I had better start out by admitting what a self-serving topic I’ve chosen. My books are consummately flawed. They’re Baryshnikovs dancing in chain mail, ninjas fumbling with bifocals. I am thus about as suited to write this essay as, say, Naomi Novik would be to write “Daring to Add Dragons to Napeleonic Warfare” or Joe Hill, “Daring to Scare ‘Em Silly.”

All the same this is a cry from the heart. I want more imperfection in fantasy, and particularly in epic fantasy. Not just any sort of imperfection, of course: I want the kind that results from immense aspiration, deeply felt material, difficult or disturbing terrain. In a word: risk. We see few truly risky books anymore, and in an important sense I think our own professionalism is to blame.

Writers can still be pretty naughty (just stay up late enough at the next big con). But compared to the rogues of yesteryear we are almost embarrassingly well-behaved. Overall this is not a bad thing. American writing in the 20th century lost more than it gained by turning writers into two-bit prophets, cult kings and goatish gurus. It was an unhealthy worship. It tied some writers up in knots of self-regard, and whispered to others that they could live as pigs and be praised for it. Not long ago an editor told me of his younger days at a major university. His job had been to make sure every visiting Great Man of Letters was attended by a lovely undergraduate woman, bedazzled enough by his Greatness to prove it in bed.

No, we don’t need the good old days. If we’ve growing up a bit as writers—meeting the occasional deadline, listening now and then to critique—so much the better. But professionalism too has a dark side. It helps us finish our stories, but it doesn’t help us find them. Today we make a conscious thing of our writing, compartmentalizing the challenges and honing our various skills as conscientiously as future Olympians in the gym. We shape worlds. We think through magic. We keep our prose nimble, dance through points of view, master questions of timing and suspense. We know the how as never before, but we’re in danger of losing our grip on the why, and even the what. Novels are—entertainments? Certainly. Inventions? Yup. Stories too long to read in one sitting? Usually. Challenges put quietly to the reader’s soul?

Um. Ah. Gotta go now. You’re weirding me out.

We all know what makes “a good read.” Some elements, like those above, we can train ourselves to produce on demand. Others we must chase, like bright, sassy birds. The latter include coolness, irony, “attitude,” the essential twist, the careful darting beyond the reader’s moral comfort zone (far enough to shock, but never to appall). You need all these skills, but don’t worry—you can have them. They’re for sale. The old chestnut informs us that writing can’t be taught, but that is guff. Writing is taught everywhere, endlessly, like plumbing and architecture. Writing instruction is a massive business, and it thrives because it works.

Up to a point.

Because what can’t be taught are the furious intangibles. Vision. Benediction. Existential terror. Deep wonder. Aching need. These are not for sale. These things—however secular your orientation—you must pray for.

Or else not bother with. That’s the safer path. In a time when we are expected to fight over that shrinking pie called public notice, not bothering with the vision thing is the choice of many. And who can blame them? Thousands of architects leave school each year ready to build houses—safe, square houses, perfect houses—and if they want to feed their children they’d best build lots of them, and quickly. They may be faceless, interchangeable houses. But they will certainly be bought. And if one day houses are declared impractical, they’ll build apartment blocks.

The problem is that novels do not want to be mere cells in a great grey tower. This is true above all with fantasy. We don’t come looking for prudence or practicality, the next well-built home. We want the next Himeji Castle.

Many of us want the castle desperately—so desperately that when we fail to find it, we settle for the thirtieth-floor apartment cell, because at least it offers altitude, windows facing the river, a distant view of our dreams.

About now you may be wondering who I intend to skewer in this essay. The answer is no one. My house may be made of a different sort of glass, but it’s glass all the same. Besides, I love everyone. I hug people, even here in New England. And I mean to keep it that way.

But let’s take the opposite approach, and think about some classics. What would become of them today? Nearly every one displays the kind of imperfections that contemporary writers would labor like Hercules to avoid. Let me start with two of my favorites.

EXHIBIT A: The Left Hand Of Darkness. Le Guin’s Hugo & Nebula-winning masterpiece is a complex vision of a world of hermaphrodites, locked in an ice age, being propelled towards war for the first time in its history. It is also a platonic love story, a tundra survival tale, a pastiche novel, and one or two other disgustingly well-executed things. But above all it is an exercise in message control. Inspired by the Tao Te Ching, this novel gives you Tao coming and going: the mutual dependence of light and dark, male and female, human and nature, reason and instinct. The salvation to be found in embracing one’s opposite. The hopelessness of seeking absolute. On and on, until even the most charmed reader may be stifling a scream.

This pounding of a theme is probably le Guin’s signature flaw. But it is also her glory. Every one of her book has its deep thinkers, and what thoughts they have! Never, ever, does she go through the motions of intellect. Her people struggle, face crises of philosophy and belief. You can feel yourself getting wiser by the page.

Today le Guin (a young, nobody, just-starting-out le Guin) would be encouraged to toss out most of that. To make it simpler, shallower. Thinking’s fine, my dear—as long as it doesn’t slow you down. Give us the kind of thinking one can splash about in. Nobody wants to get in up to their neck.

EXHIBIT B: The Lord of the Rings. We all know what’s wrong with Tolkien: no women, no sex, no doubt as to the utter evil of the hordes, no end to the landscape descriptions. Very well. Guilty as charged. The most beloved epic fantasy since Homer is a mess.

But just imagine the disaster if someone had persuaded Tolkien to tinker—to correct those flaws. That someone might have been his survival-minded editor Stanley Unwin, or C.S. Lewis, or his wife, or someone he wished had been his wife. Today the list might also include a marketing team. Just imagine the well-meaning advice. Lose the elvish, lose the birthday party, lose the talking trees! Man those hobbits up! You can’t seriously expect us to publish twelve hundred pages about some helpless, hairy gnomes! Cut the travel-talk. And for God’s sake, let Aragorn and this Arwen babe get their hands on each other. Couldn’t they hook up in Chapter Three?

Any and all of these “improvements” might have been urged upon Tolkien (the rookie Tolkien, the nobody) if he had written The Lord of the Rings today. They might well have been given as preconditions for being taken seriously, let alone published.

Don’t misunderstand me: I would never argue the impossibility of an improved LOTR. Even the films succeed in doing so, here and there. Peter Jackson brings Eowyn to life in a way Tolkien never attempts, and makes Boromir into a man whose pain is raw and inescapable, rather than a gruff cipher we are rather glad to be done with.

But what if Tolkien had tried to be “perfect?” What if he had possessed a checklist, rather than a collection of manias and obsessions? Take the running travelogue—that crazed, impossibly precise description of every blessed dell and dingle and crevasse. Yes, it is excessive—by that pragmatic reckoning which sells books even as it neuters them. It is also the very substance of his greatness. It is what happened on the page when he conjured Middle Earth. No other gift of Tolkien’s outshines this almost superhumanly sustained act of imagining. No other epic in history does it better.

There is no end to examples like the two above. Take the great American epic fantasy, Moby Dick. You may remember its genius—but do you recall its unreadability? The book is laughably overstuffed. It is also mesmerizing, transcendent. Writing of Ahab and Starbuck, Melville observes that “there is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls, that can alive dive into the blackest gorges and sail out of them again, to become invisible in the sunny spaces.’ Moby Dick does just that, astonishingly well. And yet it’s a shipwreck. And yet it’s not.

Think of Lolita. A monstrous book. Nabokov’s snobbish, flowery, pretentious, self-loving, self-loathing and (lest we forget) pedophilic hero is at once horrible and—for the very same reasons—irresistible. Think of One Hundred Years of Solitude, yet another kind of epic fantasy. Hilarious and tragic, surreal and razor-sharp, absurd in particulars and utterly true in its portrait of loss and the fragility of consciousness.

Think, finally, of Dune.

Now, I want to believe that even today, an editor presented with Dune would sign Frank Herbert in a heartbeat. Probably they would: the book is close to the adventure-story ideal. That, of course, is my point: it is close, but not exactly the ideal. It doesn’t hit the bullseye with a splat. The parts that deviate from perfection—all that questionable philosophical mumbo-jumbo, the irate little lessons voiced by one character after another—are not just baggage. They’re essential. They elevate a rip-roaring adventure into a sublime and awe-inspiring one. They spark the latent wonder of it all into vibrant, multidimensional life.

But to include them was, of course, a risk. All that thick, compulsive musing could have gone too far, wrecking Dune as it did (for this reader) every one of the sequels. Logically, Herbert should have played it safe. He should have clipped his own wings, handed us a grand adventure and denied us a masterpiece.

Of course sometimes the adventure is all we want. I am not calling for us to live on broccoli alone. I eat popcorn too, and occasionally read it. There’s no reason whatsoever to condemn books that offer only the expected thrill, the requisite exoticism, the standard heroic caper. There is also little cause to praise them, debate them, enroll in workshops to emulate them, or in truth to talk about them much at all. They’re just here, like the squirrels we smile at while crossing the park. Wildlife, you could call them. And they eat popcorn too.

But what is that, crawling out of the river at the edge of the park? A giant lizard, an alligator? A megalosaurus? You there, leave your picnic, run! Good lord, it is eating a Pomeranian! It’s so hideous…or do I mean beautiful? Is that intelligence in its eyes? Does it see me? Has anything ever looked at me this way before?

We may not find answers to these questions, but we’ll never forget the creature that provoked them. It will stay with us, haunt our dreams, give us a story to tell our children about. Those are the stories I dream of. That’s the wildlife I go looking for in books.

Robert V.S. Redick is the author of three epic fantasy novels: The Red Wolf Conspiracy, The Rats and the Ruling Sea (The Ruling Sea in the U.S.) and The River of Shadows, the latter published April 19 by Del Rey and Gollancz U.K. Together with the final volume (2012) these books make up The Chathrand Voyage Quartet. Before turning full-time to fiction, he worked for the antipoverty organization Oxfam, reviewed theater for two New England newspapers, taught in a bilingual school in Cali, Colombia, and ran a writing workshop as part of the International Development and Social Change program at Clark University. His unpublished mainstream novel, Conquistadors, is set during the Dirty War in Argentina, where he studied and traveled extensively in the 1990s. Redick has an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and an M.A. in Tropical Conservation and Development from the University of Florida. He lives in western Massachusetts with his partner Kiran Asher, as well as a cat, dog and three-striped mud turtle. He can be reached through his website, redwolfconspiracy.com.