Fantasy Clichés to Avoid - What Beginners Do in Fantasy Fiction Fantasy Fiction Clichés to Avoid - What Beginners Do in Fantasy Fiction [First, my profound apologies to the vast majority of readers who don't steal content, but I have to state the following. This article and all content on this website belongs to Val Kovalin, copyright © Obsidianbookshelf.com, except where noted. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without written permission from Val Kovalin is strictly prohibited. Here at Obsidianbookshelf.com, I always have to keep these clichés in mind. Architecture.An historic castle is sometimes really tiny! In reality, those castles and keeps were sometimes built small to be easy to defend. Appearance of character.Keep it to a minimum.I'm all for not describing your character at all, and letting your readers fill in their own picture. I realize that writers of romance or epic fantasy will probably ignore my advice. Characters – EthnicityWhy is everyone a Northern European? For example, I have a sergeant. Read Tolkien.
Brent Weeks | 2. Writing Fantasy: Tools & Techniques a. World Building i. Tips/strategies ii. b. i.How do you write a bad guy? c. d. e. a. i. A lot of writers have different takes on your question than I do. But my answer is that the story is what matters. There are more and less elegant solutions to the problem of how you set up an entire world and lay the ground rules quickly. ii. I’m not going to be able to do justice to your question about world-building in one short post here. The world-building has to occur along sort of two tracks: first, you need to set up a lot of things that you absolutely know about the world. Secondly, you’re going to have to think about just how the world works. So along that first track of thinking, you, outside of the fiction, need to make all of these decisions about how the world actually works. Third, do things differently. Fourth, now you have to put all of this into practice. Fifth, the biggest thing about world building is that you can talk at length about anything you find fascinating. b.
Fantasy writing tips, how to write a fantasy novel, creative wri Sign up to my mailing list, and choose a FREE EBOOK as a gift. Join here. A Creative Writing Ebook AVAILABLE NOW from $0.99 25 Fantasy Writing Prompts If you wait for inspiration to strike before you start writing, you might never put pen to paper or fingers to keys. That’s where writing prompts can help. Since I write scifi and fantasy, I’ve put together a list of 25 fantasy writing prompts to get you started. They’re mostly contemporary fantasy ideas: supernatural, magic, vampires, stuff like that. A working-dad desperate for money to feed his family turns to robbery, only to find that he’s chosen a wizard as his victim.A man comes home from work one evening to find that his couch is missing. 25 Fantasy Writing Prompts by Justin McLachlan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
365 Creative Writing Prompts - ThinkWritten Sharing is caring! As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Thank you for your support! If you want to become a better writer, the best thing you can do is practice writing every single day. To help you brainstorm, we put together this list of 365 creative writing prompts to give you something to write about daily. Whether you write short stories, poems, or like to keep a journal – these will stretch your imagination and give you some ideas for topics to write about! Want to Download these prompts? Don’t want the printable version? Here are 365 Creative Writing Prompts to Inspire: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51: Sunrise/Sunset: The sun comes up, the sun goes down. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.
How to Make Readers Feel Emotion on January 30th, 2011 by Fiction Editor Beth Hill and last modified on February 8, 2011 I wrote an article on the importance of creating emotions in readers, but I’ve noticed that writers are looking for specifics on how to accomplish that. So, this article complements that first one, presents practical tips on how to stir the reader’s emotions. Readers like to be touched, moved, by story. They like to imagine themselves in worlds and situations that challenge them, that give them opportunity to do and be something other than what they do or are in their real lives. Fiction, whether in book or film or games, allows people to not only step into other worlds, but to experience those worlds. Since readers want to immerse themselves in other worlds and other lives, what can writers do to make that experience authentic, to make the fictional world real for a few hours? But how can a writer accomplish this? 1. This is a major key for rousing reader emotions. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
How To Worldbuild Magic: Short Rules for Real Worlds Fantasy writers take a significant amount of crap from SF writers for what the SF writers perceive as their “fluffy bunny” worldbuilding and their use of magic as an easy out for solving their characters’ problems. In fact, however, magic is no more of an easy way out for well-written fantasy than physics is an easy way out for well-written SF. The following are ten rules that will make your use of magic in your fantasy novel rigorous, and will save you from the “fluffy-bunny” label — and will, at the same time, make your story better, more entertaining, and more exciting. 1. Nothing comes from nothing. Also known as There Ain’t No Free Lunch. 2a. When your characters start using magic, they must be made to pay for it in some way. 2b. This rule is the storyteller’s best friend – in fantasy, in SF, in mainstream… anywhere. 3. The most obdurate magical stone wall created by the mightiest evil wizard had better have a crack in it that a determined, intelligent hero can find with effort. 4.
The Initial Steps of Worldbuilding: Architect, Gardener, Tourist Monday, March 17, 2014 Listening to the news in the real world – that horrid place where dragons are small and kept in vivaria and pixie is just a kind of haircut – it is very apparent that life is a very complicated place. Anything from the politics between two warring countries, down to a neighbourly dispute on a single street, the world we live in is complicated, intertwined and gorgeously abundant with issue. So, when you sit down ready to begin that next big fantasy epic – like I decided to do about a year ago – how do you make sure that your disputes between elves and goblins are as interesting and in depth as reality itself. Now, sitting in front of lists of “how do’s” in writing, can leave me feeling a bit empty. There are two very easy answers to this question. An architect will sit for hours, days, weeks, planning every intricate detail of a world. If the idea of sitting for hours noting down every tree of a forest seems tedious, you can of course be a gardener. Nathan T.
Mapmaking for Fantasy Authors Monday, December 16, 2013 A good map is, I’d venture to say, just as vital to you as it is to your characters; you need a map to know the size of the world they occupy, the length of their journey, its difficulty, and distance. Furthermore, a good map serves as an important tool for your readers as well. It can give them perspective in a completely foreign world, offer subtle clues to the history and culture of your creation, and create mystery and the promise of adventure. But just as a good map can bring a novel to life, a bad map can highlight an author’s shortsightedness, reinforce weak conceptual links between the stages of a plot, and direct reader attention to lazy writing and worldbuilding. Maps as Writing Tools Making a good map is not as simple as purchasing good design tools or the appropriate number of ink pens. Tools: 3 x #2 pencils Colored pencils Micron ink pen (the smaller the better) A ruler Tracing paper A notebook (paper or digital) Stage 1: Location Stage 2: Size Stage 3: Shape
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