Christopher Paolini

I describe the genres I write in as vehicles for good stories.

As a reader myself, I do love speculative fiction.

I love reading about dragons.

I love reading about science fiction.

But I also enjoy historical fiction and all sorts of other types of fiction.

Ultimately, if a story is good, that's what matters to me.

What I try to write is ultimately just a good story.

I enjoy speculative fiction, and I do call it speculative fiction because that encompasses what we would call otherwise science fiction or fantasy, but also things that even sort of border that like horror or supernatural elements.

But I write in those genres because it provides me with the greatest creative freedom possible.

as a writer.

Within speculative fiction, anything is possible.

And the most powerful aspect of that is that it allows you to externalise things that would otherwise be internal for the characters.

And that's an incredibly useful and powerful tool as a writer.

I think it's a necessity if you're writing about a world that doesn't actually exist, or a future that doesn't actually exist.

You want it to feel real to the reader, so you have to do your groundwork to sort of think about what would this place actually be like if it actually existed.

And by doing that, you also will create...

New material for your story.

When you world build, the world itself influences the story and then the story influences the world.

There's an old debate in fiction about what's more important, character or plot?

And a lot of genre fiction gets stereotyped as being very plot heavy and literary fiction gets stereotyped as being very character heavy, which there's some truth to that.