When first I wrote fantasy, I yearned for escape, to be lost in worlds of fantasy myself, away from what I perceived as the misery of my own existence at that time. Then I wrote because I yearned to write as well as my heroes, to be my heroes, use their ideas, their motifs, and …
Category: Reminiscences
Why I Write Fantasy: The First Ambitions
So last week I wrote about my first intentions when writing fantasy stories. Some, like the youthful need to ‘borrow’ bits of my favourite books and add them to my own in a wholly unsubtle way, have been abandoned as bad practice. Others, like the fundamental need to write, and to share my imaginings, have …
The Writing Life: Aiming High Part 2 – Missing is Not Failure
Last week I wrote about what it meant for me to aim high. A significant part of reaching for the stars is not grasping them. I believe that for me to be fulfilled as an artist, I have to try to hit some pretty difficult targets. I also acknowledge that for me to live as …
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Why I Write Fantasy: Early Intentions
I don’t know about anyone else, but I started writing stories because I had to. It, being a writer, was what I wanted to be, but more importantly, and far more primal, was the need to tell stories. I needed to write them down, the tales that flowed in fractured circles in my head; the …
The Writing Life: Aiming High
For me, aiming high in writing is to simply try to do the best I can, write as well as I can, and try to express my ideas in a way that satisfies both my potential readers and myself. But of course, there is always more to it than that, or this article could start …
Why I Write Fantasy: Honouring Influences Without Being a Slave to Them.
I think many writers spend some time forging their own writing identity: the what it is they want to write, and how they wish to present it to others. For many a young writer there is a phase of aping the things they love, and it can be a very conscious process. It certainly was …
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The Writing Life: Maintaining Focus, New Goals
It has been over a month since The Thief and The Demon’s release. A month to reflect on how much work has been done, and realize how much more remains to be done. There is a lot to learn and to do online, social media can be an absorbing maze with a lot of new …
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Why I Write Fantasy: The Travel Begins at Home Edition
All writing, it seems to me, begins in your own head. Sometimes it will be written as a strong spontaneous reaction to outside stimulus – protest songs, polemical essays, critical feuds, a satirical impulse to start telling a particular story in order to hit a particular target, but for me, the story starts as a …
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The Writing Life: Travel as Inspiration
For a long time I did not travel. My memories of flight were fuzzy – laying my jacket down on the floor and sleeping between the seats on a flight across the Atlantic in 1974. The weird sensation of the ground I walked on not being solid, the vague bounce I had never previously experienced …
The Writing Life: Letting Go of Your First Love
The first love you wrote, I mean. Of course, many authors successfully publish their first loves, and do astoundingly well. For others there is another story, of a first, or first and second and more novels written and discarded, before a book is released to the reading world. I’m guessing that one of those discarded …
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Roderick T. Macdonald 