The Reality of Fantasy
Delivered at the fantasy panel of the International
Federation for the Teaching of
English, Malthouse Theatre, July 7, 2003
As I am to this panel, I am a johnny-come-lately to fantasy writing. I have been a writer for twenty years, and a full-time writer for more than a decade, but I only began to write fantasy novels in 2000. In my life as a writer I am primarily a poet, though I wrote a poetic (and somewhat fantastic) novella in 1995, which subsequently vanished magically without trace.
I started writing fantasy when my children grew old enough to read it. I have always been an enthusiastic reader of children's fiction, a vice I inherited from my father, but when my oldest son began to read The Lord of the Rings, I remembered the fantasy I read and loved when I was his age - most notably J.R.R. Tolkien, but also writers like Ursula le Guin, Alan Garner and even (I was, then as now, a random and rapacious reader) strange Victorian phenomena like The Wood Beyond the Worlds by William Morris or the stories of George MacDonald.
One day in 2000 I sat down and started writing a story which was later to become The Gift [The Naming]. I didn't have a plan: I didn't know anything about this girl who had appeared before me except her name, and I had no idea what this world that I had started creating was. But I found I was enjoying whatever it was I was writing; and it reminded that my first ever ambition as a writer, when I was about ten, was to write a fantasy novel.
When I had reached about eighty pages, I stopped. At that point (it
was before The Lord of the Rings
hit the cinemas) I didn't know if
fantasy was more than a minority sport, like poetry. I rang someone I
knew at Penguin Books, which published my first book of poems, and
asked for some advice: I was writing this thing, and I had no idea what
to do with it, or even if it was interesting. He said, right, fine,
send it in, and I'll let you know what I think. A month later, to my
amazement, I received an offer of publication. And so I finished the
book, which is something I might never otherwise had done, and it came
out last year. I was and am still amazed that I could write something
that stretched to 450 pages - you have to remember that I am a poet,
and for a poet "long" means writing anything which goes
over five pages. Last Friday I finished Part 2, a book called The
Riddle. That was a rather different but equally interesting
process to
writing The Gift, but having
written two books I now feel more like a
proper fantasist.