Let’s talk about dragons!

Dragons are to fantasy what starships are to SciFi. The come in all shapes and sizes. They can devastatingly powerful. They can be friendly. They must all be respected.

When I try to describe tropes to someone unfamiliar with the term, dragons are one of my go-to examples. Tropes are the shorthand of the genre, so a fantasy reader does not need to have elves, dwarves, or dragons explained in great detail.

I can separate my writing life into two stages: the mess around part, when I was a teenager with a computer, no internet, and I was tired of the games I had so I messed around with the word processor. This is the stage in my life where I discovered that I loved writing, but I wasn’t any good at it yet. The second stage is the “find out” part, which started about 12 years ago when I decided to take my writing seriously and worked as hard as I could to make it a bigger part of my life. I focused heavily on my writing skills during this time, and it was shortly into this stage of my writing when I started The Repossessed Ghost. I don’t believe I’ve written any stories in the “find out” stage. I remember writing about a dragon when I was a teenager, though.

It was fun! Dragons are powerful and scary, and even when you don’t know what you’re doing, the mere presence of a big, monstrous dragon can provide some weight to your story.

Let’s take a moment to go into some of the different kinds of dragons.

There are the big, fire-breathing, gold-obsessed dragons, like Smaug from Lord of the Rings. I tend to think of these as “classic” dragons, though I think Chinese dragons are older.

There are Chinese dragons, which always looked kind of goofy and silly to me, with their long skinny body and their oversized, lion-like head. I don’t really know much about these dragons, I’m sad to say. I recall them featured prominently in some New Years celebrations, but I’m not sure if that’s an actual cultural item or if it’s cliche propagated by Western culture.

There are somewhat vague dragon-monsters, like Grendell in Beowulf. I don’t remember Grendell or Grendell’s mother being particularly well described, and I might be misremembering the dragon connection altogether, but these dragons have little in the way of personality and are more or less embodiments of evil and maleficent force.

There are shapeshifting dragons, like what you see in games like Shadowrun. These dragons often have strong personalities, and usually appear in a humanoid form. They’re the power behind the power, usually ancient, magical, and conniving.

There are tiny teacup dragons, about the size of cats, and they are adorable.

There are fairy dragons, which are weird and colorful, and also potentially very small.

Then there is The Wheel of Time, where “The Dragon” is a title, and the only presence of what we think of as a dragon is a picture on an ancient flag.

As a trope, dragons save the writer a little bit of description space, but given how many types of dragons there are in stories, the writer should probably be specific when adding a dragon to their story.

I think that’s all I have to say on dragons. One will eventually show up in one of my stories, but I’m not sure when. I doubt there will be dragons in Mel Walker’s world. I have a three book fantasy series that I really want to write, and dragons may be appropriate in that story, but I would need to think on that for a long while.