M. John Harrison on writing Fantasy:
Hi, I got your book. You ask me how to make it different.
Substitute imagination for exhaustiveness, and inventiveness for research. As a reader I’m not interested in a “fully worked out” world. I’m not interested in “self consistency”…
When I read fantasy, I read for the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone of difference & weirdness that defamiliarises the world I know. I want the taste of the writer’s mind, I want to feel I’m walking about in the edges of the individual personality. I don’t want to read a story misrepresented from some other culture’s folklore, or a story in which mainstream ideology of the last fifty years is presented as myth. Go read Clive Barker. Go read Kenneth Patchen, who was reportedly an unlikeable man but who could write you a fantasy in a couple of lines. Or put “The Gates of Eden” on repeat.
Go away & write me a fantasy like that. Wait twenty years before you start. Write it out of some emotion of yours you never understood, or some decision you made you’re not sure if you regret; but never once name that emotion or let me see the decision. I want what’s underneath.