Fantasy Writing

Things I've Noticed About Fantasy Tropes

Kia Orion | | 7 min read

A few things I've noticed about fantasy tropes, after years of reading more of this genre than is probably healthy:


The Dark Lord works when he's an idea that characters project onto, when he fills whatever shape their fear requires. Tolkien's Sauron barely appears in The Lord of the Rings. He has no dialogue, no scenes from his perspective, almost no physical description. That absence is the whole point.


Joe Abercrombie's contribution to fantasy wasn't grimdark. It was demonstrating that the tropes carry arguments. A Chosen One story told straight is making a claim about destiny and merit and who deserves power, and Abercrombie looked at that claim and decided to pick it apart in front of you, one bloody page at a time.


The farm boy protagonist isn't the problem. What kills it is a farm boy who leaves the village and turns out to be good at everything within a week. The farm boy who crosses the mountains and still can't light a fire properly, who gets swindled in his first city, who misreads every political situation he walks into for three hundred pages, that's the version worth writing.


Prophecy is the laziest form of foreshadowing because it does the reader's work for them. The best uses of prophecy are when the characters misread it or when the prophecy turns out to be true but means something nobody expected. A prophecy that says exactly what will happen and then that thing happens is just a spoiler with better typography.


Fantasy readers will believe in elves. They'll believe in sentient swords and talking trees and cities that float. They won't believe in a world where power has no cost. Economics matters even when the currency is mana.


"Ancient evil awakens" is a structural problem before it's a writing problem. An antagonist who was dormant for a thousand years has no relationship with your protagonist. There are no personal stakes, no history, no grudge that goes both ways. The best ancient evils have a reason to care about this particular person in this particular age.


Robin Hobb spent three books making Fitz Chivalry the most frustrating protagonist in fantasy. He can see the right path. He won't take it. He makes every wrong choice, doubles down on the wrong choices, and the reader keeps turning pages because Hobb understood something about consistency of character that most writers miss. You'll follow a character you understand. The question Hobb kept asking is whether the character's choices, however infuriating, are consistent with who they are.


The "magic is fading" plot is always about something else. Tolkien's Third Age, Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen. The magic fading is grief. It's what the world loses when it stops being wondrous, and most of us recognize that feeling from our own lives even if we can't name it.


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Most fantasy writers under-research the medieval economics and over-research the magic taxonomy.


Robert Jordan built a magic system so intricate in The Wheel of Time, the One Power with its gendered channeling and the True Source and the taint and the weaves, that the world required fourteen books to inhabit. I'm genuinely unsure whether that was a feature or a trap he built for himself, but either way readers followed him into it, millions of them, for decades.


"Show don't tell" is harder in fantasy than in any other genre because you're describing things that don't exist and readers need enough detail to see them. What fixes it is description that serves the emotion of the scene. The architecture of the world can wait.


The sidekick who's funnier than the protagonist is one of fantasy's oldest structural problems and nobody has fully solved it.


Naomi Novik's Uprooted works because the magic draws from Polish folk tales rather than being invented from scratch. You can feel the weight of something that actually lived in someone's mythology, something that was told around actual fires. Invented mythologies have to work harder to feel that old.


The inns in fantasy novels should be grimier and the ale should be worse.


Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora proved that fantasy can run on competence and wit instead of chosen destiny, and that a heist structure can carry a secondary world just as well as a quest structure. That felt genuinely new when it came out.


Joe Abercrombie once wrote that "the world is the sets, and the best sets ever are never going to make up for rubbish acting, script, camerawork, editing and direction." That's the trap most fantasy tropes create. They feel like the work. You spend months on the magic system and forget that nobody cares about the magic system unless they care about the person using it.


A good fantasy villain believes in something. Something specific that readers can half-understand, even if they disagree. "I want power" isn't a belief. "The old kingdoms were better and I'll burn this one to rebuild them" is.


The map at the front of the book is a promise: the plot will go to these places. Break that promise too often and readers feel cheated. Include it only if the geography actually matters.


I keep thinking about fantasy tropes when I sit down to write in the morning, because the tropes are really just questions about what kind of story you believe in, and answering that honestly is harder than any worldbuilding exercise.

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Kia Orion

Author of The Writer's Daily Practice, the #1 Bestselling book in Journal Writing and Writing Skills. He writes a free daily reflection for writers.

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