What I Write

    In the last eighteen months, I have been on a journey of exploration. Ever since I wrote the first official draft of The Noble Thief (the novella I'm revising right now, and hope to publish in the next [couple] year[s]) and realized that there wasn't a lot of magic in it, I've been questioning whether I can really call myself a fantasy writer. After all, if your whole magic system is nothing but a volcano that can understand people's intents, that doesn't feel very magical--or very fantasy. In fact, the most fantasy-like part of The Noble Thief is the plot, which follows the classic fantasy plotline of a runaway/exiled/kidnapped princess who reclaims her throne. Where have we seen that before? Oh, yeah, fairy tales and fairy tale retellings: The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale, The Golden Braid by Melanie Dickerson, The Fairest Beauty by Melanie Dickerson, etc.

    This questioning has raise a lot of insecurities for me--I call myself a fantasy author-in-training, but is that really true? And if it isn't, what the heck do I call this weird, fantasy-styled but often relatively magic-less genre that I write?

    However, in these last eighteen months, I have been busy collecting ideas around revisions of The Noble Thief and reboot after reboot after reboot of Landsong (this one is an arranged-marriage romance fantasy that actually has a magic system! It's a perception-based magic system, and I finally decided on the final details today, so yay!).

    A lot of those ideas have been dystopian ones, oddly enough, especially since, when I first started collecting them, I did not read dystopian. Oh, no. I didn't read dystopian; I was a dedicated fantasy fan and a Christian, and Christians just don't do dystopian. (Guess what? I was wrong.) So I wrote them all down on a document of their own in case I decided I wanted them later and generally forgot about them.

    Well. A lot has changed.

    It started when I read the first book of The Hunger Games and realized that maybe dystopian wasn't actually that bad. Especially when I remembered a book I read at eleven (I was too young for it, but I enjoyed it anyway) called The Alliance, by Gerald N. Lund.

    Gerald N. Lund was a man of my own faith, and he wrote a series called The Work and the Glory that dramatizes the history of my church into an entertaining story. Surely, if he wrote dystopian, then it had to be okay for me to write, too! That made me feel a bit better about the file of dystopian ideas hanging out on my flash drive.

    Now, I did not like the second book of The Hunger Games. That book, I felt, turned things away from the original idea I liked to an overly dramatic love-triangle romance mess that reminded me far too strongly of Hallmark movies. No thanks, I'm good; that's not my genre.

    But with a little bit of dystopian under my belt, I felt a little more confident to try other dystopian books here and there, as they looked interesting. I reread Lois Lowry's The Giver quartet, and realized that three of the four books there were also dystopian--and, what was more, dystopian that my parents actually liked! (I'm sure they would not have approved of my experimentation with The Hunger Games had they known at the time that I was experimenting with it.) I also had to read George Orwell's Animal Farm for my home school reading discussion class, and what do you know but that's dystopian as well! Who knew that there were dystopian books my family approved of?

    Then I took a break from dystopian for a year, until my dad started watching dystopian action movies. I'm very picky about movies, but those drew me in, even though I only got to watch them in halves and snippets as my schedule permitted. Total Recall, Insurgent, Allegiant. Insurgent and Allegiant are the second and third movies in a series; I walked in during the second half of Insurgent and so never saw the first.

    Allegiant ended on a cliffhanger, so we did some research to see if there would be a follow-up movie. Unfortunately, the project was canceled! However, there were three books...

    I got the first book on hold on my online library and settled down to wait for it, but then, one day I was browsing the bookstore and found the entire series on a shelf! I flipped through the first book, noted that the narration style was in first-person, present-tense, just like The Hunger Games. I wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

    However, there was bonus material in the back, and what did I find in there but a list of quotes the author based the story off of--and one of them came from the book of Galatians in the New Testament, which meant the author was a Christian. Three books of Christian dystopian. And I just happened to have a gift card in my wallet.

    Here I am, two and a half weeks later, having finished the trilogy and decided that I love dystopian! I'm just as picky about it as I am about fantasy, of course; I still haven't tried the Matched trilogy by Allie Condie, even though I know she is also a Christian. It just hasn't looked interesting yet.

    A basic explanation of this genre is that dystopian is like a more real-world version of science fiction (usually) that spends time exploring society, rather than any scientific principle or fantastical idea. It usually shows a supposed utopia that solves everybody's problems and makes life perfect--except that there is someone for whom the utopia is not perfect--in fact, far from it. That person does some more exploration into how the society truly works, and whole host of problems appear, and next thing you know they're starting a rebellion to try and fix things.

    Unlike fantasy and science fiction, dystopian has a way of making me believe that this story could be real even after I've finished it. It's not so far removed from the real world that my suspension of disbelief ends with the book. Also, how many of the authors whose dystopian novels I've been reading are Christian? Clearly, it is possible to write dystopian stories that align with my beliefs.

    Furthermore, looking back at those dystopian ideas I've been saving up, a lot of them have fantasy elements in them! There are a few that are more science-fiction based, but for the most part, that's fantasy! My old favorite genre.

    For example, I have this one idea where there is a giant biosphere bubble in which all the remainder of humanity lives. Everyone inside the bubble is taught that the world outside is an inhospitable desert, and entering it will assure an unpleasant death. However, the protagonist accidentally finds a way out of the bubble, and not only do they not die unpleasantly, they find people living out there--people with power over fire, water, wind, and stone. Yes, the world is desertifying at an incredible rate, but it is possible to live out there. As the protagonist explores further, they discover that, contrary to all they were taught as a child, the bubble is not protecting mankind from the desert--rather, it's creating it, by sucking up all the magic of the world itself, and the world is slowly dying. When the magic supply runs out, not only will the people living in the desert die, but the bubble itself will fail, taking all the rest of humanity with it.

    Yes, it's magic-based. Yes, it's different from your average dystopian novel. But it's still a form of dystopian fiction. And given that almost half of the (admittedly very few) dystopian novels I've read so far were written by Christians, and the fact that one of my goals with my writing has been to create well-written Christian fiction to fill a void in the market, this might just be my genre.

    So, what do I write?

    Well, sometimes I write low fantasy. Sometimes I write fantasy romance (without awkward love triangles). But more and more moving forward, I think I'll be writing Christian fantasy-dystopian. I've seen that it can be done, and I love books that incorporate these elements. I think it's time for me to try my own hand at it and see what I come up with.

*Note as of 3 days later: I am (technically) a published author! I'll provide a link to the book below.

A Day on the Farm: A Book by Elia Beck

(This book was created as part of an assignment for my Intro to Educational Technology class.)