A Long Time Ago In a Playground Far Away…, Trudi Canavan

I’ve always been captivated by story. I loved fairy tales and myths, and as I grew up I found I still had a preference for stories containing an element of the fantastic.

As a child I was so inspired by Star Wars that I decided I was going to make films like it when I grew up. A wise adult suggested I write my ideas down. I sketched and painted as much as wrote, and these two creative mediums are still my favourites today.

Later, as a young teen, I read Lord of the Rings and all I wanted to do was write something just like that. Then someone told me how long it took for Tolkien to write, and that he created an entire language, and I grudgingly decided what I made might have to be a bit simpler.

Something changed between then and when I started the Black Magician Trilogy. I no longer wanted to make something just like that. I didn’t want to read books that were carbon copies of other books, and I definitely didn’t want to write any. (Besides, there was a concept called ‘plagiarism’ I now understood.) While I wanted to stay within the broad definition of what we call fantasy, I had read widely enough to see that the fantasy was a broad and varied genre – a vast playground with endless possibilities.

Sometimes it seemed as if too many of one type of play equipment had been built in that playground, usually because it had been fashionable in a particular era. When I started writing the Black Magician Trilogy I’d read many, many fantasy stories with male protagonists and few with female ones.

I thought I was trying something unusual by creating a main female character. Trouble was, so did a lot of other writers over the five or so years it took to write the trilogy and find a publisher. By then I was hearing readers complaining about how too many main characters in fantasy were female.

But I had discovered that the genre itself could be a wonderful source of inspiration, either by providing and idea I could develop further, or by challenging me to turn it on its head. I wasn’t aiming so much to be original (as they say, nothing is original) but to explore some of the less used paths in the fantasy playground.