Genre Essentials: Fantasy — 10 Fantasy Books [Non-Fiction] You Must Cover

When you are writing an original screenplay within a specific genre, you really should know the heart, soul and guts of that genre. This will inform every step of your creative and writing process: concept, character development, brainstorming, plotting, tone, style, atmosphere, voice, pace, and so on. There are certain attributes common to each genre, and you need to know as much about them as possible, if you want to follow, reverse or break those conventions.

Obviously you can’t read and watch everything, but isn’t there a way to cover the essentials?

Which led me to a new GITS series: Genre Essentials.

This week: Fantasy.

Today: 10 Fantasy Books [Non-Fiction] You Must Cover

Please post your suggestions in comments. Tomorrow and the rest of the week, let’s do our best to generate quality suggestions for the other categories.

To read your suggestions for 10 Fantasy Movies You Must See and add to the list of suggestions, go here.

To read your suggestions for 10 Fantasy Scripts You Must Analyze and add to the list, go here.

To read your suggestions for 10 Fantasy Books [Fiction] You Must Read and add to the list, go here.

Next week: Horror.

I’m happy to announce that Shaula Evans, who as I’m sure you have noticed has been an active presence in this series and others, has agreed to oversee the flow of resource suggestions for Genre Essentials. My current thinking is whittle down the choices to something on the order of 20 titles [where we have that many], then put them up to a vote of the GITS community to end up with 10 top choices. Meanwhile thanks, Shaula, for the help!

UPDATE: The votes are in for Action, Comedy, and Drama. I’m working through them and will be posting Genre Essential lists for these three soon. Thanks to everyone for participating with their suggestions and votes.

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