Chris Humphreys: Fantasy Worlds – and How to Build Them
Event Information
About this Event
Fantasy is an extraordinarily varied and fantastic genre. From the loftiness of Lord of the Rings to the grim-dark of Game of Thrones, from dystopia to comedy, from fabulous beasts to blood-sucking villains, there appears no limit to an author’s visions. But does its vast scope make it easier to write than other genres?
In this online workshop, Chris will consider the excitements, the practicalities, and the difficulties of writing fantasy fiction. He will tackle the myth that less research is required in fantasy; how a world, however fantastical, must be credible and coherent within itself; how to use dialogue to evoke character in realms unknown, and how to take the risk of making your made-up worlds truly different, while maintaining believability.
There will also be “the dragon exercise”: how to take one of fantasy’s favorite themes and use it in entirely new ways.
Time for Q&A will follow the workshop.
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Chris (C.C.) Humphreys has played Hamlet in Calgary, a gladiator in Tunisia, waltzed in London’s West End, conned the landlord of the Rovers Return in Coronation Street, commanded a starfleet in Andromeda, voiced Salem the cat in the original Sabrina, and is a dead immortal in Highlander. He has written eleven adult novels including The French Executioner, runner-up for the CWA Steel Dagger for Thrillers; Chasing the Wind; The Jack Absolute Trilogy; Vlad – The Last Confession; A Place Called Armageddon and Shakespeare’s Rebel – which he adapted into a play and which premiered at Bard on the Beach, Vancouver, in 2015. Plague won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel in Canada in 2015.
He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. He is now writing epic fantasy with the Immortals’ Blood Trilogy, for Gollancz. The first book, Smoke in the Glass, was published in 2019 and The Coming of the Dark in 2020. He is also publishing his other new fantasy series, The Tapestry Trilogy, beginning in August 2020 with The Hunt of the Unicorn. He is the artistic director of Salt Spring’s Theatre Alive.
