A Quote by Lauren Schmidt Hissrich

I didn't have a lot of experience with adult fantasy. And that's sort of what intersected with me and 'The Witcher.' — © Lauren Schmidt Hissrich
I didn't have a lot of experience with adult fantasy. And that's sort of what intersected with me and 'The Witcher.'
For everyone else who aren't fantasy fans or who don't know anything about 'The Witcher', this is something that we can experience together because it's drawn from the novels, but there is so much within the novels that we have developed.
When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.
That, to me, is the core of fantasy - real people in a crazy environment, dealing with crazy problems. That's what I think the books of 'The Witcher' did really well, and it's what attracted me to them, in the first place.
I was in the fantasy. I was selling myself on the fantasy as I was doing it. It never occurred to me. I did take notes, but just because I am a writer. I've been a writer since I was five. You don't have any sort of outlandish, shocking, extraordinary, horrifying experience without writing it down, because I know and knew that you forget things. No matter how outrageous and amazing and extraordinary and seemingly unforgettable an experience is, it's kind of like a dream. It will erode inevitably, for me.
The way I felt growing up, which was like an outcast - I was weird, I was a nerd, I read fantasy books - I think a lot of fantasy book readers and a lot of readers and writers in general have that experience of isolation.
What's interesting to me is how many vampire/urban fantasy authors are writing young adult series as well, often set in the same world as their adult books, but focused on a younger audience.
And I wanted to do a movie [Moonrise Kingdom] about a childhood romance - a very powerful experience of childhood romance. About what it's like to just be blindsided, when you're in fifth grade or sixth grade, by these kinds of feelings. Along the way, I sort of mixed in some interest in "young adult fantasy" writing.
The Seventies were an interesting time to be a reader or writer of fantasy. Tolkien was the great master. Lin Carter was resurrecting wonders of British and American fantasy from the early twentieth century in his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.
There has been a lot of bad fantasy in the past - I'm by no means saying that all classic fantasy out there is bad - but there has been a lot of bad fantasy written by people who read a lot of fantasy and so all they keep doing is recycling it.
To me, what I define as defiance, in some ways, is knowing the "reality" and having the ability to possess a realist mindstate yet still working towards the fantasy and still being childish. While still having the understanding and capacity that would generally inspire pessimism: some sort of more realist perspective that I think most people classify as adult. Anything like that and anything that's sort of fun.
Fantasy Man's my favourite, I think, because he's sort of like Don Quixote. He lives in a fantasy world, but he gets jolted back into reality, and I guess that's me, really!
Fantasy is a genre that allows me to create anything I want. That, in turn, allows me to explore any sort of idea I'm curious about. I love it because Fantasy is a genre that asks, "What if...?" That's my favorite question.
I feel more confident and like I have more to say. I feel like I'm working more than ever, not just from fantasy, but actual experience. I'm an adult now - I actually have experience.
I did this movie called 'Lymelife' when I was 18, and you know, it was the first time I was working as an adult, a legal adult, and that was a huge growing experience for me.
Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.
Nobody wants to see the truth. Everybody wants to have the fantasy. When I look back at the books I was reading in my childhood were selling some sort of fantasy as well. Most stories are not going to tell the deep suffering of every day. No book prepared me for the suffering I would experience in life because the word "suffering" does not even describe what the suffering is. No story is going to tell you that, and no words can tell you that.
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