In a guest post on Chuck Wendig’s blog, Dan Koboldt shares advice from his book, Putting the Fact in Fantasy, on bringing authenticity to your fantasy writing. “Even works of fantasy…benefit from some grounding in the real world,” Koboldt writes.
One way to help your readers relate to your fantasy world is verisimilitude, or creating the feeling that something is true or real. “Great writers lean in to their strengths, whether it’s Tolkien with linguistics or Rothfuss with music,” Koboldt writes. “Their deep and personal knowledge lends a convincing realism to those aspects of their stories.”
Of course, writers can’t experience everything firsthand, so research may be required. “When I speak to experts, I ask them to do two things,” Koboldt says. “First, I want to know the common blunders or misconceptions related to their area of expertise – in other words, the most glaring errors that pervade books, television, and other media.” Second, he asks for esoteric tidbits and minutiae to drop into his work, the kind of detail that would lead a reader to believe that he knows what he’s talking about. “This, truly, is the secret weapon of the informed author: a knowledge base about an in-depth topic that’s been curated by a real expert,” Koboldt says.
