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1.
AOTW: How did you choose to be a fantasy writer? Or did the genre choose you?
Patrice Kindl: Oh, the latter, for sure. I have a hard time picturing a writer who sits down in cold blood to assess market trends and royalties and then becomes a fantasy writer as a result. For one thing, the temperament of a person who would do that is not the temperament of a successful fantasy writer, or so I believe. I remember reading one of those How-To-Write books when I was first trying to turn myself into a writer. Under no circumstances, instructed the book, attempt to write fantasy until you have mastered the mainstream story. Well, the whole process was so tedious I nearly quit writing then and there.
I think fantasy is in the blood and bones of its practitioners. Why? Some need for the strange and marvelous? An obscure religious impulse, perhaps? I don't know.
Nancy Farmer: I became a fantasy writer after being possessed by a wandering spirit in Central Africa.
Nancy Springer: In the back of my mind I always wanted to be a novelist, but as a young woman fresh out of college I felt I had no authority. In my English Lit. classes we had studied Hemingway, who went to war, killed lions, etc., and Faulkner, who drank whiskey, fell off horses, brawled in bars, etc., and many male others writing important novels about going to jail, driving cars very fast, rise and fall of empires, that sort of thing --- but no women except Jane Austen, who wrote about getting married. I didn't want to write about getting married. I had no idea what a young woman like me could write. Finally it dawned on me that I could write fantasy; I wouldn't need a life to do that --- and by the time I found out how wrong I was, I was hooked.
Tamora Pierce: I was already writing adventure stories when I discovered fantasy in middle school, in the form of Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring. From that time on most of what I wrote was historical fantasy or, later on, science fiction. My childhood and adolescence were just plain lousy. The only things that helped me to forget that and my powerlessness for any space of time were fantasy and science fiction; ditto in my struggling twenties. I'd always been interested in pre-gun history in other reading, which gave me another strong inner drive that pushed me toward fantasy as a career. I have sold other kinds of fiction and would at some time like to try my hand at novels of science fiction and straight historical fiction, but fantasy remains my first, best love.
Meredith Ann Pierce: The genre definitely chose me! As someone who grew up with a large collection of talking stuffed animals and imaginary friends, I don't think there was ever any question that fantasy was the genre for me.
Carol Hughes: I can't say it was ever a conscious choice. But looking back it doesn't seem surprising that I should write fantasy. When I was a child I loved fairy stories, C.S. Lewis, Alan Garner and Tolkien and read and reread just about any book with magical elements. I suppose the genre chose me. But then again I don't think of myself as solely a fantasy writer. Most of the stories I've written do have fantastical elements, but they tend to be grounded in or have some connection to the real world.
Mark L. Williams: The genre pretty much chose me. Stories come to me, and they tend to have time warps, ghosts, mordant animals, and other elements just naturally blended in...
Sherwood Smith: It chose me, at age eight.
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