“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” - J. R. R. Tolkien
I love a great adventure story and it’s made even more spectacular by adding fantastical elements to it. As a youth, daydreaming of a dragon hiding out in the mountains behind my house at the foothills of the Bridger Mountains, evil orcs and goblins sneaking about in the shadows, and noble elves watching over from the forests seemed almost real. Where I grew up, the history of our town is stacked with epic adventure sagas of the Mountain Man Jim Bridger, The 3-7-77 Vigilantes, and other rugged frontiers that followed the Lewis and Clark expedition. The wilderness in Montana felt alive and undiscovered. Spending days romping around the woods behind our house, my imagination roamed, inventing fantastical adventures as I played.
Given my expansive and playful imagination as a child, I was naturally drawn in by epic fantasy stories much more so than others. The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter were among the first novels I truly enjoyed. My dad and I would spend evenings staying up and reading chapter by chapter of these classic fantasy’s that captured my attention as they have so many fantasy readers at young ages.
As I grew older and learned about a fellow Montana boy in the neighboring town who was finding enormous success in writing fantasy stories about a dragon rider, my attention on fantasy only became more interesting. Reading Christopher Paolini’s Eragon and the books to follow sealed my love for fantasy. I daydreamed about what it was like to find a dragon in the woods behind my house and find out how my fate would be tied to facing a powerful evil. I wanted to do what Paolini had done and write fantasy stories about dragons and their riders. After all, he was a young Montanan with a grand imagination, just like me.
Now that I’ve written my own dragon rider series and have continued to write more creative and imaginative fantasy worlds, I think about the question, why do I write fantasy? The motivations are many, aspiring to be known, wanting to share my ideas of what makes fantasy great with like-minded people, loving imagining myself as a character who is in an impossible situation facing impossible odds, and the list goes on, but the origins of where this fascination with magic and otherworldly creatures is one I can attribute largely to the stories I read as a youth and the inspiring journey of a fellow Montana author.
I love to hear back from readers like you who share a passion for fantasy books. Feel free to reach out and share your thoughts on social media or emailing me at ajwalker@ajwalkerauthor.com.
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Happy reading,
A J