-
Sarah Narnathron replied to the topic Enter the Taleweaver in the forum Introduce Yourself 8 years, 6 months ago
@Sam-kowal Thank you very much! As for music-based magic . . . it’s a little more common than you’d think? But I took a different route with my music-magic than most of the variations I’ve seen in published stuff. It’s super fun to write, except when I’m like “Darn it, can I use this music word here, or is that wrong?”
YESSSSS. Stormlight is the best. Well, that or Mistborn, I always go back and forth on which I like better— but yes, Brandon Sanderson is a master of the multiverse, and honestly of worldbuilding in general.
@Lady-Iliara Ooooh. That’s a fun power. But yeah, in the hands of a seven-year-old, the things not turning out right would really be the least of the problems, at least the ones I can think of . . .
@Allison-Grace Hey’a! Nice to meet a fellow fantasy writer. High fantasy and low fantasy are sort of the two most basic distinctions in fantasy, in that books from a lot of other categories also fall into one of them, but they’re also super broad/vague, and therefore sometimes hard to define.
Essentially, though, high fantasy is stuff like The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, the Stormlight Archive, the Chronicles of Prydain, books where you have a different world than Earth, an epic scale (often involving the possibility of the end of the world, or at least the destruction of a few major kingdoms), and prevalent magic. High fantasy also tends to involve clear-cut good guys and bad guys who really are good and bad, though this is becoming slightly less of a factor in modern examples.
Then, for low fantasy, you have books like Ranger’s Apprentice, Redwall, The Goose Girl . . . I’m sure there are examples that aren’t MG/YA, but I can’t think of them right now, except that the earliest Game of Thrones books might count, based on what I’ve heard. Basically, this is fantasy that might or might not take place in a different world than our own (though if it’s in another world, that world might look suspiciously similar to ours), involve problems on a much more local scale, and have either low or no magic. These are also more likely to involve grey-and-grey morality, though that’s not always the case. These are also very easy to get mixed up with urban/contemporary fantasy, which is fantasy set in our world, but honestly, there are some urban fantasy books that I would classify as high fantasy even though it’s not another world.
Aaaaand that was probably way more info than you wanted. Sorry, I did a project on the different fantasy subgenres at the end of last semester.












