Why you like science fiction and fantasy even though you think you don't

People constantly tell me they don't like fantasy and science fiction when they clearly do. It's bewildering. At the start of the Story Elements course, I ask students to bring their three all-time favourite novels. Invariably, with at least one fantasy or sci-fi novel in their pile, they explain that they don't like or read fantasy or sci-fi. One of my closest friends swears blind that she cannot stand fantasy or sci-fi. Recently, she did one of those Facebook name-your-ten-favourite-books lists:

How to create an abundance of ideas

How do you conjure up reams of ideas, ripe for the picking? You take a leaf out of magical realism's book, of course. Among its features is "abundance" or "plenitude": it soaks ideas up like a sponge. Anything you want to throw at it, it just absorbs, gleefully. And the kind of fanciful, unexpected, incongruous ideas it likes best aren't the kind that come from frowning at a piece of paper and thinking very hard – they come from the bouncy bit of your brain leapfrogging around. (That's the kind of thinking we traditionally call "right brain", even though it's actually the left brain doing it.) It's a kind of careless, carefree, giggling, half-cut freedom of ideas. So how did I create that space, for the Summer of Writing Magical Realism workshop? And how can you use that to create an abundance of unexpected ideas?

Things I've learnt: endings and emotional honesty

Rope of Words is a limited fine-press edition of numbered, handbound books, the result of a collaboration between me and the artist, Lin Kerr. I wrote the story over a period of 5 years: this series of blog posts is about its writing process and the various illuminations that came from sailing straight into the rocks at every turn. At least I have the advantage of hindsight, to know the story did work out in the end - the artist who illustrated it, Lin Kerr, shared her process from the outset, with no such reassurance. You can see excerpts and images from the book here.

Words have a life of their own

The Woman who was a Bitch

'In broken words, she tried to explain how she’d been reduced to those increasingly desperate acronyms and abbreviations.
“You still let go,” he said, in the words of one syllable that were left to him.
They sat on the silent moonlit moor where nothing beside remained.
“So what will you do?” he said at last. “Will you go back?”
“Back to the golden valley?” She shook her head.  “It burnt down.” She thought about all the words she’d collected and their electric charge.  “I think I burnt it.”
His face, until then as hard as an exhibit behind glass, turned uncertain. “I don’t think it can burn down.”
“It did. I saw it. I was there. Well – some miles above it and accelerating fast, but I saw the trees catch fire. Lightning hit the tower. It was very striking.”
None of their truncated words were adequate to that task.  They lay down, a careful distance apart, to sleep.  She balanced the angels’ phial against the two unwanted words that stood between them.  And they slept.'