Following the cinematic success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Harry Potter, the Narnia Chronicles and, now, the Philip Pullman novels would-be fantasy authors are busy redusting their manuscripts in the hope they will be the next thing to be discovered. Theoretically fantasy fiction should be easy to write. As an author you have little factual research to do, the members of your target audience are already predisposed to the suspension of disbelief that's required of readers, your plot line is not hampered by real-world limitations and your characters do not even have to be human.
By all accounts fantasy fiction should have a huge volume of work and a huge number of writers and yet the fact that it is still considered niche publishing indicates that it is neither easy to write nor can it be always written well. This also means that the current success of Tolkien, Rowlin and Pullman notwithstanding fantasy fiction is still regarded as science fiction's, let alone mainstream fiction's poor relation.
It was in search of answers to these questions that I spoke to Thoma Hunt via email in what is probably one of the rarest exchanges in fantasy fiction. Those who know Thomas Hunt, know he wrote The Shade and know that he does not do media interviews. He is, however, never short of answers when it comes to either writing fiction or talking about the publishing industry and the way it is evolving which is how him and I got going in the first place.
Fantasy fiction, Hunt says, is more about writing about mythical universes. Its appeal harks back to fairy tales and the Jungian archetypes within each culture and each person. Because the appeal occurs at a basic and largely subconscious level it is exceedingly hard to write Fantasy Fiction that reiterates the things we find familiar and comforting in fairy tales and yet breaks new ground in a way that is fresh without being disturbing.
"It's a little like sex," says Thoma Hunt rather disingenuously, "in order for it to work it has to have a certain familiar structure in the sense that we need to roughly know where we are going and what we should expect on the way there. It really does not matter if the payoff is exactly what we expect or something that totally surprises us or even disappoints us. What is important is that the tropes work in such way that they achieve two things: 1. They prepare us, mentally and psychologically, for the journey ahead 2. They make us, through the process of subconscious expectation and mental and psychological preparation, whole-hearted participants to the enterprise. Then the fantasy novel becomes a shared journey of discovery between the author and the reader and a masterpiece is born."
Thomas Hunt makes it sound easy because he's an expert and knows the genre inside out. His novel, The Shade, treads much of the territory. In his analysis of literature, culture and archetypes Jung laid out four main archetypes:
The Self, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation. The Shadow, the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possess nonetheless