I would like to write more novellas. And I’ve recently realized that ebooks mean I can.

And yes, I do need to generate more because I’m focused on the flash fiction to novella range. If you look at my writing goal for this year, which is 50k words, that’s going to likely end up being 2-3 novellettes, 3-4 flash fiction stories, and 3-5 short stories.

But also I just think it’s a good idea to continue to capture ideas so that when it comes time to choose the next writing project, I have a variety of choices to work with. Part of what slowed me down over the past 10 years (which is really the main period in which I’ve written fiction — I just wrote a couple of stories in my twenties) is that I’d have one or two story ideas and I’d feel like I needed to complete them before I moved on to anything else. A better method is to interrogate them a bit more before I commit to writing a rough draft.

The thing that really astounds me is the “8 ideas a month” part. I’m lucky if I get 2 ideas per year. Maybe that’s why I tend to think in terms of novels (and even multi-novel sets) rather than stories…

One of the things I’ve learned lately is that I need to generate many more ideas than I have in the past and then rather than forcing myself to tackle everything that comes down my mental turnpike, figure out what I’m most excited about. Letting your excitement be the gauge and needing that excitement to sustain you really strikes a chord with me.

One of the major criticisms of secondary world fantasy has been the lack of diversity of the departing-points. What’s interesting to me is how in the past 10-15 years, authors have reacted to that and broadened the market.

Interestingly, I would suggest that important as Tolkien has been in his impact on the reception of fantasy literature, he’s less dominant in terms of its composition and production than we sometimes think, partly because he’s not a true ur-text but rather a fairly late production of an existing tradition. Significant strands of modern fantasy literature lead back through other important sources for their grounding, such as Robert Howard’s Conan books (and their predecessors) and L. Frank Baum’s Oz books (and their predecessors). I’d say that Tolkien’s stature is more like that of Shakespeare in English drama: massive, but not truly foundational.

Let me briefly suggest that one (or possibly two) vital additional frames that need to be considered are (a) the context of magical thinking underlying the logic of the world (e.g., Ursula Le Guin’s use of the old fantasy trope of words in some original tongue as true names, and names as embodying power), and (b) the non-fantasy world(s) used by the author as template or departing-point of the specific imagined world, as for example the Shire as a calque on 19th century Britain and Rohan as a calque on the culture of Anglo-Saxon verse (as demonstrated by T. A. Shippey), or early 19th century America (including but not limited to the Joseph Smith story) as the template for Card’s Alvin Maker series.

A final point: Invention or not, it seems to me that inevitably in any standard fantasy story, there’s a context of familiarity that lends a sense of pattern as opposed to patternlessness (your point #3 above, but expanded somewhat to include things like the rooting of magic systems in discredited-but-familiar rules). This is why, despite some apparent affinities, modern fantasy isn’t really well suited to postmodernism. A fantasy-oriented structuralism might catalogue those various underlying ideological and/or historical patterns. As I said earlier, however, that’s the path I decided not to take in my professional life…