This is a little touchy because everybody who posted on the "Are You Writing Serious Fantasy" (aywsf) thread is a subject of this post. I have no intention of offending any of you. The one benefit is that you have the opportunity to respond to this analysis.
The "Valid Criticisms" discussion spurred me to start the aywsf thread. I was astounded that the topic garnered so many fervent responses. My original reason for starting the thread was to see if other serious fantasy writers (in this case all unpublished in book form) were running into the difficulties of Tolkien imitation and the pitfalls that go along with that, and how they were trying to overcome it, and how successful they thought they had been. I guess you could call it a more or less unscientific case study. The thread became a bit of a support group for fantasy writers' frustrations, which helped crystallize for me "six levels of seriousness" in writing fantasy.
Let me reiterate that I consider each level of seriousness to be, indeed, serious, and not at all worthy of contempt. I myself have passed from level one to the succeeding ones as I have gotten more serious about my own writing.
To recap:
1. personal satisfaction (ex.: emotional wellbeing) - akin to Tolkien's 'escape' from "On Faerie Stories"
2. self expression (personal aesthetic pleasure)
3. communication (an audience is part of the consideration)
4. good plot and character development
5. the inner consistency of reality
6. evolution of consciousness (this is a concept from Owen Barfield, a better description than what I gave on the other thread).
At the risk of oversimplifying, there are two types of evolution of consciousness. First, there is new awareness of distinctions where none were before comprehended (like someone indigenous to an equatorial region aware afar of snow, who then visits my home state of Michigan in February and becomes aware of snow, sleet, slush, and so on). Second, there is increased awareness of the "isness" of something that has been part of one's life for some time (one of the best examples for our purposes is how Tolkien's Ents have changed our awareness of Trees). This second type of evolution of consciousness is akin to Tolkien's 'recovery' from "On Faerie Stories". I think that Tolkien's 'consolation' and 'eucatastrophe' can span the levels.
I noticed in hindsight that these levels corresponded somewhat to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When I brought up the six levels, interest in the thread moderated from its initial heated pace. I can think of two explanations for that: one, the newness of the thread was gone; two, the introduction of the six levels raised the discussion above the need-level of a support group; analysis was not their interest.
Some responses to the six levels were offered, and must be taken at face value. For the rest, reading through the posts allows for general categorization of various writers' efforts.
I have been writing long enough such that despite my meagre talents I have been able to hone my craft enough to even consider approaching level 6. Others have been writing for a few years, and have attained to higher levels due to their high level of talent. I am consistently impressed, for example, with Nar's perspicacity.
Conclusions:
1. Granted, I am discussing unpublished works that cannot be read in order to determine their artistic value or level of seriousness (which I'm hoping are synonymous terms).
2. Some writers, such as StarCupCake, show an aptitude toward beauty of expression that rivals and perhaps surpasses published works in certain ways, having to do with a Sense of Place. Her 'in the Blue' captures an essence of between-dream that is haunting in its beauty.
Her example brings up a tension that seems to me to be central to the issue of the genre: the publishing industry is looking for good plot and character development because the reader is understood to want to connect to a character and care about what happens to her/him. On the other hand, fantasy lovers are aware of a Sense Of Place that is equally important for good fantasy. Tolkien's Middle Earth is for me the primary example of this. This is part of the success of C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles, despite their failure in other ways vis-a-vie Tolkien's ouvre. The problem is that many fiction lovers, such as at least two in my own writer's group, have little sympathy for this 'sense of place'. One of my sympathetic readers sees this sense of place as little more than the paraphernalia of run-of-the-mill fantasy that must be put up with. But to me it seems to be at the core of escape, recovery, and consolation.
3. There are other writers posting in the aywsf thread who revel in precisely the sword-and-sorcery fantasy that is bemoaned in the Valid Criticisms thread.
This points to the fact that there are at least two fantasy mountains, shall we say, down whose streams flow, feeding the main courses of the river of fantasy, and the mixture of the two seems to be inevitable, except that all artist-writers are free to dip their buckets into whatever part of the river and streams, at any place in the geography of story they please. So one may dip in a purely Nordic stream, or further down one may dip into a confluence of Celtic and Nordic myths. My own story shows a choice to dip into a variety of streams relatively high in the mountains and create my own confluence for my particular 'soup of story'. I think Kalessin's rant bemoans the tendency of most published works to dip their buckets down in the valley where the river is wide and the confluence is thoroughly mixed and the Sense of Place is more or less washed out by all the other elements of story.
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