I think it is fair to say that every writer has a bookshelf containing well-thumbed, go-to resources. Odds are that shelf contains a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a style guide such as Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. And while these resources can help every writer find the right word or phrasing, fantasy writers have additional, more specific needs. They need to design richly detailed worlds filled with people, cultures, monsters, and magic—all while avoiding cliché. Here are a few books fantasy writers can rely on to meet those needs.
Worldbuilding
When I pick up a new fantasy novel, I love pouring over the details found in that inside-cover map. But that’s just the beginning. A really great fantasy novel will portray a world crammed full of details: history, culture, religion, economics, classes, trades, and more. In other words, even though the world is fictional, it will feel real and grounded. Here are some sources to help your story’s world come to life.
Civilzation and Capitalism, 15th – 18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life by Fernand Braudel and Siân Reynold. This volume discusses what people ate, how they dressed, what jobs they worked, what tools they used, and how the economy functioned in a pre-industrial society.
The Time Traveler’s Guide To Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer. If the above book is too academic for your tastes, give this one a try: it’s written in a more engaging, tongue-in-cheek style. But like the above book, it will help writers understand a world that is far different from the one we know. And there is a companion volume for Elizabethan England if that is more appropriate for your story.
What People Wore When: A Complete Illustrated History of Costume From Ancient Times to the Nineteenth Century for Every Level of Society by Melissa Leventon. Finally, for you visual learners, here is a great resource for dressing your characters. This book will give you a sense of proportion, material, and color from cultures around the world. Additionally, it will probably also expand your clothing vocabulary dramatically.
Monsters and Magic
Not only do I look for a well-built world, but I also want to read about creative monsters and magical systems. And while I love greybeard wizards, snarling werewolves, and corpse-like vampires as much as anyone, I prefer reading stories that introduce me to a new monster or new magic, or put a unique spin on an old classic.
Although books such as Irish Fairy and Folk Tales by W.B. Yeats as well as the The Prose and The Poetic Edda will provide a solid foundation of myth and magic, I think books that provide a global collection might be of more value to fantasy writers. Books such as the Oxford Companion to World Mythology provide a single-volume of collection of gods, goddesses, myths, monsters, and magic that many writers and readers will have never heard of.
Themes, Foreshadowing, and Other Details
Zooming in a little, I also love fantasy novels that make use of themes and foreshadowing, especially if the author employs symbols or items that are rich with secondary and tertiary meanings. Even if every reader does not pick up on this subtle trail of hidden Easter eggs, those that do will enjoy your story even more.
The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols is a great tool for this task. Just as a bouquet of flowers used to convey pages of subtext through clever and careful choosing of flowers, a writer could employ this book to populate a novel with seemingly every day items that will tickle a reader’s subconscious.
Avoiding Clichés
Finally, a fantasy writer should also have a good understanding of what not to write. The best way to do this is to read every other fantasy novel out there. Obviously, as every fan’s “to read” pile can attest, this is an impossible task. Thankfully, there are a couple of shortcuts.
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The Essential Guide to Fantasy Travel by Diana Wynne Jones is a list of just about every cliché in the fantasy genre. You’ll never read about horses, swords, armor, or stew the same way.
I almost included the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual in the monsters and magic section, but, I think it as more useful as a guide to stock characters to avoid. Perhaps writers should use it as a starting point: with a few twists, a clichéd character can become something entirely new.
This list is, of course, incomplete. My hope is that it will provide fantasy writers with sources that they may not be familiar with, but that might be as useful as a dictionary is to every other types of writers. My hope is that these books might help create richer, more detailed, and more original stories. And if you are looking for a convenient, online version of many of these books, I would suggest checking out TVTropes.org. And finally, if you know of a resource that is not on this list, please post it in the comments below and share it with the other fans and writers of Fantasy-Faction.
