Starting a Contemporary Fantasy short

Hello there,

Last week I completed my teen drama short. I finished it after completing a written test for a content writer position. Funnily enough one of the questions in my interview for the position is how do I handle avoiding any burnout with writing and I just wanted to send them every script I have written on this challenge!

I just don't and can't have time for burnout.

So teen drama done. Not my best work, however the story is about a teenager who is also a hired assassin. I guess something like Umbrella Academy but with teenage assassins? I dunno but it might be worth keeping in the back of my mind and see if I can make a series idea out of it?

Now though, I am onto the next genre. I am moving away from the drama section of the list it seems. Medical, political, docu-dramas have been the focus of the last couple of weeks. Now I move onto fantasy. Contemporary, dark and high epic fantasies are the next three genres to write in. I am a big fan of Lord of the Rings and Tolkien so I think this will be great fun for me. I already have written a comedy high epic fantasy called FIVE ORCS . Pax Alpha is a pilot for a series that is set in Roman Empire times and is a fantasy too. I also have several ideas for more fantasy comedies so I should be OK for this one.

Contemporary fantasy is up next. I will need to complete this by 6th February. So this blog is a stream of consciousness where I try to start my mind working on an idea. Apologies if this is veering wildly from thought to thought but hey, you get to know what my writing process is.

Imagine this is a well thought out outline.

So, some information before we start. Contemporary fantasy is fantasy set in the present. You may know it as Urban Fantasy as these are often put together as one. Both are fantasies that are set in the present time of the author. Modern times. However, Contemporary and Urban have a slight difference. Urban Fantasy focuses it's setting in a city or a densely populated area. Urban Fantasy deals with issues like conflicts with police, drugs, gangs, real estate developers, toxic pollution, media influence and social isolation while surrounded by millions of people.

An example of Contemporary Fantasy would be Harry Potter and the Twilight saga. Harry Potter is set mostly in and around the school of Hogwarts which is secluded in the Scottish Highlands. Twilight is set in Forks Washington, which although a city, is not on the same scale as the L.A setting of the movie Bright. What We Do in the Shadows which is set in Staten Island, New York is another example of Urban Fantasy.

So this is the setting we are working in. Modern times. Not necessarily a city setting but if I end up with an idea in a city, then I will settle on it since many people put Urban and Contemporary together. I want to move onto the fantasy element now but first:

What is interesting about modern fantasy settings is that they still hold classic fantasy creatures / races. Dragons, dwarves and fairies come from way back in history but still dominate the fantasy genre. I struggle to think of a fantasy creature that is a 21st century creation? Something that would fit in alongside dragons and co. while being a newer, evolved addition to the genre.

So I think it's interesting to look at some common fantasy monsters / races and see when they seemed to have popped up in history. Now for dragons we can go back to the bible at least and see in the Old Testament, Leviathan appears in Psalms 74:14 as a multiheaded sea serpent. God kills the monster and gives it as food to the Hebrews in the wilderness. Dwarves seem to have come from Norse mythology whereas Fairies, at least the term itself, looks to have come along during the early Middle Ages also. I think dragons are a good place to start and imagine what they might look like if they were in the real world and had a chance to evolve.

Like Birds evolved from a group of meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods. What would the "Dragon Bird" look like if dragons were real. There is a...sort of...dragon like dinosaur that existed. A tree climbing and gliding family of dinosaurs called Scansoriopterygidae. The only fossil from the family was found in China in the late Jurassic period. It's name is Yi Qi.

(Find out more about Yi Qi here)

Of course we could imagine this is the ancestor of bats right? And there are some similarities between the two (I say it seems there are, I am in no way qualified to give a lecture on it) but there are differences that show it has similarities to a flying squirrel instead.

Now what has Yi Qi got to do with Contemporary Fantasy and creating a new modern fantast creature / race for a short? Well, what if, I was to plan a short based around the idea of Jurassic Park but for fantasy creatures? Something like this? Could a wizard open a park like this?

(Hmm...would anyone believe he look like a wizard?)

You might remember in Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs, like velociraptors, are created but not at all like the real scientific understanding. In the franchise, they reason this by saying the park didn't want real life, it wanted excitement. All of it is just make believe. They couldn't actually create 100%, true to life, dinosaurs. In fact, the raptors that terrorized Jurassic Park were based on a Velociraptor relative: Deinonychus antirrhopus, a much larger dinosaur that inhabited North America in the early Cretaceous period.

So, and this is where I conclude my thought process for this evening. If I was planning a wizard opening up a park for fantasy creatures, he might be manipulating the attractions we see. I can work on taking creatures and races like fairies, dragons and more and working on new versions of them. Something that will seem fresh and a nice spin on it all.

That would be great. However, I need to keep in mind these shorts are meant to be low budget. Oh dear, the short might just be a wizard giving a PowerPoint presentation.

Thanks for reading, let's see what happens in 7 days.

Kevin of Many Colours