How To Write- Fantasy

How To Start

Start With a Tagline

A good place to start when creating an idea for a story is to come up with a new tagline. A tagline is a short sentence that describes what a story is about and really grabs your attention. If your tagline is boring, then your story likely isn't all that interesting, and you should come up with a new idea of tweak the one that you have.

An example of a bad tagline would be something along the lines of, "The son of a king sets off to kill a dragon to prove his bravery." Does that sound like a story you'd like to read? Probably not. It sounds like a pretty dull story to me, and I wouldn't even be tempted to open the cover of a story with that description. However, we could change that tagline to make it more interesting. Suppose it went something like, "The reviled son of a king sets out to accomplish what his father has failed to do; slay the black dragon that terrorises the kingdom." That sounds much more intriguing, and you could definitely make a good story based off of that tagline.

Start Writing

Now that you have a basic tagline, it is time to start writing. Without thinking too much about it, write down a two page summary of your story. Once you have finished, then read through what you have written and determine whether or not the story idea is something that you want to pursue. If it still sounds interesting to you, then great, but if not then determine whether or not you can tweak the idea to make it better. If you can't, then create a new tagline and repeat this process until you have an idea that you really like.

If you liked your two page summary, then start fleshing out your main character. The story is about them so you need to take some time to figure out who they are. Once you have a better idea of what your main character is like, then write a chapter or two about them. If you still like what you've written, great! If not, then keep trying until you get a couple of chapters that you like. If you have reached that point, then congratulations! You now have the beginning of your fantasy novel, abd you are ready to start thinking about the structure of the story.