Apologies for not posting this last night. There was no internet connection available. Here is the post I wrote below in its entirety:
I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about Brandon Sanderson that pains me. It took some time and a lot of reading—both of his stories and his website—but I think I have it figured. You see, Sanderson is a master of the game. He’s figured out how to create worlds and systems of magic that are both consistent, familiar, and completely engaging. Now normally this is a good thing, to be engaged by a story and a world, but here it isn’t entirely wonderful. In fact, it is a real problem. You see, Sanderson exposed a system that is older than Tolkien and hasn’t done much by way of evolution since before I was born. Fantasy is a genre that is repeating itself. There are no Tall Towers, no new worlds to explore and nothing that hasn’t already been said about Dragons, Elves, and the Fae. Or is there?
The problem of innovation starvation is that people (writers, etc.) are so entrenched in the rules and the tropes and the works of old that they rarely deign to make something entirely new. Most fantasy falls under one of a series of boilerplate ideas and, if you’re really daring, it hits several. Largely fantasy is concerned with magic—if not defined by it. The way magic is presented shapes the way the world is presented. In Sanderson’s Elantris, magic is a huge part of the culture and those touched by the power live in a special place. The story itself details the fall of that magical place, which anyone whose read fantasy of any sort can recognize as a trope or tenet of the fantasy story. When I first created Emil Torath I did so under that same auspice and wound up trying to tell stories in a way (and a world) that has already been done to death. In truth, the last really innovative fantasy story I read isn’t even seen as fantasy. It’s seen as Urban Fantasy, which is defined now as a genre unto itself.
The clock is running out, so I will continue this at a later time, but the main argument here is that there isn’t anything new happening in fantasy and if you want to be successful as a writer in this genre—I mean really successful—you gotta come with something new. Only, what new is left in a genre that is focused on a dead past?