: Re: How little "fantasy" can be in a story and it still be recognizably fantasy? How little "fantasy" can be in a story and it still be recognizably fantasy, and not mainstream fiction? The "recognizable

@Cugini967

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How little "fantasy" can be in a story and it still be recognizably fantasy, and not mainstream fiction?

As little as your readers will tolerate.

There is no hard-and-fast bottom line for fantasy fiction, because different readers and different editors have different expectations. One reader's baseline for "fantasy" might require obligatory elves and talking swords, while another might be happy with the slightest hint of counterfactuality. There is certainly precedent for "fantastic" stories taking place in the real world, with the fantastic elements being limited to an overlay of vampires, magic, ghosts, or something subtler yet.

So if an editor is telling you that a story isn't fantastic enough, the most you can say about it is that it wasn't fantastic enough for that editor at that venue. It doesn't mean that it's not "really" fantasy. However, if you're hearing this a lot from genre editors, you might try selling it to a more mainstream literary press. The literary markets have become a lot more open to stories with elements of the fantastic, and a story with very mild suggestions of fantasy might fit in better in that sort of market.

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