Fantasy Genres

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Fantasy Genres

• There and Back Again Our World goes to another
  world ENCHANTED JOURNEYS
• Beyond the Fields We Know Everything happens in
  magic land with no concrete links to our world
• Unicorns in the Garden- Magical and Fantastic
  Events occur in our mundane world
• That Old Black Magic- There is a menacing
  supernatural force that terrifying old black
  magic SUPERNATURAL FANTASTY.
• Bambis Children- Animals think, speak, and act
  with human intelligence ANIMAL FANTASTIES
• Once and Future Kings, Queens and Heroes- Tales
  of Arthur and other ancient myths. HEROIC OR
  QUEST FANTASIES

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The following are Popular Fantasy writers for
Children with a bit about what they and others
say about their craft.
I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said
Alice, because I'm not myself, you see.'  I
don't see,' said the Caterpillar.  I'm afraid I
can't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very
politely, for I can't understand it myself to
begin with and being so many different sizes in
a day is very confusing.'
The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in
managing her flamingo  she succeeded in getting
its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under
her arm, with its legs hanging down, but
generally, just as she had got its neck nicely
straightened out, and was going to give the
hedgehog a blow with its head, it WOULD twist
itself round and look up in her face, with such a
puzzled expression
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Lloyd Alexander
"My parents were horrified when I told them I
wanted to be an author " Alexander recalls. "I
was fifteen in my last year of high school. My
family pleaded with me to forget literature and
do something sensible such as find some sort of
useful work. "I had no idea how to find work
useful or otherwise. In fact I had no idea how to
become an author. If reading offered any
preparation for writing there were grounds for
hope. I had been reading as long as I could
remember. Shakespeare Dickens Mark Twain and so
many others were my dearest friends and greatest
teachers. I loved all the world s mythologies
King Arthur was one of my heroes I played with a
trash can lid for a knightly shield and my
uncle's cane for the sword Excalibur. But I was
afraid that not even Merlin the enchanter could
transform me into a writer."
4
Roald Dahl

• Loved for their gleefully evil villains and their
  often mischievous sensibility, Dahls books
  introduce us to fantastic creatures and bizarre
  places -- and encourage our imaginations to run
  wild.

5
Madeleine LEngle

• "Every major publisher turned it down. No one
  knew what to do with it," she says. When Farrar,
  Straus Giroux finally accepted the manuscript,
  she insisted that they publish it as a children's
  book.

"I have never served a work as I would like to,
but I do try, with each book, to serve to the
best of my ability, and this attempt at serving
is the greatest privilege and the greatest joy
that I know."
6
Brian Jacques

• But the writing that really put him on the map,
  the book REDWALL, first started out as a story he
  crafted to entertain the children at the Royal
  Wavertree School for the Blind. He knew the
  children because one of his many jobs was
  delivering milk, and the school was on his route.
  

7
C. S. Lewis

• Someday you will be old enough to start reading
  fairy tales again.preface to The Lion, The
  Witch and the Wardrobe

The Chronicles of Narnia are today and will be
forever, perhaps the greatest classics of
children's literature of the 20th century. I
think the reason for that, one of the reasons for
that is that they deal with truth, inescapable
truth. They dealt with reconciliation,
forgiveness, things of that nature which are
essential for children to learn at some point in
their development. One of the greatest problems
in western society today is that we've given up
the search for forgiveness and reconciliation in
favor of revenge. And that of course destroys any
society quite quickly. You see a great deal of it
in today's television programming, everyone
looking for revenge and uh, it washes through the
whole society. And this is one of the most
destructive things in our society. Truth, truth
telling, all of these things are dealt with in
the Chronicles of Narnia
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Kate DiCamillo

• I've always wanted to write and to tell stories
  but I didn't start working on children's books
  until I got a job at a book warehouse on the
  children's floor. When I started reading some of
  the books, I was so impressed and moved that I
  decided I wanted to try it, too.

9
Eva Ibbotson

• She has a daughter and three sons, who showed her
  that children like to read about ghosts, wizards,
  and witches "because they are just like people
  but madder and more interesting."

10
Vivian Vande Velde

• When our daughter Beth was born, I quit my job as
  a secretary. Since I was home all day, I had to
  either take housework more seriously or come up
  with a good excuse why I couldn't. So this was
  the point where I had to stop saying "Someday I'm
  going to be a writer," and do something about it.

11
Jane Yolen

• I am always asked where I get my ideas from. That
  is a very difficult question to answer, since I
  get my ideas from everywhere from things I hear
  and things I see, from books and songs and
  newspapers and paintings and conversations--and
  even from dreams. The storyteller in me asks
  what if? And when I try to answer that, a story
  begins.

12
Bruce Coville

• The first time I can remember thinking that I
  would like to be a writer came in sixth grade,
  when our teacher, Mrs. Crandall, gave us an
  extended period of time to write a long story. I
  loved doing it. I started working seriously at
  becoming a writer when I was seventeen. Like most
  people, I was not able to start selling my
  stories right away. So I had many other jobs
  along the way to becoming a writer, including
  toymaker, gravedigger, cookware salesman, and
  assembly line worker. Eventually I became an
  elementary teacher, and worked with second and
  fourth graders.

13
Edward Eager

• Edward Eager first began writing children's
  stories at age 40 when he was searching for books
  to read to his young son. His career had been a
  lyricist/playwright.
•  As a child I was always reading, chiefly Oz
  books, and I alway knew I wanted to be a writer
  someday. But most of my writing has been for
  grownups, plays and songs for the theater, radio
  and television.
• Born in Ohio, died at age 55 in 1964

14
J. K Rowling

• How do you feel about sequels?" Rowling asked
  Cunningham.
• "When a first novelist says that to an editor,"
  he says now, "you're always slightly worried."
• Cunningham pointed out that the first book hadn't
  even been published yet, but Rowling replied that
  she had seven books in mind. "She was obviously
  bursting to say it," he says. "And what convinced
  me that we were on the right track is that she
  knew what Harry was going to do every successive
  year of his life until he left school.
• Go to Rowlings Official Site The Site

15
Cornelia Funke

• Although Cornelia Funke is one of Germany''s
  best-selling children's book authors, she was
  relatively unknown in North America until The
  Chicken House, whose books are published by
  Scholastic in North America, published The Thief
  Lord in September 2002.

16
Jenny Nimmo

• Jenny Nimmo has been an actor, researcher,
  floor-manager and script editor for childrens
  television, born and lives in England.

17
Lemony Snicket(Daniel Handler)

• Though his formal training was chiefly in
  rhetorical analysis, he has spent the last
  several eras researching the travails of the
  Baudelaire orphans. This project, being published
  serially by HarperCollins, takes him to the
  scenes of numerous crimes, often during the
  off-season.
• Eternally pursued and insatiably inquisitive, a
  hermit and a nomad, Mr. Snicket wishes you
  nothing but the best.
• Attended the Santa Rosa (CA) High School prom
  with a friend in the late 1980s.
• He and his wife are expecting the birth of their
  first child around Halloween, 2003.
• Wife Lisa Brown is an illustrator

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Margaret Haddix

• Her former occupation, for several years, was as
  a reporter for the Indianapolis News. 
• She also taught at Danville Area Community
  College, in Danville Illinois. 
• I was lucky enough not to face any required
  summer reading lists until I went to college. So
  I still think of summer as the best time to read
  for fun.

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Norton Juster

• Norton Juster was born in 1929, and trained as an
  architect The story still resonates. If anything
  might wind up dating it, it's the tollbooth. When
  I wrote it, I didn't realize that people in the
  West wouldn't be familiar with tollbooths. Now
  they're even starting to remove them back East.
  That may end up being what dates the book. People
  will ask, "What was a tollbooth?"
• When the architectural practice got really busy,
  there I was with three partners, and you don't
  walk away. You can't say, "I'm working on a book.
  I'll see you in two weeks." You have to be there.
  And it's hard for me. I can't write unless I have
  other things out of my head. I can't just switch
  gears.

20
Nancy Farmer

• I have always found it hard to worry about what
  race someone is.
• In my universe there are the people who get
  kicked around a lot and who are trying to make a
  space for themselves in the world.
• And there are the bastards with guns and power
  who are doing the kicking.
• Most of the sensitive, good people I know have
  found themselves a little island where they can
  avoid the attention of such bastards.

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Terry Pratchett

• He lives behind a keyboard in Wiltshire, England
  and says he 'doesn't want to get a life, because
  it feels as though he's trying to lead three
  already'.

22
Christopher Paolini

• Abiding love of fantasy and science fiction
  inspired him to begin writing his debut novel,
  Eragon, when he graduated from high school at 15.
  Now 19, he lives with his family in Paradise
  Valley, Montana, where he is at work on Eldest,
  the next volume in the Inheritance trilogy. It's
  hard to attribute the success of science fiction
  and fantasy to any one element. Both genres are
  far too diverse to be able to point to just one
  thing and say, "This is why people love these
  books." However, I believe that a large part of
  their appeal comes from the exercise of pure
  imagination and flights of fancy, as well as the
  intellectual delight of attempting to extrapolate
  the evolution of technology.I enjoy fantasy
  because it allows me to visit lands that have
  never existed, to see things that never could
  exist, to experience daring adventures with
  interesting characters, and, most importantly, to
  feel the sense of magic in the world.

23
Tamora Pierce

• My dad probably saved my sanity one day when I
  was in sixth grade, a year before he moved out.
  He heard me telling myself stories as I did
  dishes, and he suggested that I try to write some
  of them down. He even gave me an idea to start
  with, a book about travels in a time machine (we
  both loved history and television shows like the
  original "Star Trek," so he knew what would grab
  me). The next year, as I was still scribbling my
  own stories, my English teacher (bless you, Mrs.
  Jacobsen!) introduced me to The Lord of the Rings
  trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkein. I got hooked on
  fantasy, and then on science fiction, and both
  made their way into my stories.

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Eoin Colfer

• Eoin Colfer followed his parents into teaching
  and soon began to invent stories for his pupils.
  His first novel, BENNY AND OMER, was a bestseller
  in Ireland - like ARTEMIS FOWL, it was written
  after a day's teaching and after his young son's
  bedtime. Eoin lives in Wexford, Ireland. ARTEMIS
  FOWL was shortlisted for the Whitbread Children's
  Book of the Year
• All of us went to the primary school where Dad
  taught, and it was in Wexford CBS that I first
  developed my interest in writing and began my
  habit of writing my own stories. At the time I
  used to accompany my literary efforts with my own
  illustrations. I was a one man production line.
  My friends however were not too impressed with my
  work. You see in my first 'opus' which was based
  on the Viking stories we were doing in history, I
  had made sure to include all my friends in some
  part of the story...with myself...of course as
  the dashing hero. Their feeling of importance at
  being characters in a story waned in the final
  chapter where in the climactic battle scene they
  were all slaughtered with only one survivor...who
  just happened to be ... me...well I did write the
  book.

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Jeanne Duprau

• Jeanne DuPrau spends several hours of every day
  at her computer, thinking up sentences. She has
  this quote taped to her wall
• A writer is someone for whom writing is harder
  than it is for other people. Thomas Mann
• This gives her courage, because she finds writing
  very hard. So many words to choose from! So many
  different things that could happen in a story at
  any moment! Writing is one tough decision after
  another.

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http//www.spiderwick.com/
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Ursula LeGuin

• Le Guin leads an intensely private life, with
  sporadic forays into political activism and
  steady participation in the literary community of
  her city, particularly the Library, Oregon
  Literary Arts, and the Soapstone Foundation.
• She limits her public appearances mostly to the
  West Coast.
• She has taught writing workshops from Vermont to
  Australia, and now teaches one or two a year in
  Oregon.
• Dear Miss Kidd,
• Ursula K. Le Guin writes extremely well, but Im
  sorry to have to say that on the basis of that
  one highly distinguishing quality alone I cannot
  make you an offer for the novel. The book is so
  endlessly complicated by details of reference and
  information, the interim legends become so much
  of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the
  very action of the story seems to be to become
  hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually,
  unreadable. The whole is so dry and airless, so
  lacking in pace, that whatever drama and
  excitement the novel might have had is entirely
  dissipated by what does seem, a great deal of the
  time, to be extraneous material. My thanks
  nonetheless for having thought of us. The
  manuscript of The Left Hand of Darkness is
  returned herewith. Yours sincerely,
• The Editor
• 21 June, 1968

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Susan Fletcher

•   "Before I married, my name was Susan Clemens.
  One day when I was in third grade, our teacher
  told us about a famous author named Mark Twain,
  whose real name was Samuel Clemens, and he had a
  daughter named Susan.
• Susan Clemens. That was my name. So I thought,
  'I'll become an author!' Not very
  logical--picking your career because of a name.
  But my love of stories--already well
  established--made it stick.
• She lives in Wilsonville, Oregon

29
William Sleator

• Mr Sleator divides his time between homes in
  Boston, Massachusetts and rural Thailand