RightingWrite by Fadran - Fantasy

[Elf]

2 minutes ago, Channelknight Fadran said:

Juvenile fantasy means, like, story fantasy and not world fantasy. Like how Twilight is a romance fantasy in the sense that the characters love each other somewhat miraculously.

Ah ok. That makes sense. 

1 minute ago, Frustration said:

Wikipedia is nice and all but it's far from infalible.

Not one bit.

Really all the genres are just marketing, with no real qualifications to be any of them, it's all just based on public preception

That I suppose is true. 

[Channelknight Fadran]

Outlining is generally helpful depending on how in-depth your story is, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with going with the flow.

[Szeth_Pancakes]

1 hour ago, Channelknight Fadran said:

Outlining is generally helpful depending on how in-depth your story is, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with going with the flow.

That’s… thanks. I needed that. Everyone’s been telling me “oh, Szeth, you should outline before you write anything long,” but I don’t like outlining and that’s been keeping me from doing writing

so yeah thanks

[Trutharchivist]

6 hours ago, Szeth_Pancakes said:

That’s… thanks. I needed that. Everyone’s been telling me “oh, Szeth, you should outline before you write anything long,” but I don’t like outlining and that’s been keeping me from doing writing

so yeah thanks

Discovery writing is a great way to work, I think. Not that I have any experience.

[Channelknight Fadran]

I actually kinda shifted from being a pantser to a planner--Stephen King would not be proud

[Voidspawn]

On 8/22/2021 at 1:37 PM, Channelknight Fadran said:

Whenever I can't come up with a good RP character I just steal someone from Fire Emblem

Nice strategy! That should cut off hours of banging my head against the wall when I'm trying to name people in my works!

P.S. I just opened up the Iconar Collective and I see the first word, the first character introduced, and the first viewpoint character is 'Corrin.' (from FE Fates) I can see you're following your own advice.

P.S.S. When is the Soft Worldbuilding section coming out? I'm looking forward to more!

[Channelknight Fadran]

Just now, Voidspawn said:

P.S.S. When is the Soft Worldbuilding section coming out? I'm looking forward to more!

Uhh... I already wrote a thing about it in my "blog," but I guess I should probably teleport it into here.

Can you post again so I can do that?

[Voidspawn]

Sure.

[Channelknight Fadran]

Quote

I yoinked this straight from my weird blog thing (there's a blog feature on the Shard and I use it sometimes), so please don't rep this if you already have. I don't like exploiting dumb stuff like that.

So this is Brandon Sanderson's fansite.

Talk to most young authors nowadays: chances are they're a hard worldbuilder. They can throw together the foundations for a decent universe on the fly without a pen or pencil in just a few minutes. Chances are also likely that they read Brandon Sanderson--let's face it, who doesn't?

Is there a correlation here?

...

Yes. Yes, there is. The answer is yes.

Which is fine. Hard Worldbuiding is great; I would know. I'm a hard worldbuilder too. Heck, I'm right here at the Sandersite. But I don't need to write a blog post defending Hard Worldbuilding.

Now, most people aren't jerks (there's gonna be a blog post about that soon-ish too, actually). However, I've still met the odd folk infected with Worldbuilder's disease who knows absolutely nothing about Soft Worldbuilding (imma called it "Softy" from here on out) and are kinda mean to people who do it. This problem stems from misunderstanding (obviously): essentially, people will assume that Softies exist as just a weaker version of Hardies, which of course would be bad. Basically, what this means is that soft worldbuilders would simply be lazier than hard worldbuilders, and should be treated like such.

Which is wrong.

That's not what Softies are. It is not a form of Hard Worldbuilding with fewer details and weaker connections; it's a form of worldbuilding with a focus on a different aspect of the story.

Generally speaking, Hardies are very plot-centric. Take Mistborn, the Final Empire, for example; I mean, both the magic and the world are both there in the name! The plot is all about the nobles versus the skaa, and the exclusionary metal magic and creepy eye spike dudes. Why do you think they're called the Stormlight Archives; it's all about the Stormlight! Hardies are a planner's playground.

Sofites, on the other hand, cover a completely different side of the story: the tone.

Show of hands: how many of you read Mistborn and have tried to write a dark fantasy, nitty-gritty slog story? Based on what I've seen from the Shard, a lot of you have. Some are better than others (I'm thinking of Syn's Mystic-verse in particular), but it's easy enough to say that a lot of you have a half-murderhobo protagonist who gets down and dirty with some sort of oppressive force, using their magic to slaughter the evil and bring about justice in their own twisted way.

In the case that you rasied your hand, then clearly you liked the tone of Mistborn enough to try and replicate it. There's no problem with that; I loved Mistborn as much as the next guy. Its tone is so perfectly dark and gritty. The point I'm tryna get across here is that tone is crucial for a story--but it's often difficult to get across correctly.

A Softy story is almost always entirely tone-centric. They're meant to evoke more otherworldly feelings and internal connections rather than drive a hard plot along with logic and reason. If any of you have seen Studio Ghibli, try to imagine the strange wistfulness that every (good) movie always evokes: Spirited Away, Castle in the Sky, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Howl's Moving Castle, Kiki's Delivery Service, uhh... Ponyo (what was that movie? I love it to death but it was so weird). PRINCESS MONONOKE (I just watched that last night so I'm still kinda in the vibe). These movies never really expound on the details because that wouldn't help--heck, it'd even detract from--the immersion.

Lemme whip out an example that people have actually seen, though, so I can go into more detail: Spiderverse.

To start, imma just say that this movie is the best frikin cinematic masterpiece of a singular film ever created (it's tied with Castle in the Sky, by the way, for first place in my grand tier list of movies. Endgame would be higher, but it's too perfect and also not much of a standalone, so I keep it away). Now, to start, this is a comic book movie: it's not exactly designed for cold hard reason. However, a lot of Marvel films are very hard worldbuildy anyways (Iron Man and Captain America, for example, are farther on the harder spectrum than, say, Shang-Chi and Doctor Strange), so I honestly couldn't care less. Anyways, Spiderverse leaves that amazing, wistful gut feeling in you like nothing else; every time it gets to the final scenes and everything awesome has already happened I'm always just aching for more. But that's not created by the hard physics of multiversal travel and Spiderman powers: it's created by Miles Morales' and all the other Spidey's arcs.

Tone is captured by the atmosphere of the setting as well as the characters and their emotions. It's almost as all-encompassing as a theme, and manages to capture your world not in a fancy picture frame but through a different lens. Every story needs it; but Softies are almost always 100% focused on it.

When I first started writing, I never really focused much on the Tone. Iconar Collective was just a boogaloo of hard magic and worlds. I never focused on trying to set a vibe to the whole thing; I was too bent on showing off this epic world that I had created. But, of course, dropping exposition left and right isn't writing: hence why the first act is so goshdarn terrible.

It's easy to learn and memorize facts: how to properly plot and pace a world, how to give a character an arc, how to develop of a solid world. It's less easy to learn the writing itself: theme, tone, voice, and all that. And it wasn't until I started trying out Softies that I really got a hang of decent prose. Before I wrote Wishing Away and a myraid of other little storyettes, I'd never focused how to write a decent setting or strike a certain mood. I'd go completely minimalistic for how everything and everyone looked, leaving the reader with a blank image of pretty much nothing in their head. All they got was magic and facts. But now I go into paragraphs upon paragraphs of detail explaining just one or two things so it's very clear just how this particular place is supposed to look and feel.

Currently I'm working on another Hard Worldbuilding project (the itch came back to me), but all my dabblings in the Softy realm have given me more experience in theme, tone, and even just prose itself than jotting down details in a notebook ever would.

So if you take anything away from this at all, then just give a Softy a try. Crack open a google doc and try to hit the tone instead of the details of the world; flesh out as little as you can, and just focus on your character. If you can figure it out, it'll give you the most experience a piece of writing ever could.

* * * * * *

Thanks for reading! This might've made absolutely no sense because I'm terrible at explaining things, but if you've gotten this far, then good for you!

I'm going to create a thread in Creator's Corner dedicated to developing Softies so people can ask questions that I'll hopefully answer in time. I've been meaning to make one for awhile, actually. And no, I'm not only making it now so I can have the 1000th topic in the subforum. I'll edit in the link as soon as it's made.

Don't die!

~ Fadran

Edited January 4, 2022 by Channelknight Fadran

[Frustration]

So a new tip that's been working for me, set a goal to write a certain number of words, make sure it's pretty easily reachable, then write at least that many words, the next day increase the number by one and repeat. Make sure you keep track of how many days in a row you make the goal, and have at least one day a week with zero writing. Don't worry if you feel the starting goal is too short the point isn't to write a on of words, but to be consistant.

I can do 2,000+ words in a day, but I get burnt out doing that, starting with 100 words and following this model and I've been much more efficent.

[#1 Taln Fan]

Yeah so I’ve ended up in a bit of a pickle. Last year I published a comedy novella, and it was pretty popular among my grade and some other people. (I didn’t try and market it or anything, mostly wrote it for my friends.) I had written it with a pretty big sequel oppurtinity, where a magic artifact the sidekick uses starts to turn him evil, as seen in the epilogue of the book. 

So here’s the problem: I started on a sequel late last year, around October. It started off pretty slowly, but I got going. Then NaNoWriMo approached, and I decided to start something new for that, and put the novella sequel off until after NaNo. I soon fell in love with the plot/characters of the new NaNo story, as writers are want to do. I wrote 40K of it in November, but then continued with it, and I’m now at 50K. I got bogged down January/February, both with a research paper and general busniess. 

Now, I want to work on my Nano novel (which is a military epic fantasy, and its only 1/3 done). But 20-odd people are very eager for me to finish the novella sequel. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy writing it, but its going so slow and I’ve hit severe writer’s block with it. I decided to partially co-author my bigger Nano project with my best friend, who’s a aspiring author with some talent and a deep knowledge of the military and guns, where one of my POV’s is based a lot. So he’s writing 1/3 of the future POV’s, which takes some weight off my shoulders. 

But then the question remains: Should I continue to work on the bigger, more fun military epic, which is at an estimated 50K/140K words? Or should I work on the novella comedy sequel, which is 20k/50k?

(Idk if any of that makes sense)

Edited February 21, 2022 by #1 Taln Fan

[Frustration]

21 minutes ago, #1 Taln Fan said:

Yeah so I’ve ended up in a bit of a pickle. Last year I published a comedy novella, and it was pretty popular among my grade and some other people. (I didn’t try and market it or anything, mostly wrote it for my friends.) I had written it with a pretty big sequel oppurtinity, where a magic artifact the sidekick uses starts to turn him evil, as seen in the epilogue of the book. 

So here’s the problem: I started on a sequel late last year, around October. It started off pretty slowly, but I got going. Then NaNoWriMo approached, and I decided to start something new for that, and put the novella sequel off until after NaNo. I soon fell in love with the plot/characters of the new NaNo story, as writers are want to do. I wrote 40K of it in November, but then continued with it, and I’m now at 50K. I got bogged down January/February, both with a research paper and general busniess. 

Now, I want to work on my Nano novel (which is a military epic fantasy, and its only 1/3 done). But 20-odd people are very eager for me to finish the novella sequel. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy writing it, but its going so slow and I’ve hit severe writer’s block with it. I decided to partially co-author my bigger Nano project with my best friend, who’s a aspiring author with some talent and a deep knowledge of the military and guns, where one of my POV’s is based a lot. So he’s writing 1/3 of the future POV’s, which takes some weight off my shoulders. 

But then the question remains: Should I continue to work on the bigger, more fun military epic, which is at an estimated 50K/140K words? Or should I work on the novella comedy sequel, which is 20k/50k?

(Idk if any of that makes sense)

I think that's up to you man, would doing them both at the same time work or would your quality suffer too much?

Edited February 21, 2022 by Frustration

[Channelknight Fadran]

20 minutes ago, #1 Taln Fan said:

But then the question remains: Should I continue to work on the bigger, more fun military epic, which is at an estimated 50K/140K words? Or should I work on the novella comedy sequel, which is 20k/50k?

(Idk if any of that makes sense)

Both!

I do best having a few projects to work on, so that I can switch focus if I ever get burnt out.

[#1 Taln Fan]

Yeah I think doing both at the same time will decrease the quality, its what I’ve been trying the past two months. 

[Frustration]

1 minute ago, #1 Taln Fan said:

Yeah I think doing both at the same time will decrease the quality, its what I’ve been trying the past two months. 

Well one is only 30k from completion, so you could try and finish that one quickly.

[Frustration]

Additonal tip to my previous post

See here

Spoiler

 

Keep track of your weekly average, doing so makes it easier for you to mark progress and increase overall word count. Likewise I recommend keeping track of your overall average word count. It turns writing into a game rather than a chore.

[Channelknight Fadran]

Go read Lord of the Rings.

Soak up every individual line.

Because you when you do...

Every individual line SLAPS.

 

And then you write better!

[DramaQueen]

I've been trying to read LotR for like a year now and I can't

Edited June 19, 2022 by DramaQueen

[Medium]

how dare you tell me how to write /j

my writing is BEAUTIFUL and i taught myself so bonus

[Channelknight Fadran]

Here's a piece of advice that I think people might find...

...I dunno. Scandalous?

Spoiler

Stop writing like Brandon Sanderson

 

[The Unknown Ajah]

1 minute ago, Channelknight Fadran said:

Here's a piece of advice that I think people might find...

...I dunno. Scandalous?

  Hide contents

Stop writing like Brandon Sanderson

 

Blasphemy!

But also correct.

[Channelknight Fadran]

And also stop writing like Brandon Mull, but that's mostly my vendetta against every. single. goshflam. YA fantasy novel.

Seriously. Every fantasy YA is just Fablehaven with a fresh coat of paint. This is why I gave up on reading them.

Sigh.

I'm not exactly in the right mindset right now to explain all this. Perhaps it'd be best if I stopped giving advice altogether for the time being...

[The Unknown Ajah]

21 minutes ago, Channelknight Fadran said:

And also stop writing like Brandon Mull, but that's mostly my vendetta against every. single. goshflam. YA fantasy novel.

Seriously. Every fantasy YA is just Fablehaven with a fresh coat of paint. This is why I gave up on reading them.

Sigh.

I'm not exactly in the right mindset right now to explain all this. Perhaps it'd be best if I stopped giving advice altogether for the time being...

I think the problem with YA is that it's essentially Middle Grade, but with romance. It has the same target audience, except it's for people who care about romance. Anyone who can read YA can read Adult. It's mostly just a marketing technique for parents to know what to buy, which is hated by everyone who has read both. 

[Frustration]

On 6/18/2022 at 9:37 PM, DramaQueen said:

I've been trying to read LotR for like a year now and I can't

Personal recommendation: Read along with an audiobook for the first time.

[DramaQueen]

....*dislikes audiobooks with a passion*