Fantasy Cliche

[spacemonkey]

Hell, Ive got one.How about all the nonsense crap that"Falls from the Sky?" Geez,just once i'd like to see something shoulder it's way out of the ground just for the sake of variety.......PLEASE NO MORE D+D B.S.!!!!.By the seven! I got bored with that back in 86.Let's move on and leave that tired crap behind!!!! <LAUGHING IN MALICIUOS GLEE>

[Farm Ur-Ted]

Prologues.... Seriously, does every stinking book have to start with a prologue? It's starting to drive me nuts.

Another thing that drives me nuts is when authors get lazy on their maps. So, they come up with a new world, they draw a map and stick in all the key geographic areas. Then they have a big blank spot on the edges, and they can't come up with a name for it, so what do they do? They call it the freaking Reach! Or maybe the northern, or northron wastes. I would swear that every fantasy world has one.

[Zarathustra]

Falls from the sky? Examples?

I, too, can't stand prologues. Just get on with the story!

[A Gunslinger]

A prologue is a cheap way of generating instant tension. More of a trick than it is writing.

[Farm Ur-Ted]

A prologue is a cheap way of generating instant tension. More of a trick than it is writing.

I agree; what really drives me nuts is when the prologue has absolutely nothing to do with the next several hundred pages of the book. I always end up forgetting what happened in it, and when it suddenly becomes relevant again, I can't for the life of me remember why. The most recent one that I hated was the prologue for A Feast For Crows (Martin). As I recall, the characters aren't seen again until the final chapter of the book, 900+ pages later. I'm just not that smart that I can remember some obscure character for that long. Throw me a frickin' bone, for cryin' out loud!

[Holsety]

Prologues.... Seriously, does every stinking book have to start with a prologue? It's starting to drive me nuts.

Another thing that drives me nuts is when authors get lazy on their maps. So, they come up with a new world, they draw a map and stick in all the key geographic areas. Then they have a big blank spot on the edges, and they can't come up with a name for it, so what do they do? They call it the freaking Reach! Or maybe the northern, or northron wastes. I would swear that every fantasy world has one.

So. Damn. True.

I'm alright with the basic concept of a prologue, but when I actually read 'em I tend to dislike 'em.

[Zarathustra]

A prologue is a cheap way of generating instant tension. More of a trick than it is writing.

Great point about generating instant tension. As for the second sentence, well, all writing is a series of "tricks," in a sense. Some writers invent their own, some just have an impressive bag of tricks borrowed from others.

[Xar]

Usually when reading a fantasy book, if the author absolutely HAS to have a prologue, I'd rather have a prologue that perhaps speaks about the relevant history of the world, or something like that, rather than a narrative prologue with characters and contemporary events. Prologues that "describe the setting" for those who don't know it, especially if the setting itself is rather complicated, are also good, as long as they don't turn too technical or confusing.

In the stories I write (and you will be able to see something like that in Ghostblood, in the new KW Anthology) I have short "prologues" which usually are an introduction to the main story, written by the narrator, which at least hints at the themes the story is going to explore, or which sets the pace for the story itself. But even then, these "prologues" are never, ever as long as a story chapter.

[Zarathustra]

Xar, I think any writer reading this thread is going to find people bitching about stuff they do in their own work, and then worry that they're committing the "cliche mistake." I know someone had me worried about that "falls from the sky" complaint, because there is one significant event in my book involving this. However, I look at it as archetypal, rather than cliche. It's only cliche if you don't do it well. Like Lucimay was trying to say. Or Joseph Campbell. Mythology (where fantasy has it roots) deals with those aspects of the human condition which transcend our "every day existence," which touch upon the limits of how we understand our being, waking us up to an aspect of reality we previously took for granted. I personally find the moment when mankind realized the earth and sky were not two separate, dissimilar realms to be one of those mythic moments, when reality opened up and we realized we're already floating in "heaven." What we called, "the heavens," were already our home, rather than some Yonder World we need to die in order to enter. That's a transcendental revelation. I don't care how some writers have reduced it to cliche. It's something I feel strongly about, so I'm not going to worry about including it in my work.

And neither should you worry about including prologues in your work if it's something you care strongly about. We might all be bitching, but is there anyone who skips prologues? I don't. And I'm usually sucked in by this so-called "trick" when it's done right.

[Matthias]

I skip prologues at first, but then come back and force myself to read them. As far as I'm concerned, a prologue is just Chapter 0 named differently. In my stories, I use "prologues" only when it is necessary to reveal a short prelude...so then it would be called a prelude, no?

[drew]

Some of these are kind of funny.

www.rinkworks.com/fnovel/

[Zarathustra]

Yeah, they're funny. But they also eliminate just about every single fantasy series ever written, including the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

[jacob Raver, sinTempter]

Nobility. I'm tired of kings and princes. What, the common man/woman can't have an adventure without secretly being the lost heir of the kingdom? Or there's nothing to aspire to other than being knighted or recognized in some similar way by royalty?

I think one of the main primary 'components' of a "fantasy" story is Nobility, or olde euro type err people-systems? I can't remember the words here. Anyone know what I'm sayin? The Lords, even the Ramen speak like them, etc.