by Royalene Doyle

Created on: January 07, 2010   Last Updated: January 08, 2010

Watch out!  Birthing the next great Fantasy novel will take you—the author—into another dimension and that’s just where you need to go in order to develop believable characters, places and plot.  If this is your chosen field, you’re already experiencing elements of being in that other place, as characters and scenes pop into your thoughts.  Here are a few ideas to help you move from concept to concrete: 

Don’t park in your thoughts.  Write them down.  Type them out.  Talk them into a recorder.  No matter how weird they may sound or look on the page, get them recorded.  Some folks call this Free-Writing.  I like to call it Spontaneous Combustion because when I look (or listen) to what I’ve done during these bursts of creative imagination my true writing skills POP out and I find myself well on the way to developing something worthwhile. Talk to your characters.  Yep.  That’s what I said.  Talk to them individually.  Talk to them as they enter and exit their scenes.  Talk to them when they’re hiding from each other…and from you.  Basically, just sit back (in a private space) and talk with these people you’re creating. 

Even if one of them is a translucent wisp of Cerulean ribbon, that character has something valuable to offer within the mix of your characters. Think visually.  Of course, this is an automatic function for every human being, however, the writer—and especially the Fantasy writer—must think super-visually.  When creating the setting/environment/surroundings for your story, every element is critical, whether it will be a focal point or subtle background.  For example:  A “spiky” pine tree can be easily seen by your readers, because they already know the concept of a pine tree.  However, in your story the tree might need to be a “brute-tree…covered in razor cone-spikes filled with the sap of eternal sleep.”

The best suggestion I ever followed was to audit an art class.  The multiple genres of art, from stained glass, to oil, water colors, even clay and wood carving will peek every facet of the writer’s imagination.  Plus, the unique terms used in this field opened a whole new vocabulary to use—and adapt—for my characters.  One discovery I made for myself was to keep a Color-Wheel in my resources files, as

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