fire burn, cauldron bubble

When you think about it, all of the wildly popular contemporary series of books have fallen into the fantasy genre: Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Harry Potter, (gag) Twilight.

I'll focus on the first because of those four, LOTR is the only good literature not geared towards children (or pubescent teenage girls).

When I was a pubescent teenage girl, I started writing a fantasy novel. I stopped when I was about 15. Over the course of about four years, I had created an entire universe. My characters had taken on lives of their own and had stories to tell far beyond what I'd written. The entire document, all 122,000 words of it, is still on my computer. It is not even close to being finished.

I've been debating whether or not to return to it for years. It is entirely different from anything else I have written since. Nowadays, fantasy is a guilty pleasure. I read maybe two fantasy novels a year. Yet I can feel a grittiness in the writing that I like--a darkness and a maturity that is emerging from the action-heavy, plot/character development-weak scenes that dominate the earlier chapters. These early chapters are truly atrocious in every way except one: there is a story. And the story wants to be told.

If I really want to write again, it would, after all, be easier to do so using characters I've already created.