Normally I hate books about writing. All those ‘how to write a best seller’ titles by people who evidently haven’t... (Stephen King was allowed to, obviously). Many books about writing perpetuate ideas that we can all be best sellers, bound for fame and fortune. In practice 90% of aspiring authors will make nothing, and of the remaining 10% who do, half of those will make no more than a few thousand dollars a year. There is no magic formula for writing a successful book. What we get instead, are endless rip offs of last year’s new big idea. Try searching for ‘boy wizard’ or ’50 shades’ in amazon’s search engines if you don’t know how bad it is...

While I’m grouching, I’d like to mention that I really hate how predictable the fantasy genre can be. Yet another mediaeval style swords and sorcery. Yet another unpronounceable barbarian on a quest. And behold, a woman inexplicably wearing a chainmail bikini...

So it was with no small amount of delight and relief that I read ‘Desiring Dragons’ – Kevan Manwaring’s valiant attempt to get some originality and enchantment back into the fantasy genre, and give new writers a realistic sense of what’s out there, both in terms of writing process, and the industry.

Unusually for books about writing, Kevan gets into the philosophy of creativity. What is this stuff for? What does it add to the world? What, beyond longings for fame and fortune, might motivate us to write fantasy? The issues of how we write, are also explored. I found the idea of author journey as heroic journey really interesting, and Kevan charts the tale of book creating in an imaginative and engaging way. For me, books are more like babies, gestated slowly, squeezed out with no small amount of pain, then considerable effort trying to mould them into something decent before they run away and never phone me at the weekend.

As a fiction author and teacher of creative writing, Kevan Manwaring knows what he’s talking about. While his experience isn’t universal, and this is only one story about the making of stories, he’s also very clear that we’re all different. He brings his mythic knowledge and storytelling skills to present a colourful and very readable approach – not so much how-to, more why-to.

This is Kevan’s strongest non-fiction work to date and an excellent antidote to all the ‘how to write a best seller’ nonsense out there.

You can find Desiring Dragons anywhere there are books, but here's the amazon link.

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