. You want, you know, to to people
to, to empathize with your characters and that you know
that doesn't happen overnight. That's that take.
It can take quite a few drafts and it's all a very delicate
balance of, of, of getting your characterization right.
But also, as you we've been saying, the world building and
the magic system, all of this has got to sort of work.
(44:07):
It's a bit like a Jenga tower. It's all got to sort of go up
together and work together and yeah, like there's, it's a long
process, but you know, it's alsoa fun process, so.
Yeah, yeah. As the editor of the book, have
you got any particularly favorite chapters?
(44:28):
Well, I have to ask that question.
There you go. I tell you, what I think really
like was that so every time we do our three spotlight pieces,
which is specifically on individual authors.
So obviously Lucy's is on UrsulaLe Guin when we have the
discussion. So obviously we thought we had
to have Tolkien. We couldn't get away without
having Tolkien in there, but then we had discussion.
We like, we don't want to just have like Tolkien and CS Lewis
(44:50):
and, and then possibly Pratchettor someone because it's suddenly
you've got 3 white male writers from very similar backgrounds
really. And it was just, it's always one
of my favorite bits of the book is you get to kind of throw up
and say, OK, well, there's probably someone we have to have
there. In which case it was this case,
it was Tolkien. But then it's like, well, how do
we push the margins a bit more on that?
(45:10):
So one was having Le Guin, whichI, I grew up reading the
Earthsea book. So the fact that we, we've been
able to include that in a major way in the book is massive to me
because I feel like they, they're just incredible.
Even today, they're just incredible.
I don't my, my wonder at them has not lessened over the years.
But the other one that I was really pleased putting was
Michael Moorcock, partly becauseI think he's the first one we've
(45:32):
done a spotlight piece on who isstill alive and certainly the
first one who I've actually worked with.
So that was very nice to be ableto include someone.
But also his Elrich books in particular were fundamental to
me when I was growing up, when Iwas like 1516 years old.
And their vision of a fantasy world, like in retrospect now
looking at it as kind of older me, I felt was, was really
(45:54):
important to the direction that that fantasy went in, especially
British fantasy went in. He took it in a much darker,
more gnarly direction that it had been before and challenged
the boundaries of what you coulddo with it and couldn't do with
it. Partly because he used to churn
out like 5 books a year. So that that I think gave him
the freedom to to experiment. And if a book failed, it didn't
(46:14):
matter because he had another 4 coming out that year.
So it was fine. But yeah, just for me growing
up, I was like, they, they literally blew my mind.
At the age of about 15 or 16. I was like, I'd never read
anything like them in terms of kind of darkness and intensity.
I think in fantasy at the time, we were very used to kind of big
sprawling fantasy epics. The Arabic books were generally
(46:37):
pretty short and pretty violent and dark and quite intense.
And quite often you kind of, youcame out the back of one of them
and felt like you had to like have a bit of a breath of fresh
air and read something else afterwards for a while before
you came back to them. So being able to include that as
well. And I think like very different
facets of the fantasy genre thatI personally had enjoyed because
(46:59):
the Gwyn, Moorcock and Tolkien were all a big part of my
reading when I was younger. Being able to include those
three, I was really exciting to me.
I really liked that. There's always the surprise
essays as well. You always get surprised to say
RJ Barker's is probably the surprise essay this time.
Around that doesn't surprise me,but.
Just because it's completely bonkers.
Yes, of course. Yeah, I remember, he remember he
(47:21):
first week, he wasn't sure if hecould write anything.
And so we had a discussion. I said, well, you know, just try
and see how you get on and we can always have a chat about it.
We'll come up with it. And then literally about a week
later, he's like, I've written something.
I don't know what it is. It might not even work.
It might just be a collection ofblog posts.
I don't know. But I'm working on it.
We'll see how it comes out. And when it came out.
It's fantastic. It's actually more on just the
(47:43):
process of writing itself almostmore than it is about fantasy
fiction and what writing means to him.
But probably more than any otheressay we've had in these books,
I think it is very much just a pure expression of what the hell
am I doing? Feeling of writing, which I
think I've ever seen anywhere else, is the idea that even as
an experienced writer with lots of book books under your belt,
(48:05):
you can still be in that place where you're like, how does this
work? What am I even doing?
I don't really understand how all of this comes together.
It just seems to somehow. I think that's great.
I'm really happy that I'm looking forward to reading that
because that is exactly, Yeah, that's when someone, when
someone asks you like how, how did you do this?
How did you do that? And I'm like, I, I don't know
(48:27):
how I did that. Like it was all, it's about
balancing all of this stuff in your head and it all sort of,
it's all in there and it all sort of makes sense in a way.
And sometimes it doesn't. And it's very, you know, I, I
think people, we, we like to be able to, I think people like to
think we can teach writing. Like you can, you know, you
start out one day and you're nota writer and then you do a
(48:47):
course and you're a writer at the end of the course and you
can do it. And it's, and it like, like,
like learning to drive, you know, but you, it's not the
same. I mean, it's, it's a constant
journey of evolution. Like I'm hoping that I will
become better and better and better as I continue writing
and, and developing as a person,because it's also very deeply
(49:09):
personal expression of Salford writing in, in any, any form of
writing. And so it's, and it's, it is
hard to express that. And I don't think people talk
about it enough. I think we sort of like to
simplify the process and break it down into manageable chunks.
And while that's helpful, you know it and it gives people a
(49:30):
sort of an, an opening actually the, you know, I think what,
what RJ was probably trying to express is, is the, it's the
wonder of it, the wonder that itcan be done at all.
That was, I mean, actually when we came up with the title
writing the magic. I mean, obviously, as we've,
we've talked about, like magic is a fun fundamental part of the
(49:51):
fantasy genre, but we did kind of we settled on that title in
the end because the, the workingtitle was just writing fantasy.
We had to probably something slightly more interesting, but
we settled on that one in the end just because it we found it
kind of encompassed both sides of it.
So it encompasses the the writing magic in a literal way,
but also just the magic of the writing process.
I do often feel like more than any other kind of artistic
(50:12):
endeavour, there's this kind of weird expectation when people
start out writing, like you say,they can somehow just be taught
it and then they'll be a writer and they can go away and do it.
And you wouldn't expect someone to take some guitar lessons and
suddenly be able to go and be a rock musician or take some
painting lessons and suddenly have artworks in the take
gallery or something. It's just like it takes work.
(50:33):
It becomes your life's work if you know if you wanted to.
And you just chip away at it andwork at it and change and evolve
and develop new skills and maybelearn these new things and lose
old bad habits that you may be picked up along the way.
But it is that constant kind of progression and evolution.
I think that it is interesting. So you can learn the craft, you
(50:57):
can learn to play a guitar, you can learn to to write sentences
on a page. But to take it to that next
level and be someone who's successful as a musician and
lauded as a musician, you need to do more.
And it's the same with writing, I think.
In order to write the magic, in fact.
You said that last year I had, I'd written myself in a very
cheesy way. I'd written myself like, I think
(51:19):
3 or 4 like motivational sentences.
It was like a New Year's resolution thing.
I was like, OK, I'm not going todo a New Year's resolution, but
I'm going to just like write kind of like some guiding
principles, what I want to do this year.
So that one of them was like always lift other people up
where you can because I feel like that's important in terms
of community and things. But one of them was, was to keep
learning, to keep learning and keep learning new things.
(51:41):
There shouldn't, I don't think, be a point as a writer where you
feel like you know it. Now you know writing.
You don't need to learn. Everything.
Else you should constantly be learning and developing.
And so I think sometimes it's important to remind ourselves of
that, that if you're still learning new things, it doesn't
mean that you've fallen short oryou've failed before.
(52:02):
Now it it's just natural that you keep progressing and keep
changing and developing and refining what you're doing.
Yeah, couldn't, couldn't have said that any better.
Amazing. Well, I think that's a brilliant
way to to bring it all to a conclusion.
And yeah, Dan, Lucy, thank you so much.
It's been fantastic when you both have learned loads.
(52:22):
I'm sure everyone listening to home has learned an awful lot as
well. Best of luck with the book.
It'll be out very soon. There's going to be a bit of a
tour, isn't? There, Yeah, Yeah.
So it's officially out on the 18th of September, but we have
got events lined up for it, which is kind of exciting.
There are two officially announced ones, which is there's
(52:45):
one Liverpool on the 18th of September and then one at
Edgelit. But then also it's not
officially announced yet, but itis going to be at MCM Comic Con
in London. We're going to have a panel on
the Saturday at MCM Comic Con London and I can't reveal who's
going to be on the panel becausethey haven't announced them yet,
but they have announced me. So I think I'm allowed to say I
(53:06):
will be heading the panel and there will be people on it on
the Saturday MCM Comic Con. I'm amazing.
And if anyone wants to learn more about both of your books
and your writing, where's the best place to go?
Lucy, What about yourself? Well, you can follow me at
Sylvan historian and that's SILVAN on Instagram and that's
(53:30):
pretty much my handle across allsocial media.
Have a sub stack. Please join my sub stack.
I write a lot about medieval things and hearts and, and the
book that I I can't talk about yet, but it's coming in 2027.
Wait, what? Watch this space for watch.
Watch that for October. I should be able to talk about
(53:50):
it come World fantasy in October.
Yes. Or of course you could check my
website out, which is just Lucy hansom.co.uk.
Nice. What about yourself then?
Easiest price is probably Dan coxon.com, which is the website,
but I don't always update that as much as I should.
(54:10):
So there is a newsletter that you can sign up to on there,
which is a good way to get this kind of monthly updates on kind
of new releases and events and stuff.
Or I am on Instagram at Dan dot Coxon dot author and I'm on Blue
Sky as well now, but I can't quite remember what I am on Blue
sky. I don't go on Blue Sky often
enough really, but I'm just kindof there floating in the sky
somewhere. I've got links for everything in
(54:33):
the description. Thank you again both.
It's been a fantastic shot with you.
Good luck again with the book and thank you everyone home for
listening. Thank you for listening to the
fantasy writers tool shed. If you'd like to join our
writing community on Discord andget access to fantasy writing
classes and books on Patreon, check the links in the
description. And if you don't want to miss
(54:55):
any future episodes, be sure to follow or subscribe.
And to support the show, leave aquick rating on Spotify or
iTunes and share this episode onsocial media or with anyone who
you think may be interested. Thank you very much for
listening. Enjoy the show.
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