Love Fantasy? Why?

Fantasy. Some readers love it, others can't stand it. I fall into the first category, but, as I've said before, all fiction is fantasy. Yet the genre Fantasy, like scifi and horror, with which it is often grouped, has other-worldly elements. I love fantasy for its fairytale elements, and because it goes wherever the author's imagination takes it, which sometimes can be visionary. Good fantasy, like a good folktale, plays with our imagination.

Author Eric Price
Blog

I read and write as a healthy means to escape reality. This has caused me to avoid non-fiction (too real), and at the same time, it has drawn me toward fantasy. Of all genre fiction, fantasy contrasts the greatest with today's world and thereby provides a more complete escape.
        Fantasy worlds often draw a similarity to our past. Sword fights, knights in shining armor, and vast, sparsely populated landscapes appear in many novels. But usually, the stories become even more, well, fantastic.
        Magic and amazing creatures frequently assist or hinder (usually both) our fantasy heroes on their quests.
        I'm not saying I don't enjoy a good horror or mystery, but when I want a real escape, nothing beats a fantasy.

 
Author Suzanne de Montigny
Blog
I love both. And I don't know why really. I think it's because it takes me away from reality.


Author Sherry Antonetti 
Blog
I've read fantasy since my father first decided we would read aloud Watership Down and The Hobbit one summer. Talk about setting the bar high for all that followed. What I loved was the epic nature of these stories that dealt with important things like friendship and loyalty, courage and leadership, and the comfort that good food and warm light could bring in the darkest points of the journey. In college, I still read comics and took a course called Fantasy and Philosophy where the professor opined that no century needed the journeys available via the imagination more so than the 21st century, where we seek to distill all the mystery out of our everyday existence via rational, logical and scientific thought. Fantasy fiction allows us to delve into the realm of myth, where truths can be revealed about our interior lives that our waking selves aren't quite ready to accept. We become in the play of the story, the hero or heroine, who saves the day, who rights the wrong, who inspires, who is a light, who recognizes good and evil and takes a stand. When we play at this role of being more than we appear, we begin to grasp the amazing truth that each of us has a singular destiny, and it is for us to recognize and chose to embrace, to be more than we have allowed ourselves, and to begin the amazing adventure that involves the dangerous thing of going out our front door.



Author Pamela Kelt
Blog
My first teen fantasy comes out on MuseItYoung in September. Ice Trekker is about the Grells of Hinderland, who face a bleak future. For the sake of his family, young Midge leaves his cozy home in search of a job and treks north to the mysterious icy wastes of Krønagar.


Author Graeme Brown
Blog

I love to read and write fantasy, not just because of the 'anything is possible' flavor, but I relish the reassertion of good against evil in different guises. And who can resist a worthy quest?

Fantasy creates for me, as reader and writer, a landscape to explore free expression, like a dream bound up in the trappings of reality. Fantasy becomes reality, and with it, the ideas and possibilities that stir my senses when I experience this world expand in ways they'd never be able to. It feels when I read about imaginary worlds or enter my own to explore it like I am looking not into something impossible, but something that beckons - a reality that could be, that should be. It is a reason to dream, to imagine, to ponder, and to wonder. It is a place to make that all real, a sandbox where I can draw my fancies, or build castles that hold together long enough to admire.

Why do I write it? Why do I read it? So that I do not forget. There is a world of endless possibilities that lurk before us, an infinite landscape that all the years of eternity would just begin to reveal. When we are awake we work, we eat, we toil and groan and complain, and though we dream, we forget when we are assaulted by the next day. But when I enter the fantasy landscape, that is the time to remember; that is the time to balance the dream with the waking world, the time to remember what reality truly is and to dare to make it real, one word at a time.

Authur Ceci Giltenan
Blog

I love the ease with which I can suspend disbelief when reading fantasy. I write historical romance, although I have one fantasy novel started and another mapped out. When a book is "historical," some reviewers, fans and other authors are primed to criticize its historical accuracy. Although I aim for accuracy, the genre is primarily romance and occasionally facts take a back seat. Still, I understand historical inaccuracies, no matter how minor, can interfere with a reader's ability to simply enjoy the story. This is completely eliminated in fantasy because the author creates their own reality surrounding the story.

Author Jane Toombs

As a kid, I loved E.A. Poe-- I still do--because of his fantasies in stories and verse. As an adult, I even wrote a story about a gal who falls in love with and marries a ghoul (see Ten Past Midnight). And I always felt there really should be dragons, so I write stories about them (see Dragon's Pearl). I think it's because fantasy takes us away from the mundane and opens new possibilities of worlds where such creatures exist. I don't know if I'd like such a world, but it's fun to read and write about. (Jane passed away in 2014)