Notes on writing and fantasy fiction

Below is an attempt to consolidate what I know and would like to share from my experience in and around publishing and my knowledge as a reader.

Here’s an outline of the post:

Writing advice
Literary fiction vs. commercial fiction
Save the Cat by Blake Snyder
SPJG posts about writing advice books
SPJG posts about avoiding writing mistakes
Miscellaneous links

Recommended authors: children’s and YA fantasy
“Recent” (1980s onward)
“Classic” (1900 to 1980)

Publishing
Purpose
Audience
Context
Process via self-publishing
Process via traditional publishing

Writing communities
Singapore Writer’s Group
NaNoWriMo
Reddit

Conclusion

Writing advice

Literary fiction vs. commercial fiction

Books in the fantasy genre tend to be optimistic and have happy endings. Those are the kind of books I like. But serious literary fiction is just the opposite.

I have posted about about Brandon Mull’s optimistic books, in contrast to literary fiction.

I have also posted about a time when I tried to read and understand a book of literary short stories.

Save the Cat by Blake Snyder

I have posted about this book on screenwriting that describes the key parts of a complete plot.

I wrote summaries of several dozen movies (and a few novels) on my blog using this plot structure; I did it because I wanted to practice noticing and using the structure, and because I wanted to post something about all the movies I was watching.

Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody (Amazon link) adapts the screenwriting structure to book writing and gives lots of examples.

SPJG posts about writing advice books

I’ve read a lot of books about writing, but these are the ones I’ve written long-ish posts about:

SPJG posts about avoiding writing mistakes

Because of my educational and professional background and personal interests, I have high standards for technical correctness in English writing—which is a nice way of saying I’m a writing snob.

Don’t get me wrong, I truly believe that story matters more than technical correctness (especially in a first draft), but I believe equally strongly that, with rare exceptions, a true writer willingly pursues excellence in the technical aspects of the craft of writing, and at least achieves competence. Therefore, in some contexts, I see mistakes as evidence of appalling ignorance, laziness, or lack of respect for the reader. In other contexts—notably, public signs in East and Southeast Asia—I think mistakes are not just inevitable (and thus completely inoffensive) but also delightfully amusing.

Here are some mistakes to avoid:

Different languages have different internal structure and characteristics, which means that some language features are really not intuitive to speakers of other languages, even educated careful speakers. For example, Chinese doesn’t have plural; thus, knowing when something should have an ‘s’ on the end is a true difficulty. Given the existence of uncountable nouns, and their overlap with countable nouns, it’s not as simple as you might imagine!

The following are mistakes that are perhaps more common among Singaporeans, Chinese speakers, speakers of other Asian languages, and maybe other groups of non-native speakers of standard American English.

Miscellaneous links

Warning: Below is a truly miserable and inadequate list of just three links, a list which is particularly lacking in that one of them doesn’t even work anymore. However, it is a true and authentic list of some stuff I remember discovering online when I was first trying to learn about writing and publishing fiction. Anyway, you can use whatever your favorite search engine or AI tool is to come up with more and better ideas for informative websites you can visit.

I used to read the Evil Editor blog years ago. It often talks about writing a “query letter” to get a literary agent. The literary agent then looks for a publisher and helps negotiate a contract, etc. But maybe it also talks about other aspects of writing.

There was another blog I read years ago called Miss Snark, but it disappeared from its original location. There are pages still online at archive.org. And someone made an organized list of useful links to specific posts.

The Turkey City Lexicon is a famous guide to some common writing errors in the sci-fi genre (which of course is not the same as the fantasy genre, but still genre/commercial fiction).

Recommended authors: Children’s and YA Fantasy

“Recent” (1980s onward)

Brandon Mull
He has written several multi-volume fantasy book series: Fablehaven (5+ volumes), Dragonwatch (5+ volumes, sequels to Fablehaven), Five Kingdoms (5 volumes), Beyonders (3 volumes), The Candy Shop War (3 volumes). I like his writing because he explicitly shows how his characters make decisions that have practical and moral importance, and also explicitly shows what the consequences of the decisions are. Also, I like how imaginative his fantasy worlds are, and how he puts everyday modern kids into fantasy situations (in contrast to writing about everyday kids only, or writing about a pretend world where nobody is surprised magic exists). This post expands on these points.

Terry Pratchett
I love Terry Pratchett’s books because they are entertaining and also because they have important messages embedded in them. Pratchett believed in the power of storytelling, and he was an expert storyteller. Mainly he wrote a fantasy/comedy/social satire series for adults called Discworld, which has 41 volumes (including the 5 young-adult novels in the Tiffany Aching series). Books he wrote for children/teens include The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (which directly puts forth a theory about the importance of stories in human life), the Bromeliad trilogy, and Nation.

Jeanne Du Prau
I love City of Ember! This is a post-apocalyptic series with the first book set underground. It’s entertaining, but it’s also about critical thinking.

Veronica Roth
I love the dystopian teen fantasy series Divergent! It’s entertaining and imaginative, but I also feel like the author has important, deep things to say. Much better than the Hunger Games series.

Philip Pullman
The His Dark Materials trilogy is compellingly weird.

Rick Riordan
I read and enjoyed the first five Percy Jackson books; Percy Jackson is like Harry Potter (a normal boy with a secret destiny who gets involved in a magical world hidden from others), but instead of witches and wizards, it’s people, deities, and monsters from Greek mythology.

Mary Pope Osborne
This American author wrote the Magic Treehouse series. These are short, illustrated novels for younger kids. I think I’ve only read one of them (the first one) and I don’t remember it. However, they strike me as primarily educational; each one teleports the characters to some new kind of situation. Maybe the idea is like the Magic School Bus books, a series of picture books about science topics. (I temporarily confused the Magic Treehouse series with an Australian children’s book series by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton. It starts with The 13-Storey Treehouse, and the number of storeys increases by 13 in each title. From what I can tell based on a description of the first book, these books have no educational value whatsoever.)

Ruth Chew

American author Ruth Chew’s short, illustrated chapter books are usually about two siblings or two friends in New York City who accidentally encounter a magical object or person and have some sort of random adventure. There are witches, wizards, cats, shrinking, flying, and shape-shifting, for example. When I was in college, I made a webpage about her books. Later, I created the website ruthchew.com, which contains information on all her books, including translations into other languages. After I built the website, the publisher decided to republish some of Ruth Chew’s books that had gone out of print!

Mormon writers

Shadow Mountain is the mainstream content imprint of Deseret Books, the official publisher of the Mormon church (officially, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).

Many people have pondered the link between Mormonism and successful children’s and young adult fantasy novels.

A New York Times article in 2023 pointed out that Mormon writers have had remarkable success writing YA fantasy fiction.
However: “Now, contemporary Y.A. books often reflect evolving social norms, including L.G.B.T.Q. themes and more relaxed views about sexuality, making it harder for some Latter-day Saint writers to find an audience.”

Deseret News, the official Mormon news outlet, has also published an article about Mormons and YA fantasy fiction.
“[M]any Utah readers also choose YA fiction because they want to read something clean, and a good majority of teen fiction is fairly free of graphic violence, sexual content and bad language relative to adult fiction…. More YA books are read by adults than young adults across the U.S.”

List of Mormon fantasy fiction and YA fantasy fiction authors:

  • Brandon Mull, author of Fablehaven
  • Stephanie Meyer, author of Twilight
  • Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game
  • Shannon Hale, author of The Princess Academy
  • James Dashner, author of The Maze Runner
  • “Obert Skye”, author of Leven Thumps
  • Ally Condie*, author of Matched
  • Brandon Sanderson*, author of Mistborn

*authors whose books I have not read, but have definitely heard of

“Classic” (1900 to 1980)

Edith Nesbit
I believe this British author was a direct inspiration for Edward Eager and Ruth Chew. She is probably most famous for her novels The Railway Children (1906, not fantasy) and Five Children and It (1902, fantasy). Her books are in the public domain (no longer under copyright), so you can legitimately get free ebooks online if you want to read them:

» Edith Nesbit’s books at Standard Ebooks

» Edith Nesbit’s books at Project Gutenberg

In general, Standard Ebooks are good quality in terms of copyediting and formatting. They are made using source texts from Project Gutenberg. In general, Project Gutenberg’s texts are less user-friendly, but there are a lot more of them. Edith Nesbit’s books are maybe not so relevant to today’s market, but they’re enjoyable, and they’re part of the history of the genre of magical writing for children.

Edward Eager
American author Edward Eager published 7 magic stories in the 1950s and 1960s. They are still in print. Half Magic (1954), Knight’s Castle (1956), Magic by the Lake (1957), The Time Garden (1958), Magic or Not? (1959), The Well-Wishers (1960), Seven-Day Magic (1962).

C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis was a famous Christian writer. The first book of the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, is often assigned in school in the US. It’s a fantasy story, but it’s also an allegory where the lion represents Jesus. They made CGI movies out of some of the books.

J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are fantasy classics. They weren’t necessarily written for kids, but my mom read them to me when I was little.

Madeleine L’Engle
She wrote a lot of books, but is best remembered for A Wrinkle in Time, first published in 1962, and its sequels.

Other Classics

  • Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain (related to Welsh mythology)
  • The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper (related to Celtic mythology)
  • Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin

Publishing

I know a bit about the process of writing, editing, and publishing fiction because I’ve read books and blogs about writing, editing, and publishing, I worked for an academic book publisher, I worked with a graphic designer to produce children’s workbooks for an education company, and I was in a writers’ group where other people were publishing or trying to publish books and discussing the process.

There are many types of publishing, and it’s changing all the time. Mainly, publishing is more accessible because of the internet and the prevalence of digital devices that can be used for reading and writing. But it’s a universal truth that all writing has a purpose, audience, and context.

Purpose

The writer’s purpose might be to devote time to an enjoyable hobby, make new friends in a writing group, or to start a side gig or career to make money. But the purpose of the writing itself is probably different. Writing can teach facts, entertain, mock, horrify, persuade, etc. The fantasy fiction I like best is a combination of entertaining and inspiring; it demonstrates good ways to behave and succeed while demonstrating the author’s creativity and humor.

Audience

The market for “children’s books” can be segmented by age group. Note that different publishers and booksellers do this differently.

The younger age groups aren’t really reading.

  • Babies and toddlers (ages 0-3):
    These books are made of thick cardboard because they will get chewed.
  • Picture books (ages 3-8)
    A few large pages with prominent illustrations. Read by parents and teachers.
  • Early Readers (ages 4-8)
    Written very carefully to help kids who are learning to read.

Fiction books for older children are somewhat like regular novels:

  • Chapter books (ages 6-10)
    These short, relatively simple books for independent readers have chapters and illustrations and use a large font size. Themes are carefully chosen for age-appropriateness.
  • Middle grade books (can be further divided into upper and lower) (8-14)
    These are more like short regular novels in terms of length, difficulty, and themes.
  • Young adult books (can be further divided into younger and older) (12-18)
    These are even more like regular novels in terms of length, difficulty, and themes.

You can generally tell what age group a book is written for by the age of the main character. The main character will be the same age as or older than the children who are the target audience. Generally speaking, kids don’t want to read about kids younger than themselves—because that would be, you know, lame. On the other hand, ever since Harry Potter, it’s more socially acceptable to read books written for younger people.

I feel like J.K. Rowling’s success created the “young adult” section of the market, although this is not exactly what happened, and the first Harry Potter books are supposedly “middle grade”. My impression is that what really happened is, because of Harry Potter, more people started buying and reading middle grade and YA books even if they were older, so writers, publishers, and booksellers all focused on that segment more intensely. Cha-ching! One of the effects of this boom was that the New York Times created a separate bestseller list for children’s books specifically because the Harry Potter books were blocking normal adult books from appearing there!

Similarly, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas and Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros have launched a whole new (well, not new, but newly trendy) genre called “romantasy” that takes fantasy and makes it edgier. These books, unlike most previous fantasy novels, likely contain curse words and sex scenes, and are thus characterized as “spicy”. These books are targeted to the “new adult” market, which sits between young adult books and normal adult books. (I haven’t read any romantasy; I’ve read a bunch of books by the previous generation(s) of fantasy fiction writers: David Eddings, Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, Anne McCaffrey, and Andre Norton.)

Context

There are different kinds of writing for different contexts. A blog post is usually more casual than a journal paper. Posts on Twitter/X are shorter than the ones on Facebook. Unsurprisingly, a 21st century children’s novel doesn’t sound like the children’s novels published 100 years ago. The vocabulary was different then, and, moreover, some of those books are widely considered unacceptably colonialist/racist now. (The 1920s-1940s Doctor Dolittle children’s book series is one example.) Publishers want to publish books that resonate with today’s readers. Publishers don’t want to see old ideas repeated, especially if the old ideas are now offensive. That being said, there are publishers (and readers!) looking for books that reflect traditional family values as well as books that celebrate modern liberal notions—the success of Mormon writers is a case in point.

Process: via self-publishing

Technically you don’t need help from a traditional publisher. In the US at least, authors can publish and sell (or distribute for free) whatever they want, in digital or printed form. There are three challenges: judging whether the work is good enough to sell, packaging the work so that it *looks* like it’s good enough to sell, and finding people to sell it to. Authors can learn to do these things themselves (which can be difficult), or they can find individuals or companies and pay them to help them (which can be expensive). There are a multitude of different self-publishing paths. Many authors have found that the marketplace offers a feasible route to publication that does not involve traditional publishing.

  • Authors can directly sell ebooks on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, and Kobo. Distributors like Draft2Digital and Ingram let authors register an account and then automatically send their books to multiple platforms.
  • Through Amazon KDP Print and IngramSpark, authors can also sell print versions in multiple channels (authors supply the content but don’t need to manage packing or shipping to customers).

Authors may need/want to hire people to do:

  • various kinds of editing
    • editorial assessment – big picture feedback (on plot, characters, theme, etc.)
    • developmental editing – advice on restructuring large parts or aspects of the story
    • line editing – intense editing to improve writing in many aspects
    • copyediting – cleans up minor problems
    • proofreading – checks for typos and glitches in the final typeset text
  • graphic design and illustration (for the cover, for the interior)
  • book design and formatting (for print and digital versions, for different platforms or formats)
  • marketing (online advertising; promotion on various social media channels; promotion via interviews, reviews, or articles; custom website creation; newsletter and mailing list management; other online channels; maybe offline channels too).

Beware: There are some scammy “author services” companies out there. Some even put “Amazon” in their name to try to look official. They charge big prices for fancy bundles of editing and design, production, and promotion. Lawsuits have been filed against the notorious company Author Solutions and its associated imprints (Xlibris, iUniverse, Trafford, AuthorHouse, Balboa Press).

To avoid wasting money, it seems the recommended procedure is to hire specific freelancers with good reputations for specific tasks—for example, on the platform Reedsy. Look for recommendations from reputable sources in writing communities.

Process: via self-publishing

Like self-publishing, traditional publishing can also be difficult (because you have to be better than a bunch of other authors who are competing for limited publisher resources) and expensive (because the royalties from traditional publishing are smaller percentages than you can get through self-publishing). In my opinion, a writer should probably just focus on writing; for me the gold standard is to be able to let a publisher manage all aspects of production and and promotion.

The first steps of traditional publishing are partly the same as the steps of self-publishing:

  • you read a lot
  • you learn how to write well
  • you write something
  • you get feedback
  • you rewrite, get more feedback, rewrite… etc.
  • you find yourself satisfied with your “final” draft

My impression—based on first-hand experience working for an academic publisher in the early 2000s and miscellaneous second-hand information—is that in the US, the traditional publishing path goes something like this:

  • you find an agent
    • you write and send “query letters” describing your project in a particular concise way
    • you send a sample to the agent if they express interest
    • you send the whole manuscript if they like the sample
  • the agent accepts your project and gives you advice about changes that will make your book more appealing
  • you make some changes
  • the agent finds a publisher and helps you negotiate a contract; according to this contract, you get some money right away (this is the “advance”), then you get a small percentage of the book sales *after* the publisher earns back the money they paid you as the advance (these are the “royalties”).
  • the publisher
    • asks for more changes (and you make some)
    • copyedits the book (and you check it)
    • maybe adds interior illustrations (they are mostly in charge of this)
    • designs the cover (they are mostly in charge of this)
    • conducts marketing activities to a degree matching the level of success they envision the book will have (which, statistically speaking, is likely small), and also tells you what they expect you to do to help (at a minimum, promote the book to your social media followers, which they hope are numerous)
      • they will put the book in their catalog of new stuff
      • their sales representatives will try to sell it in retail channels
      • they might make you a website
      • they might pay for various kinds of advertisements
      • they might arrange publicity events (interviews, book signings, talks, panels)
    • typesets the book for printing and performs quality checks (and you maybe check too)
    • formats the book as an ebook and performs quality checks (and you maybe check too)
    • manufactures printed copies (traditionally, a hardcover first, then a paperback later)
    • supplies the book to wholesale and retail channels online and offline
    • reprints the book, if it succeeds

If a novel really succeeds, someone buys the movie rights and makes a movie adaptation. (I have mixed feelings about that! The book is almost always better.)

Writing communities

My experience: the Singapore Writers’ Group

I used to be in a critique group for writers. Around the time I joined the group, it split into several different groups for different types of writing. These were monthly in-person meetups at people’s houses to discuss a part of each author’s work-in-progress; a few pages per person were shared in advance for people to prepare feedback for discussion. The group also had a monthly social event at a restaurant, and organized some free and paid workshops and talks. In addition, sometimes I met up with writer friends at cafes on a more informal basis. Many people I know published their work, and I bought copies of their books and attended their local book launch events. It was good to be part of a face-to-face writing community.

NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

Wikipedia says:
“National Novel Writing Month, often shortened to NaNoWriMo, is an annual creative writing challenge that takes place in November of each year. Participants are tasked with writing a 50,000-word novel draft by the end of the month, aiming for an average of 1,667 words each day. Although the U.S. based nonprofit organization that founded the project closed in 2025 (due to scandals and financial issues), the event lives on through community-led initiatives and alternative platforms like NaNo 2.0.”

I never participated, but I think friends of mine did. Sounds fun. Reading the Wikipedia page, I learned that Wool, by Hugh Howey, was originally a NaNoWriMo project. It’s the basis of an amazing Apple TV show called Silo, a post-apocalyptic story set in a vertical underground city.

Oh, and here are some instructions for how to actually go about writing a book in a month: Book In a Month: The Fool-Proof System for Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Victoria Lynn Schmidt

Reddit

If you can’t easily join an in-person group, or even if you can, online communities of writers can be supportive and informative. There is a subreddit for seemingly every topic under the sun. Here are just a few of the reading and writing ones.

Reading

Writing and publishing

Conclusion

I was writing a novel a few years ago; I have about 25% of a first draft, and that’s it. So…

Do as I say, not as I do!

Get out there, write a novel, make it good, and show the world. 🙂