Fantasy Cliches that Aren't



Without adequate character description,
your character may be a Lego brick.

Sometimes people create lists of fantasy cliches that they can't stand, and yet some of them aren't really cliches if you can make it your own. Here are some examples:

• No apostrophes in names. I sometimes put apostrophes to indicate another pronunciation. In one novel that was eventually scrapped, a character had the name "J'akal". This was to prevent his name from sounding like "jackal", but rather "juh-akall."
• Urban fantasy with vampires, werewolves, or zombies. This is a big possible cliche, depending on how you treat it. Vampires are portrayed either as haunted romanticists in paranormal romance and bat-like heliophobes. Werewolves are portrayed as muscular, courageous that become half-wolves under the light of the full moon. Zombies are portrayed as lurching, brain-devouring corpses. If you can find a way to make a vampire, werewolf, or zombie that doesn't fall under one of these categories, you're safe.
• Fantasy in medieval England. If you know how to portray medieval England with the utmost realism, I find nothing wrong with this. It's only when you start making it incorrect that I have a problem.
• Made-up names in fantasy worlds. I actually have the opposite problem; I can't have an alternate world where peoples' names are still "Joe" and "Bob".
• Describe your character as little as possible. I find this absolutely ridiculous; don't spend three pages talking about what it looks like, or break from the action to do it, but I at least want to know what the character looks like. It's not good enough to say "man" or "woman".
• Don't make up your own religions. In an alternate world, nobody's going to know who Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, or Siddhartha Gautama is; you need an alternate religion. Similarly, some people say not to create too many religions, but think of all the religions in our world.
• Don't make your own language. If you can make it sound like an actual language, and you can conjugate the verbs in this language by yourself, that's fine. If you know anyone skilled in linguistics, get them to help.
• Don't have everyone speak the same language. In most of my work, societies have their own primary languages, but educated adults know an IAL.
• No prologues. This can usually prevent a first-page infodump. In one of my scrapped novels, the prologue told the story of a battle between a goddess and an invincible lord, as she decides to take him to another world to defeat him there. On the first page of chapter one, a new character is introduced that turns out to be her.
• No taking from mythology. Greek/Roman are overdone, and Egyptian is coming up on this. I'd like to see more Celtic mythology integrated (who wants to be the first to create a YA series about Celtic demigods?), as well as Mesoamerican and Middle Eastern.

If you can find a way to make these your own, they're fine. Otherwise, stay away from the original voice.