Why I Write Fantasy: Wonder, Escape, and the Power of Story
Fantasy first offered somewhere to go. It became something deeper: the place where fear, responsibility, loss, power, and possibility could finally be seen.
Answer in brief
Nick Blade writes fantasy because the genre creates distance from reality without abandoning it, making fear, responsibility, loss, power, and possibility visible at full scale.
I didn’t come to fantasy because I wanted dragons. I came to it because I needed somewhere to go.
When I was younger, there were stretches of time that felt heavier than they should have. The kind of weight you don’t really know how to name yet, only that it’s there. And during those times, fantasy gave me something nothing else did.
It gave me distance. Not from the world—but from the feeling that I was trapped inside it.
The first book that really opened that door for me was The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks.
I didn’t know anything about structure or genre or what made a story work. I just knew that when I was inside that world, things felt different.
Bigger.
Clearer.
Possible.
I’ve read everything he’s written since then. Not because I was trying to study him, but because I never really stopped chasing that feeling. That sense that somewhere, just beyond what you can see, there is something more.
01
Fantasy reframes reality
People talk about fantasy as escape. And I understand that. That’s how I found it. But I don’t think that’s what it really is. Fantasy doesn’t remove you from reality. It reframes it.
It takes things that are hard to understand—fear, responsibility, loss, power—and stretches them out into something you can actually see. Something you can walk through.
A reluctant hero becomes a way to understand hesitation.
A broken world becomes a way to understand pressure.
Magic becomes a way to understand consequence.
That’s why I still write fantasy.
Because it’s the only genre that lets you tell the truth at full scale.
02
The place where the world makes sense
There’s also something quieter underneath that.
Something simpler.
Fantasy feels like home to me.
Not because it’s easy, but because it’s familiar in a deeper way. The rhythm of it. The sense of wonder. The idea that the world is layered, and that what you see isn’t all there is.
When I sit down to write, I don’t feel like I’m inventing something. I feel like I’m returning to something. And if I’m being honest, there’s one more reason I write it.
It goes back to that first feeling. Sitting with a book that made everything feel just a little more bearable. A little more meaningful. A little more possible.
If someone reads one of my books and feels even a fraction of what I felt reading Terry Brooks…
That’s enough.
That’s more than enough.
I don’t write fantasy to escape the world. I write it because, for me, it’s always been the place where the world makes the most sense.
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See these ideas inside the stories
The fantasy begins with Aargaranth: a complete trilogy and two standalone novels shaped by wonder, consequence, and the pressure of old worlds.
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