XXXVII: Interview with…Ella Crean, Fantasy Author

Ella Crean is a fantasy author based in Manchester. With an interest in immersive fiction that pushes her characters to their limits, Ella’s narratives come from wherever her interests take her. From fossils to folktales, pirates to pantheons, and angels to apocalypses, she has a novel idea for them all. She has a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Lancaster University and an M.A. in Novel Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University. She is currently sending her manuscript, The Trail of Blood Red Stars, to literary agents. 

Ella can be found as @ellacreanauthor on TikTok, Instagram and BlueSky.

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I think many writers and readers have long and deep relationships with fantasy and it's orrery of subgenra. But the experience, time, and labor – if I can put it as crude as that – involved in either type of interfacing may be drastically different. What are the most instructive and surprising things you've learned about the difference between writing versus reading fantasy?

When I began writing Fantasy, the most difficult part of the process to accept was that no matter how many novels, reviews or writing guides I read, I would never know the shape of a story until I’d written it. The internal structure of a novel is wholly different when writing compared to reading – and discovering the heart of a narrative requires a unique process for every project. All the basics you know as a reader – the Inciting Incident, the Rising Action, the Midpoint – cease to exist during the first draft. As a writer, you learn the story alongside the characters, and there isn’t a place for the reader in that journey. At that point, the manuscript is a shifting, struggling creature, and you must move alongside it. During early drafts, you’re too close to the story to see it for what it truly is – and whatever story the reader experiences won’t be the same as the one you’ve written.

I find that a novel is a window into the true story. Not everything can fit into the manuscript. I often experience the story as if I am the character, or as if I’m standing alongside the character, controlling them like the protagonist of a video game. Translating this sensation into prose is a wonderful puzzle, but the story inevitably fractures and must be forged into a new shape.

On the track “Maintenance”, Aesop Rock says: “Well any asshole with a book of matches can light a fire fresh / Make that sucker burn for days, I'll be impressed”. You said, which I found vital and insightful, that one key metric of fantastical immersion is not simply how deep and wide the world built to accommodate and (dis)orient your imagination and its effective resonances and emanations is, but the desire to subsequently re-create that aptitude, in your own way, both for yourself and others. Could you speak to immersion-qua-immersion as this kind of productive tension between consuming, creating, and maintaining immersion?

If I had to choose one key metric of fantastical immersion, it would be inspiring creation in another artist. If the immersive experience doesn’t move the reader – be this towards creation, elation, disgust – is it truly immersive?

In a strange contradiction, I find that inspiration for my novels often comes from breaks in my immersion, such as worldbuilding that was stretched too thin or characterisation that wasn’t pushed far enough. Therefore, when I speak of creation, I mean any form of creation, inspired by love or disdain for a story. Whether the responding artist had a positive or negative emotional response to the narrative can’t be controlled – while a positive response may be preferred, the desire to create is why we’re here as artists at all. If you can inspire somebody to make something, then you’ve done important work. Perhaps my origins as a fanfiction writer are obvious here!

 I’ll use The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and its Dragonborn DLC as an example, as they are the inspiration for an untitled work-in-progress. The philosophical and thematic clash between the First and Last Dragonborn has always been a concept that intrigues me – but if you play the game, their interactions are few and far between. Here are two demigods trapped at the beginning and end of their world, and while each must use the other as a sacrificial lamb, they’re also the only people who could ever truly understand the other. There is a break in the immersion where I’m left grasping for what could’ve been. In a better written game, did the relationship between these characters have more depth? In another life, could they have been allies, or were they destined for bloodshed?

I often wonder whether we're in a cultural moment diagnosed by say someone like Byung-Chul Han, in his The Crisis of Narration, in which he claims that in our contemporary information society, narrative as a cultural practice of binding – communal and existential – has been deep-fried, brainrotted, it's dopamine and dithyrambs numbed, whereby telling a story is nil compared to the premium involved in selling a story. Is contemporary fantasy world-building more important than fantasy narratives-qua- narratives?

I don’t believe so! There has been a trend of bite-sized Fantasy: novels built on existing tropes that are easily sold within a TikTok and stacked onto the ‘currently popular’ table at Waterstones. There has also been an increase in shorter Fantasy novels and novellas – The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht is a personal favourite that I take every opportunity to recommend. As we find ourselves with less time to read, is it any wonder that smaller fantasies are what we search for?

Despite this, I don’t believe there is a sweeping argument that can be made in terms of worldbuilding-before-narrative or vice-versa. Worldbuilding and narrative can both be a selling point, but so much comes down to the passion of the writer, and the focus on worldbuilding and narrative is a personal decision that depends on the story. I might even argue that Fantasy novels can’t be separated from their worldbuilding – there's a reason that Fantasy manuscripts are known for their hefty wordcounts, after all. If Fantasy is defined by its worldbuilding, then its narratives bring that worldbuilding to life.

That isn’t to say that certain subgenres aren’t more concerned with narrative than worldbuilding – Romantasy is a clear example, with its epic romances at the forefront and its worldbuilding typically used as set dressing. Across the genre of Fantasy, there are too many subgenres to speak for, but I will argue that there is no precedence for worldbuilding over narrative. We don’t want beloved characters adventuring through a bland world, and we don’t want a lustrous world inhabited by boring characters!

“when I met Rebecca Roanhorse (left) at Eastercon earlier this year. Rebecca gave me a lot of wonderful querying advice and kindly let me have a picture for this interview!”

What exigent need or desire does Romantasy serve the ostensibly fantasy-inclined readership? What role do technological apparatus and phenomena – from Wattpad, Tumblr, BookTok, to Character A.I – play in this milieu? 

I wrote my MA Dissertation on this topic – the intersection between Fantasy and Romantasy! Romantasy is about desire – initially cisgender and heterosexual female desire, though this is increasingly including queer romances. With Fantasy traditionally being a male-oriented genre, Romantasy responds to this by elevating female desire: the genre is a power fantasy, recentering the focus on female sexuality, empowerment and capability.

However, I wouldn’t say that Romantasy is the same as female-led Fantasy. Rather, it is a subgenre with its own evolving traditions. A Fantasy novel might have a romance subplot, but the weighting of Fantasy and romance are entirely different. Romantasy is romance with a Fantasy backdrop, distinguishable from a female-oriented Fantasy that includes a romance. I’m reminded of the differences in the romances in Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller and Carissa Broadbent’s The Serpent and the Wings of Night: both are Fantasy novels with romances and empowered female characters, yet the tones and presentations of the romances are distinct. This is how Romantasy serves the Fantasy readership: by taking familiar worldbuilding and narrative conventions and elevating the focus on female desire.

There is an increasing conflict between Fantasy and Romantasy readers. As a writer, I think the false dichotomy between the genres is starker for me. In my writing, I seek to combine the in-depth worldbuilding and high stakes of Fantasy with the dramatic, erotic romances of Romantasy. I therefore write Fantasy with a romance subplot, but I take inspiration from Romantasy’s emphasis on the sensory exploration of desire. Romantasy also serves as an accessible gateway into other Fantasy subgenres that, to a reader who hasn’t ventured into tomes such as Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree, may be intimidating.

We spoke a bit about an area of practice that intrigues me very much – the limits of immersion. How coherence and lyricism of voice can decohere if pushed too far, can indeed stumble. How do you know or decide when this limit-experience has been reached and whether to acquiesce or resist it?

The limits of immersion were an ongoing struggle during my Novel Writing MA, and I’ll share the only advice that mattered – read everything out loud. There's a rhythm that comes with truly immersive writing – the lyricism reaches a peak where the words cease to be spoken in a meaningful manner. We’ve all experienced this when reading – when the words on the page fall away and the story becomes bright and colourful in your mind. It’s like watching a movie. There should be physical reactions – your heart will race as the character’s races, and your breath will catch as the character’s catches. If you’re lucky, you’ll feel a chill from a gust of wind.

And as you read out loud, you’ll eventually stumble. There will be a break in the rhythm that cracks through your immersion, and you’ll discover where your edits need to begin. The process of editing then becomes a task of elevating all your prose to this immersive rhythm.

How is boredom a symptom of a lack of voice?

If the writer is bored, the reader is bored. If the writer is bored, they need to stop writing. Something is wrong with the scene, or the story itself, and it needs to be identified.

 A lot of writers forget that writing is supposed to be enjoyable. It can be difficult, and writer’s block comes for us all, but it’s supposed to be fun! Engaging, at the very least. However you describe it, we write because it feels wrong when we don’t write. There’s an obsession that brings us back to the manuscript. So many novels feel the same – the internal voices are so similar – and I find myself forgetting about all of them. If you’re enjoying the writing process, then the unique twist you bring to your narrative voice will shine through.

Whenever I find myself bored by my writing, I ask myself questions. What makes me unique as a writer? Why should I write this story instead of another?

Why do I write?

Miles Davis once said, I paraphrase, that it took him his entire life to play like himself. That describes, to me, an inescapably iterative process. What do you feel is the role of obsession in sustaining this process? In other words, how does one cultivate a sustainable practice of disciplined obsession?

If I’m not obsessed with a story, then I know the story isn’t finished. Once I’m obsessed with a story, it will never be finished. So often the joy can be sapped from writing, and it’s easy to think in terms of wordcounts, agents and publishers.

 Writing a novel is a Sisyphean task, and simple motivation isn’t enough. Writing must be an act of discipline – how else can anything be completed? I think that cultivated obsession is the most important attribute for a writer to have, because there might be nothing else to drag you to your manuscript on a dark, cold morning.

 This is when the adage ‘write for yourself’ rings true for me. Not in the context of finding an agent or publisher, but because for potentially years of the writing process, you are the only person who knows what this story is supposed to be. It can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be a painful one. If you’re going to write that book, you need to make the process as enjoyable as possible. When I don’t write, something feels wrong – and that’s how I know the novel is building towards what it needs to be.

Influenced by my current readings in around QFT, I suppose I now tend to think of creative writing as a particular manifestation, and amplitude, of a numinous intensity, a field of story. What are the most interesting trends of these amplitudes you see in fantasy writing today?

I’ll tie this into the above discussion of obsession. The simplest path to obsession is to pinpoint moments of intensity – the fragments of story that truly exhilarate you as a writer – and stitch them together. Tropes are an obvious example of this: moments of recurring excitement across genres. During my younger years of writing fanfiction, I can count on one hand the number of times a familiar trope didn’t make its way into my work! Nowadays, the increasing popularity of such tropes within published work is a fascinating example of such recurring intensity.

What are some of your favorite things about your first novel? What was the hardest thing about writing it? What are some ways you might approach reviewing/rewriting/rewiring it?

I began writing my first novel, The Folktales of Foxes, during the 2020 lockdown before I went to university. It was a Fantasy novel which followed a runaway heir escaping his past and a peasant storyteller escaping military conscription who meet at a bankrupt university. Their names are Atlas and Brynn, and you can find art of them below by the talented @mishoru on Instagram.

The novel was non-linear and dual-POV, jumping between Atlas and Brynn’s initial hostility and their later romance. The most challenging aspect of writing the novel was the non-linear structure – for my first attempt at writing a book, I didn’t make it easy for myself! There was a lot of reshuffling chapters so I didn’t contradict myself or spoil the switching timelines, but I think this provided a wonderful dynamism to the internal structure of the novel!

If I had to choose my favourite part of The Folktales of Foxes, it would be the relationship between Atlas and Brynn. Their love for each other is the heart of the novel: if I changed everything else, I would want their relationship, and all its complicated trust and intimacy, to stay the same. There’s an interplay between their individual themes, motivations and experiences in the relationship that I’m very proud of. They’ve become the basis by which I measure the romances of my novels – and don’t tell my other characters, but they’re my favourite.

“The finished commission is of Brynn and Atlas, who are the protagonists of The Folktales of Foxes. Since our interview I've decided to pull The Folktales of Foxes out of retirement and rewrite the manuscript - I hope to have it finished in time for the World Fantasy Convention later this year. This commission was also done by @mishoru on Instagram.”

We spoke about what I think of as the rhizomatics of storytelling/stories/story-worlds. What are your thoughts on fantasy writing and/as a relational web of mutual effects?

As I plan my third novel, I’ve been toying with new ways of outlining narratives. I view a story as a spiderweb. Each aspect of the narrative is a thread. When you pull on one thread, three other threads across the spiderweb should also move. The threads can be anything: character design, plot beats, worldbuilding ideas. This creates an interplay between the different pieces of the story, breathing life into the scattered pieces of an outline and turning the narrative into a dynamic entity.

In this censorial and doctrinaire global moment we find ourselves in, what are some of the most important tropes you feel need to be brought back, forgotten, and/or subverted?

 I’ll counter this question – I don’t believe there are tropes to be brought back or forgotten. However, we have lost sight of what tropes are: building blocks! There is an ongoing trend in Fantasy – particularly in romance subplots – of narratives being established around tropes, rather than the unique beats of the story. It’s a waste. Tropes in fanfiction are impactful because they take beloved characters and throw them into entertaining variations of similar stories. This draws on the love that the reader already feels. In published novels, tropes have become a shorthand for creating connections between characters, when they should be used to enhance relationships that have already been established.

However, I do appreciate that unique narratives can come from the subversion of a trope. My first novel, The Folktales of Foxes, was inspired by the fake dating trope, and what its opposite could be: characters who are closer than anybody else yet forced to act as enemies to keep up a ruse. I find subversions of tropes far more compelling, whereas if tropes are mentioned in a blurb at a bookshop, I’m only going to put the book down!

Can you discuss/describe what compels you about Dragon Quest 9 and why?

Dragon Quest 9! A wonderful Nintendo DS game that came out in 2010. You play as a being known as a Celestrian - in essence, a guardian angel - who must travel the world after losing their divine powers to discover what caused the destruction of their homeland. The Dragon Quest series has a love of wordplay, whimsical narratives and suddenly intensifying stakes. When I first played the game as a child, two things stood out to me.

Firstly – it introduced me to death. I didn’t know what a corpse was until one came to life and killed my player character. Dragon Quest 9 was also the first game I played that didn’t flinch from killing its protagonists – if you’ve played the game, you know who I’m talking about.

Secondly – the writing style. The naming conventions of Dragon Quest 9 often have other meanings. The Celestrians, such as Aquila, Corvus and Columba, are named after constellations, while the names of settings are references to real-world locations and mythologies. This continues into the storytelling itself, with the dialogue often having hidden second meanings.

As a child, there was a sudden realisation that there was something in this story I didn’t understand – and that because I didn’t understand it, it was important. I wasn’t well-read enough to know what a Protectorate was, or that the Yggdrasil was from Norse mythology, or that ‘Benevolessence’ was a play on words – but I knew that someday I needed to understand. Here was a story that I loved, and it was a story I comprehended a fragment of. I owe Dragon Quest 9 my thanks for sparking an obsession with words – it's a great reason I am where I am today.

“The sketch is of Nuada and Setanta, who are the protagonists of The Trail of Blood Red Stars. I'm querying the manuscript at the moment! The artist is @mishoru on Instagram. We thought it would be interesting for people to see into the commission process with this sketch, and we'll have the final version posted on our accounts soon.”

What does contemporary fantasy both get wrong and get right about female and queer desire?

I think the open existence of female and queer desire is something that contemporary Fantasy is increasingly getting right – to the extent that the subgenre of Romantasy is now dedicated to it. In the wider Fantasy genre, there is a rising trend of female and queer desire being explored in depth, alongside all the complexities, troubles and joys that come with it. The queer-normative worldbuilding of Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller and Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth comes to mind.

However, I do believe that the enjoyment of desire is being lost – perhaps because authors feel they must write to meet a demand, rather than wanting to investigate such themes. So much interesting character work can be done through an exploration of desire, but often I’m bored by sex scenes in novels. Sex scenes can be fun, and the justification for their existence can be as simple as that.

In my novels, I make a point to have on-page sex scenes. There was a learning curve to managing my own discomfort, and perhaps I use the academic to justify the narrative. Even now, I’m tempted to type ‘romance’ as a euphemism for sex. However, it’s important that my writing tackles these topics, and it’s important because it’s taboo. Not long ago, I wouldn’t have been able write about desire in the way I am now: searching for a literary agent, posting about it online, discussing it with family and friends.

My grandmother is in adamant agreement that because the women before me couldn’t write about desire, I have a duty to. I often wonder what the women of my family before her would’ve said. Would they have answered with disgust? Or did they have writings of their own?

What are you working on now? What are some of your favourite things about the novel? 

I’m currently querying my second novel: an adult fantasy titled The Trail of Blood Red Stars. The novel follows a young woman named Nuada who is possessed by a demon that hides in her shadow. When her only friend is kidnapped by gladiator traders, Nuada begins a quest to save him – by striking a bargain with the demon that has possessed her. 

The Trail of Blood Red Stars is set in the same world as my first novel, The Folktales of Foxes, and the most enjoyable part of writing it was the crossover between the two projects. I structured the novels so you don’t need to read one to understand the other, but I adore interconnected fantasy series that explore different parts of the same world. It was important to me that both novels had queer-normative worldbuilding in the backgrounds of their romances, which is a narrative decision that permeates the rest of the novel in fascinating ways, such as laws of inheritance and naming conventions. This was the decision behind The Trail of Blood Red Stars having a female protagonist, Nuada, with a traditionally male name. 

Using traditional comp titles, The Trail of Blood Red Stars combines the demonic companion and political conspiracy of Rachel Gillig’s One Dark Window with the deadly tournament and complicated romance of Carissa Broadbent’s The Serpent and the Wings of Night. However, my favourite pitch would be The Exorcist meets Gladiator - and make it a fantasy novel. In case any literary agents are reading this, the manuscript is complete at 104,000 words and book one in a proposed trilogy!