I’ve been writing Peacekeeper for forty-five years. It’s a science fiction and fantasy series that’s consumed more of my creative life than any other project, and it’s taught me more about world-building, character development, and long-form storytelling than any writing class or book on craft ever could.
Alongside Peacekeeper, I’m writing Grim, a collection of thirty stories exploring death through the eyes of the dying across different eras and cultures, with a cosmic backstory that readers piece together gradually across the collection. I’m writing Shield of Ashes, a political thriller set against nuclear escalation compressed into seven days. I write short stories, flash fiction, and a serialized novel.
For more, see World-building. I also ghostwrite fiction and nonfiction for clients, coach fiction writers through their projects, and have written an entire series of handbooks covering every aspect of fiction craft.
I care about this genre, and it deserves better than how it’s usually taught. Too much fantasy advice comes from people who’ve never had to keep a world consistent past the second book, and it shows in the manuscripts I see: gorgeous maps, clever magic and nothing underneath holding any of it up. I write fantasy every day, and after forty-five years with one series I care far more about the essential parts of a world than the paint.
| Element | Common mistake | What works |
|---|---|---|
| World-building | Set dressing: a map, a cool magic system, kingdom names | Infrastructure where geography, culture, politics and conflict drive plot |
| Genre contract | A world where individual actions don’t matter | Agency, meaningful choice and the sense that character matters |
| Tropes | Random twists for their own sake | Subversions that keep internal logic and feel inevitable |
| Magic systems | Listing what magic can do | Defining what it can’t do, what it costs and its consequences |
| Characters | A detailed world nobody cares about | The world creates pressure; the character’s response is the story |
| Point of view | Head-hopping, made worse by AI drafting | Each viewpoint perceives only what that character would |
| Dialogue | “As you know” exposition between characters | Information delivered through conflict, subtext and drama |
| Series | Sprawling epics started with no plan to finish | Plan the series arc, or write standalones |
Why is world-building infrastructure, not decoration?
Real world-building means constructing the infrastructure that everything else in your story depends on.Share on X
Most fantasy writing advice treats world-building as set dressing. Create a cool magic system. Draw a map. Name some kingdoms. That approach produces worlds that feel like backdrops instead of living systems. For more, see writing science fiction and writing romance books. Real world-building means constructing the infrastructure that everything else in your story depends on.
Geography affects culture. Culture affects politics. Politics affects conflict. Conflict drives your plot. If any layer is missing or inconsistent, readers feel it even if they can’t articulate what’s wrong.
Each layer of a fantasy world rests on the one below it, so a gap in geography or culture shows up in the plot.
Fantasy world-building also carries a genre contract with readers that most writers never think about consciously. Fantasy readers seek worlds where individual actions have meaningful consequences. Where personal qualities like courage, wisdom, and determination can overcome obstacles through direct action.
This is why fantasy defaults to monarchical or feudal political systems: they create clear authority relationships where individual actions influence political outcomes through personal relationships instead of bureaucratic processes. If your fantasy world runs on committees and policy memos, you’re fighting the genre contract.
I think writers who ignore this contract set themselves up for readers to punish them, and it isn’t fair to blame the readers for it. Somebody who picks up a fantasy novel has told you exactly what they want by picking it up. Hand them a world where nothing a person does matters and they’ll put the book down, leave the review and skip your next one.
This doesn’t mean every fantasy must use medieval feudalism. It means understanding why readers chose fantasy over literary fiction or thriller, and building a world that delivers the psychological experience they came for: agency, meaningful choice, and the sense that individual character matters.
Peacekeeper required building an entire cosmic structure before I could write a single story within it.
The rules governing how the universe works, the political systems, the technology, the cultural assumptions of different species. All of that had to exist before characters could move through it believably, because characters make decisions based on what they know about their world. If the world isn’t consistent, the characters can’t be consistent either.
Grim required a different kind of world-building: cosmic backstory that readers accumulate across thirty separate stories. God, angels, the Enemy, the machinery governing existence. No single story explains the full system. Each story reveals a fragment.
By the time the final story confronts God directly, I’ve prepared readers without them knowing I was preparing them. That structural planning happened before I wrote story one. My World-Building Handbook covers this in depth: how to build worlds that function as systems instead of collections of cool details.
Watch: Lecture #1: Introduction — Brandon Sanderson on Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, Brandon Sanderson
How Do You Subvert Fantasy Tropes?
Twists that exist only to prove the writer has read the same books everyone else has are a waste.
Fantasy runs on tropes. The chosen one. The wise mentor. The dark lord. The quest. These patterns recur because they work, and they belong to everyone. Your story can use any trope without originality concerns. What matters is how you execute it. But readers know these tropes as well as you do. They know dragons kidnap princesses, knights rescue damsels, and magic solves problems. Familiarity breeds boredom. The most engaging fantasy takes well-worn tropes and flips them in ways that reveal character truth or comment on the original trope’s assumptions.
Good subversion requires understanding what readers expect before you challenge it. A princess who stages her own kidnapping says something about agency and power. A dragon who critiques kidnapping technique adds humor while maintaining the creature’s essential nature.
Random twists for their own sake feel gimmicky. The best subversions feel inevitable once revealed. The key: maintain internal logic. Subverted tropes still need consistent rules. Your helpful dragon should have believable motivations.
Twists that exist only to prove the writer has read the same books everyone else has are a waste. A subversion that breaks the world’s own rules to get a gasp cheats the reader, and a reader who’s been cheated once starts doubting every reveal that comes after it. Keep enough familiar elements that readers can follow your story while you surprise them with the unexpected ones. And let characters react realistically to subverted expectations, because their reactions give readers permission to process the surprise.
How Do You Design a Magic System?
The most common mistake in fantasy writing is designing magic by listing what it can do. Writers define interesting magic systems by what they can’t do, what they cost, and what consequences they produce. (See also Rayne Hall’s Writing about Magic) A magic system without limits removes tension from your story. If your protagonist can solve any problem with magic, there are no stakes in any scene. The reader knows the character will simply magic their way out of trouble.
But constraints alone aren’t enough. Magic systems in fantasy serve a psychological function beyond dramatic effect. They create worlds where personal development translates directly into practical capability.
Magic that grows through training, moral development, or personal sacrifice satisfies the reader’s desire for a world where individual effort creates meaningful power. Magic that requires wisdom, courage, or moral clarity provides psychological satisfaction by showing how personal virtues create practical advantages. This is why the best magic systems feel earned instead of arbitrary.
See my interview with Mercedes Lackey for a working author’s take. Sanderson’s Mistborn gives characters metallic abilities with clear rules and costs that reward strategic thinking.
Le Guin’s Earthsea integrates magic with moral philosophy so deeply that power and responsibility become inseparable. In both cases, the magic system reinforces what the story is about at a thematic level.
In Peacekeeper, the systems governing the universe follow rules that the characters discover over time. The rules constrain what’s possible. Those constraints drive the plot because characters must work within them, around them, and occasionally against them. The rules were designed before the stories, and the stories are better for it.
The exercise I give coaching clients: choose a specific magical ability, define what it costs the user, plan three unintended consequences it might create, consider how society would react to this magic, and determine what character growth opportunities the limitations provide. Magic works best when it complicates characters’ lives as much as it helps them. My Fantasy Writer’s Handbook covers magic system development in depth, including AI-assisted techniques for finding logical gaps and balancing supernatural power with story needs.
Why do characters matter more than the world in fantasy?
You can build the most detailed, interesting world in fiction history and it won’t matter if readers don’t care about the people living in it. World-building serves character. The world creates the conditions that test your characters, reveal who they are, and force them to change.
A character raised in a rigid magical hierarchy who discovers the hierarchy is built on a lie faces a different challenge than the same character in a different world. The world creates the pressure. The character’s response to that pressure is the story.
Grim works because every one of the thirty death stories is about a specific person dying in a specific way.
The cosmic backstory matters, but it matters because it gives context to individual human experiences of mortality. A medieval peasant dying of plague and a modern executive dying of cancer are both confronting the same fundamental reality through completely different lenses shaped by their worlds. My Deep Character Handbook covers character development in depth: psychology, motivation, arc construction, and how to create characters that feel like real people regardless of how fantastical their world is.
Point of View Makes or Breaks Fantasy
Fantasy fiction involves more POV challenges than most genres because you’re managing information the reader doesn’t have about a world the reader has never seen. Every POV decision affects what the reader learns, when they learn it, and how they experience the world you built.
Peacekeeper uses multiple POV characters shifting between first person and third limited. That complexity is necessary because the story spans too much territory for a single perspective, but it requires rigorous POV discipline. Each viewpoint character can only perceive what they’d perceive, know what they’d know, and interpret events through their own lens.
AI makes POV problems worse. If you use AI for drafting assistance, it shifts perspective mid-scene constantly. It generates plausible text that includes another character’s internal thoughts, describes things the viewpoint character can’t see, or shifts to omniscient overview for no reason. Without constant correction, your carefully maintained viewpoint degrades into head-hopping. My Point of View Handbook covers every aspect of perspective management, including the problems AI introduces and how to defend against them.
Dialogue in Fantasy Has to Sound Like People, Not Prose
Fantasy dialogue fails when it tries to sound “literary” or “period appropriate” at the expense of sounding like actual speech.
Characters in fantasy worlds still talk like people. They interrupt each other, trail off, say things they don’t mean, and avoid saying things they do mean. The language might be adapted to reflect the world, but the underlying patterns of human conversation remain.
The worst fantasy dialogue reads like characters delivering exposition to each other about things they both already know. “As you know, the Dark Lord rose three centuries ago and destroyed the five kingdoms.” Nobody talks like that. If both characters know it, neither would say it.
As-you-know dialogue is the fantasy flaw I’d kill first if I could only fix one. It tells the reader the writer didn’t trust the story to deliver the history on its own, and it turns two supposedly real people into tour guides reading from the same brochure.
Find ways to deliver necessary information through conflict, subtext, and scenes where the information serves a dramatic purpose beyond informing the reader. My Dialogue Handbook covers writing conversations that reveal character, advance plot, and sound like actual human speech regardless of genre.
The Long Game
Fantasy writing, especially series writing, is a long commitment. Peacekeeper has been forty-five years of my creative life. Characters I created decades ago are still evolving.
World-building decisions I made early constrain what I can do now. That’s how it should work. A living world develops over time, and so does the fiction set within it.
If you’re starting a fantasy project, think carefully about whether it requires one book or several. A series demands planning that standalone novels don’t.
Abandoned series do real damage. Readers who give three books of their time to a world and never get the ending grow wary of every new series they see, and the writers who start sprawling epics with no plan to finish them are hurting everyone else in the genre.
Patrick Rothfuss is the case fantasy readers bring up first. DAW Books published The Name of the Wind in 2007 and The Wise Man’s Fear in 2011, and the Kingkiller Chronicle has sold more than 10 million copies, according to Newsweek. The third book, The Doors of Stone, still hasn’t come out.
In July 2020 his editor, Betsy Wollheim, wrote on Facebook, “I’ve never seen a word of book three.” The Guardian reported that the comments were later taken down.
I don’t know what goes on in anybody’s writing room, and I won’t guess. I do know that millions of readers have waited fifteen years for an ending, and I’d bet plenty of them think twice now before they pick up book one of the next big series. If you’re not confident you can finish, write standalones. They’re complete in themselves. Nobody feels betrayed when a standalone doesn’t continue.
But if your story needs the scope of a series and you’re willing to give it the years, I think it’s the most rewarding work in fiction. I’ve watched characters I created decades ago keep changing on me, and no standalone could’ve given me that. Fantasy deserves writers who commit to their worlds for the long haul, and the genre gets poorer every time somebody treats a world as a weekend project and walks away from the readers who believed in it.
For fiction writers who want to develop their craft, my Fantasy Writer’s Handbook covers the genre, and my full collection of writing handbooks covers world-building, character, dialogue, POV, plotting, pacing, and every other element of fiction craft. For one-on-one guidance on your project, book coaching gives you a collaborator who has been doing this for decades. If you have a fantasy story you want written professionally, ghostwriting is also available.
My take
Don’t start a series you won’t finish. Readers who give three books to a world and never get the ending turn wary of every new series. Every writer in the genre pays for it. If you aren’t sure you’ll see it through, write standalones. Nobody feels betrayed by a complete book. If the story needs a series and you’ll give it the years, commit. I’ve spent forty-five years on Peacekeeper, and the characters still change on me.
Fantasy Writing FAQ
- Kingkiller Chronicle Editor Believes Author Hasn’t Written in Years, Newsweek
- Patrick Rothfuss, Wikipedia
Writing It Yourself? Keep Going.
If you want a professional in your corner while you write, my writing coaching works one on one without taking the pen out of your hand. The Fantasy Writer’s Handbook takes this topic deeper.
