If you’re an avid reader, you might have realized that fantasy short stories are hard to come by. That’s because fantasy as a genre is extremely hard to do in the short story format due to how many rules the writer has to establish and how complicated the rules are.
When creating anything in the fantasy genre, the author has to consider how much their audience is willing to let go of what they know to be true, and believe what the author is saying. This is called suspension of disbelief and it takes a skilled writer to do. Fantasy storytelling is so rich with detail that adding information without overwhelming the reader and still giving enough to tell a complete story is way more work than writing a slice of life about a regular person with a job and family. Every detail included in a fantasy story needs to add something, lest the author waste space talking about something that ultimately doesn’t matter to the plot.
Maybe the magic system the writer uses doesn’t have anything to do with the plot or characters and things would have ended the same way regardless of if the main characters had magic wands and rode brooms. At that point, what’s the point of making the genre fantasy in the first place if the story would end the same way regardless?
Although this is a common critique of fantasy short stories, one must remember that writing is an art form like music or painting. Sometimes the art exists because that’s what the artist wanted to create and that can be enough. These critiques are only meant to highlight all the fantasy genre could be and make creators aware of its limitations, hopefully giving creators the education and experience to create what they want confidently.
