Writing Creative Writing

Writing Fantasy Fiction

Build immersive worlds, compelling characters, and polished fantasy stories with Professor Elizabeth Evans

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Quick Course Facts
18
Self-paced, Online, Lessons
18
Videos and/or Narrated Presentations
6.4
Approximate Hours of Course Media
About the Writing Fantasy Fiction Course

Writing Fantasy Fiction is a practical course for writers who want to shape wonder, conflict, and imagination into a complete fantasy story. With Professor Elizabeth Evans, you will learn how to build immersive worlds, compelling characters, and polished fantasy stories while strengthening the craft choices that keep readers engaged.

Develop Your Fantasy Story From Worldbuilding To Revision

  • Learn how fantasy works as a story form and how to meet your reader’s expectations.
  • Build immersive worlds that support plot, character, culture, magic, and conflict.
  • Create compelling characters, villains, ensembles, and personal stakes that belong in your imagined world.
  • Revise fantasy fiction for clarity, depth, momentum, and a stronger finished manuscript.

Writing Fantasy Fiction guides you through the core skills needed to plan, draft, and refine a fantasy story with confidence.

This course begins with the foundations of the fantasy genre, helping you understand subgenres, reader promises, and the difference between a vivid idea and a story that can sustain a full narrative. You will develop premises that combine wonder and conflict, then shape those ideas into worlds designed around story needs rather than disconnected details.

Through focused lessons on worldbuilding, magic systems, myth, religion, culture, history, and power structures, you will learn how to make your setting feel coherent and alive. Professor Elizabeth Evans also covers character design in depth, showing how to create protagonists, rivals, villains, allies, mentors, and found family dynamics that grow naturally from the world you have built.

As the course moves into plot and scene craft, you will study quests, journeys, political plots, prophecy, chosen ones, exposition, sensory description, action, battles, monsters, and danger. You will also strengthen your Writing style through point of view, voice, clarity, and the careful use of invented language.

By the end of Writing Fantasy Fiction, you will have a stronger command of fantasy conventions, a clearer revision process, and practical tools for turning imaginative material into polished fantasy stories. You will leave better prepared to build immersive worlds, compelling characters, and emotionally satisfying fiction that gives readers a reason to keep turning pages.

Course Lessons

Full lesson breakdown

Lessons are organized by topic area and each includes descriptive copy for search visibility and student clarity.

Genre Foundations

2 lessons

Lesson 1: Understanding Fantasy as a Story Form

18 min Preview
This opening lesson defines fantasy as a story form rather than a collection of surface details. Students learn how fantasy uses the impossible to create meaning, pressure character choices, and resha…

Lesson 2: Choosing Your Fantasy Subgenre and Reader Promise

20 min
In this lesson, students learn how to choose a fantasy subgenre deliberately instead of treating “fantasy” as one broad shelf. The focus is on identifying the core experience a reader expects from epi…

Story Concept

1 lesson

Lesson 3: Developing a Premise with Wonder and Conflict

19 min
In this lesson, Professor Elizabeth Evans introduces the fantasy premise as a focused story engine: a striking source of wonder placed under meaningful pressure. Students learn how to move beyond a va…

Worldbuilding

2 lessons

Lesson 4: Building a World Around Story Needs

22 min
In this lesson, Professor Elizabeth Evans teaches a story-first approach to fantasy worldbuilding. Instead of inventing encyclopedic histories, languages, maps, and customs before the story has direct…

Lesson 5: Designing Cultures, Histories, and Power Structures

23 min
In this lesson, Professor Elizabeth Evans shows how to design fantasy cultures, histories, and power structures that feel lived-in without overwhelming the story. You will learn how to connect belief …

Magic and Myth

2 lessons

Lesson 6: Creating Magic Systems with Rules and Consequences

24 min
In this lesson, Professor Elizabeth Evans shows how to design fantasy magic that feels wondrous without becoming arbitrary. You will learn how to define what magic can do, what it cannot do, who can u…

Lesson 7: Using Myth, Religion, and Legend in Fantasy

21 min
This lesson shows how fantasy writers can draw from myth, religion, folklore, and legend without flattening them into decoration. Students learn to identify the narrative functions of sacred stories, …

Character Design

3 lessons

Lesson 8: Creating Protagonists Who Belong in the World

20 min
In this lesson, students learn how to design fantasy protagonists who feel native to their worlds rather than dropped into them from outside the story. The focus is on connecting character identity, d…

Lesson 9: Writing Villains, Rivals, and Moral Opposition

22 min
This lesson teaches fantasy writers how to design antagonistic forces that do more than threaten the hero. Students will distinguish villains, rivals, and moral opposition, then build adversaries whos…

Lesson 10: Building Ensembles, Allies, Mentors, and Found Family

19 min
This lesson shows how to design fantasy ensembles that feel purposeful rather than crowded. You will learn how allies, mentors, rivals, companions, and found-family figures can each pressure the prota…

Plot and Structure

2 lessons

Lesson 11: Structuring Quests, Journeys, and Political Plots

24 min
This lesson shows how to structure three major fantasy plot engines: the quest, the journey, and the political plot. You will learn how to separate movement from momentum, make each stage of a journey…

Lesson 12: Making Stakes Personal, Public, and Mythic

20 min
In this lesson, students learn how to build fantasy stakes that operate on three connected levels: personal, public, and mythic. Rather than treating “the fate of the kingdom” as automatically dramati…

Fantasy Conventions

1 lesson

Lesson 13: Handling Prophecy, Chosen Ones, and Familiar Tropes

21 min
This lesson examines how to use prophecy, chosen-one arcs, ancient artifacts, dark lords, magical bloodlines, mentors, quests, and other familiar fantasy conventions without producing a predictable st…

Scene Craft

3 lessons

Lesson 14: Writing Exposition Without Stalling the Story

23 min
Exposition is the information a reader needs in order to understand a fantasy story: history, magic, politics, geography, culture, prophecy, species, technology, religion, and the rules of danger. The…

Lesson 15: Creating Immersive Description and Sensory Detail

18 min
In this lesson, Professor Elizabeth Evans shows how immersive fantasy description works at the level of scene: not by listing visual details, but by filtering the world through a character’s body, att…

Lesson 16: Writing Action, Battles, Monsters, and Danger

22 min
This lesson focuses on writing fantasy danger scenes that feel clear, tense, and emotionally consequential. Students learn how to build action around character goals, spatial clarity, escalating compl…

Style and Clarity

1 lesson

Lesson 17: Managing Point of View, Voice, and Invented Language

21 min
In this lesson, Professor Elizabeth Evans examines three style choices that strongly affect fantasy readability: point of view, narrative voice, and invented language. You will learn how to choose a p…

Revision and Next Steps

1 lesson

Lesson 18: Revising a Fantasy Manuscript for Depth and Momentum

25 min
In this lesson, Professor Elizabeth Evans shows how to revise a fantasy manuscript for both depth and momentum . You will learn how to move beyond surface edits by testing whether your worldbuilding, …
About Your Instructor
Professor Elizabeth Evans

Professor Elizabeth Evans

Professor Elizabeth Evans guides this AI-built Virversity course with a clear, practical teaching style.