(Actually a few days ago, but I'm milking the drama here.)
To clarify: I am excising all elves and elven references from my epic fantasy cycle, written and planned. My elven characters will now be human. Their culture, tree-motifs and all, is now a human culture. I'd thought of simply adding a few differences and renaming them something else. But that's stupid. A rose by any other name, and all that.
I am absolutely going to keep writing fantasy. Just not about elves. Why? Well...
A lot of reasons.
1) I wasn't writing much about elves anyway.
While they
2) I never made them my own.
I never developed them as a race, in other words. This is opposed to my other races, all of my own invention. (Though one or two are, admittedly, inspired from other sources. *coughangelscough*) Their cultures and histories and origins are all a part of the story, and are expanded upon accordingly. Their races, in and of themselves, matter.
I never did that for the elves. If you asked me what separates my 'own' races from humanity, I could give you my own answers. If you asked the same about the elves, all I could give you would be the same tired old shtick. They're long-lived, they like trees, yada yada yada.
And none of that was even reflected in the story. Looking back, my elf characters had absolutely nothing personality-wise that distinguished them as elves - the pointed ears were just window dressing. This too is telling. My elven characters are three-dimensional personalities; I'm quite proud of them, really. It's just that those personalities barely had anything non-human about them. I didn't care enough to emphasize their elvenhood.
Elvishness? Elvanity? Whatever.
And what references to their being elves I did include were unoriginal. Because let's face it...
3) Elves are cliché.
I confess. Remember how I killed off most of my elves in the backstory? Well, the few survivors were supposed to be holed up in - you guessed it - an ancient, hidden forest city that no one could get into uninvited. *hangs head in shame*
Seriously, though. George Martin had a point when he said that elves have been done to death. They've been around for centuries in myths and folklore, of course. But Tolkien popularized them, Dungeons and Dragons made them playable, and the Quendi blew up from there.
By now, elves have been depicted as good, evil, noble, savage or morally ambiguous; they've been subdivided into high elves, wood elves, dark elves, wild elves, nomad elves, mountain elves, sea elves, and - I kid you not - space elves.
And all that's just from one author. Would you like some more examples?
(I do apologize for relying so much on Wikipedia. There's only so much you can find on the internet.)
Like it or not, elves have become one of those things everyone thinks of when thinking of fantasy, along with dragons and edged weapons and wizards/mages/whatever-you-want-to-call-them. They're everywhere.
And that leads to my final and most important reason. Because I'm afraid that finding elves everywhere means that...
4) They no longer interest me.
I still like elves. Always have, probably always will. But these days, more often than not, seeing that a book contains elves will actually make me less likely to read it. Isn't it a cardinal rule that you should never write something you wouldn't want to read?
Nowadays, I'm looking for originality. (Aren't we all?) And even if another author has successfully made elves their own, I'm not sure I could forget that they come with a lot of baggage attached. (Unless they're funny. In that case, all bets are off.) I still think elves are cool, but they're also...quaint. Old-school.
That's not a bad thing; far from it. But now that I'm older and wiser and somewhat jaded, when I see how many different viewpoints and societies and stories have been built around this one race...
I think I'd rather just make up my own.
