Why I’m Writing Fantasy (and Why It Matters to Me)

I don’t remember the name of the book.

I’ve been searching for it for years, and it still hasn’t turned up. I was around eight or nine, and it was library time, which was always one of my favorites. Right alongside computer time, when I’d use my free minutes to write little stories of my own, these minutes felt like a small pocket of quiet I could count on. I remember walking between the shelves of the library, heading toward the section that housed Junie B. Jones, as always. And there, in the wrong spot (or maybe the perfect one), I found a fantasy novel about three witch sisters. I didn’t know it then, but that book would change everything.

What I remember isn’t the plot so much as the feeling. Their bond. Their world. The sense that there was somewhere else I could step into for a while, where I realized that sisterhood could be gentle and protective, not something you had to survive. At the time, I needed that more than I knew how to say. My home life was complicated, and reality felt heavy in ways I didn’t yet have language for. That book didn’t fix anything, but it offered something just as important. Distance. Safety. A reminder that other worlds existed, and that I could breathe inside them.

I never really stopped looking for that feeling. And I never stopped escaping. I just found new doorways to it. I feel it now in stories like Red Queen, The Hunger Games, and The Legendborn Cycle. These are the worlds I step into when I need distance, perspective, or proof that survival can look like many different things. Each one offers escape, yes, but also courage, reckoning, and the quiet reminder that wanting a better world is not the same as refusing to see this one. Eventually, those doorways led me from reading stories to wanting to write my own.

Fantasy gives me space. It lets me step back from the noise without turning away from truth. It offers hope without pretending things are simple, and it allows big emotions to exist without apology. Though it has always been an escape for me, fantasy has never been a shield. The stories I love don’t pretend the world is gentle or fair. They hold space for wrongs and injustice, for loss, for violence, and for the kind of pain that leaves a mark. There can be gore. There can be heartbreak. Sometimes there are happy endings, and sometimes there aren’t. Often, what fantasy offers instead is honesty. A way to look at hard truths from a distance that makes them bearable, and a way to imagine a better world precisely because this one still falls short. The ache that lingers after those stories isn’t a failure of escape. It’s part of why they matter. In fantasy, feelings can be vast and messy and meaningful, and no one has to minimize them to make the story more “real.”

The real world can be overwhelming. Words pile up. Thoughts overlap. As someone who lives with bipolar disorder, anxiety, and OCD, both the world and my own brain can get very loud. Fantasy doesn’t silence that noise, but it helps me move through it. It gives shape to chaos. It creates room to explore fear, courage, longing, and hope from a safe distance. When I write fantasy, I’m not trying to shock anyone or prove how dark things can be. I’m not interested in spectacle for its own sake. I’m interested in meaning. In transformation. In the quiet bravery it takes to keep going, even when the path isn’t clear.

A lot of me lives in my stories, though rarely in obvious ways. Sometimes it’s metaphor. Sometimes it’s emotion. Sometimes it’s just a question I haven’t finished asking yet. Each story decides for itself how close it wants to stand. I write fantasy because I like to escape. But I also write it because escape can be healing. Because stepping into another world can help you return to this one a little steadier, a little braver, a little less alone.

Fantasy has never made me less grounded or less thoughtful. If anything, it’s taught me how to pay closer attention. It’s given me language for things I couldn’t name yet, and it’s reminded me that imagination and intelligence are not opposites. Fantasy writers don’t write fantasy because they are uneducated about the world, its quite the opposite actually. We are observers. Translators. We build worlds not because we don’t understand this one, but because we do.

If someone closes one of my stories someday feeling hopeful, a little braver, or quietly changed, then I’ve done what that long-lost book once did for me.

I don’t know its title. But I know what it gave me. And I’m still writing toward that feeling.

Until the next page, Sam.