Follow-Up

Unsurprisingly, I got hit for having a passive protagonist and for some plot problems that I just didn’t have time to fix before sending the story out. What did surprise me was that some people had trouble realizing it was fantasy. Last semester, of the four short stories I wrote for the class (mostly the same classmates), two of them prominently featured lycanthropes; I love fantasy and talk about it often; I have misinterpreted other people’s stories as fantasy often enough that it’s become a running joke in the class. However, of my story’s fourteen pages, one person didn’t get that it was fantasy until page six, and another person until page eight. Now, if you will, consider the following:

Page One:
– mention of the Royal Mage Academy

Page Two:
– dead body levitated by magic, done by a person explicitly called the Royal Mage

Page Four:
– mages run around changing the colors of things

Page Five:
– mage changes the color of POV character’s clothing, with magic special effects at center stage

Page Six:
– prince arrives on magical flying horse (at this point, Person Two speculated that it COULD be fantasy, while Person One went, and I quote, “AHHH! What? I bought the healer/mage academy thing, but nowhere else did you indicate that this world was otherwise extraordinary!”)

Page Eight:
– prince’s backstory includes enchanting doors and mirrors – at the use of the verb “enchanting,” Person Two conceded that the setting could be fantasy.

Funny? I thought so.