Inspired by Hagelrat: Why do you write what you write?

[Archaelos]

Hagelrat's question about how you became a fantasy fan made me think of the other side of the coin. For those of you who write, why do you write the type of stories that you do? What leads a writer to try fantasy instead of historical romance? Why urban fantasy instead of mysteries?

My own (unagented, unpublished, *sigh*) manuscript is horror. I've tried my hand at fantasy, and I think I've written some decent short stories in that genre, but when I tried to approach a fantasy novel it didn't click for me. I found that I wanted a story with plenty of supernatural elements, but grounded on the firm base of reality.

My imagination stills turns down the dark back-alleys in search of ghosts and goblins no matter when and where I set the story, so horror made sense. There's also an element of inspiration. I very much would like someone to pick up my book one day and be as scared by it as I was the first time I read Salem's Lot and The Shining. While I love pure fantasy, I find more and more it's the areas with the greatest crossover between supernatural and reality that speak to me.

So, for those of you who write: why do you write in that genre? Or, do you even consider your work to be in any genre at all?

[Magnus Bergqvist]

So far most of my stuff have been fantasy/science fiction. They are the genres I feel most comfortable with.

/Magnus

[Harper]

I don't set out to write in a particular genre, I just write what interests me and try to make it interesting to others. The Greywalker novels were meant to be detective books, but those ghosts and vampires and things snuck in because I started "what iffing".

[Ginger Lewis]

Years ago I started writing a fantasy story about one of my longstanding RPG characters. While I love the character, I hated the story, and since then I've veered more towards the urban fantasy side of things rather than high fantasy. I like writing about worlds that seem like ours except where certain things; magic or elves for instance, are real and in the here-and-now. So much easier to borrow a world that already exists, rather than invent an entirely new one from scratch :D

[Harper]

much easier to borrow a world that already exists, rather than invent an entirely new one from scratch :D

That's kind of what I think, too. I don't have to make up all the rules and I can break a few as long as I establish a set of new rules to replace the ones I break. Call me lazy....

[Detritus]

All my fiction writing right now is background material for my PbP V:tM game here at CF. This is partly to present the PCs something concrete about the fact that the world moves on without them, even if the story in question happens to be OOC knowledge. The other main goal of my writing is to solidify distinctions in the goals and personalities of the main NPCs. My elder vampire NPCs in particular seemed to me to have similar on-stage signatures, and that's something that can easily break verisimilitude if they're all stuffy or manipulative or clueless about the modern world in basically the same way.

[Origen]

I write the sort of stuff I enjoy reading. It's pretty much that simple.