Continued from the post yesterday. More things that I think authors need to watch out for.

( Go look at the caveats on yesterday’s rant if you haven’t read it yet, because this is more of the same )

Before I start this rant, three caveats ( Read more... )

This is different from other rants I’ve done before, which mainly concentrated on avoiding clichés like Dark Lord fortresses, stupid villains who blab everything right before the hero kills them, and so on. This is on actually improving villains and making them interesting (at least, I hope so).

( Villains are people too )

For when you just want to toss those crystal balls down the stairs and watch them shatter into their component parts.

( Fortune-telling, a.k.a stronghold of plot-cheating and a lot of clichés )

This rant is very similar to one I did a little while ago, things Limyaael thinks would be really cool. Transformative fantasy isn’t a defined genre of fantasy as such. It’s one I’m defining. The books I like best tend to have at least one of these qualities, and the more they have, the better I like them. Summed up, they tend to add up to:

( Change is Lord, and God )

A while ago, I did a rant on putting characters through hell. While I’m a big fan of that, I’m also a big fan of not getting melodramatic, and making it seem as though the hellish events actually fit into the story. So…

( Fitting them into the story )

This is not, specifically, against cynicism in fantasy novels. I love cynicism in fantasy novels, provided that the character is expressing it in such a way that it fits the story, and not just because the author thinks it’s Cool. However, as the dominant tone of a story, it can become just as nauseating as a fantasy where the dominant tone is ( Read more... )

Basically, dialogue. But world_wanderer suggested the wording of this (I think), so I wanted to leave that intact.

( Why there are few things more worrying to me than a long fantasy conversation )

I’m really going to try to keep myself from ranting about just political fantasy here, because gods know it’s not just political fantasies that can lose their plots.

( If you walk Byzantium, know the streets )

I would call this the “mental powers rant,” except that that would probably bring up issues of character intelligence, and then we would be here all night. So, just to make it clear: I’m dealing with things like telepathy, telekinesis, communing with the dead, and all the rest of the froo-froo that Gets Capitalized, gets unlimited power, takes over ( Read more... )