If you have been following the adventures of Jane Austen, vampire (Jane Bites Back, Goes Batty and Jane Vows Vengeance) you are quite familiar with our featured author Michael Thomas Ford. The author of over 50 books, acclaimed columnist and non-fiction writer, Michael has been a favorite of ours here at BestFantasyStories ever since his Jane Series came out. When I asked him to do a guest blog, I wasn’t sure someone with a busy schedule like his could find the time. But you know what they say – ask a busy person if you want to get something done, and Michael has delivered to us a very insightful chat on the nature of our favorite genre, fantasy. Enjoy!

The Reality of Fantasy

This past Sunday, Meryl Streep won her third Academy Award, for playing former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. This is notable for several reasons, most of them personal to Streep and to those with an interest in Oscar trivia, but the thing that interests me is that, once again, the Oscar has gone to someone playing a real-life figure.

Since 2000, 8 of the 12 Best Actress Oscars and 6 of the 12 Best Actor Oscars have been awarded to performances based on actual people and events. Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Reese Witherspoon as June Carter, Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, Colin Firth as King George the VI — the roles are varied, to be sure. Yet when it comes down to it, what is being rewarded isn’t so much an ability to bring a character to life as it is to effectively mimic someone whose appearance and personality are often (although certainly not always) already familiar to us.

Why does this matter? It doesn’t, really. Awards seldom have anything to do with anything other than popularity. But it raises an interesting question — why do we frequently reward artists for using existing characters rather than for creating entirely new ones? Why are we seemingly more impressed with the ability to copy than we are by the ability to make us believe in someone with whom we have absolutely no prior connection?

Perhaps it’s because it’s easier to gauge the success of a performance when we have something against which to measure it. Streep succeeds because she mirrors the speech, mannerisms, and attitude we associate with Margaret Thatcher. Foxx succeeds because he embodies the person we already know as Ray Charles and does it effectively enough that we believe we’re watching Charles on screen.

Yes, it takes talent (or in the case of Kidman’s Woolf, a particularly good prosthetic nose) to bring someone from history to life. Yet isn’t it more impressive when an actor takes a character created by a writer and makes us believe in her? In 2007 Marion Cotillard won the Best Actress statue for her performance as Edith Piaf. It was a stunning performance in a wonderful film, and I loved it. But anyone who saw Julie Christie’s performance in Away from Her as Fiona Anderson, a woman whose advancing Alzheimer’s profoundly affects her relationship with her husband, knows who had the more difficult job. I left the theater after spending time with Cotillard’s Piaf knowing more about the French chanteuse than I did going in, and I think the film and performance say a lot about the passions that drive artists. But at the end of my time spent with Christie’s Fiona, I sat in my seat crying over the life of a woman who never really existed except on film. Christie made me believe so fully in Fiona and her struggle that I felt as if I knew her, and her loss hurt deeply. Cotillard enhanced my experience of a person I already knew; Christie introduced me to someone I’d never met and will never forget.

This trend of relying on historic — or at least familiar — figures is evident in today’s popular literature as well. Frequently we see novels in which recognizable characters are front and center. Often the events in which the character participates are entirely invented, but the character is nonetheless familiar. And so we have Abraham Lincoln as a vampire hunter or, in the case of my own novels, Jane Austen as a vampire. There are also numerous novels in which Austen’s characters are characters themselves, plunged into new adventures but still recognizable enough that we already have some notion of who they are.

I’ll be the first to admit that there’s more than a hint of laziness in this approach, although in many cases (my own, I hope, included) it’s used to comic effect and doesn’t merely reflect a lack of imagination on the part of the author. Still, it’s a type of shorthand. In writing Jane Austen as a vampire, I had a lot to draw on, and much of the tone of the books comes from the notion of this character so many of us know and love being thrust into a ridiculous situation. The books would not be nearly as effective if my Jane were plain old Jane Smith, disgruntled author, who suddenly finds herself undead. And I am very aware of this. My books would not exist without Jane Austen. Or, for that matter, Lord Byron and Charlotte Brontë.

I’m proud of “my” Jane and Byron and Charlotte. But am I as proud of them as I am of the characters I’ve made up from whole cloth in my other novels? Probably just a little less. Not a lot, mind you. I love “my” Jane her dearly, and much of who vampire Jane is comes from me. Still, I’m always aware that the success of my series is owed to the real Jane Austen, and that without her my books wouldn’t exist.

Something else I can’t help but think is that this tendency to give Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar for playing Truman Capote, while ignoring Alan Rickman’s eight pitch-perfect turns as antihero Severus Snape, or to laud the latest Jonathan Franzen novel while attributing the success of J.K. Rowling’s novels to adolescent wish-fulfillment really means that we’re much more comfortable with “reality” than we are with “fantasy.” Although my novels for adults (apart from the Austen vampire books) are primarily reality-based, my work for young readers is mostly in the horror/supernatural category. When these books first appeared, I was surprised by how many people asked me when I was going to write “real” books. It took me a while to understand that what they considered genre books they also considered to be somehow less legitimate, and therefore less valuable, than books based in the “real” world.

This was, and continues to be, confusing to me. My perspective is that the heart of a story is, well, the story, whatever that might be. The person underestimated by everyone (including himself) who rises to the occasion and discovers his inner strength. The frailties of the human heart. The conflict between good and evil. Take your pick. Everything else is how you dress that story up, and you can dress it in the costume of fantasy, the shroud of horror, the cowboy boots and hat of a Western, the button-down shirt and khakis of the “real” world, or what have you. It doesn’t really matter. As long as the fundamental story is sound and people close the book thinking about whatever it is you intended for them to think about, you’ve done your job.

Yet still there exists this bias against fantasy, horror, and science fiction, as if those of us who write it somehow have an easier time of it because we get to make it all up. And there exists a bias against those of us who read it because somehow we’re escaping “reality,” as if we prefer talking dragons and hobbits because we aren’t clever enough to understand the inner workings of “real” people. It’s why people like perpetually grumpy critic Harold Bloom get their panties in a bunch when the National Book Foundation awards its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to someone like Stephen King.

Whatever. I don’t let it keep me up at night. But I do think