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 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.

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 the magic system.

And so we're going to talk about the book today.

There's lots of different topics that it covers.

We all love writing, talking about writing fantasy.

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.

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.

I work quite closely with Celtic mythology 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 10 years.

In that time, I've also been 1/3 of a intersectional MNS podcast 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 activities when it comes to fantasy.

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 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 a couple other anthologies and then I think we talked before about kind of quite a lot of those.

But most recently I've had Hartwood, which was the Nostalgia Wood anthology, which Lucy had a story in and which is up 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 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 various writers 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 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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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 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 for the 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 the moment.

He's just got into a fantasy series for kind of for the first time, and he's absolutely loving just the imagination of it.

And I think a lot of us, because we grow up with that, it's something that's just very dear to us and something that we still really enjoy, at least for me.

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.

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.

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 are you 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 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 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 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 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've always been a great believer in, in fantasy as a sort of arena to, to explore real world issues 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 exploring all 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 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 cliche for a while.

But now it's it's, it's really like grown in its depth and it's it's almost philosophical.

I think, I think actually in the last kind of 10 years or so, in particular, I think both horror and fantasy have really thrived.

Science fiction, not necessarily to such an extent.

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 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 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.

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 like, say, Ian McEwan or Kajuishi Guru to, to decide to write a fancy or science fiction novel because they they it allows them to approach ideas in an 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.

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 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.

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 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 look at it sort of more more analytically and, and to, to look at it as a, as a, you know, as, as a living, breathing piece of, because of academia, really.

Because I mean, like, it's, it's got 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 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 literary space.

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 mentioning that.

So I I discovered this completely coincidentally when I was working on this book.

I got handed like three boxes of stuff out of my dad's loft that had a load of my books from when I 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 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.

And because of that, they became like 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.

It's been fascinating to me writing, working on these writing books, the ways in which the, the genre lines are constantly crossed as well.

The way you get, you know, fantasy crime books nowadays and you get kind of fantasy horror books and it's just, it all kind of 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 subgenres and how they intersect because 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 used to your standard kind of sits in the middle of a genre shelf kind of novel.

So anything that kind of veered outside of that was always a bit 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 are just much more open to 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 down as a writer and say, oh, if you, 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 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 a contract and book sales, but it doesn't necessarily produce the most interesting work.

And therefore it doesn't necessarily produce the things that actually last and stand the test of time and that people will still be reading 1520 years down 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 your instinct and then trying to work 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 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 writing the genre.

And what was it like in those early days and what were the biggest lessons that you learned back 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 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 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 much more difficult getting your hands on weird out of print books.

So I constantly had these enormous long lists that I'd 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 don't remember there being, you see now it's completely different.

And this is the same with, with creative writing actually as, as a, 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 Word document, it's blank and you just start, but you think, how am I doing this?

And I've never really stopped to think, how am I crafting this?

When does my magic system come into play?

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 second draft 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 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 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 opportunity to, to sit down and, and work out what I do as a writer when I start 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 writing the magic was we need to have 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, but fairly 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 where where people disagreed with each other and we had disagreement on world building.

Jen Williams very much argues that she kind of makes a lot of it up as she goes along and then makes 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 writing something in it and didn't use the only use kind of a fraction of the world that he built in, in the actual book.

And the fun, at least in the first instance, was in the world building 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 writers that 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.

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 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 Song of Legends lost.

She was saying that she was talking about magic systems and hard magic versus soft magic and saying that she she was arguing 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 point in 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 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 rules or I think magic shouldn't have rules.

And, and what I just say to them is, 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 else in your world.

It's got to have, it's got to feel natural and it's got to 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 a spectrum.

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.

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 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 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 the chapter on Ashley Lewin's magic 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 world and 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.

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, is that 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 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, because teaching 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 at the start of, at the start of your 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.

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, 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 of it.

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 of magic 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, I can't remember anyway, so that I 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 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, you know, 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.

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 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 or as 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 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.

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 these folders 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.

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 quite often, 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.

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.

It doesn't have to be something you could pluck out and play a game and have people be actually be 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 magic system that you could play a 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 the jobs 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 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 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 just because, again, you had that that kind of depth of background and kind of workable world and economy and society and all that kind of stuff.

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 you have for writers who aren't quite sure how much they need to do?

I don't know.

I'm very lazy.

So I'd probably say do less than you 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 and all of your enthusiasm in building a world and then never actually getting around to 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, 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 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 in place.

Like the, the part, the fun part of 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 vague idea 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 advance, I feel like it would be quite 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 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 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 life to do it that way.

And you feel much more rooted in the story.

I am an editor as well, so I'm a, I'm a firm believer in the 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 in the 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 places as well, like not sure how this will work later on or come back to this once we've got a 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 kind of unaware of, I guess, not necessarily 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 that first sketch and then you can work from there and build it up or build it down or break it into different parts or whatever it 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.

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 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 from your unique life experience.

And you're trying to make this place as welcoming as possible 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 to as 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 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.

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 also a fun process, so.

Yeah, yeah.

As the editor of the book, have you got any particularly favorite chapters?

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 Ursula Le 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 and, and then possibly Pratchett or 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?

So one was having Le Guin, which I, 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 because I think he's the first one we've done a spotlight piece on who is still alive and certainly the first one who I've actually worked with.

So that was very nice to be able to include someone.

But also his Elrich books in particular were fundamental to me when I was growing up, when I was 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 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 could do 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 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 pretty short and pretty violent and dark and quite intense.

And quite often you kind of, you came 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 that I personally had enjoyed because 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 first week, he wasn't sure if he could 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 of blog 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 process of writing itself almost more than it is about fantasy fiction and what writing means to him.

But probably more than any other essay 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, 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 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 not a writer and then you do a 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 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 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 it can 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 fantasy genre, but we did kind of we settled on that title in the end because the, the working title 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 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.

It becomes your life's work if you know if you wanted to.

And you just chip away at it and work at it and change and evolve and develop new skills and maybe learn 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 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 3 or 4 like motivational sentences.

It was like a New Year's resolution thing.

I was like, OK, I'm not going to do 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.

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 or you've failed before.

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.

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 one Liverpool on the 18th of September and then one at Edgelit.

But then also it's not officially announced yet, but it is 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 because they haven't announced them yet, but they have announced me.

So I think I'm allowed to say I 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 pretty much my handle across all social 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 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.

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 kind of there floating in the sky somewhere.

I've got links for everything in 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.

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