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Originally Posted by Nogrod
So how are they using it in the first place and how they should use it? What is the role of our personal imagination in the first place?
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Originally Posted by Thinlómien
But if you look very close, the heart of the problem is probably that most people see fantasy only as the Dragonlance/Robert Jordan/Weis&Hickman/Eddings (whose books I actually do like unlike the others on this list ) stuff. The clumsy and pompous badly-written and cheap-looking stuff with too much everything just seems to rule the popular image of fantasy.
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Originally Posted by alatar
Another thing about fantasy is that, to me, it's even harder to write...well
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I think the three of you are onto a possibility in this story of Rowlings and her teacher. After all, we don't know what kind of writing she was producing when she was 11 and 12. For all we know, it could have been very, very twee and her teacher was hoping to wean her of that sentimental streak using a kind of simplistic comparison he thought appropriate for the age. After all, how many teachers tell ten year olds simply "Never start a sentence with because" because the teachers figure the formal explanation of the grammar of compound/complex sentences is a bit much for the tender development of that age?
Frankly, I think this dichotomy between fantasy and "gritty realism" is a bit of a broad stroke. Just think of the novels of Iain Banks, aka Iain M. Banks. His 'realistic' works are incredibly macabre fantasies. Now there's one writer who is definitely making fantasy mainstream!