The Fantasy Novelist's Exam

[mothwing]

I found this today:

The Fantasy Novelist's Exam, by David J. Parker
Additional Material By Samuel Stoddard

Ever since J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis created the worlds of Middle Earth and Narnia, it seems like every windbag off the street thinks he can write great, original fantasy, too. The problem is that most of this "great, original fantasy" is actually poor, derivative fantasy. Frankly, we're sick of it, so we've compiled a list of rip-off tip-offs in the form of an exam. We think anybody considering writing a fantasy novel should be required to take this exam first. Answering "yes" to any one question results in failure and means that the prospective novel should be abandoned at once.
 

The Exam

1. Does nothing happen in the first fifty pages?
2. Is your main character a young farmhand with mysterious parentage?
3. Is your main character the heir to the throne but doesn't know it?
4. Is your story about a young character who comes of age, gains great power, and defeats the supreme badguy?
5. Is your story about a quest for a magical artifact that will save the world?
6. How about one that will destroy it?
7. Does your story revolve around an ancient prophecy about "The One" who will save the world and everybody and all the forces of good?
8. Does your novel contain a character whose sole purpose is to show up at random plot points and dispense information?
9. Does your novel contain a character that is really a god in disguise?
10. Is the evil supreme badguy secretly the father of your main character?
11. Is the king of your world a kindly king duped by an evil magician?
12. Does "a forgetful wizard" describe any of the characters in your novel?
13. How about "a powerful but slow and kind-hearted warrior"?
14. How about "a wise, mystical sage who refuses to give away plot details for his own personal, mysterious reasons"?
15. Do the female characters in your novel spend a lot of time worrying about how they look, especially when the male main character is around?
16. Do any of your female characters exist solely to be captured and rescued?
17. Do any of your female characters exist solely to embody feminist ideals?
18. Would "a clumsy cooking wench more comfortable with a frying pan than a sword" aptly describe any of your female characters?
19. Would "a fearless warrioress more comfortable with a sword than a frying pan" aptly describe any of your female characters?
20. Is any character in your novel best described as "a dour dwarf"?
21. How about "a half-elf torn between his human and elven heritage"?
22. Did you make the elves and the dwarves great friends, just to be different?
23. Does everybody under four feet tall exist solely for comic relief?
24. Do you think that the only two uses for ships are fishing and piracy?
25. Do you not know when the hay baler was invented? (Er. The nineteen fifties? Sixties?)
26. Did you draw a map for your novel which includes places named things like "The Blasted Lands" or "The Forest of Fear" or "The Desert of Desolation" or absolutely anything "of Doom"?
27. Does your novel contain a prologue that is impossible to understand until you've read the entire book, if even then?
28. Is this the first book in a planned trilogy?
29. How about a quintet or a decalogue?
30. Is your novel thicker than a New York City phone book?
31. Did absolutely nothing happen in the previous book you wrote, yet you figure you're still many sequels away from finishing your "story"?
32. Are you writing prequels to your as-yet-unfinished series of books?
33. Is your name Robert Jordan and you lied like a dog to get this far?
34. Is your novel based on the adventures of your role-playing group?
35. Does your novel contain characters transported from the real world to a fantasy realm? (Ever since I started this story I wanted to kick her out, yet never had the heart. She's still there).
36. Do any of your main characters have apostrophes or dashes in their names? (Guilty. One character, another fossil from my teenage days, retains her apostrophe. It's a title in her case, though, akin to "Dr.". Ahem.)
37. Do any of your main characters have names longer than three syllables? (What's so special about four-syllable names? Willhelmina made Dracula fail!)
38. Do you see nothing wrong with having two characters from the same small isolated village being named "Tim Umber" and "Belthusalanthalus al'Grinsok"?
39. Does your novel contain orcs, elves, dwarves, or halflings?
40. How about "orken" or "dwerrows"?
41. Do you have a race prefixed by "half-"?
42. At any point in your novel, do the main characters take a shortcut through ancient dwarven mines?
43. Do you write your battle scenes by playing them out in your favorite RPG?
44. Have you done up game statistics for all of your main characters in your favorite RPG?
45. Are you writing a work-for-hire for Wizards of the Coast?
46. Do inns in your book exist solely so your main characters can have brawls?
47. Do you think you know how feudalism worked but really don't?
48. Do your characters spend an inordinate amount of time journeying from place to place?
49. Could one of your main characters tell the other characters something that would really help them in their quest but refuses to do so just so it won't break the plot?
50. Do any of the magic users in your novel cast spells easily identifiable as "fireball" or "lightning bolt"?
51. Do you ever use the term "mana" in your novel?
52. Do you ever use the term "plate mail" in your novel?
53. Heaven help you, do you ever use the term "hit points" in your novel?
54. Do you not realize how much gold actually weighs?
55. Do you think horses can gallop all day long without rest?
56. Does anybody in your novel fight for two hours straight in full plate armor, then ride a horse for four hours, then delicately make love to a willing barmaid all in the same day?
57. Does your main character have a magic axe, hammer, spear, or other weapon that returns to him when he throws it?
58. Does anybody in your novel ever stab anybody with a scimitar?
59. Does anybody in your novel stab anybody straight through plate armor?
60. Do you think swords weigh ten pounds or more?
61. Does your hero fall in love with an unattainable woman, whom he later attains?
62. Does a large portion of the humor in your novel consist of puns?
63. Is your hero able to withstand multiple blows from the fantasy equivalent of a ten pound sledge but is still threatened by a small woman with a dagger?
64. Do you really think it frequently takes more than one arrow in the chest to kill a man?
65. Do you not realize it takes hours to make a good stew, making it a poor choice for an "on the road" meal?
66. Do you have nomadic barbarians living on the tundra and consuming barrels and barrels of mead?
67. Do you think that "mead" is just a fancy name for "beer"?
68. Does your story involve a number of different races, each of which has exactly one country, one ruler, and one religion?
69. Is the best organized and most numerous group of people in your world the thieves' guild?
70. Does your main villain punish insignificant mistakes with death?
71. Is your story about a crack team of warriors that take along a bard who is useless in a fight, though he plays a mean lute?
72. Is "common" the official language of your world?
73. Is the countryside in your novel littered with tombs and gravesites filled with ancient magical loot that nobody thought to steal centuries before?
74. Is your book basically a rip-off of The Lord of the Rings?
75. Read that question again and answer truthfully.

4/75 - Even though this means my story is doomed according to the test it really could have been worse. I definitely see the point of this exam - and I wish they had included  "objects with names of any kind" as well as "list of names in the back" and "map in front of the book".

 

Comments

[ladyelleth.livejournal.com]

This wins so much, but hey, just because you are fulfilling a few tropes in this list doesn't mean it's a failure. Know the rules, then break them. :D

and I wish they had included "objects with names of any kind" as well as "list of names in the back" and "map in front of the book"

XD!!! This.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Hi! How are your holidays so far? I hope the paper marathon of the last weeks of the semester is nearly over!

Yeah, I don't feel too bad about the tropes I do have - I've been spending far too much time on TVTRopes (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropesAreNotBad) to feel bad about tropes at all. XD

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I think one is a bit harsh.

Novel I'm working on fits into three or four of those, plus a half-yes.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Ooh, another Fantasy writer!
It really depends on which ones, these are not all equally bad. Well, if it's 74 or 75, then abandoning does not sound like such a bad idea, though.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Well, #1 is pretty fair, as is #75. I remember trudging through the Sword of Shannara ages ago and getting frustrated with so many of the things in that list (slow pacing, constant slow travel, etc).

Some of it's detail stuff that by itself doesn't really matter (I won't freak out over a writer thinking stew is good on the road, but I really hate all races having one nation, one ruler, and one religion is pretty irritating).

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

For long I was tempted to try reading the Shannara series because I enjoyed Brooks' Landover-series (apart from the entire character and concept of the female main character Willow, which still makes me retch). My library does not seem to have the books in English, though, and now I wouldn't want to read them in Germany anymore. Are they any good?

They do have a point with those details, very often these things do go together. I wish more published writers had consulted it. Looking at you, David Eddings.

[firenightingale.livejournal.com]

Guilty or sort-of guilty of the following in The Omalfi (though, as it's fantasy without being Tolkein/Lewis type fantasy it's got away more lightly than it might have otherwise!:

"19. Would "a fearless warrioress more comfortable with a sword than a frying pan" aptly describe any of your female characters?"

I guess the daughter of the thieves guild leader comes under that category. In fact, having a thieves guild ought to have a category of its own!

"25. Do you not know when the hay baler was invented?"

No - but I know that if it's a fantasy novel, you don't NEED to know, if you want pistols in a prehistoric society, you can have them - likewise hay bales.

"28. Is this the first book in a planned trilogy?"

Guilty as charged, no excuses here!

"37. Do any of your main characters have names longer than three syllables?"

My main character's surname is Evidivici, which is five - but they are all very short!

"48. Do your characters spend an inordinate amount of time journeying from place to place?"

Yes but well, isn't that what is supposed to happen? Stuff happens to them when they're travelling, you know, plot?

"61. Does your hero fall in love with an unattainable woman, whom he later attains?"

Yes, in the first volume - and then she turns out to be a psychotic murderer and he has to kill her to save his friend, who later becomes his enemy, so that doesn't really count. Of course, he spends a lot of time arguing with the woman he eventually winds up with - which again needs its own category!

If you like this - you should read The Tough Guide To Fantasy Land by Diana Wynne-Jones - it's an A-Z of categories pulling apart stereotypical fantasy. Such as (paraphrased as I'm too lazy to get the exact quote) 'Blankets - these are made out of an amazing material that allows them to be soaked through in a thunderstorm and yet dry overnight by the heat of a small camp fire.'

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

I'll definitely try to hunt that one down in our libraries, it sounds entertaining.

I only got around 28 because I don't know yet how many of the subplots I plan to include need own instalments or can be crammed into the first instalment.

The journey as well as the "entering another world"-thing really got me - as far as I know, these are so popular they've evolved into something like subgenres. I've even read an article on the travelling one somewhere - although I am not sure what they ended up naming their genre. Wiki does not list them as subgenres, though, and I can't remember where I read that.

I like that your hero does not stay with the first woman he claps eyes on - that happens so often it really should be on that list.

[fourthage.livejournal.com]

Do you not know when the hay baler was invented? (Er. The nineteen fifties? Sixties?)

I'm guessing this is a protest against descriptions of bales of hay in quasi-medieval fields? Still, what kind of hay baler are they talking about? The modern day version dates from the 1970s, but the 1940s had one that worked with a tractor, and the late 1800s had a version that featured horses on a treadmill. Given the amount of freaky machinery/lost technology that features in a lot of fantasy, it's not totally unreasonable that basic, make-your-job-easier stuff would filter out/survive to the farming class.

And that was probably a lot of unasked for information, but that question bugged me.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

It really wasn't. Googling up the history of hay balers and hay baling vs. tying hay up in stooks and or building stacks was the first thing I did after taking that "exam".

[fourthage.livejournal.com]

My mother's side of my family, excepting herself since she packed up and left for D.C. after high school, have been farmers for hundreds of years. I get a little tetchy about the subject.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the additional information on this. I think I can understand the tetchiness - coming from a family of hunters and smiths I have some pet peeves, too and often don't get why people don't bother reading up on this sort of detail if a large part of their works is set in a quasi-medieval rural area - it's not as though it is classified information.

[fourthage.livejournal.com]

Seriously! I mean, when I was in high school I wrote a short story that had three sentences referencing yarn dying and I had no idea what temperature the water should be, so I went to the library and looked it up. It's not that difficult.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Especially since today, there's the internet. I had to either dig through my parents books or get on my bike and cycle to the library to get the information I needed, these days, with Wiki offering information on nearly everything, there is really no excuse (unless, of course, your mother tongue does not offer a great variety of articles and you don't speak one of a main Wiki language). Off my lawn, pesky kids!

[firenightingale.livejournal.com]

Not as annoying as Megan Cabot's 'Regency' romance that has a 16 year old orphan heiress in complete control of her own fortune and life and who apparently doesn't need a chaperone to trot off around the place!

Fantasy novels allow for twisting historical fact because technically, it's not this world, so it could happen like that. If something is set in this world then... a little basic research is kind of vital!

My Story Notes (working title) plotline is sort of set in a historical time period that could be the dark ages or could be another world. Even so, I am flagging up anything that needs research - such as whether the Catholic church has curates or not (I think that's C of E only but I need to check), even though it's only a tiny aside reference.

[firenightingale.livejournal.com]

Darn my bad tagging!

I should also mention that Megan Cabot's heroine has Trustees, they just seem to be quite happy not to actually trustee anything other than the investment of her large fortune. Allowing a minor (as she would be until the age of 21) to dispose of her inheritance in whatever method she desires and marry whoever she wants is apparently fine...

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Yeah, historic novel authors and science fiction authors need to be on their toes and it's pretty funny if they aren't. This example - ugh. Why did they set it in the period if they were clearly not interested enough in it to do the most basic research on how things worked...? Because of the pretty clothes? I'm so curious I'll try to hunt down these books in the library.

I wonder why people don't bother with their details. When I was fifteen I read up on the basics of largely self-sufficient farming to keep a "lone mentor figure in the woods"-character from starving and ended up having whole paragraphs on him getting on with his harvest, which was probably too much detail - but I kept wondering how Yoda managed.