I keep a commonplace book where I collect phrases, proverbs, sentences, or ideas like a haphazard bouquet of wildflowers. I pick them as they come to me, with no curation save what I share on this blog.

In this series, I’ll offer a quote and meditate on why it deserved to be preserved in my Florilegium.

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“Aren’t all these economic problems and religious differences too like the politics of our own world? Why go to faeries for what we already have? Surely the wars of faeries should be high, reckless, heroical, and romantic wars—concerned with the possession of a beautiful queen or an enchanted treasure?”

C.S. Lewis, letter to Jane Gaskill 09/02/1957

Modern fiction, particularly fantasy, doesn’t do it for me anymore. There was a time in my life were going to a major bookstore chain—an onerous thirty-minute drive with terrible parking—was an event. I looked forward to visiting the bookstore and would spend hours perusing the shelves, on the hunt for that one perfect volume.

The last time I went to a major bookstore chain, I spent thirty minutes wandering the morass of confusing shelves, games, toys, anime, and Marvel ephemera. It was a dreadful experience punctuated by the reek of unwashed teenagers, bad coffee, and the bumping of Billboard Chart pop.

Worse still was the book selection. It was atrophied; tables awash with the same five writers, all with similar titles: A Blank of Blank and Blank. An entire section was carved out for “cozy” fantasy and the comic book section was expanded into a malignant tumor of plastic toys and uber-expensive special editions. I could barely find the historical section, which of course, had been trimmed down to make room for the toys.   

It was a veritable swamp of similar plots, similar heroines, glossy, minimalist photo-shopped covers, and all stinking of plastic-wrapped corporate greed.

This is starting to sound more like a complaint than an invitation.

Why go to faeries for what we already have?

Growing up, my family was not the kind of family that could afford lavish vacations. Instead, we spent three to four days every summer camping in the California Wilderness punctuated with a day-long trip to the lake.

It was in those woods that I would imagine tales of heroic wolves and foxes as questing knights. Only as an adult do I really appreciate how truly formative the dense, quiet woods of the Sierra-Nevada were for my identity and style as a writer.

Those knightly wolves and foxes were out to rescue a headstrong, tom-boyish queen—the character I most often pretended to be.

For three days, with a new school year looming on the horizon, I got to pretend that the world of fantastical forest animals was in deep, dark peril from a wicked and unnamed evil that stalked the woods at night and ate little girls who wandered too far from the fire.

Fiction, was then, as it is now, my escape from the daily grind.

So, why the hell would I want to read a book about an elf opening a Starbucks? Or about your thinly veiled political hang-ups? Or your trite condemnation of “religion?” Or your edgeless handwringing love-triangle?     

 I want the “high, reckless, heroical, and romantic.” I want the bright banner and the crimson sword, the passionate romance of destined lovers, the tricks of faeries, and the triumphs of brave knights.

Give me edge, give me flesh and blood—take me somewhere else, somewhere that isn’t here.

I wrote this quote down, not to smugly lecture writers on what they should and shouldn’t write, but as a reminder to myself.

I owe myself a good story.

While I’ll never be able to escape my biases, reminding myself that they exist makes it easier to avoid them. I want to be the kind of writer people read because they enjoy what I write, but I can only do that if I try to make myself the kind of writer I want to read.

That means high adventure and even higher truths.    

Above: Fairy Rings and Toadstools. Dated 1875. Richard “Dickie” Doyle (18 September 1824 – 10 December 1883). British Illustrator. Watercolor on paper. Private collection.

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