Saturday, January 30, 2010

The Real Deal About Writing Fantasy With Arianne Lewin

Ari Lewin is an Editor at Disney/Hyperion


She's edited a lot of fantasy books, picture books, chapter books, and the bulk of what she does is fantasy - which is in it's "Golden Age." In fact, 4 out of 5 of the books on her fall list are fantasy. So, she knows of what she speaks!

She's starting out defining the different kinds of fantasy:

there's high fantasy: swords, magic, dragons, midaevil, low technology

like Tamora Pierce's books

steampunk: alternate histories (often victorian england) often perfected technologies that we've abandoned

i.e., Levianthan by Scott Westerfield


Urban Fantasy (set in city) like Holly Black's modern fairy tales


Paranormal Romance:

lots of bestsellers

Blue Bloods by Melissa DeLaCruz and that book, you know... Twilight

Distopian Fantasy:

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Feed by M.T. Anderson

Then some that are hard to classify:

Percy Jackson?

everyone's reading fantasy that was meant for all age levels.

Now she's going into tips about writing fantasy and world building... oooh, some of these are great. Like this:

1. You make up your own rules
2. Have them make sense
3. Follow them consistently
4. You can never change the rules



--Posted by Lee Wind

No comments:

Post a Comment