Fantasy exaggerates and distorts our sense of proportion. This is used to enhance mood, and develop and highlight themes. The key element of fantasy is
whimsy -- bringing something fanciful, fantastical into the story.
For example, a dense wood can be creepy, but a magical wood like Mirkwood is eldritch and malign. A warrior hero is strong, but a magical warrior hero like Heracles is fabulously strong.
Thematically, power can corrupt, but a magical source of power like the One Ring corrupts insidiously, perniciously and inevitably. Ambition can lead to over-reaching, but magically endorsed ambition like Macbeth's leads to catastrophe. Love can heal wounds, but the love in Sleeping Beauty overcomes death.
Fantasy is built out of whimsy. So the question: when is it too late to be whimsical breaks down to: when is it too late to run highlighter pen over mood or theme? And in related questions: when is it too soon? How little is too little? How much is too much?
Before we answer thse we need to ask a more fundamental, non-genre question:
when is it too late to introduce mood or theme at all?
My answer: after scene one is done, it's too late.
Rationale: Fiction is an emotional journey. If scene one doesn't have mood, we've already missed the boat. And character development is a thematic journey. Our themes need to be at least foreshadowed when our characters are introduced.
Next question:
when is it too soon to run a highlighter pen over mood and theme?
My answer: when the mood or theme aren't interesting enough, susprising enough, astonishing enough, to support highlighter.
Rationale: Highlighting pen doesn't change the ideas it highlights -- it merely makes them more visible, more central to the story. So they'd better be able to support a story in the first place. I feel that the whimsy introduced by fantasy does the same. Frodo's journey is a moral and psychological one, but so was Mitch McDeere's in John Grisham's
The Firm. A key difference between the two stories is that in
Lord of the Rings, lust for power
is an object. In
The Firm, it's a
motive. By turning a motive into a physical symbol, Tolkien gets to play with it directly in story -- he can pass it from hand to hand, let it change characters, let characters react to it directly. That's the power of whimsy.
And finally:
when is it too late to run whimsy over mood and theme?
My answer: when the best bits are already past.
Rationale: other than in parody, whimsy only works when it's used sparingly. The whimsy in fantasy is inevitably tied to the drama. When the mood is high, we can use more highlighter pen. When it's low, we need to be sparing. When characters are undergoing crisis and change, we can add whimsical symbols. When they're keeping business as usual, we put the cap back on the pen. This is nowhere more evident than in genre called horror. A great deal of the horror genre is scary fantasy. We can't scare the reader if we show the monster in the first scene. We must let the mood itself tell us where the monster appears.
But what about those stories where the magical is commonplace? What about Superman stories, where he begins an adventure by flying on patrol? Nothing's happening, but he's still
flying, right? Flying's whimsical, so where's the mood or the theme justifying it?
My answer is that Superman's flying stopped being whimsical once his routine abilities were established with his audience as tropes. It's impossible to create a sense of wonder from the ordinary and familiar -- the highlighter pen runs dry. So where early Superman stories create wonder from the power even
existing, later stories must create wonder from something else -- e.g. the power disappearing, mutating, or being utterly inadequate to deal with his crisis. Superman's flight power continues to make him a fantasy character, but after a while the fantasy itself must be delivered some other way.
So in conclusion:
- We have to get mood and theme right from the outset, regardless of how much magic is in our stories
- We should use whimsy sparingly, unless we're writing for comedic effect
- Let peaks of mood and dramatic crises tell us where best to apply the fantastic
- Beware whimsy that becomes too familiar -- it ceases to be fantastic
