How to Write a Fantasy Story Using Story Types
Did you start drafting a Fantasy story and get stuck along the way? Or are you writing yet another draft and keep running into the same problem, not sure how to fix it or maybe even how to define it?
At Pages and Platforms, we know how it feels to want fast and applicable solutions for story challenges. Today, we’re sharing with you one of the most useful tips and tricks we’ve found for helping our clients build, evaluate, and improve their Fantasy stories.
First, let’s look at the Fantasy story classification and why it’s an important choice you make, to differentiate it from other milieus and realities, for your story.
Fantasy as a Story Milieu
Fantasy stories require audiences to suspend disbelief significantly. Such stories often reflect myths and folklore and are generally regarded as imaginative. This marketing category includes works incorporating dystopian themes, science fiction, and those with anthropomorphized or magical characters. Calling your story Fantasy means that the audience should expect to suspend their belief of reality to a certain degree. It means the story veers from the “scientific facts” of the real world.
Some subcategories of the Fantasy classification include:
Epic — The setting is a magical environment with unique rules and physical laws. Epic stories tend to focus on a well-developed heroic figure or group of heroic characters. Examples are Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series and Lord of the Rings. Epic also includes stories of swordsmen and barbarians, such as Fish Wielder.
Low — The setting mimics the real world but incorporates some unexpected magic that surprises characters. Examples are E.T, The Indian in the Cupboard, and Russian Doll.
Magical Realism — Similar to Low Fantasy but the characters accept the fantastic such as telekinesis and superpowers, as a normative aspect of their world. Examples are One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Lobster.
Dark — Horror stories in a fantastical setting. Examples are works by H. P. Lovecraft and Alien.
Sci-Fi — Set in a speculative but realistic future in which technology not currently available is a focus. Examples are The War of the Worlds and Frankenstein.
Dystopian — A setting that fosters widespread suffering. Common themes are governmental or technological control or environmental destruction that leads to loss of individualism. Examples are 1984 and Handmaid’s Tale.
Fables — Stories that incorporate anthropomorphized animals or supernatural beings to teach morality. Examples are Animal Farm and The Rainbow Fish.
Fairy Tales — Set in faraway lands. These stories are generally intended for children, and tend to begin with “Once upon a time.” They often portray giants, dragons, witches, and spellbound princesses. Examples are Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Shrek.
While these subcategories are essential for a writer to know when it comes to marketing or describing their story, they are not the basis for formulating or evaluating a story structure. They aren’t adequate for writers trying to create working stories.
So, what are we getting at? Fantasy is not the type of story you are telling. Fantasy is the milieu in which your story takes place. For instance, you can have a Love Story on Mars, a Horror Story at the bottom of the sea, or a Crime Story in a magic kingdom. No matter how exotic the milieu, the story has to work the same way as if it were in modern Los Angeles. This makes sense since you’ve probably already made your choices from the Reality selections above and are still stuck getting your Fantasy story on track.
Choosing your Story Type is the single most critical decision you’ll make in writing your Fantasy story. Story Types give you the practical and applicable assistance you need for creating a professional working draft.
What Are Story Types?
Story Types are a way of identifying and categorizing the kind of story you’re telling.
We define Story Type differently than publishers, booksellers, and sales departments. Story Type concerns more than marketing and selling books. It’s not analogous to marketing genres that help booksellers and audiences. Story Types are for writers and editors.
As we see it, there are seven essential Story Types. (Other writers and editors have sorted stories differently, saying there are dozens of story types, but we’ve distilled it down to seven for the sake of simplicity.) They are seven distinctive plot forms, each with individual character arcs, themes, and audience expectations.
Story Types guide you through every step of creating a story that works. The seven Story Types are: Action, Crime, Horror, Love, Worldview, Validation and Redemption.
Determining your Story Type is a critical first step in answering the six essential questions you’ll need to answer for your Fantasy story:
What’s Your Story Type?
What are your character’s wants & needs?
What’s at stake?
What’s your story’s premise?
What audience emotion does your story evoke?
What essential characters, situations & moments does your Story Type require?
These Essential Questions are more important than the milieu of your story because a good Fantasy story does five main things for its audience:
Evokes empathy for its characters
Creates tension and excitement
Conveys a thoughtful takeaway
Provides emotional satisfaction for your audience
Meets audience expectations for the story type
The six essential questions you answer for your story help your story reach all those goals. More good news? You can set a well-crafted story in almost any Fantasy milieu.
Story Types also help you:
Write a consistent story with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Finish. Your. Damn. Book.
To write that great Fantasy, you have to understand what kind of story you’re telling. We walk you through the essential elements of each of the seven Story Types in this free seven-page downloadable PDF.
With the necessary foundation of Story Type, you can apply it to your Fantasy story and innovate on a solid foundation.
Applying Story Type to Your Work
Once you know what Story Type you’re working in, how do you use it to fix your manuscript?
Start by answering the following questions:
What’s the premise of your story? Is your premise consistent throughout the story? Did you set up the premise in the beginning and prove it in the end?
Is the climactic event of your story compatible with your Story Type?
What’s at stake for your protagonist? What is the biggest thing your protagonist could gain or lose?
Does the climax of your story resolve when your protagonist uses their gift?
Do the wants and needs of the protagonist fit the wants and needs of your chosen Story Type?
Is the primary Story Type prominent and clear, or does the supporting Story Type overshadow it?
Does your story have all the essential characters, situations, and moments of your primary Story Type?
Does your story have most of the essential characters, situations, and moments of your supporting Story Type? (Note: the supporting Story Type doesn’t need to meet every essential story element.)
Do you have events that don’t seem to fit with your primary or supporting Story Type?
Are there entire scenes relevant to supporting Story Type but not the primary Story Type?
What scenes and events can you remove to clarify and strengthen the story?
What scenes and events can you add to clarify and strengthen the story?
Worldbuilding for Fantasy Stories
Second only to Story Type, worldbuilding in Fantasy stories is critical. Write it right, and your audience may forgive some minor mistakes with your structure. Get worldbuilding wrong, and it would take a perfectly constructed (impossible) story arc to compensate. It’s no secret that the Fantasy audience expects and requires the author to display mastery of worldbuilding skills. You have to create a believable and convincing world for your story characters.
Great writers can create extraordinary environments and make audiences homesick for places they’ve never even seen. But for many of us, worldbuilding might be just the thing that feels overwhelming.
Although some writers juxtapose a real-world setting with fantastical elements, many create entire universes with unique physical laws and logic and populations of imaginary races and creatures. There are several ways to approach the setting for your story.
Now, it doesn’t matter if you are a plotter or a pantser when it comes to worldbuilding. You could plan the rules of your world ahead of time or write it as you go for your first couple of drafts. Both the plotter and the pantser have techniques with advantages and disadvantages.
As a developmental editor, what I see most with Fantasy writers is the over-planner and overwriter. More than any other writers I work with, Fantasy writers will spend more time planning the worlds (creatures, landscapes, tribal rules, etc.) than the structure of the story they are telling. Writing with free abandon makes sense. Until it doesn’t.
Many writers confuse creating a magnificent setting for writing an actual story. They aren’t the same. And many writers get stuck in worldbuilding as an act of resistance to doing the work of creating a story structure. Worldbuilding becomes an excuse not to write.
The pantsers, on the other hand, are the ones most likely to write themselves into a corner. They write on whim and fancy until they can’t get their characters out of a problem they’ve created. These are the writers who have to spend most of their time editing their work and creating continuity.
The more you can bridge the gap between writing willy-nilly and outlining every character’s family history and feelings about the landscape's cartography, the better. Your goal is to go with your natural inclinations and keep your eye on the results you want. Here are some suggestions for creating other worlds for your story setting.
Make critical decisions regarding your milieu upfront. These are the story parameters that won’t change from beginning to end. For example:
What types of creatures live in your world?
What skills and abilities do they have?
Does magic exist? Superpowers?
What are the primary governmental structures?
What level of technology exists; weapons, transportation, medical care? If cars don't exist yet, then does it make sense that airplanes do?
What are the local customs that will impact the storyline?
What is the climate? The terrain?
Create one map rather than ten. Get the general lay of the land and allow for flexibility as you move through your first few drafts. You want the environment to work for your story, not against it. If you need your characters trapped in a mountain range on day three of their adventure, make sure those mountains are a three-day journey away.
Of course, cultural environments are more extensive. A writer must consider socio-economic and political systems, and if you are writing one of your first few drafts, go ahead and explore. Just be sure to leave most of this on the cutting room floor, and don’t let all that worldbuilding keep you from building an actual story.
Use the Five Senses. To fully immerse your audience in your world, make the protagonist experience all five senses. This helps the audience hear, see, taste, feel, and smell at least one aspect of every scene you’ve written. You must rely on more than sight and hearing.
Spare the reader the details they don’t need. This is your best bet in worldbuilding. Firmly root your audience in a few aspects of your world rather than telling them a little about many elements. To intrigue your audience, you want to leave some facets open to mystery. Let them wonder, so they keep reading to explore along with your characters.
If you are creating magical systems or superpowers, keep a few things in mind as you write:
Make your characters’ wants, needs, and flaws more compelling than their powers.
Ensure the character’s ability to solve problems with their powers doesn’t exceed your audience’s understanding of the magic. Foreshadowing is key. If magic is going to save the day in Chapter 24, the audience must know that magic exists in the beginning hook.
Make sure there are clear limitations to the powers available to the characters. Remember, the villain needs to be more powerful than the hero, but even the villain needs weaknesses and flaws the hero can inevitably exploit.
Remember that Fantasy audiences want you to immerse them in a new world. It’s your responsibility to transport them without smothering them in descriptions and exposition. Introduce your world in small chunks of text, in a single word here and there, with a brief encounter with a strange object, force, or rule. Use dialogue to explain the world to your characters (and therefore, the reader). Rather than long expository blocks of texts, you can thread a dialog into the action.
Innovating Fantasy Stories
Once you have a working story, one that is consistent in Story Type, how do you make sure it’s innovative rather than formulaic? Try the following:
Read deeply in both Fantasy and your Story Types. Compare your work to other successful stories in your genre and Story Type as well as to the guidelines here. Use your favorites as examples, taking some things you love from each of your top two or three favorite books. You'll find example books and movies for each Story Type in the Guide to get you started
Read widely outside of Fantasy and compare your work with some of the techniques used in other stories. Can you use them in your work as well? Read that book a loved one has been trying (and failing) to get you to read for years.
Keep in mind that if your story’s premise is timeless, the payoff must be fresh and new. On the other hand, If the story pushes the boundaries of tradition, it’s best to ground it in the familiar. If the rules of your world are unique and your setting unexpected, try a take on a classic story.
Allow your raw ideas and bold thinking to take your writing where other writers are hesitant to go. Story Types are a tool for translating the work of the muse, not for overriding it. If you want to innovate, allow vulnerability in your work. Try out the madness. See if it works. If it doesn’t, toss it in the junk pile. Try something else.
Create a dynamic protagonist and antagonist with opposing goals. How can the conflict escalate in surprising ways? If the reader is expecting one thing, what happens if you write the opposite?
Pair your primary Story Type with an unlikely supporting Story Type. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies took a classic Love story and paired it with zombie hunting, to create a new story that’s primarily Action.
Evaluate how you can integrate your primary and supporting Story Types (that is, your main plot and your subplot), overlap scenes, and tie one into the other.
Go back to the book you think is most similar to yours and ask, “What about my story is dissimilar enough to distinguish it from the original?”
In the final drafts, find readers you trust who know Fantasy stories well. Ask them to review your work for continuity, pacing, and whether they understand (as much as they need to) the unique world you’ve created. Ask them if you’ve told them too much about your world. Ask them where they felt the story slowed down too much. Where the story is slow, it’s usually due to too much exposition.
Putting It All Together for Your Fantasy Story
You’ve seen that Story Type is your guide, and worldbuilding is a tool. You now have the basics for creating a Fantasy story that resonates with readers and meets or exceeds their expectations. As a Fantasy writer, you have an extraordinary talent to offer the world in escapism and real-world cultural change. Are you ready to share your gift with the world?