How to Write a Fantasy Novel, Step by Step

To write a fantasy novel, decide what kind of fantasy it is, build only as much of the world as the story needs, give the magic limits and a cost, put a character with a clear want at the centre, and keep every rule of the world consistent from the first page to the last. The rest of the craft is the same as any novel. The nine steps below take the fantasy-specific parts in turn, with what J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, Brandon Sanderson and Diana Wynne Jones actually wrote about them, checked in their own essays, letters and books.

What Makes a Novel a Fantasy?

A fantasy novel is one where something impossible in our world is real in the story's world, and the story treats it as real. Tolkien gave the genre its working vocabulary in "On Fairy-Stories", a lecture he gave at the University of St Andrews on 8 March 1939 and published in 1947. Our world is the Primary World. The writer's invented one is a Secondary World.

His description of what a fantasy writer does: "He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside."

The phrase he borrowed from the dictionary for what holds that belief together is "the inner consistency of reality". It is the one test every step below comes back to. Tolkien again: "The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken".

What Are the Steps to Write a Fantasy Novel?

1. Choose your kind of fantasy.
2. Build the world the story needs, and no more.
3. Give the magic rules, limits and a cost.
4. Draw the map before the journey.
5. Put a character with a want at the centre.
6. Plot the story, and outline as much as suits you.
7. Show the world through the story, not before it.
8. Plan the length.
9. Revise for consistency.

Step 1: Which Kind of Fantasy Are You Writing?

Start with where the story happens, because it decides how much you have to invent. There are three broad answers.

• A Secondary World. The whole world is invented, from its maps to its gods. Epic and high fantasy live here, and so does most sword and sorcery. You build the most, and the reader needs the most help finding their feet.
• A portal. A character from our world crosses into another one. The reader learns the new world through someone as lost as they are, which makes exposition easier.
• Our world, with magic in it. Urban fantasy, magical realism and contemporary fantasy keep the Primary World and add one impossible thing. The worldbuilding is smaller, but the rules of the impossible thing still have to hold.

Read widely in the kind you choose. The conventions differ, and so do reader expectations about length and pace.

Step 2: How Much Worldbuilding Do You Need?

Enough to make the story believable, and no more. Tolkien is clear that it is hard work. Anyone can write the words "the green sun", he says, but "To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft."

The trap is doing that labour instead of writing the book. Brandon Sanderson, in his essay on his Third Law of magic (2013), warns about "worldbuilder's disease": "Practicing worldbuilding is important, but to have a well-balanced story, a potential writer will also need to practice prose, characterization, and plotting." His fix is depth over breadth. Follow a few inventions all the way through, how they shape money, faith, war and daily life, rather than inventing many and following none: "this law challenges me to create deep worldbuilding instead of just wide worldbuilding."

Keep what you decide in one place you can search, so the details do not drift between chapters. What belongs in it is covered in how to build a worldbuilding bible.

Step 3: How Do You Create a Magic System?

Decide what the magic can do, what it cannot do, and what it costs, and show the reader those rules before the magic solves anything. Sanderson's First Law is the standard statement of the problem: "An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic." Magic that saves the day without being set up reads as a cheat.

Not every fantasy needs hard rules. A mysterious magic works well, as long as it makes problems rather than solving them. The three laws, hard and soft magic, and the unofficial Zeroth Law are set out in full, in Sanderson's own words, on Sanderson's laws of magic.

Step 4: Should You Draw a Map First?

For any story with a journey in it, yes. Tolkien wrote to the novelist Naomi Mitchison in 1954, while she was reading proofs of The Lord of the Rings: "I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit (generally with meticulous care for distances). The other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities, and in any case it is weary work to compose a map from a story".

The map does not need to be art. Its job is to fix distances, so that a ride that takes four days in chapter 3 still takes four days in chapter 20. Whether a map goes in the finished book is a separate choice. Diana Wynne Jones, in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (1996), her mock travel guide to the genre's clichés, opens with it: "Find the Map. It will be there. No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one." Her joke that follows is a warning worth heeding: "you are going to have to visit every single place on this Map, whether it is marked or not. This is a Rule." A map is a promise. Leave places on it the story never visits, and readers notice.

Step 5: Who Is Your Fantasy Protagonist?

Someone who wants something the world makes hard to get. The magic and the map are the setting; the story is what a person does about a problem. Readers forgive a thin world far sooner than a character with no clear want.

Give the protagonist a goal the reader can name, a flaw that gets in the way, and a reason the problem is theirs and not someone else's. A fantasy opponent works best with a goal of their own, as how to write a villain sets out. The chosen one, the farm boy with a secret heritage and the wise old mentor are familiar for a reason. They still work, but only when you choose them on purpose.

Step 6: How Do You Plot a Fantasy Novel?

The same way as any novel: a want, a series of escalating obstacles and a climax that settles it. Fantasy leans on the quest shape, a journey out and a return changed, which is why the hero's journey is often taught alongside it. Use it as a check, not a formula.

Fantasy is also the genre where outlining pays most. A world with rules, distances and history punishes a plot that contradicts itself, and fixing a broken rule in chapter 30 can mean rewriting chapters 3 to 29. Writing into the dark works too, but plan to spend the revision checking the world. The two approaches are weighed on plotter vs pantser.

Step 7: How Do You Introduce a Fantasy World Without an Info Dump?

Show the world as the story needs it, one new thing at a time. A prologue of history, a page of geography or a conversation in which two characters explain to each other what both already know will stall the book before it starts. Let the reader learn the world the way the protagonist acts in it: the rule of magic when someone pays its cost, the politics when they get in the way. The craft behind that is show, don't tell.

The famous exception proves the rule. The Lord of the Rings does open with a prologue, "Concerning Hobbits", but it was written for readers who already knew hobbits: the prologue points them back to The Hobbit, published seventeen years before. A debut has no earlier book to lean on, so its opening has to earn the reader's interest on its own.

Voice matters as much as facts. Le Guin's essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" (1973, collected in The Language of the Night, 1979) is about exactly this: fantasy written in flat, modern, everyday prose, with characters who talk like they live down the road. Her line: "the point about Elfland is that you are not at home there. It's not Poughkeepsie. It's different." The names, the speech and the rhythm of the sentences should tell the reader they are somewhere else, before any fact does.

Step 8: How Long Should a Fantasy Novel Be?

Long enough for the story, and within what publishers in your kind of fantasy take for a debut. Fantasy runs longer than most genres, but a first novel that is far longer than its shelf is harder to sell. The sourced ranges, and why the famous long books are a poor guide for a debut, are on fantasy novel word count.

Step 9: How Do You Revise a Fantasy Novel?

Read it once for the story and once for the world. The second read is where fantasy differs. Check every name and spelling, every distance and journey time, every age and date, and every use of magic against the rules you set. Any one slip is a moment where, in Tolkien's words, "disbelief arises", and the reader is outside the world looking in.

A timeline helps here more than in any other genre, because a fantasy calendar is one only you know. The checks are set out in checking story chronology for consistency.

Where Did Tolkien Start?

With languages. A common assumption is that Tolkien invented Middle-earth and then gave it languages. He said it was the other way round. In a letter to his American publisher, Houghton Mifflin, in 1955 (Letters, no. 165): "The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse."

That is not a method to copy. The point is that a fantasy world can start from anything you care about deeply enough to follow through: a language, a map, a magic, a question. Sanderson's equivalent is his Zeroth Law, to start from what excites you and work out the rules afterwards.

Which Fantasy Quotes Are Misattributed?

• "Fairy tales are more than true" is Gaiman's wording, not Chesterton's. Neil Gaiman put it at the front of Coraline (2002): "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten", credited to G. K. Chesterton. It is a paraphrase. What Chesterton wrote, in "The Red Angel" (Tremendous Trifles, 1909), is: "The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon."
• "Willing suspension of disbelief" is Coleridge's, and Tolkien disagreed with it. The phrase comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817), chapter XIV: "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." Fantasy pages often credit Tolkien with it. He quoted it in "On Fairy-Stories" only to reject it: "But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens." In his view a good fantasy does not ask the reader to suspend disbelief. It earns belief, by the inner consistency of its world.
• "Worldbuilder's disease" is not a ban on worldbuilding. Sanderson's own caveat: it "is only a problem for writers who want to make a professional living writing books. If your goal is to have fun worldbuilding, and the writing of a book is something secondary to that, then there's nothing at all wrong with focusing your time on your setting."

A Worked Example

Here is the plan for a fantasy novel, The Salt Road.

• Kind of fantasy: a Secondary World, with one magic.
• The magic: saltcraft. A ring of salt, sung over, keeps the drowned dead out. Cost: every ward takes one of the singer's memories.
• The map: Fenwater, a marsh town, and the Glass Hills, nine days away on foot by the salt road.
• Protagonist and want: Mara, a salt-carrier, wants to bring the hill singers to Fenwater before the spring flood.
• Scene 1, The flood at Fenwater: Mara's mother sings a ward to hold back the first flood, and afterwards cannot remember Mara's name. (The reader learns the cost.)
• Scene 2, The salt road: on day four the drowned dead find Mara camped in the reeds, and an unbroken ring of salt holds them. (The reader learns the rule.)
• Scene 3, The Glass Hills: on day nine Mara finds the singers gone, and must sing the great ward herself. She chooses which memory to give. (The magic solves the problem, by the rule, at the cost the reader already saw.)

The world appears one piece per scene. The nine days on the map are nine days in the story. And the climax is a choice about the cost, which turns the magic into character.

How Do You Plan a Fantasy Novel in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app for Windows, macOS and Linux. Its Codex holds the world beside the manuscript, its Outliner is a board of cards, one for every document in the book, each with a synopsis, and its Timeline puts the story's events on an axis to scale.

1. Open the Codex from its button in the menu bar. In Locations, click the + (New entry) and choose Location or Blank. Name the place, and write one line under the name about what it is.
2. Click Add fields to record the facts the story must keep, such as a field called "Days to the Glass Hills". The group name is optional.
3. In Custom / Lore, make an entry for the magic the same way. Add Multi-line fields for its rule and its cost, and fill them in before you draft a scene that uses it.
4. Open the Outliner on the Draft and add a card for each scene with Add › Scene. In each synopsis, write what happens and the one new thing the reader learns about the world.
5. Open the Timeline and click Add Plotline. The + on the lane (Add event) opens New Timeline Event in the Inspector: give the event a title and a Start, pick the scene under Linked chapter/scene, and click Create Event. The board is to scale, so a journey that should take nine days looks like nine days.
6. The axis counts in days by default. In Timeline settings, Unit lets you count in whatever your world keeps time by, such as moons or years.
7. When you revise, open a place's entry and click its Mentions tab to see every passage where it is named, and check each against the facts in its fields.

The same Codex holds characters, factions and history, and what to include in a story bible covers the rest of it. When a scene needs to move to keep the world in order, the Outliner is where you drag it.

Common Mistakes

• Building the world instead of writing the book. Build what the next chapter needs, then write the chapter.
• Opening with history. A prologue of ancient wars before the reader cares about anyone is the classic info dump. Open on a person with a problem.
• Magic with no cost. If it is free, it solves everything, and there is no story.
• Solving the climax with a new rule. Show the rule earlier, ideally in a scene where it costs something.
• Distances that change. A ride of four days in one chapter and two in another breaks the map. Fix journeys on the map and the timeline first.
• Modern voice in an invented world. Le Guin's point: if the characters talk like your neighbours, the reader never leaves home.
• Names nobody can say. A reader who cannot pronounce a name stumbles over it every time it appears. Keep invented names few, distinct and sayable.

Sources

Retrieved 30 October 2026.

• J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories", lecture at the University of St Andrews, 8 March 1939, first published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947), read in Tree and Leaf, through Open Library's search inside (archive.org). Lecture date from Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (eds.), Tolkien On Fairy-stories (2008) (archive.org).
• Humphrey Carpenter (ed.), The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981), no. 144 to Naomi Mitchison (1954) and no. 165 to the Houghton Mifflin Co. (1955) (archive.org). The no. 165 sentence was checked in its quotations in Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000), and other Tolkien studies.
• Ursula K. Le Guin, "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" (Pendragon Press, 1973), collected in The Language of the Night (1979). Quoted as given in Michele Landsberg, Reading for the Love of It (1987) (archive.org), and in 80! Memories and Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin.
• Brandon Sanderson, Sanderson's Third Law of Magic, September 2013, and Sanderson's First Law, February 2007.
• Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (1996; revised edition 2006), "How to Use This Book" (archive.org).
• J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), Prologue, "Concerning Hobbits" (archive.org).
• G. K. Chesterton, "The Red Angel", in Tremendous Trifles (1909) (Project Gutenberg).
• Neil Gaiman, Coraline (2002), epigraph (archive.org).
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), chapter XIV (Project Gutenberg).