# Is fantasy a cop-out?



## JustRob (May 16, 2017)

I have received criticism of my novel from readers (outside of WF I hasten to add) that implications that experiences might be dreams are bad because dreams inevitably become unstructured, that readers prefer to read about "reality" (so not fiction at all?) and so on. Fundamentally there seems to be an assumption that fantasy is a cop-out, an excuse to lower one's standards and create a flawed facsimile of reality. Personally I regard fantasy as being on a higher plane than reality, a superset of which reality forms just a part.

There are a preponderance of fantasy writers and world-builders here on WF, indeed maybe too many, so how do you feel about writing fantasy? Do you see it as an easy way to ease into writing or a challenge beyond the simpler one of writing about real life situations? 

Personally I jumped straight into writing with a science fiction story with fantastic elements, but I am experienced in maintaining sound structures from my past career and have been aware of the stigma attaching to poorly written fantasy. 

How do you see it, as inferior or superior to other genres closer to "reality"?


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## Bishop (May 16, 2017)

I tend to think of fantasy (and sci-fi, for that matter) as different settings more than different genres. To me, it's more a part of the circumstances surrounding the story, a way of giving a tale character and color and pulling it away from the overly familiar "reality".

Just another way to tell a story, in the end. Nothing inherently better or worse about it, and certainly not a "cop-out" because no matter what genre or setting you put a story in, the story has to be good on its own merits.


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## JustRob (May 16, 2017)

Thanks Bish. Having read some of your work at length I acknowledge that it does contain the all-important conventional human aspects that ultimately make for a well balanced story. As you indicate, the fantasy side should be a setting rather than the crux of a story. A space opera is still at heart an opera. Wagner was a fantasy writer too, wasn't he?

I wonder how many beta readers who claim to prefer not to read fantasy and science fiction have read Lord of The Rings. Perhaps they think that that was the be all and end all of high fantasy. Did Tolkien set the bar too high or do other prospective writers in that genre not realise just how high he did set it?


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## Ariel (May 16, 2017)

I think that building a world that is consistent and well built is difficult to do. I honestly don't think it's a cop-out but rather a way of exploring reality.  If it were a cop-out then I think many of our greatest writers have used it.


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## Terry D (May 16, 2017)

All genres are equal, in my opinion. But then, much of what I write is horror -- a sub-genre of fantasy -- so I'm biased. In reality (can I use that phrase when talking about fantasy?) all fiction is fantasy by definition. We are simply discussing degrees of diversion from the _perception_ of reality in the settings we choose to portray. Fantasy, as we are discussing it here, is often the first genre readers are introduced to. Mother Goose, anyone? Grimm's Fairy Tales? The myths and legends of the Norse gods, the Greek's Olympians? Perhaps that earliest association is what implants the idea that stories set in fantastic worlds populated with strange, and powerful creatures is somehow childish? If so, that is very sad, because fantasy -- in all its forms from my beloved horror, to Tolkienian High Fantasy, to Robert Howard's Conan sword and sorcery adventures, to dark Fantasy, Magic Realism, Urban Fantasy, and the plethora of science fiction genres -- provides a wonderful parable to our 'real' world. The same themes that comprise the central nervous system of 'realistic' fiction can be explored from vastly different perspectives through fantasy, SF and horror.


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## Sebald (May 16, 2017)

I don't write it, or read much. But I have an open mind. Game of Thrones (books and show) profoundly affected the public's respect for the genre.

JustRob, do you mean you have an actual dream sequence, and that's what they didn't like?


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## NeenaDiHope (May 16, 2017)

To me fantasy has always been about someone asking "What if?" and then giving examples to go along with that question. I believe that without fantasy or fanciful thinking, there would be a slower progress forward.  Because someone thought to ask "What if?" we have things like computers, cell phones, the internet, electric cars, and ships that have made it to space and deep into our oceans. Given enough time there are aspects of fantasy that will become reality, so technically they are reading about "reality" they just aren't open minded enough to see that. 

Do what you love and love what you do.


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## Schrody (May 16, 2017)

I'm currently writing a mix of Fantasy and Sci-Fi, and it's not easy. I'm a "world builder", and I like to "immerse" readers into my worlds, maybe even inspire them. Is Fantasy on a pedestal of genres? Not really (at least not here where I live). Is it worth writing it? Yes, if that's what your story needs to be. You shouldn't pay so much attention on what the reader wants (because the reader usually doesn't know what he wants and why), pay attention to what your story is. There's no shame in writing fantasy, especially because it's usually the most "imaginative" genre of all!


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## JustRob (May 16, 2017)

Terry D said:


> In reality (can I use that phrase when talking about fantasy?) all fiction is fantasy by definition.



I tend to agree but I suspect that when a reader talks about a story being real they are speaking of its plausibility, not whether it happened but whether it could. 



Sebald said:


> JustRob, do you mean you have an actual dream sequence, and that's what they didn't like?



The particular reader I was thinking of didn't get far enough into the story to find out. That was his point though, that just the likelihood that an experience was a dream could cause some readers to stop reading and he did. It was a dream in a way and the character experiencing it thought that it was, but that didn't matter because it was still a life-changing experience. That was a key motif in the story, that it is experiences that shape our lives, not just realities. For example, if a person knows that they are dreaming but that the dream will never end, should they regard their life as having ended or accept the dream as their new reality? If a person experiences recurring nightmares, should we just write those off as irrelevant experiences? Those who are so afflicted in real life can find that very difficult. In my story the issue is not whether any experience is real but whether the memory of it is tolerable. After all, that is all that we are creating in the reader's mind, unreal experiences and memories. If they count for nothing then there is no point in reading fiction at all. 

On the other hand, is there any difference between a memory of a dream or a story and one of a real experience? As people get older eventually they may not be sure whether a memory is of something fictional, something real that happened to them or to someone else. Memories are just memories. I knew a man who claimed that he had memories of several years of his life that couldn't possibly have happened and he was only in his thirties. Nevertheless they were real to him. Whether they had been dreams was irrelevant to him. He was also a Trekkie, so memories of that science fiction series were more real to him than to someone who wasn't. How big a TV screen do we need before we feel that we have really been in space within our memories? How much science do we need to understand to be able to imagine being weightless? 

This afternoon I read the whole of _Alice in Wonderland _in preparation for a course that I'm attending. It's all a dream. So what? What does that invalidate in the story? What story doesn't take place in the world of our dreams?

My novel is freely downloadable from my website, if you want to know more about it. I haven't escaped from the dream yet. Maybe I never will now. It has changed my life permanently. Apparently it wasn't all fiction.

Neena is right that all it takes is for someone to think "What if?" In fact my stories are set in a place that I call Eventuality, where some people go to muse "What if?" and others to muse "If only ..." Those with a mind for science call it phase space, I believe. It's real in a way but imaginary in another. As a mathematician I have no problem with that. The answer to the question "What if?" is "In the Eventuality ..."

What we are discussing is the ideal, our objective, but my question was really whether it is just too easy to write bad fantasy and think that it is more than it is.


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## Sebald (May 17, 2017)

Your musings about memory are interesting, JustRob. And fiction is certainly one of the best places to explore these ideas.

I suppose anything can be pulled off, if you do it well enough.

It seems that, if you're trying something that's ambiguous about its own reality, this has to be the major motif, really foregrounded, so the reader knows what they're dealing with (The Matrix. Sartre's In Camera, where we're in the afterlife and everyone is trapped in their own private hell. Before I Go to Sleep, a crime novel narrated by a woman whose memory is constantly being wiped clean. Elizabeth is Missing, a literary novel about a woman with Alzheimer's, who can't make anyone believe her best friend is in urgent danger. Everything by Jeff Vandermeer.)

All brilliantly successful. But tight, focused and not trying to do other things.

If an 'it was all a dream' device appeared unexpectedly, unless I had the sense the whole novel had been about this theme, and leading up to this revelation, it could be tricky.

You've clearly had some profound experiences when it comes to dreaming. But, for most people, the dreams of others do register differently to hearing about something that really happened.

From an article about writing in the papers this weekend (The Guardian, by the novelist Colum McCann): "Gogol said that the last line of every story was: 'And nothing would ever be the same again.'"


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## kaminoshiyo (May 19, 2017)

JustRob said:


> How do you see it, as inferior or superior to other genres closer to "reality"?



A cop-out, maybe, but most of us live in a fantasy-world to some degree and most people choose fantasy over reality anyway. The cop-out of reality tends to be what most people opt for and fantasy is _always _good business. 

But for the most part, tell those goofs that dreams can be structured and "reality" can unravel just as easily. And "hope" is a fantasy. A "vision" is a fantasy. None of these things exist, but they can be positive things that motivate us to try as well as powerful delusions. Fantasy is often the herald of substantial achievement because we dream of more before reaching for it. Fantasy is vital. Even Einstein said that the imagination is the most important aspect of the mind. 

I don't think that fantasy is "higher" necessarily, but that each one is necessary for the greatest output. There certainly is a danger in becoming too fantastic, but there is also a danger is becoming to immersed in what one perceives as "reality" or "the real world".

Still, if they criticized the fantasy, then it's probably because it wasn't appealing enough for some reason...maybe...


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## Tettsuo (May 19, 2017)

JustRob said:


> How do you see it, as inferior or superior to other genres closer to "reality"?



That's such a canard.  Fantasy is just as fake as any other piece of fiction.  Just because a story doesn't have a dragon doesn't make it more literary or superior to a story that does.

Honestly, I think fantasy and sci-fi both require a deeper understanding of human behavior as you have to still relay the human condition while also shaping a world that's completely outside of our own and how it'll effect the characters.


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## bazz cargo (May 20, 2017)

Hi Rob,
I'm minded on how sci fi can date. H Beam Piper wrote some cracking stories but his computers were as large as buildings and programmed with punch cards. His stuff is almost a history lesson in attitudes. There are times when I wonder if I could 'update' some of the golden age stuff. Good fantasy seems to be outside any dating method. 

I have just one more thing to say on the fantasy front, Animal Farm.

Thanks for giving me something to ponder
BC


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## JustRob (May 21, 2017)

Thanks to all who have contributed to this thread so far. I really must read what you have written some time, but after spending most of last week studying Lewis Carroll's Alice books I need to cop out of fantasy myself and get back to reality for a while, especially because it's Sunday and I spend that predominately with my angel.

Ah. Any thoughts that you may have that my perception of her as an angel is itself a fantasy are the result of you not knowing the reality, of course. My perception may be romantic or semantic in nature, but not fantastic ... well, it's that as well in a sense of course ... Oh I give up; some things can not be expressed in words easily apparently. If they could we'd all be successful writers. Write on.


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## Xander416 (May 21, 2017)

What is "reality" in the first place? And I'm not asking in story telling terms. I think everyone has their own individual perception of reality that differs in some way, large or small, than the perceptions of everyone else. And as once discussed on _Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman_, maybe what we believe to be the "real world" is just one giant, elaborate computer simulation? Maybe our world is really a video game in which we're all being subconsciously controlled by a "player", much like John Marston in _Red Dead Redemption_ or Nathan Drake in _Uncharted_? Or maybe our actions and emotions are simply words on a sheet of paper? If it was, how would we ever know in the first place? How do we know there isn't some plane of existence where Harry Potter and other beloved literary creations are physical flesh and blood?

Next time anyone brings up "reality", you tell them to ponder _that_!


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## LOLeah (May 21, 2017)

I contemplated this recently in regards to my historical fiction/fantasy novel I've been working on forever and a day. Not being an historian, that part of it has been extremely difficult. The amount of research involved is so time consuming, I'm doing hours of it just to write a single scene. I have often thought "This would be so much easier if I just went full fantasy"...then I slap myself and remember why I decided to go with historical fiction in the first place, the history lends me so much of the tale. I think THIS is tough, I should try world building, right? :witless:

I definitely don't think it's a cop out genre...it's one of my favorites and I think many of the best stories ever written have come from it. What is "real" anyway? It's the nuances of the characters, how they make us feel, not the time or place or fantastical elements.


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## Non Serviam (May 21, 2017)

Not all genres are equal, but I think that speculative fiction does vary a great deal in how hard it is to write.

Basically spec fic is where you create a world that doesn't work how our world works, and then explore the consequences (so it includes most science fiction, most fantasy and some horror -- generally supernatural horror is spec fic but slasher horror isn't, or at least, not necessarily).  A lot of the appeal is taking readers to a place that doesn't really exist, so you do have to make your world vivid and real for them.  This can take a lot of work to make it go right.

I think the best spec fic introduces me to minds that think as well as mine does, but not like mine does.  That's _extremely_ hard to do well.


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## Newman (May 23, 2017)

JustRob said:


> fantasy is a cop-out, an excuse to lower one's standards and create a flawed facsimile of reality



That is a craaaaaazy suggestion. Real wacko. Like Trump level loser wacko. Ignore anyone who says that.


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## Ariel (May 23, 2017)

Newman said:


> That is a craaaaaazy suggestion. Real wacko. Like Trump level loser wacko. Ignore anyone who says that.


It's Platonion. Anything not based in reality cannot, according to Platonion values, represent truth and truth is the only thing of worth.


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## JustRob (May 23, 2017)

Ariel said:


> It's Platonion. Anything not based in reality cannot, according to Platonion values, represent truth and truth is the only thing of worth.



Relativity and quantum mechanics have rather blurred the lines since Plato's time. They are evidently real. Reliable axioms just seem to get more and more abstract. Even truth is relative and subjective ultimately. This is why my favourite word is now "preternatural". It covers the grey area between accepted reality and speculation without committing to fantasy. It also has the distinction of not being any better understood as a word than the things that it describes, which seems fitting.

P.S.
Experience is the only thing of worth. Someone told me that that is the true maxim of hedonism, which many people misconstrue as just being about enjoyment of life.


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## Non Serviam (May 23, 2017)

Ariel said:


> It's Platonion. Anything not based in reality cannot, according to Platonion values, represent truth and truth is the only thing of worth.



Argh!

Platonian.  A platonion would be, err, a flat but pungent root vegetable, I think.


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## Ptolemy (May 23, 2017)

Non Serviam said:


> Argh!
> 
> Platonian.  A platonion would be, err, a flat but pungent root vegetable, I think.



I was thinking this too and wondering if Ariel was referencing "Ion" by Plato.


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## bdcharles (May 24, 2017)

JustRob said:


> I have received criticism of my novel from readers (outside of WF I hasten to add) that implications that experiences might be dreams are bad because dreams inevitably become unstructured, that readers prefer to read about "reality" (so not fiction at all?) and so on. Fundamentally there seems to be an assumption that fantasy is a cop-out, an excuse to lower one's standards and create a flawed facsimile of reality. Personally I regard fantasy as being on a higher plane than reality, a superset of which reality forms just a part.
> 
> There are a preponderance of fantasy writers and world-builders here on WF, indeed maybe too many, so how do you feel about writing fantasy? Do you see it as an easy way to ease into writing or a challenge beyond the simpler one of writing about real life situations?
> 
> ...



I write fantasy because research is boring, much of reality is similarly dull, and my interior world is, to my way of looking at it, far more riveting than most actual  stuff. I wish I had the tenacity to write based in real world but I don't. I could feel bad about it but what would be the point? I am what I am, and I daydream alot. 

But I am not sure your readers were really going there; I suspect they might worry that the implications of everything being a dream would mean the internal logic becomes unravelled and meandering, meaning there would be more self-indulgence than story, not so much that the content is seen as fantastical in nature. But you seem to have a handle on this so I'm not sure what their problem is, but if I was reading something and it was hinted that it was a dream, I - I dunno, I might feel a little drop of disappointment. I would want the dream stuff to be the actual content, the actual what-happened of it. I would worry that my protagonist would wake up in a dingy bedsit and that would be the end of the fabulous world. I suppose there is a reason why agents shy away from books that open with dreams.


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## Ariel (May 24, 2017)

Non Serviam said:


> Argh!
> 
> Platonian.  A platonion would be, err, a flat but pungent root vegetable, I think.


Sorry, new phone and I'm still training autocorrect. 

-_-

Yes, I'm referencing Plato and his "Republic."  In a perfect society as described by Plato, art cannot exist.  Simply because, according to Plato, we already experience distorted truth.


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## JustRob (May 24, 2017)

bdcharles said:


> I'm not sure what their problem is, but if I was reading something and it was hinted that it was a dream, I - I dunno, I might feel a little drop of disappointment. I would want the dream stuff to be the actual content, the actual what-happened of it. I would worry that my protagonist would wake up in a dingy bedsit and that would be the end of the fabulous world. I suppose there is a reason why agents shy away from books that open with dreams.



I agree that springing the fact that events already recounted were a dream would be annoying to the reader, but what of the opposite, the possibility that what a character believes to be a dream may not be? In the opening chapter of my novel a girl goes to sleep in bed and apparently wakes up elsewhere. She considers the most likely explanation to be that she is dreaming, but the experience seems too real and the idea that she has really been physically abducted in her sleep hovers at the back of her mind. The young man that she meets tries to reassure her that the truth is that her experience is neither of these things, but she cannot understand how there can be a third possibility. 

To set the reader's mind at rest half of the novel is then devoted to explaining to them how a third possibility does exist. After that the scene is revisited with the reader seeing it from the young man's point of view. Now the reader's view is also changed in that they know more than the girl does but, having previously seen the event solely from her perspective, they can still understand her reticence to commit to believing any version of events outright. Eventually she does end up back in bed in her own flat and the question is then whether she will even remember her encounter with the young man, let alone believe that there was any element of reality in it. Did he make enough of an impact on her to overcome her inclination to forget the whole incident like a passing dream? Will she resume her normal life or try to find her way back to him, effectively pursuing that dream? The reader is fully aware of what is at stake and it is far more than simply the lives of two people, so this is no simple love story. 

My planned trilogy covers the entire longer story and visits five different degrees of realism from strict reality to unruly fantasy, but retains connections between the different contexts throughout. As the same characters appear in all of the contexts the story is more about how adaptable humans are rather than anything else. Having lived the dream, can anyone return to their mundane everyday life and truly be satisfied with it? That question reminds me of the musical _Brigadoon_. Experience changes us regardless of its reality.

My novel still needs to be rewritten properly to remove the apparently paranormal realities of my own life and to add the new facets that I have conceived since first writing it. I still doubt that I'm a writer though and don't see the need to rewrite it. After all, it may all have been a dream, a fantasy even ... or would believing that be a cop-out on my part?


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## Ultraroel (May 25, 2017)

What I like about fantasy is that one can criticize current systems, beliefs or practically anything, without necessary pointing to a specific group of people or anything. If intended, it can allow us to read deeper into a context without judgement towards a specific demographic.. Ofcourse, some aren't meant like that at all.. but I like to think deeper about my story than just the plot.


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## JustRob (May 25, 2017)

Ultraroel said:


> What I like about fantasy is that one can criticize current systems, beliefs or practically anything, without necessary pointing to a specific group of people or anything.



I agree. Take an everyday situation and then add an abnormality which shifts commonly held values to see what happens. Do people try to adapt their principles to the new situation or abandon them for entirely new ones? This is an evident aspect of my writing, an attempt to discover what it fundamentally means to be human. How far can one distort reality and still preserve the basic human psyche? That is definitely speculative fiction.

In that respect fantasy can simply be an extension of genuine cultural differences that have evolved around our world. In fact it may actually be a comment on the impracticality of real measures, which highlights it by taking them to the extreme.  

In a way my original question may simply be the one that we ought always to ask when planning a work. Is the journey or the destination the objective? Do we simply want to entertain the reader along the way or lead them to some conclusion? Is fantasy often just a way of spicing up the journey without adding any value to the conclusion? There's no harm in that if it's what the reader wants of a story. It is just an entirely open question on my part.

My own work is a pantser experiment. If it does lead me to some conclusion then I will share it with the reader, but there is no guarantee, only my promise to try to find one if it exists.


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## Penless (May 27, 2017)

*Fiction writing has lower barriers to entry, but at their highest level both are equally difficult and valuable. **


Both are valuable.*
Good fantasy writing inspires emotion and new ideas in the reader. 
The fictional setting gives the author greater freedom to do this, and makes the stories more accessible to the reader.

Think: Aesop's fables. 
I think all would agree that it's the fictional element which makes these moral stories so accessible to children. 
*
Non-fiction demands a higher standard of writing.*
Interesting fiction is only limited by the imagination, and sloppy style can sometimes be forgiven by an intriguing premise. 
Interesting non-fiction requires either;
Exciting events, for which there will be a thousand other competing articles. 
Mundane events, and a very skilled writer.


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## JustRob (May 27, 2017)

@Penless, thanks for your observations. So are you of the opinion that all fiction is effectively fantasy and hence I should qualify my distinction by calling it _speculative_ fiction? I have already conceded this to be true in a way anyway.

I agree that it would be difficult to find real historical incidents to illustrate all the tenets portrayed in Aesop's Fables so concisely in a factual way and that even if one could that approach would not be so accessible to children. I have always emphasised that we must keep our target readers in mind when choosing our approach to a subject. I don't really believe in the universal book that suits all readers. Literature is a joint activity between writer and reader. On the other hand, during the recent course on _Alice in Wonderland _that I attended we discussed how effectively Lewis Carroll catered for readers of several types with that one work. In fact the original that he wrote for the real Alice herself alone was different and he added scenes suitable for a wider readership when he produced the published version, but then he was an exceptional man, a polymath even.

Regarding your latter category, I have the problem of trying to write speculative non-fiction, which, as you indicate, will involve a good deal of skill, probably more than I have. I have collected together an amount of historical research on a local Victorian family, but this only provides pinpoints of information in their lives and I would have to speculate about how these points are connected. So, should I try to present the work as formal history or an entertaining speculative story? It would involve a great deal of work to do both, carefully recording all my sources of hard facts and then filling the gaps with my speculation, which real historians would no doubt regard as little more than fantasy. The most that I could say would be that it would be extremely difficult to prove that any of my speculation was untrue. Maybe that is all that can be said about history in general anyway though. 

I started researching the family because I felt that one member had been caricatured in the scant references to him in the local literature. I have now compiled a more accurate legend about the family, but even this may not be enough to be seen as history. So, is my legend a better option than a less well informed caricature or, as potentially little more than a fantasy, is it a cop-out because further research on my part would just be too difficult and expensive? My contention is that, regardless of how one views it, readers would find it interesting, which is what you identified as the key requirement. 

So, far from being about the differences between fiction and non-fiction or the fantastic and the realistic, speculative writing can extend across both fiction and non-fiction and in the latter case bear all the characteristics of reality. Maybe speculative non-fiction is the most intriguing genre of all but, just as with its fictional counterpart, it could still be regarded as a cop-out if handled badly, couldn't it?


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## ironpony (Jun 3, 2017)

I don't think it's a cop out with big hits such as Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, etc.


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## bookmasta (Jun 4, 2017)

I only define any genre or specific stylistic form of writing as a 'cop-out' if it's one you're displaced into writing due to pier pressure or other factors from writing the style and genre you personally want to actually write yourself. Otherwise, what is the point to be writing? Apart from my manuscripts and my characters are concerned, I only focus on what will improve my ability to write, further one of my works, or teach me more of writing from a technical vantage. The rest, however, is just noise.


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## Gamer_2k4 (Jun 7, 2017)

I think the trouble with dreams is that there doesn't have to be any expectation of internal consistency.  A fantasy world is made up, sure, but it's still "real" in a sense that a dream isn't.  Once a reader has accepted the nature of that fantasy (like that Dwarves are a mining race that live underground, or Dragons are monstrous reptiles that can breathe fire), they're happy to keep reading and accept the world on the author's terms.  A dream, however, doesn't have to maintain that consistency.  A person could be wandering through a desert one moment and the next moment, giant pink trees could spring up around them as flying toasters fill the sky.  Not every dream in a story will be like that, and most shouldn't be, but I'm leery of them for that reason.  

"Why is the author using a dream here? What is he trying to tell me in the freedom of a dream that he couldn't in the constrains of reality?"


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