To write a fantasy novel, start with a character who wants something the world makes hard to get, then build only as much of that world as the story touches. Choose your subgenre early, since its readers expect a particular book. Give your magic limits and a cost, reveal the world in scenes rather than lectures, and for a debut aim at roughly 100,000 words and a book that resolves its own plot.
Choose your fantasy subgenre
Fantasy is a shelf of genres with different contracts. Grimdark readers expect betrayal. Cozy fantasy readers will feel cheated by a massacre in chapter ten. Pick the subgenre that matches your book and read a handful of recent titles in it. These six are the ones you will meet most often.
| Subgenre | What readers expect | Known for it |
|---|---|---|
| SubgenreEpic (high) fantasy | What readers expectAn invented world, a large cast, a kingdom at stake, several viewpoints | Known for itRobert Jordan's The Wheel of Time |
| SubgenreUrban fantasy | What readers expectMagic hidden in a modern city, often built like a mystery | Known for itJim Butcher's The Dresden Files |
| SubgenrePortal fantasy | What readers expectSomeone from our world crosses into another one | Known for itC. S. Lewis's Narnia books |
| SubgenreCozy fantasy | What readers expectLow stakes, found family, small pleasures, little violence | Known for itTravis Baldree's Legends & Lattes |
| SubgenreGrimdark | What readers expectMoral grayness, violence, power over honor | Known for itJoe Abercrombie's The First Law |
| SubgenreRomantasy | What readers expectA love story as central as the fantasy plot | Known for itSarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses |
The subgenre also tells you which patterns readers come looking for. A trope such as the chosen one or enemies to lovers is a promise, not a flaw. The craft is delivering it through specific people in a specific place.
Worldbuilding as an iceberg
In Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ernest Hemingway compared good writing to an iceberg, which moves with dignity because only an eighth of it shows. Leave out what you know and readers still feel it. Leave out what you never worked out and you get hollow places. Worldbuilding is the same. The opposite trap is building the whole iceberg before writing a word: years of dynasties and pantheons, no chapter one. Build what the story stands on, and let the draft ask for the rest.
What to decide first
- What is different here. The one or two departures from our world the plot depends on: magic costs memory, the dead linger for a year, the sea is rising.
- Who holds power, and how they keep it. Rulers, money, armies, temples. Most fantasy plots are fights over power.
- What magic can and cannot do. Enough to know how your characters might escape their problems, and why they can't.
- The places the story visits. A rough route with distances and travel times.
- The history still causing trouble. One war or broken treaty that shapes the present. The rest can wait.
- How ordinary people live. What your viewpoint character eats, fears and swears by. Daily texture convinces faster than dynasties.
| What you know | What reaches the page |
|---|---|
| What you knowThe Salt War ended 300 years ago with a treaty signed at Lowmere | What reaches the pageAn old ferryman refuses to carry anyone wearing Lowmere gray |
| What you knowTemple law forbids writing the names of the dead | What reaches the pageGraves are marked with carved knots, and the heroine cannot read her mother's |
| What you knowThe duke's grandfather took the throne by poisoning a feast | What reaches the pageThe duke never eats in public, and nobody asks why |
Classics to study
Your comp titles should be recent. For craft study, these older books are in the US public domain, so you can read and quote them at length.
| Book | Study it for |
|---|---|
| BookLewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) | Study it forA portal world whose nonsense keeps its own rules |
| BookWilliam Morris, The Wood Beyond the World (1894) | Study it forAn early quest set wholly in an invented world |
| BookL. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) | Study it forExposition through a newcomer's questions |
| BookLord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924) | Study it forThe border between the human world and the magical one |
| BookHope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) | Study it forA law that pretends fairy fruit doesn't exist, so smugglers are tried for smuggling silk |
Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55) are still under copyright, so study rather than quote them. Notice how much of Middle-earth lives in the appendices, with their chronologies, family trees and calendars, while the story moves with hobbits who know little more than the reader. That is the iceberg in print.
Character first, world second
Readers don't fall for worlds. They fall for people in trouble, and the world makes the trouble. Start from a character who wants something specific, then ask what in this world stands in the way. A tax on magic matters when your heroine can't pay it, and a border matters when her brother is on the other side. If an invention touches nobody in the book, it belongs in your notes.
The crown everyone is chasing can be a MacGuffin, as long as each pursuer has a reason of their own. Readers care what the chase costs them, not about the crown. Choose your point of view character the same way: someone with a stake in what is strange, like the apprentice who can't afford the magic. In epics with several viewpoints, each needs a reason beyond showing another corner of the map.
Design a magic system: hard or soft
Brandon Sanderson's 2007 essay "Sanderson's First Law" gave writers the standard vocabulary. The law, paraphrased: how far an author can solve a conflict with magic depends on how well the reader understands that magic. Soft magic keeps its rules mysterious and creates wonder. Sanderson's example is Tolkien, whose Gandalf does not simply fly Frodo to Mount Doom. Hard magic has rules the reader knows, so characters can win by using them cleverly.
| Soft magic | Hard magic | |
|---|---|---|
| Rules | Soft magicVague or hidden | Hard magicExplicit and consistent |
| Best for | Soft magicWonder, dread, the unknown | Hard magicClever solutions, heists, duels of skill |
| Can it solve the climax? | Soft magicRarely. It reads as a cheat | Hard magicYes, if the rules were set up earlier |
| Main risk | Soft magicConvenient rescues | Hard magicReads like a game manual |
His second law, from a follow-up essay, is that limitations are more interesting than powers. He splits them into limits (what magic can't do), weaknesses (what an enemy can exploit) and costs (what it takes from the user). The third: expand what you have before adding something new. Work out what one power does to trade, war and family life before inventing a second. Here is a system built that way.
Skyselling. Anyone standing in a valley can name tomorrow's weather there, aloud, and the sky will grant it.
- Limits: only tomorrow, only within the ridgelines you can see, never aimed at one person.
- Cost: the sky takes one day of your memory, and you don't choose which.
- Weakness: two callers in one valley cancel each other out, so a rival can ruin your harvest by calling against you.
- Consequences: rich farmers pay poor callers to spend their memories. Callers keep diaries to reread lost days. Courts won't hear a caller as a witness.
- The story: the day the sky took from the heroine was the day her brother disappeared. She was the only witness, and because she is a caller, no court will hear her anyway.
Every line raises a question a story could answer. That is how you know a system works: its rules create conflict instead of settling it.
Reveal the world without info dumps
An info dump is background delivered in a block, before the reader has a reason to want it. The Turkey City Lexicon, a workshop glossary hosted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, names a common form of it "As you know, Bob": characters telling each other what they both already know.
How much explaining a book can carry depends on its viewpoint character. Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008) sorts fantasy into four modes by how the fantastic enters the story. Three of them matter here. In a portal-quest fantasy the hero is a newcomer, so questions are natural. In an immersive fantasy she would never explain her own world, so the reader assembles it from detail. In an intrusion fantasy the strange breaks into the ordinary, and explanations come late, if at all.
"But I thought all witches were wicked," said the girl, who was half frightened at facing a real witch.
"Oh, no, that is a great mistake. There were only four witches in all the Land of Oz, and two of them, those who live in the North and the South, are good witches. I know this is true, for I am one of them myself, and cannot be mistaken. Those who dwelt in the East and the West were, indeed, wicked witches; but now that you have killed one of them, there is but one Wicked Witch in all the Land of Oz—the one who lives in the West."
Baum hands over the political map of Oz in one speech, and it doesn't read as a dump. Dorothy has a reason to ask: she has just killed someone. The answer corrects her, which is a small conflict, and the last clause plants the antagonist. Without a newcomer, use the scene itself.
Before. The city of Harrow had been ruled by the Salt Council for three hundred years, ever since the flood drowned the lower districts. The Council controlled the sluice gates, and anyone who opened one without a license was hanged in an iron cage above the harbor.
After. Mara had the sluice key in her fist before she saw the cage. It hung over the harbor where it always hung, and this week it was not empty. She knew the boots. She had sold him the grease for them. Below her, the water in the lower district had reached the second step of the chapel and was still rising.
The second version explains less and does more: there are gates, there is a law, the punishment is public, and the heroine is about to break it. The rule of thumb: reveal a fact when a character needs it or is about to break it, in her words and with her opinion attached, one fact per beat. The Council's three hundred years can wait for a later chapter.
Names, maps and languages
Names
Readers sound out names in their heads, so make them easy to say and hard to confuse.
- Give each culture a sound palette, a few favorite consonants and endings, so its names sound related.
- Vary first letters and lengths across the main cast. Aelar, Aelor and Aerin in one chapter is a quiz.
- Don't rename ordinary things. The Turkey City Lexicon calls it "call a rabbit a smeerp": an exotic name for something that behaves exactly like the real thing.
- Record every name and spelling as you go, the way a copy editor keeps a style sheet.
Maps
Draw a map early, for yourself. Tolkien once told an interviewer that a complicated story has to be written to a map, because you can't make one fit afterward. Two checks catch most howlers: rivers run downhill to the sea and merge rather than split (deltas aside), and land on the far side of mountains from the prevailing wind tends to be dry. You don't need a finished map to query agents. If the book is confusing without one, fix the prose.
Languages
Tolkien, a professional philologist, wrote to his American publisher in 1955 that his invented languages came first and the stories were made to give them a world. Few novels need that. Most need a naming language: a few dozen roots that recur in place names and titles, so that if "vel" means river, Velmouth and Ardvel both sit on one. To go further, read The Art of Language Invention (2015) by David J. Peterson, who created Dothraki for HBO's Game of Thrones. On the page, keep invented words few.
Length and series planning
Fantasy runs long because worldbuilding takes words, but a debut still has to fit the market. Chuck Sambuchino's widely cited word count guide for Writer's Digest calls 100,000 to 115,000 words an excellent range for science fiction and fantasy and says 90,000 to 124,000 is probably all right. Epic fantasy sits at the top, and young adult runs shorter. Past about 120,000 words a debut is a harder sell: a long book costs more to produce, and a new author has no sales record. Our guide to word counts by genre has the full table.
Series are the norm in fantasy, yet many agents advise pitching a debut as a standalone with series potential: a complete story whose main plot resolves, with room to continue. Publishers are wary of committing to several books by an unproven author. Plan the larger arc loosely, write book one to stand alone, and track every invention in a series bible so book three doesn't contradict book one.
How to write a fantasy novel, step by step
- Choose the subgenre and read it
Read five recent books in it. Note what they promise in chapter one and deliver at the end.
- Write the premise in two sentences
Who wants what, and what in this world stands in the way. If you need a spark, start from one of our fantasy writing prompts.
- Build the first layer of the world
Answer the six questions above, a page or two each. Stop there.
- Put the magic on one card
Limits, costs, weaknesses, consequences, and how hard or soft it should be.
- Sketch the map and outline the main turns
Outline what starts the trouble, what changes in the middle and how it ends. If magic resolves the climax, plan where its rules appear first. Our guide on outlining a novel covers the methods.
- Draft forward
Write to the end. When a scene asks a question the world can't answer, decide quickly, note it in your world file and keep going.
- Revise for exposition
Mark every paragraph that explains rather than dramatizes. Cut it, move it into a scene, or delay it until a character needs it.
- Test it on fantasy readers
Ask readers of your subgenre where they got lost, which names blurred and whether the ending felt earned.
Where Strokes fits
A fantasy novel produces more documents than chapters: world notes, the magic card, a names list, a timeline. In Strokes you can keep them in one project, each chapter its own document beside the notes. Add the world notes to a chat with the AI Assistant and ask whether chapter twelve breaks your magic rules, or which paragraphs read like an info dump. Version history lets you cut a lore-heavy prologue and restore it in one click, and export sends drafts to readers as PDF, Word or EPUB.
Common fantasy writing mistakes
- Opening with history. A prologue of ancient wars asks readers to care about a world before they have a person to care about, and some agents say they skip prologues in a query sample anyway.
- Magic that saves the day without warning. If the climax turns on a power the reader has never seen, it reads as a cheat. Plant it early.
- The default medieval kingdom. Castles, a king and a farm boy, with no thought about who grows the food or pays the army. Borrow from history on purpose, and from more than one place.
- The chosen one with no choices. A prophecy can start a story, but readers stay for decisions that cost something.
- A first book that only sets up the second. Resolve the main plot of book one, whatever you leave open.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a fantasy novel be?
For an adult debut, roughly 90,000 to 120,000 words, with 100,000 to 115,000 often cited as the sweet spot. Epic fantasy runs toward the top of that range and young adult fantasy shorter. Established authors publish far longer books, but a debut over about 120,000 words is a harder sell.
Should I finish worldbuilding before I start writing?
No. Decide what the plot stands on: what is different about the world, who holds power, what magic can and cannot do, and where the story goes. Then draft. The draft shows you what else needs building.
Is hard or soft magic better?
Neither. Soft magic suits wonder and dread. Hard magic suits stories where characters solve problems with it. Either way, follow Brandon Sanderson's First Law: magic can resolve a conflict only as far as the reader understands it.
Can my first fantasy novel be the start of a series?
Yes, but many agents advise pitching it as a standalone with series potential: a complete story whose main plot resolves, with room for more. Book one has to work on its own.
