If you write fantasy, you’ve probably thoroughly enjoyed Dungeons and Dragons, or something inspired by it. D&D has been a massive part of pop culture for over half a century.

Some authors wear their table-top influence on their sleeve to great effect, while others create cliche, inauthentic slurry.

Which one are you?

A few weeks ago I talked about how fantasy writers can find inspiration in historical nonfiction rather than pilfering other fantasy (Read that here). In that article, I argued that drawing your inspiration solely from other fantasy is like taking a photocopy of a photocopy—the farther removed it is from the original, the more faded the copy.

Fantasy is a massive genre and is notoriously difficult for new writers to get right. When crafting a new fantasy, the biggest mistake I see authors making is deriving most of their ideas from other fantasy.

Have you ever copied a photocopy? The more removed it is from the original the more faded it becomes. The same is true with fantasy fiction—your story can get lost in the sauce of absurdity when you rely too heavily on fictionalizing something that’s already been fictionalized.

So, you’ve finished the first draft of your book. That’s great, and you should be proud. But don’t crack open the champaign just yet—there’s still much to be done.

I’ve harped time and time again on the importance of rewriting and how it is necessary to extract the highest quality from your writing. A lot of people resist the idea of rewriting—I mean, you just spent months or years writing your, why would you start over? That sounds like a special form of masochism.

I just graduated, earning a Bachelors in Creative Writing… but was it actually worth doing?

Going to college is supposed to be a rewarding experience. It’s supposed to lead to professional growth you would struggle to achieve without a degree. Unfortunately, for creative writing students, and for students of the arts in general, the post-college path isn’t clear cut and success is not a guarantee.

When you graduate with an undergraduate degree, you are not likely to have a job waiting for you. You will need to work a lot harder to find your career or accept that graduate school is a necessity to progress in your field.

The last time I walked down Union Avenue (or Road, I can never remember) in the town where I grew up and where I lived through my early adulthood, I was bombarded by memories everywhere I looked. There’s the dealership where I bought my first car, that’s the BevMo that used to be the old movie theatre. Look, it’s the McDonalds where my sister worked in 2005 and that’s the street where my first apartment was. It’s all in that same neighborhood, connected to the same stretch of road. I’d be writing a novel if I listed every tie I have to that neighborhood, let alone the entire town.