What's in the water down here?
May. 12th, 2006 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adelaideseanThis Wednesday saw the launch of David Cornish's Foundling, the first book of his Monster Blood Tattoo kids' fantasy series, here in volatile Adelaide. It's a great book, and I was honoured to launch it in front of a packed crowd at the SA Writers' Centre. Here are a couple of excerpts from the speech. (You can assume I said many nice things about David's book. Read it. He's a star.) I was talking to a fairly mainstream crowd, hence me putting the boot into realist fiction, just a little, and reminding people that Adelaide is home to more than just its popular, prestigious and very proper writers' week.
Excerpt #1:
South Australia has more fantasy writers per capita than any other state or territory in Australia--possibly the world. They include Fiona McIntosh, Tony Shillitoe, former SAWC Chair John Fletcher, Joel Shepherd, and Gillian Rubinstein (aka Lian Hearn). The list becomes even speccier if we include Sara Douglass, who came from SA, and Jennifer Fallon in Alice Springs. We're an imaginative lot, and I'm sure it's not because we habitually imagine ourselves somewhere more interesting, like Sydney or Melbourne, or Europe. We live in a liminal place, we South Australians, and I prefer to think that this gives us a unique perspective on ourselves and the rest of the world. A perspective that makes us the speculative fiction capital of Australia.
Excerpt #2:
What makes a good fantasy novel? Or, rather, what makes a fantasy novel good? Fantasy writers are, in many ways, no different to writers of any genre; we struggle just as much with characters, dialogue, style, settings, and the like. But we have an extra burden as well. Perhaps I'm overstating the obvious by saying that a novel isn't a fantasy novel unless it has something fantastic at its heart, and that's a slippery, wriggly notion to pin down. Fantasy writers are constantly called on to make the outlandish seem perfectly ordinary, and the ordinary seem perfectly outlandish, something writers of realist fiction may never be asked to do. This unusual skill is brought forth to stimulate the much lauded "sense of wonder", a sense readers of speculative fiction employ every day but which cannot be explained to someone who doesn't have it, much as you can't explain a joke to someone with no sense of humour (thanks, Justine Larbalestier). Personally, I think that everyone has it--to greater or lesser degrees, of course. It's a fundamental part of what makes us human, and alive. And sane.
Excerpt #1:
South Australia has more fantasy writers per capita than any other state or territory in Australia--possibly the world. They include Fiona McIntosh, Tony Shillitoe, former SAWC Chair John Fletcher, Joel Shepherd, and Gillian Rubinstein (aka Lian Hearn). The list becomes even speccier if we include Sara Douglass, who came from SA, and Jennifer Fallon in Alice Springs. We're an imaginative lot, and I'm sure it's not because we habitually imagine ourselves somewhere more interesting, like Sydney or Melbourne, or Europe. We live in a liminal place, we South Australians, and I prefer to think that this gives us a unique perspective on ourselves and the rest of the world. A perspective that makes us the speculative fiction capital of Australia.
Excerpt #2:
What makes a good fantasy novel? Or, rather, what makes a fantasy novel good? Fantasy writers are, in many ways, no different to writers of any genre; we struggle just as much with characters, dialogue, style, settings, and the like. But we have an extra burden as well. Perhaps I'm overstating the obvious by saying that a novel isn't a fantasy novel unless it has something fantastic at its heart, and that's a slippery, wriggly notion to pin down. Fantasy writers are constantly called on to make the outlandish seem perfectly ordinary, and the ordinary seem perfectly outlandish, something writers of realist fiction may never be asked to do. This unusual skill is brought forth to stimulate the much lauded "sense of wonder", a sense readers of speculative fiction employ every day but which cannot be explained to someone who doesn't have it, much as you can't explain a joke to someone with no sense of humour (thanks, Justine Larbalestier). Personally, I think that everyone has it--to greater or lesser degrees, of course. It's a fundamental part of what makes us human, and alive. And sane.
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Fantasy Writing
Date: 2006-05-13 06:36 pm (UTC)I have been mostly out of the country for 6 or 7 years, but took a keen interest in the upsurge in publishing in this area that took place in the mid to late 90s onwards.
I certainly agree withe comments about the difficulties of fantasy writing. It does require a conceptual and emotional plane and indeed coherence, that has to both work as well as and smoothly with, all the usual trials of a writer, such as narrative stucture, character and philoshpical sensiblity.
Quite frankly I think some quite good writers who may have dabbled with the form are confronted by its deceptive nature very quickly, and realise that they are not dealing with something easy, but something very challenging.
I have written fantasy for many years, and while I have experimented with general and even literary fiction in collaboration with another writer, I keep returning to to it because I actually believe it has a unique potential to explore the sort of world we live in, many of us at least, in current times. In many respects the modern western citizen, at least, is confronted with a world of numerous visions, ideas and quite often quite unreal reflections of themselves in popular culture and in advertising, media etc.
Fantasy for my mind actually has truly yet to come into its own, as a form able to project into a coherent landscape and reality, the very real journey we all must take for as we search for meaning, resolved tensions, new mythologies, and spiritual recogniion, through a world where nothing is certain, and inumerable visions of ourselves are on offer.
To put it bluntly, we all live in fantasy worlds these days, and the form itself it probably far more equipped to deal with making sense of the kind of televisual, fragmented, highly mythological and emotional multi-media world of our experience than the realistic camp could quite imagine.
i have of late, in addition to returning to novel writing in a big way after a hiatus been writing a blog to reflect my own experiences in trying to write a fantasy piece that dramatises my own journey. I have been searching though blogs with the hope of gathering together a wide range of people interested in developing the genre or working within it, you are mosts welcome to got in contact or visit the blog.
In any case, best and luck, and I will be sure to have a another look at what is going on in the field in my home country (at least by adoption).
Kev
http://devilpa.blogspot.com/
Re: Fantasy Writing
Date: 2006-05-15 02:12 am (UTC)Today I am struggling with the much more mundane problem of losing my voice. If this is the fantasy world I live in, I want out! :-)
Re: Fantasy Writing
Date: 2006-05-16 05:31 pm (UTC)Kev