The Lord of the Rings became my favorite book the first time I read it, and has remained so, despite the fact that age and maturity have made me more sensitive to its shortcomings.

Tolkien's work redefined the ground rules for future generations of fantasists, chiefly by virtue of the depth and tone of his world-building. Before Tolkien, fantasy typically required apology of some sort, a gimmick to explain why anyone would tell a story about the unreal. The fantasy world might be a dream, a moralizing parable, a self-conscious artificial fairy tale. Tolkien changed all that by insisting that his world of Middle-Earth stand on its own terms, requiring no explanation or authorial wink. All the languages, histories, genealogies, maps, and tales-within-a-tale that Tolkien crafted so laboriously contribute to the autonomy of his creation. This is a self-explaining world, a world greater and older than the stories that take place within it.

Readers who loved the sense of total immersion that Middle-Earth provided naturally wanted more. By the 1970s, the imitations were proliferating. Before long, there was a whole new generation of readers for whom the generic "fantasyland" of the Tolkien clones and Dungeons & Dragons was simply a given. Ironically, the very essence of the fantastic, subverting the rules of reality, was betrayed by this trend. Generic fantasyland became a completely known quanitity, whose basic rules were seldom questioned. At most, some writer would tweak a detail or two in the interests of originality.

Here's a partial list of fantasyland clichés:

• elves, dwarves (especially when spelled thus), goblins/orcs, little people, wizards, dragons
• magical artifacts that can save/destroy the world
• quests into danger, especially involving a small company of characters of different race/profession
• lofty, archaic-sounding language
• names that sound like Tolkien's Elvish names
• Invented languages
• maps, especially ones with mountains and forests indicated as Tolkien did
• lots of walking in wilderness landscapes, especially forests
• good vs. evil
• feudal kingdoms and isolated communal enclaves as the only political structures
• lost heir to the throne
• color coding (the character of creatures/people and of landscape features is shown by their physical appearance)
• technology stuck c. 1000 CE
• immersive, secondary world
• trilogy/series books

The more of these features a piece of fantasy writing has, the more likely it is to be quickly dismissed as yet another generic Tolkien clone. That's not good news for writers who actually like some of these things (I adore maps and languages, myself.) Some writers are so leery of this stigma that they avoid the entire European mythos, or work in different subgenres, such as urban fantasy and dark fantasy, that have more or less escaped the taint.

My own approach to finding a spot outside Tolkien's shadow is more subtle, but perhaps also more fundamental. I focus on making my characters very organic, people who (like us) make their way uncertainly through an unscripted life, driven by subtle complexities of character. Tolkien's characters all serve his cosmology, and this, perhaps, lies behind many of the items listed above.

Although most of my fantasy stories are set in a European-style milieu, I think they are basically a different kind of story than The Lord of the Rings or its imitators. They are about people who are not icons of anything, people who do not make history (except, perhaps, in a very fitful and accidental fashion). At least, that is my intention. I can only hope that it comes through in my writing.