And, of course, buildings must be real buildings, clothes must be real clothes, books must be real books, and food (which seems to figure prominently in my books) must be real food. I found one of the most demanding aspects of writing fantasy was the necessity to precisely imagine every moment: if a character was inside a room, it wasn't enough to know that she was sitting down. I had to know where she was sitting in the room, the dimensions and colours of the room, and where she was in relation to any other characters. If she was eating, I had to know what she was eating, and what it tasted like, and it had to reflect the culture she was inhabiting. Naturally, as I have spent a lot of my life writing poetry, the poetry mattered too: it had to reflect the imagined cultures and histories in which it was written.

Finally, and this was the aspect which to me mattered most of all, I wanted the emotional life of the novels I was writing to be absolutely real. I found this was the most exhausting part of writing the novels. Imagining the emotional life of a character requires at once that you enter the character, and also remain at an authorial distance. You must both experience whatever the character is going through, and witness it in sufficient detail and clarity to enable its expression. There has been more than one occasion when I thought that doing this - which is no more, really, than any writer who writes character-based fiction - is a remarkably odd way to spend my life.

However, all this attention to realistic detail is not for its own sake only. After all, I am not writing a realistic novel. The realism is an enabling device which then permits the real business of fantasy to take place.

When I first began writing these books, I was at first a little embarrassed; it was as if I had to come clean about a guilty secret. I think what I felt embarrassed about was that I take fantasy seriously. When I was in my deep Tolkien phase, in the years from ten to fourteen, I read everything by him I could get my hands on, including his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, his commentaries on Beowulf and a strange poem called The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorthelm's Son, which is a kind of sequel to the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon. And, of course, I read his famous essay on fantasy, On Fairy Stories. On reading it again, I realised that it has been as formative of my ideas about fantasy as anything I have subsequently read, and it still bears revisiting, despite the many things I have to forgive Tolkien for as an adult (his sexism, his imperialism, and so on). I think he describes very well why fantasy continues to be a popular and enduring form of literature: and more importantly, why it is much more than the escapist illusion it is often accused of being.

The 'consolation' of fairy-tales [he says] has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite--I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

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