I usually bill myself as a high fantasy author on the web. More specifically, an ‘aspiring author of the high-fantasy kind’. By the time I’d plotted the final book of my trilogy, I realized I probably had an epic high fantasy on my hands.

Some people say the terms epic fantasy and high fantasy are interchangeable. And I can understand that; it’s tricky to pin them down and define them. The meanings evolve on a daily basis.

At this current juncture, I’d define a high fantasy as a story that features a world with different rule-sets from our own that is threatened by a malevolent evil.

And an epic fantasy, in my opinion, has everything to do with scope (although the classic definition has to do with cycles). So what is scope, exactly, when it comes to writing novels?

If you have one viewpoint character, and that character deals with one main conflict, that is a story with narrow focus. Things become more and more epic as you start to zoom-out the camera and get to know more and more characters, their back-stories, get to see more and more locations with vivid detail, and start to understand that the aforementioned malevolent evil threatens all of this; it’s not just the main character’s struggle anymore.

An epic fantasy has a cast of hundreds, even thousands. And through this overwhelming size, stakes are raised. This is what is meant by ‘epic scope’.

As examples, both epic fantasies The Lord of the Rings and Wheel of Time start out meager in scale (Frodo in the Shire, Rand in Two Rivers), but they keep zooming out and … crescendo until by the climax, you realize the stakes are so high, the outcome will literally affect the entire world, which, if done correctly, you have an emotional stake in. When this realization hits you, it kind of makes you go, ‘Whoa!’

New writers aren’t supposed to tackle an epic fantasy, it’s just not done. And it’s generally understood that, if they do, it’s going to be a painful learning experience where they have to lick their wounds and try to scale down to something that matches their current skill-level.

Okay. If you want to write your epic high fantasy novel, fine, don’t let anybody stop you. But if it fails, don’t give up. Use what you learned from that experience to write another book.

Translation: You will fail. Epically.

The agreed upon expected progression usually goes:

1. At least five short stories.

2. A stand-alone novel (or as many as it takes, rinse/repeat steps 1 and 2).

3. Now you can try and tackle something larger in scope.

They say a lot of first-time writers admire authors like Tolkien and George R. R. Martin so much that decide they want to start out attempting to emulate Tolkien’s world-building or Martin’s ability to tell two dozen interweaving stories in one novel. Basically, the beginning author’s ambitions tend to be  larger than their skill-level. Too often this leads to the dreaded ‘world-builder’s disease’, a very counter-productive thing.

I’m guilty of all of the above (and more). But I’ve been working through it.

During the editing process, I’m especially starting to understand what all those established authors were trying to warn me about. This has been a painful, yet, rewarding experience.

I’ll promise one thing: I’m going to do this the best I can. If I somehow beat the odds and write a professional-quality high fantasy epic for my first novel, Then Alleluia! I’d be a very rare exception to the rule. So I understand that I will probably crash and burn. And I’ve accepted this. To keep going, sometimes I ask myself: If you’re going to fail, why not do it epically?