This is something I've struggled with lately---namely whether or not it's wise to use common fantasy elements (I'm thinking especially of elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs, and whatnot) in one's writing.
When I first began writing fantasy, the thought of doing it without at least a few of these races seemed impossible. I didn't have what it took to create a full world of my own from scratch, so I borrowed from archetypes I was familiar with and worked with them.
As my writing matures, however, I find that my own dwarves and elves (the common elements I chose to work with) are very different from the archetypes I started out with. This of course is a good thing, and had been a goal of mine even when I first set out to use those archetypes in the first place.
But I've now hit a point where they are sufficiently differentiated that I could simply rename the races and forego the archetypes entirely, and I'm not sure whether it's wise to do that. To be certain, there are upsides to it---a lot of people seem to be sick of dwarves and elves, particularly (and importantly) editors and agents, who I'm sure have seen the same old dwarves and elves eight thousand times and understandably get a little queasy when they see those words in a manuscript.
However, I'm not sure that giving up those associations is something I want to do. Certainly you can, and a lot of very successful fantasy writers have. Robert Jordan certainly didn't need elves and dwarves---he had enough new races of his own. But even in looking at his work I can see there are failures to his method as well. While the Aiel wound up being an incredibly cool race, the Trollocs (for me at any rate) fell flat on their faces. And the non-elf, non-dwarf knockoffs of the originals I see in imported Chinese and Korean MMORPGs just make me roll my eyes and decide to play a human instead.
Additionally, other writers have done very well with the archetypes they started out with. The elves of Dragonlance are nothing like Tolkien's elves, and the dwarves of Terry Brooks are a far cry from the stereotypical dwarf. Most readers of fantasy like elves and dwarves, at least up to a point, because it's sort of what we all began with--they're just comfortable, a part of our shared literary past. Giving readers a range of different kinds of their favorite archetypes to identify with can be a good thing to do as well.
So I'm wondering what other people think. Do elves and dwarves have a place in new fantasy anymore?
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2 comments:
Lately I've been more interested in fantasy that's not of the high-fantasy variety, so I'm not sure my comments are as applicable to your novel, but I'm a little tired of elves and dwarves. I'd much rather have a world that's all humans, with a well-considered and complex variety of cultures that interact. Because even if you do move away from typical dwarves and elves, you'll still end up with people reading your book with the stereotypes in mind, and comparing your version of dwarves and elves to all the others they've encountered. If you use different human cultures, I think people will interpret them with fresher eyes.
it seems that the association with these archetypes is favorable to readers, but what makes characters real in any work is the individual characterization. i think often people write of these archetypes but fail to have any original characterization of individuals that is not formulaic.
Perhaps one good way to go about it is to use the form of the archeotype but not the name. What do dwarves call themselves? Probably not dwarves, because that name derived from a human perspective. In high fantasy, creating a culture of a character is important. With humans, the culture comes automatically, because readers already know it, but with fantasy, it must be created. I think it's fun to play around with the old characters we're used to, the wise elves and greedy dwarves, but after that, what happens? Are all members of a race the same? Is there any individualization? I think it would make an interesting story if writers created worlds that were as diverse as humans are, if they created elven and dwarven societies that were as interesting, different, and opposed within each other as humans are.
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