Competition between Reading and Writing Fantasy

Let me preface this post about the following context of my reading which might or might not be new to those of you who subscribe to my blog: my foray into fantasy dated all the way back in the period before sub-genres were a thing. Back in those days, I would just say I read fantasy and be done with that rather than having to say that I read epic, high-magic and sword&sorcery fantasy. And while it is true that I read all three sub-genres, epic fantasy tended to be my main staple while the other two sub-genres were what I called light reading. 

Now, fast forward to the last 5 years. I’m almost done with epic fantasy or it has become more of an occasional foray for me. Why? I seem to have outgrown most of my comfort authors for fantasy overall- authors whose works I followed more or less diligently though still subject to my own whims. Also, epic fantasy as a sub-genre seems to have shrunken from being the predominant category within fantasy to being taken over by YA fantasy (not saying they can’t co-exist in for example Tamora Pierce but mostly they don’t tend to co-exist and while I dabble in YA fantasy, I’ve always been lukewarm towards this sub-genre because that’s the way my taste runs) so I feel like I have to sift through thousands of blurbs on my local library catalogue in order to find one that interests me personally. And lastly, I seem to have reached a point of exhaustion with the sub-genre due to a combination of needing to find new authors to fill the gap of my comfort authors or what I felt was a kind of overwhelming fight against publishers’ effort to publish to trends eg. turn previously high magic settings into low magic and flood the market with YA fantasy etc. 

And on top of all that above, I’ve noticed that epic fantasy is the one genre that easily creeps into my writing. And to be honest, I’m not even writing epic fantasy myself. I mean, I seem to be always writing about a largish party ala old epic fantasy but I’ve noticed that my plot always has an underlying theme revolved around family relationships so I’ve as yet not really been able to classify it into a sub-genre yet other than dubbing it Chinese fantasy. I first noticed this when I was reading Tad Williams and the Dragonbone Chair which I ended up not finishing, not because it was not well written but I just didn’t feel like continuing with it after the first section. It might also have something to do with the fact that I realised that I could possibly learn from a certain section of the story because I knew that my story occurs in a similar setting and I’m not sure whether this kind of deliberate intention on my part ruined my reading experience (as a rule, my first reading experience is as a pure reader because reading is still one of my primary leisure activities so I wondered if thinking about learning from a certain novel ‘ruined’ my usual frame of mind when reading). 

At any rate, if you tracked my reading in recent years, I think Robin Hobb is the only epic fantasy writer that I had read but to be honest I didn’t really feel that she’s on the same scale as for example LOTR. I did enjoy the Soldier’s Son trilogy and the Liveship Traders trilogy from her because they both bring some freshness to the epic fantasy genre and they do tell stories bigger than your one point-of-view or two points-of-view stories but there is a very clear divide in my mind between them and old classics. 

As of the time of writing I’m not quite sure where I’m going as an epic fantasy reader. I still remain a fantasy reader in general but am dabbling more and more into historical fantasy or straight historical fiction.