Fantasy elevates ordinary and eternal problems of youth into stories via the language of myth. It turns “No one really knows me” into “I’ve got a secret identity.” It turns “I don’t understand why other people act the way they do” into “I’m trapped in a faerie realm.” It turns “my high school must have been built over the mouth of hell” into “my ( Read more... )

I like to imagine things... It's the power of concretizing a metaphor. Taking something and making it real and making it happen and seeing where it goes. It's a special kind of magic.

I refuse to play the wink-wink-nudge-nudge game with readers. I don’t like whimsy because it doesn’t treat the fantastic seriously, and treating the fantastic seriously is one of the best ways of celebrating dialectical human consciousness there is... The best fantasies-which include SF and horror-are constructed with a careful dialectic between ( Read more... )

[But] the adventure should hold something beyond the fairy-tale elements... The nature of fantasy allows happenings which reveal most clearly our own frailties and our own strengths. The inhabitants of Prydain are fantasy figures; I hope they are also very human.

Allegory has to rely on a precise one-to-one relationship between story-element and meaning. A novel is more democratic: the meaning is not dictated or determined by the author, but is something that emerges in the space between the story and the reader's mind. Myth is a different matter. C.S. Lewis would say that a myth is a story that has the ( Read more... )

It is by such statements as "Once upon a time there was a dragon," or "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" - it is by such beautiful non-facts that we fantastic human beings may arrive, in our peculiar fashion, at the truth.

If we don't tell strange stories, when something strange happens we won't believe it.

...In fantasy, there is nothing but the writer's vision of the world. There is no borrowed reality of history, or current events... no comfortable matrix of the commonplace to substitute for the imagination, to provide ready-made emotional response, and to disguise flaws and failures of creation. There is only a construct built in a void, with ( Read more... )

When you are young so many things are difficult to believe, and yet the dullest people will tell you that they are true - such things, for instance, as that the earth goes around the sun, and that it is not flat but round.  But the things that seem really likely, like fairy tales and magic are, so say the grown-ups, not true at all.  Yet they are ( Read more... )

Not being Shakespeare, some of us writers have to get to the heart of the matter by strange roads and roundabout ways. And to some of us, the disciplined use of the imagination is at the heart of the matter already.