"Fantasy is the only canvas large enough for me to paint on"
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Brooks isn’t praising escapism so much as staking out a working method: reality is too tight a frame for the kind of moral and emotional scale he wants. “Canvas” is doing quiet heavy lifting here. It’s not “world” or “sandbox,” the usual genre shorthand; it’s a painter’s surface, implying composition, control, and craft. Fantasy, in this view, isn’t a vacation from seriousness. It’s the medium that lets him arrange light and shadow without being policed by plausibility.
The line also reads like a rebuttal to a perennial condescension: that fantasy is juvenile or inherently smaller than “literary” fiction. Brooks flips the hierarchy. The “only” is deliberate, almost defiant, suggesting not a preference but a necessity. For a writer who came up in the long wake of Tolkien and helped mainstream epic fantasy in the late 1970s and 1980s, that insistence mattered. Publishing culture was sorting genres into respectable and disposable. Brooks answers by arguing scope: if you want to stage questions about power, sacrifice, destiny, corruption, faith - the stuff his Shannara books traffic in - you need room to exaggerate consequences until they’re legible.
There’s subtext, too, about constraint. Realist fiction can feel like painting inside the lines of contemporary sociology. Fantasy is Brooks’ permission slip to invent systems, histories, and symbols that externalize inner conflict. Dragons and druids aren’t decoration; they’re scale bars, making personal stakes look like civilization-level stakes without apology.
The line also reads like a rebuttal to a perennial condescension: that fantasy is juvenile or inherently smaller than “literary” fiction. Brooks flips the hierarchy. The “only” is deliberate, almost defiant, suggesting not a preference but a necessity. For a writer who came up in the long wake of Tolkien and helped mainstream epic fantasy in the late 1970s and 1980s, that insistence mattered. Publishing culture was sorting genres into respectable and disposable. Brooks answers by arguing scope: if you want to stage questions about power, sacrifice, destiny, corruption, faith - the stuff his Shannara books traffic in - you need room to exaggerate consequences until they’re legible.
There’s subtext, too, about constraint. Realist fiction can feel like painting inside the lines of contemporary sociology. Fantasy is Brooks’ permission slip to invent systems, histories, and symbols that externalize inner conflict. Dragons and druids aren’t decoration; they’re scale bars, making personal stakes look like civilization-level stakes without apology.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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