The Story Hook

A good story that I want to read is going to offer me a good hook into the story. One of the best ways to do that is to drop me into a moment that matters. I’ll give this book credit it tried to do that. It put me into a moment where in the world a pivotal decision was going to be made for the main character. And I appreciated that.

But a lot of the best books out there, for middle grade, or otherwise are going to drop you into an important moment. Or it is going to be set-up for an important moment that occurs. There is something that is laid out that the character wants. In the Dresden Files, it sets up part of the case immediately. In Lord of the Rings, you wonder where the ring is or what Bilbo is doing with it. Or Swallows and Amazons it’s how can the kids have an adventure. And Keeper of the Lost Cities, why does she have telepathy?

I expect the hook to show up early in the story. I want to know why you want me to keep reading your story. And if you can’t do that, then it’s tough for me to continue. So provide for me that hook of why I should care about the main characters.

The World

Next up I want to put the world. The elements I want to talk about, they aren’t in a particular order. But the world is part of the story that a lot of writers get wrong. Sometimes horribly wrong but often times just a little bit wrong.

The world is tricky because it can go wrong one of two ways. The book I started gets it wrong because it doesn’t tell you enough to start. And when it does tell me more, it’s very superficial. I get a rudimentary knowledge of how the world works at best. Or basic real world things explained at a superficial level, like what drawing is.

On the flip side, you get a book like Ready Player One, chapters of the book are just world building. Do we need to know it all, I don’t think so. But we need to know a fair amount of it. So instead of just dumping everything on the reader, it is better woven into the story.

It is a tricky balance. How do I tell you what you need to know about the world in enough depth so it makes sense, but not just dump information on you? This is where the world combined with a good hook works. Unwanted gave me a little bit of a hook. But the hook was so out there that I needed it to make sense in the world. But I don’t understand the world in a meaningful way, so that lost me as well.

The Story and Character Motivation

The next thing is that I need to understand the motivation. This can be like the hook at times, but there is more than that. A hook is like me looking at a menu and being excited about an appetizer. The world is like the ambiance around me at a restaurant. The story and character motivation, that is the main course.

So this needs to take the elements from what we’ve talked about previously and give me an idea, quickly about why I should care. So it is like the hook that way, but you got my attention for longer. I’ll spend more of a chance to understand this part of the story if the hook did a good job getting me.

This is, along with the world, is where the Unwanted story really lost me. I see a hook, so now I need to know how that hook is used to tell an interesting story. Why, as a reader, should I spend time in your world?

Unwanted is a miss in two ways. For the main character I see maybe where they are taking the story. But right now it’s just a series of actions that the character is doing. And for the world, we get a vague idea of the stakes of the world. But why the world is the way it is, that’s unknown.

Compare that to Lord of the Rings, the motivation is laid out early, let’s not have the dark lord come back. And the motivation for a given book might be unique to the series. But a good book, I expect that to lay out a good motivation for characters and story. One might be stronger than the others, but I need one to be compelling.

Don’t Be Everything Else

And this is the big trap that a lot of books fall into. And Unwanted dives head first into this trap. If I want to read Harry Potter, I read Harry Potter. If I want to read Hunger Games, I read The Hunger Games. What I won’t read is a book that is boringly derivative of both.

That is where Keeper of the Lost Cities is so good. It provides a compelling story where I get hints or flavors that might remind me of other things. Harry Potter with the magical school hidden away from the world. I get that. But it is different enough that I don’t feel like it is a Harry Potter knockoff.

Obviously Lord of the Rings is one of the first to break ground in the genre of fantasy. Not that fantasy didn’t exist before, but Lord of the Rings help develop our modern fantasy books. So much so it might feel derivative of what has come since, even though it is what other series are based off of. So if you read those first, it might not work as well because it would be derivative of, well, itself.

But it is a trap that books fall into. Same with movies or shows. I want to make the next – insert series here. With Harry Potter and The Hunger Games blowing up in the young adult and middle grade areas and getting adults to read them, that is what people want to emulate. So the story is more about how it can feel like those, in some way, than how it can be a great story.

Final Thoughts

I’ve ripped into the Unwanted a lot. If you like that, I’m excited for you. Finding a book series that you enjoy is always something that I want.

It is not a series for me. The story did not grab me or make the sense that I needed it to. And a lot of it is because how simple it felt. I didn’t touch on this because it’s a story thing, but more a writer thing. But trust your readers. Harry Potter generally trusts that it’s readers are getting older with the stories. And Keeper of the Lost Cities really trusts that middle grade readers understand the idea of consequences for actions.

I think that I might have finished Unwanted had it not felt watered down and derivative. But as it is, I don’t plan to. It might have the greatest twist at the end, but right now it’s very predictable. And the elements of the story do not draw me in. I go through 100 pages and I know the basic outline of the world. But motivations by any characters or for the world feel like the worst parts of the “logic” of the Divergent series. Which I know some people love that story.

I write this, obviously with a negative flare to it. But I write this not because I want you to know about a bad book. I want more and better books to come out. Give me the next great middle grade or young adult fantasy series. Not because it’s like something, but because it is great, and I want to call out what can make that happen.

What is your favorite middle grade or young adult fantasy series?

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What Are Some Pitfalls?

With all of that said, I do think that we need to start on a bit more negative side of things. We need to call out what can create these less interesting characters in a book. Then after that, I will talk about how they can be overcome.

The Mary Sue or Marty Stu

This is one of the more common tropes for new writers. The general idea is that the main character is perfect at anything they do. Jumping out of an helicopter with a bedsheet and parachuting to safety, that is completely absurd. But it’s been done in a book that I read. Every idea the character has is right and everyone else is always proven wrong, I watched a show that ended with a season that was completely full of that.

The Dullard

Similar to the Mary Sue or Marty Stu, the dullard is slightly different. While previous they might be good at everything, this one is just generic. It is meant to have that ultimate self insert into the character. They don’t really have any traits of their own, so that as you read them, they sound like you sound. The biggest issue with the dullard is they can often be overtaken in interest by side characters. And that causes an issue for the author, they either need to make the main character better and more interesting losing the self insertion or make the side characters worse weakening the whole story. I had seen side characters fall of a cliff in terms of depth and interest of writing in a series before because of this problem.

The Out of Place

This one I see more often in RPG’s. A person has an idea for a character that they want. And they really love the character. Maybe it has personal sentiment for them or something like that. And it is something they want to bring to the table in a book or a series. The character, however, doesn’t fit in with the world that is created. A grim dark setting isn’t going to have a crazy happy brightly colored character without people believing that character would be crazy. Or it could be a archetype character that just doesn’t quite fit. But it’s something that shows up in a books as well, and can sometimes be a dullard character who just doesn’t match the depth of the rest of the characters.

The Fixes

The Mary Sue or Marty Stu

This character is one of the easier ones to fix. Give that character a flaw, and a major flaw. Going back to the one example I gave, the character who jumped out of a helicopter, the author gave them a claustrophobia that kind of appeared out of nowhere, and then was fixed the page later. That doesn’t cut it. This really goes back to RPG’s in some ways and how you can learn from them for writing, but give your characters a “dump stat”.

What do I mean by a dump stat? In Dungeons and Dragons and other RPG’s you fairly often have six different stats. For Dungeons and Dragons that is strength, agility, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. Most heroes in RPG’s will have stats that are 10 or higher in most of them. 10 is the common baseline for what everyone can do. But, a more interesting character will have a stat that is below average. So while a fighter might have 18 strength being well higher than the average, they might have a below average wisdom or charisma.

This idea can be taken into writing as well. Harry Dresden has a massive flaw when it comes to women. Now, is he a womanizer, not really, but his default is to always protect a woman. This, of course, gets him into trouble when that woman might be a vampire or just as dangerous as he is. He even knows he has that flaw, but out of a misplaced chivalry refuses to work on it. It is something that trips him up again and again, but makes him feel more human.

The Dullard

Honestly, it’s a similar fix to the Mary Sue and Marty Stu. Give them a flaw. But also give them depth of character. The self-insert character often lacks motivations in almost any way. Going back to Dungeons and Dragons, there is trick that can help with character creation that can also help with writing. There are four different character traits you fill in when creating a character.

• Personality Trait – Funny, serious, clueless. Give them one or two of these things. They are basically some role playing direction but also a common tone you can use for a character you are writing.
• Ideal – This is something that they hold up on a pedestal. For someone like Harry Dresden it could be that chivalry is not dead. Why you add this in, is because it always gives the character that goal or reference of what they hold most important.
• Bond – Who are they connected to. Going back to Harry Dresden, there is the White Council, his friends, and more. Find that one person or group of people who your character sees as important. The great thing about these characters is that you can then kill them to add in drama to your story, or at least put them in danger. But it could also be something like a bond to a religious organization or any organization as well.
• Flaw – Hey, we’re back to flaws. Give them something that they are bad at. For Harry Dresden that is that he doesn’t want to hurt a woman as that isn’t chivalrous or honorable. I talked about this a lot already, but it helps make your character feel more human and realistic than just an empty shell.

Now, these things don’t need to be explicitly stated in the story. But use them to create a more interesting and realistic character and get away from the dullard self-insertion main character. These characters will have longer staying power if you create them with depth. And this will give you a quick reference for a characters motivations when you get stuck as to what they would do, or what would make sense to do.

The Out of Place

This one is the hardest to fix. And, in my opinion, the simplest answer is save them. If you might just have that character in the wrong story. It might be that this great character is just meant to be in a totally different world and story. Take what I talk about above, create those traits, ideals, flaws, and bonds for that character, jot down some back story for them. When the time comes, when you have the right story, you’ll have that character in your back pocket who is ready to go. And who knows when that story will come to you, but don’t fret about it, it just means you have something already. Just because a character doesn’t fit doesn’t make you bad at writing, it just means that you had the right idea at the wrong time and the right time will come.

It’s Okay to Not Get it Perfect

Finally, it is okay to not get it perfect. If your character is a Mary Sue at some points, that is fine. If a character in a scene stands out like a sore thumb, that is fine. If your character ends up being a little but dull, that is fine. The only way to get better at writing is to write more. And sometimes you need a Marty Stu in your story, or you want someone who stands out, or it is meant as a fluff self-insertion story. My hope is that you leave more equipped to write a better variety of characters and deeper characters that will be memorable. While these aren’t hard and fast character writing rules, they are handy tools that are good to master so that you then know how, why, and where to break them.

What are some of your favorite characters in books, film, television, RPG’s, that have a lot of depth to them? What are some of the best examples out there?

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Let’s talk about how fairly often a trilogy happens, and we can delve into some of the issues based off of that. The creator of the story has an idea for one story, maybe more, but one that they know they can get published or produced. So they go to the publisher or producer and sell them on this story and they get it made. Now, it’s a huge success and the publisher or producer comes back to them and asks for more and not just one more, two more of the story or film or whatever it might be. So the creator creates another story picking a spot in the middle for a cliffhanger between both stories and then those are published or produced. However, the second and third don’t do as well. What went wrong?

Now, it could be that there just wasn’t anymore story to tell surrounding certain characters or ideas or even worlds. That can happen, but probably isn’t going to be the biggest issue. Probably as often it happens that the creator didn’t have any more stories to put in that setting and to get something a little bit more out there published or produced, they agree to a multi-thing deal which includes what they are actually interested in creating as well as two things that will be more successful for the company that they signed the deal with. Both of those examples, there really shouldn’t have been a second thing created at all, because there really wasn’t anywhere to go.

But, I think there’s another issue that often befalls trilogies, and that’s their ability to tell a complete story. Pirates of the Caribbean is a great example of this. In the first movie, we get a complete story, we get Jack going from being a pirate down on his luck, getting what he thought he wanted, realizing it wasn’t what he wanted, and overcoming everything in the end. Same with Star Wars: A New Hope, we get a complete story including third act metal ceremony. Then comes along the second film, in particular in Pirates of the Caribbean, less so in the original trilogy (Star Wars). You get the creators knowing that there will be a third film, so they tell part of a story. You get some build, maybe even some change, but in the end, the biggest issue still hasn’t be resolved. Instead, you have to wait for the third film. And that’s fine, if you can watch both films back to back, but most of the time if it’s something you’re really excited about, you’re seeing the film or reading the book when it comes out, not when both are out. So you get the second part which is the start of a story and ends with a small resolution, and the third part which is the continuation of the second part and then the final resolution. So combined you are telling a single story, but both parts are going to leave you feeling a little wanting, unless they are masterfully crafted.

So, how can you get around this in a trilogy? Sometimes you just plan on it being a trilogy. Lord of the Rings is a prime example of this, Fellowship of the Ring doesn’t tell a complete story, Frodo is still going to Mordor, the same with The Two Towers, Frodo is still going to Mordor, and that’s the end of the story (kind of, there are a lot of third acts) when he throws the ring into Mount Doom in Return of the King. However, in each of those, we know there’s the through story line going on with Frodo getting the ring to Mount Doom in Mordor, but we also have other characters getting a story as well and there’s story, especially in Return of the King and The Two Towers that gets told apart from Frodo’s journey that has groundwork laid in earlier books, but finishes up and tells a story there. We have the massive battle between the forces of good and evil in Return of the King which sees Aragorn become King. We have in The Two Towers multiple stories that are told and wrap with Merry, Pippin, and the Ents and the battle of Helms Deep.

Lord of the Rings does two things that should be pointed out. It has a through line so it doesn’t feel like the parts of the trilogy are disconnected. This is the Frodo and Sam story line that they need to get the ring to Mordor and Mount Doom. It’s the key piece of the story and in fact, if they fail, the whole thing fails and that runs throughout all of the books. At the same time with have Gandalf, Aragorn, Merry, Pippin, Gimli, and Legolas doing there own things, making a difference in another part of the world. And even though they aren’t carrying the end game thing, the ring, they still have an important part to play. So we get complete story arcs, from beginning to end, for them in the books and not across all the books, but in each book there is a beginning and ending point.

This varies from my Pirates of the Caribbean example because it has a through line throughout the whole thing, Pirates has characters who repeat but the first movie stands separate from the last two of the original Pirates trilogy. And Lord of the Rings has a beginning, middle and end to each book, versus Pirates 2 & 3 where you have a beginning and middle and a middle and end split respectively.

What does this mean as a creator?

First, a trilogy isn’t the end all for writing, you don’t need it to be a trilogy. The Dresden Files, a series that I love, is on book 17. So you can clearly go longer if you have more story to tell, so don’t let a trilogy limit you. And don’t let the idea of it needing to be a trilogy or anything like that force over complexity and bloat into your stories.

However, if you are going to write a trilogy, or even if you are writing something that you have a bigger idea for, but you just need to get one written and published first, think about through line and think about a complete story. Now, it’s hard if you think that you are only going to get a single shot at creating your idea, but give yourself room. Don’t bloat your idea to fit everything in to a single thing, instead, tell a nice complete story and leave room in the world for there to be even more story. Star Wars, the original trilogy, does this well. You have them blow up the Death Star, that by itself could end the story in A New Hope, however, Vader isn’t killed, so the villain is still out there. If nothing ever came after A New Hope, it wouldn’t feel like it’s missing anything, but it’s natural that we pick back up again with Darth Vader and the Empire. So create a first story, even if you don’t know that you’ll get more like that. Give the main characters a big win but leave a villain out there defeated but not destroyed. That way, you can come back and pick up with the same characters and continue a story.

Also leave plenty of your world unexplored after your first story, especially if you don’t know if there will be more. Lord of the Rings, we get through some mountains, but we know that Mordor is still out there, but we’re not there yet, and there are other lands to explore as well that we haven’t seen or gone to. Star Wars: A New Hope, they really aren’t that many locations and then they have a ton of other planets that they can create and use in future films because they didn’t have them hop from planet to planet all the time. This gives you room to create more mystery and more adventures in which to tell your complete adventure. Pirates of the Caribbean really feels like it hits up so many locations in the first film, even though it’s somewhat limited, so you don’t feel like there are a lot of players left to join the story in this small world they’ve created, as compare to Lord of the Rings and Star Wars where who knows what new enemies or allies might be out there.

Now, I’m sure there are more things out there that you can do when creating a trilogy. I do want to wrap up with that I’m not trying to bash on trilogies. I think fairly often they can work. The original Star Wars trilogy and Lord of the Rings are great examples of this. Even The Hunger Games, which I didn’t talk about much, does a good job of making the 1st and the 3rd stand separate as their own stories. But don’t limit yourself to that if you want to create an epic, and tell a complete story each time, those are just my rules for writing a series or trilogy.

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So, what is a LitRPG book?

LitRPG is a novel where it takes place in a world where there are statistics for the characters, like you would in an RPG. This can either be split between the real world and a game world, like Ascend Online and Awaken Online, or it can be a world that just happens to have RPG like rules, which you get in Towers of Heaven (though that kind of walks the line between the two) and Sufficiently Advanced Magic. In these books, you see the characters clearly leveling up and becoming better at things, gaining new skills, and getting new quests (fairly often). The quests is more obviously laid out in the ones where they actually go into an RPG, but the other ones really do the same thing as well.

LitRPG is a really easy and obvious way to do the heroes journey as you have that marker of progression for the character, and if the character is good, eventually they’ll be able to do more and more good. Now, you also have books like the first one in the Awaken Online series where the characters aren’t good, but might, in fact, be the villain of the piece if you really look at it. But if you don’t consider them going that far, they become an edge lord. I have mentioned the term before, but an edge lord is a character who is supposed to be the bad boy and edgy. I highly recommend not doing an edge lord character if you decided to write litRPG, because it seems like a wish fulfillment and often then leads to stupid situations just for fulfilling some wish of the author.

Now, LitRPG has also moved into other mediums. I actually think LitRPG most likely started in Japan, though you could argue that D&D Novels might have been the original. Manga and Anime like Is It Wrong to Pick Up A Girl in a Dungeon? and Sword Art Online are examples of LitRPG or LitJRPG that have been around for a little while. Is It Wrong to Pick Up A Girl in a Dungeon? is an example of an anime where the world itself has RPG rules to it, and Sword Art Online goes between the real world and various game worlds. It’s interesting to see how popular that these anime are or aren’t, but personally I find them both enjoyable.

So, what makes a good LitRPG?

I think that there are a few things to look for. First, you can often tell within the first few minutes or pages if the book has some sort of fulfillment edge lord fantasy feel to it. This will often be done by creating situations of unnecessary violence or hits of things of a sexual nature. This has happened in a few times when I started listening to something and I could tell quickly that it was going to be a situation where we were going to end up with an edge lord.

I also think that you can tell the quality of the writing pretty quickly by how they use descriptions or dialogue. I’ve noticed that some of the writers, since a lot seem to have originally been self published, don’t structure their books in the best way. I talked about this in my world building article, but don’t spend the first few chapters or third or whatever of the book explaining your world to me. Show me and also give me plot at the same time. If you can’t do that, I’m probably going to set down your book. And the same with dialogue or maybe more so with relationships. Know your strong points in writing. Also, be careful what point of view you use.

Also, when creating LitRPG works, have your system figured out and dispense some of the information for leveling up, things like that into your book. But don’t lean too heavily into the trope of the pop-up messages in your screen of how much damage you take or when a skill upgrades. You can show us a character sheet once in a while. I think that this is less annoying in the written form, but when I’ve been listening to things on an audio book, it really wrecks the feel you’re trying to create for the world and the characters.

Finally, have your story cohesive. People are familiar with RPG’s, you often have one quest and then another and then another, and eventually you might tie them all together, but you’ve been playing for a year now and you’ve lost one of your story threads along the way at some point, so that’s fine. But in a book, I can listen to even some of the longer LitRPG books in a week or maybe two. So that means the thread that you lost, because you might actually be pulling from your own pen and paper RPG, or just because you didn’t keep enough notes in your writing, it’s obvious to me. And if you’re doing it intentionally, don’t. It might feel thematic, but you’re writing, and like the character sheet, those things that you don’t notice in a pen and paper RPG are very obvious in a LitRPG book.

And let me do a finally, finally and say this. LitRPG is a ton of fun, I’ve been enjoying what I’ve been listening to. It has been making me want to play more D&D and write my own LitRPG, but please, people, please, if you are going to write something and self publish it on Amazon or somewhere, please hire and editor. Or at least have some friends who aren’t going to be Yes Men read the story and give you feedback. In Ascend Online, he needs someone to edit his content because he isn’t great at description so uses words over and over again. If the Sufficiently Advanced Magic writer had a good editor, they could have fixed the bad romantic language that the author tried to add to the book. And really, this isn’t just for litRPG, but please use a good editor people.

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The first is by duplicating description in the same sentence. or using too much description.

The second is by using large words for the sake of large words.

A couple of examples form books that I started reading and then quit, and one that I am actually continuing.

“The trials are our exegesis…” – A Warriors Path by Davis Ashura

“While thinking internally to myself…” – Ascend Online by Luke Chmilenko

Let’s talk about why these are poor. First, using “exegesis” in a sentence, and I shared this with a co-worker who reads a lot, is not a common word that people know. Learning new words isn’t bad, but there weren’t context clues to provide the answer to what it means. So someone would have to stop reading your book to look it up if they don’t know the meaning. And why weren’t there context clues, because this was sentence number one in the book.

I know what “exegesis” means, and because it was the first sentence, I immediately stopped listening to the book. What the first sentence tells me about the book is that it’s going to be using a lot of big words for the sake of using big words. And it’s supposed to be an epic fantasy book, premise seemed interesting, but if, in one sentence, it feels like the writer is shooting for showing off their knowledge of the English language, it isn’t ideal.

The second example is really about that first one, giving too much description. “Thinking internally” is a redundant statement. Besides that, the Ascend Online book, which isn’t bad thus far, spends too much time going through the fine details of the RPG aspect of a LitRPG. That can be done at the start, but then needs to fade to the background and that’s another way it is overwritten. It doesn’t just imply some things that the writer knows are happening in the background, but instead spells them out in great detail. This is something that happened in the Arcane Ascension series, where the writer would spend too much time explaining something that the characters already know for the sake of the reader.

So how can you avoid overwriting a story?

I think the biggest thing you can do is be a harsh critic of your own work. Not of yourself, but taking a step back from the work, look at it and ask yourself, is this part needed, or is this from a different story that I just haven’t written yet. Just because you’re cutting something, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t good, it just might not be for this story.

Along with that, ask yourself if you need to spell that out for the reader or how easily the reader can understand it. If you feel like a reader can infer what is being written about, for example, when leveling up in a LitRPG, if you’re in a video game, like Ascend Online is, have there be a noise, like a ding, when a skill levels up. As a reader, I’ll know that whatever skill was used immediately prior to the “ding” leveled up, the author doesn’t need to tell me that metal working leveled up when you were just working with metal, that should be obvious to any reader, and if the reader missed if, they know from the “ding” to look back at the previous action to see what it was. Doing something as simple as that will make the story flow better.

Ask yourself, is all this backstory/world building needed at the beginning? That’s another piece of overwriting that I see very often. It falls into the camp of too much description, but ask yourself where and when you need the backstory and world building. Too much of it is front loaded, instead, put it in when it is needed. I suspect what you’ll find, even if you had it front loaded before, is that when you reach the end of the story, there will be world details that still haven’t been put into the story, and that’s awesome. That means you’ve found the parts that were overwritten and don’t matter to your story. Also, by interweaving the backstory and world building into the main body of the story, I, as a reader, am more apt to remember them as if they are all at the beginning, I might just skim over them to get to the action.

The other thing that is often forgotten in LitRPG or with self published writing, is use an editor and copy-editor. The copy-editor is going to cut down on grammar and spelling issues, so not as important for overwriting, but the editor is the person who is going to track down those overwritten bits, question why there is so much detail or why you are using a word. They are going to be harsher on your writing than you will be able to ever be. With that, it’s important that, even if you have a friend who likes to read and is good with English, don’t use them as your editor. They aren’t going to be able to be as harsh on the work as it might need to be, because they know you. I feel like I’ve read several books where they had some editing work done, but the author either refused to trust their editor, or the editor was a friend. So there’s another thing, the editor wants you book to succeed, even if you don’t know them, because they want more work from you. When they suggest cutting something that you really liked, it isn’t because they hate you or what you wrote, it’s because they genuinely should care about helping you make the best book. So find an editor that you can trust who isn’t your friend.

Obviously, there is more that you can do, but let’s spend a little bit of time looking at some books that I really do like.

The Dresden Files – I don’t think these are overwritten. My reasoning for that is because Jim Butcher gives you enough detail but not too much and he doesn’t spend any time at the start of any books explaining something about his world that is going to show up later. There are points where as a reader, I feel like between books he’s repeating himself, but if someone was reading them once and as they came out, they probably would need that reminder. Since I’m reading them after the fact and in a row, I wish it wasn’t there, but it is smart that it is there.

Lord of the Rings – Tom Bombadil. That’s all that I need to say, JRR Tolkien had some stuff that he wanted to get into the book and added to the book that is most certainly not needed. Tom Bombadil was cut from the movies for a reason, and probably should have been cut from the book. I’ll give him some slack for the time frame, but Tolkien does overwrite, and when you think about The Silmarillion, you can see how much he cut and had in backstory that he decided to publish separately, thankfully.

Chronicles of Narnia – I think that this is another example of something that isn’t overwritten. CS Lewis does a good job keeping his series short and to the point in each book. There are a few bits that haven’t always aged the best, but that isn’t an overwriting problem, so not an issue for here. From The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, through The Last Battle, you get the information you need when you need it and the stories are on point. You could argue that The Magician’s Nephew is simply a book of backstory, but it is fairly important backstory for the world, and the book reads as a novel onto itself with plenty of action and interesting moments versus just an explanation of how the world works.

What are some book series that you think are overwritten? Are there some sentences that are really poorly written, if so, share them below, please, I love weird stuff like that.

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I’ve mentioned Urban Fantasy before in some articles, but I wanted to delve deeper into it and provide some more examples beyond my normal one.

Urban fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy in which the narrative has an urban setting.^[1][2] Works of urban fantasy are set primarily in the real world and contain aspects of fantasy, such as the discovery of earthbound mythological creatures, coexistence or conflict between humans and paranormal beings, and other changes to city life.^[3][4] A contemporary setting is not strictly necessary for a work of urban fantasy: works of the genre may also take place in futuristic and historical settings, actual or imagined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_fantasy

I figure I can just drop in some Wikapedia knowledge to get the conversation going since they are going to define it basically the same way that I’m going to describe it. I would say that urban fantasy basically does always show up in a contemporary setting at least from what I’ve seen. But as they say it isn’t required, but it is extremely normal for it to show up in that contemporary setting.

The best way that I would describe it is that it takes a realistic setting, generally earth and our world, and then puts a twist on it. Whether it’s Fae creatures as in Grimm and The Dresden Files, to the weird London Below in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, there are large chunks of the normal world still there for the story. These twists on the world can be highly hidden such as in Neverwhere or sometimes very obvious as in The Dresden Files, though magic and monsters are still generally kept under wraps there as well.

What generally makes strong urban fantasy is the balance of normalcy with the absurd. You see the normal world happening around the characters and you often see the characters pining for or rushing headlong into the more magical aspect of the world. While I wouldn’t quality Harry Potter as Urban Fantasy since most of it takes place at Hogwarts, it does have some elements of urban fantasy, and Harry is someone who rushes headlong into the magical world because anything seems better than living in the space beneath the stairs. That compares to Grimm where Detective Nick Burkhardt is not all that excited to find out what else is going on in the world. It makes his job much harder and makes his life much crazier in ways that he doesn’t want. I think this really helps drive the home the humanity of the main character as you see the struggle. There is some Urban Fantasy, and Lost Girl is an example, where the main character, Bo, loses touch with her humanity seemingly as the series goes along. Now, a lot of that is just writing, but it hurts the show when the focus on that has been lost and it was stronger at the start of the show. They made some poor decisions in the show by trying to be edgy, but unfortunately the writing dropped off too much and the acting talent wasn’t up to snuff to pull it off.

When I think about it, I don’t think that there are many particular things that make urban fantasy strong that doesn’t make most other books, movies, and TV shows strong. It has to focus in on an interesting character with flaws and have an interesting plot to go along with it. Within that a good focus on the tension between the two worlds is generally one of the driving forces. Shows like Grimm and Supernatural, which isn’t pure urban fantasy, but is closely aligned to Urban fantasy, and book series like The Dresden Files, all the main characters are the gate keepers keeping the world of monsters and other scary things back and allowing humanity to live in blissful ignorance of what is actually going on. That tension, whether or not the main character is the gate keeper, is probably the thing that is most unique to urban fantasy as it’s the most consistent theme to it. However, it is certainly not a required part of urban fantasy or something that is only limited to urban fantasy.

So I’ve mentioned some of the examples of Urban Fantasy that I’m familiar with. There are certainly a whole lot more out there, and I’m always interested in finding more to read. So I’m going to ask for some suggestions and then give some suggestions of my own. If you have some that you’ve enjoyed, let me know.

The Dresden Files
My #1 recommendation. The books are very well done and Jim Butcher does a really good job of developing an interesting world with interesting monsters. The series starts off a bit rough as it was some of if not Jim Butcher’s first major writing experience. But besides that, it’s about Harry Dresden, a wizard PI in Chicago who is basically one of the only forces holding back hordes of darkness from not just consuming the city, but at times the world.

Grimm
I believe this show was met with mixed reviews, and I will say that there is some camp factor to the show and special effects. However, I liked the show. It is a bit monster of the week throughout a lot of it, but it does that well. The main character is interesting, and the creatures and building up of the world is quite interesting as well.

Neverwhere
Probably my first introduction to Urban Fantasy, though I might have read the first Dresden Files book before. Neverwhere is an interesting and crazy crafted world of the London Below. A normal human runs across a girl named Door whose life is in danger. After helping her, Richard Mayhew starts having changes in life, and he starts to disappear from the world. He finds out that he’s now moved from his normal life in London to being part of London Below.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
One that people might not think about as it’s moved on from being part of the collective view, but like Supernatural, it’s a modern show with monsters. The reason that I would say this is more urban fantasy, at least as how I would qualify it, is that Buffy takes place in a single town of Sunnydale that just happens to be sitting on a hellmouth. It’s a classic show and one that does have a bad season or two in there, but is mostly very strong.

Just to do some more quick hits based off of what other places are calling Urban Fantasy that I’ve enjoyed:
Warehouse 13
Supernatural
Reaper
Stranger Things
The Librarians
All fun TV shows

Big Trouble in Little China
From Dusk Til Dawn
The Last Witch Hunter
The Librarian
Underworld
All solid movie choices, though a lot of them B-movies.

Little Witch Academia
Blood Blockade Battlefront
Ghost Hunt
Those are some anime options.

American Gods
Harry Potter
IT
Daughter of Smoke and Bone
Last two I would say are urban fantasy adjacent books. But I recommend all of these books.

So you can see that I’ve watched a lot, but what are some other recommendations especially in books and anime?

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What I am talking about is how series are crafted and issues that can be ran into when creating a series. Like most of these topics, it’s come about because I read a book, watched a show, heard something about a game, or something along those lines that I thought is important and could be done better than it is often or sometimes anyways. I also want to get out of the way, I don’t think this book, Arsenal (Full Metal Superhero Book 1) was a bad story and poorly written and not worth anyone’s time, I just have some issues with the fact that to get a full books worth of story, you’re going to have to continue the series, Arsenal felt like an opening act.

Let’s start out this article with wondering if you should even be writing a series. I do think there are multiple reasons to write a series and I think there are some that do it fantastically. For example, Harry Potter, that makes perfect sense to be a series and not just tell Harry and Voldemort’s story in a single book. It would have felt rushed and there is a lot to explore in the world that Rowling does a good job doing in that series, no comments about the other stuff she’s doing now. She had a clear vision for each book and a clear story to tell in each book as well as clear elements of the over arcing story that she was telling. The Dresden Files does the same thing very well with clear stories but after the first book or so, a clear plot running through all of the books. Maybe you just have to have a main character named Harry who is a wizard to write good series (if there’s any piece of advice to take, this is it, I’m sure).

However, in Arsenal, it didn’t feel like that was the case. The first book was the opening act of a larger story with no real tension to the story. You had an idea of what the overall story for the series is going to be, but the first book fell flat on delivering it’s own contained story. One could argue that it’s Arsenal’s story of her joining the superhero team, but there isn’t tension surrounding that part of the story as it’s resolved quite quickly in the book and her probationary period doesn’t seem like a situation where she’s ever not going to become a full member of the team.

Beyond having a number of self contained stories, it could also be that your story is just too epic to tell in a single book. There’s a danger with telling a single epic story like this, though, you have to have some sort of plot to drive the story for each book in the series. Again, Harry Potter and The Dresden Files do a good job of that. That’s actually one of the non-trope based knocks I have on The Warded Man as the first book of the Demon Cycle. While there is some plot that drives the book throughout that seems like it is the main plot of the first book, it falls into the trap of not having much of a plot for the book and focusing only on series plot instead. I think that is some of why it had so much exposition and backstory for all the characters that felt like it was overdone.

I’ve already talked about it some, but when you’ve decided to do a series, trilogy or longer really, there is one huge thing that you have to do to make sure that each book feels like a complete book. This is the part I really want to drive home. Even though you have the most epic story for your series, each book in the series is going to have it’s own complete story as well. An obvious example of something that most people know about that fails to do this completely is Pirates of the Caribbean. Unfortunately, after a smashing success with the first movie, they planned on several more of them and decided with Dead Man’s Chest that they didn’t need tell a complete story because they were going to wrap it up in At World’s End. Viewed together, they make a good complete story, however, when you were spending money to get see Dead Man’s Chest in the theaters you felt like you were ripped off because you had to come and see the next one to fully get the whole story.

This is actually why I haven’t continued Arsenal (Full Metal Superhero) yet, because I don’t know that I want to spend Audible credits to continue a story that I know I might have to listen to all of them to get the full story. It’s the idea that I have to do something to really get the story and that there is a very specific amount that I have to spend on the story. If you were to stop after book three of Harry Potter, sure you wouldn’t have the full story of everything that happens in that magical world, but you’d have had a good experience with those stories. It’s the same with the Dresden Files, now obviously, you’ll get more out of reading the whole story, and the same was true with Pirates of the Caribbean, but as an creator, it isn’t your job to force people to give you money to get a whole story. They should be getting a whole story every time, because that’s what they’ve paid for. Then if you’ve written your story well, people are going to want to come back and people are going to recommend your story to others. While I am mentioning Arsenal and that might get some of you interested in reading it, I’m not going to recommend it, because it fails at this tenant of creating a good series and I can’t with good conscience recommend that people spend their money on the whole series to get a whole story.

So quick recap as this wraps up. Make sure that you actually need a series to tell your story. If the over arcing story isn’t so big that you need to, don’t draw it out. You’ll end up with a lot of filler that people don’t want to read and turn people away from your series. Also, and most key, make sure that every book has a self contained story to it. Every book should feel like it’s reached a conclusion and that the consumer got their money’s worth.  And finally, if all else fails, name a wizard character Harry and go from there to see what happens.

What are some of your favorite series, either movie, books, or anything else that you think does a very good job?

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So the brings up the question, these tropes are they needed or are they being handled well in this series?

Let’s start with handling tropes well. In the Demon Cycle series, thus far I would say that the tropes are not being handled all that well. The story seems a bit predictable and a bit tired, along with that they are a bit heavy handed. But like I said, it is starting to break the mold a little bit more out of it’s tropes. When handling a trope well, in general, you need to think about how heavily you are using the trope and how needed the trope is for your characters and story.

To go back to the Demon Cycle, I do believe there are some tropes surrounding the gender stereotypes of fantasy that are being used that will end up being important to the story, or at least I hope so. However, while they are important, they are too on the nose for it being standard fantasy. So while the trope is needed the tropes are being wielded to bludgeon the ideas into the reader versus allowing the reader to find the ideas and the tropes in the story. Subtly is needed for handling these important tropes and items in your story as myself as a reader wants to feel like I was the one who discovered these clues laid about the story versus telegraphing what is going to come later. This is something that is done when the trope is also the Chekhov’s Gun in the scene or the story.

But are your tropes even needed for your story? Maybe they are just being used because they feel normal for the genre of fiction that is being written. Normalcy of a trope is not a good enough reason to have it in there, having a trope in there because it is common or expected will make your story seem derivative of other works that also use that trope. If it is needed for a story, be careful with how you use it, handle it well. I can’t really stress enough that even if you need a trope, don’t bludgeon the reader with the trope, it hides the subtly of your story and allows the reader to glaze over and skim while reading which might cause them to miss some more hidden clue in the story if there is one. Obviously, you want the reader engaged at all times.

With all that said, using tropes is not a bad thing. Tropes give the reader familiarity with your world without you having to spend nearly as much time explaining what your world looks like, how your world works, and what to expect from the story that they’ll be getting. Going back to the Demon Cycle again, this is something that the first book, The Warded Man, seems to get wrong. Instead of using the tropes to get the reader up to the main story arc faster, a lot of time is spent on showing how the world works, when the tropes make it very clear how it is going to work. This makes the first part of the book feel like a slog and has me less excited now that we are getting into more major story elements now because I’m almost looking for the standard elements of the story.

It also allows you to highlight differences faster as well. If basically everything is falling into the standard tropes, you can quickly pull out things that are different because you have a framework, and you can subvert the expectations of that framework.  Your reader is going to remember these differences more because they are not the norm. This should be used sparingly, in some ways, because if you aren’t using most of the trope, you’re going to end up having to explain away a lot of what people expect, which might take longer than actually just not using the trope as your framework.

Finally, and I mentioned this earlier, you an subvert the trope that you are using. The first time I used it, it was for helping set-up your world, this time I mean that you can use it as a twist in your book. When using subversion of a trope as a twist to your story, you have to be careful to make sure you never actually say that something is one way and then have it not be that way later in the story. The twist should come from the reading having believed something to be the case, because they know the trope and genre, only to have it change in your world.

What are some stories that use tropes well or use them poorly? Is the second thing you read using the trope always going to feel derivative or can it still be unique?

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Let’s jump into the top right away because there’s not much need to explain what magic is, but in fantasy, there is generally magic. It isn’t in every case, but in a lot of cases there is some level of magic. That’s where the difference between high and low magic fantasy settings come in. High magic settings, magic is common place. In your most common examples with D&D, there is generally a fair amount of magic, probably more medium magic, but magic isn’t something that’s going to be shocking to most people. Low magic is on the opposite end of the spectrum, magic and magical items – in an RPG – are rare. People covet magic, fight over magic, and things like magical healing are not to be found.

And the article is done. Or I’ll talk about why you might want to pick one setting over another.

First off, consider the story you are trying to tell. How important is magic to it? If magic is important to the plot, and gaining a specific type of magic or a specific magical item, ask yourself then, is that because magic is rare or not. Is the item important because it’s a forgotten relic from long ago with a magic that was long lost, and now a group of wizards are going to be fighting over it? Or was it thought long lost, and now that it’s been found regular people are fighting for it because magic is so scarce. But then again, it’s possible that magic doesn’t matter in your story, is that because magic is common place so it doesn’t stand out as special or because it’s so rare that the two people off to the side of the story who can use it aren’t going to drive the story?

From there you can start fleshing out your world and determining how magic is used, is it swish and flick magic or dancing in a circle under the full moon magic? If you haven’t decided this can also help make your decision. Even if you have a lot of magic users, it can be a world that is harder to influence by magic if the magic only works during a full moon and requires extensive rituals. It could even be that everyone has some form of magic but if the ability to cast magic is too complicated most people won’t do that, creating a low magic world. Or for example, in Harry Potter, magic is simple, but the world as a whole is low magic, we’re just in the high magic part of it for the series, so even with swish and flick magic, it’s been hidden away. Hiding magic is always interesting and can make your world feel more low magic though it could eventually end up being higher magic magic as time goes on, such as if in the world of Harry Potter magic was to be revealed, it would make the whole world feel lower magic in some ways, but higher magic because it isn’t as isolated.

Finally, consider what level of magic you want s you consider where you want the focus of your story to lie. If you’re doing a story about a normal person who makes it big in a world where magic is common and overcomes that perceived deficit, than you’d want to go high magic. But if you don’t want your story to focus on magic, going with a lower magic setting would make sense. It’s possible in that last example that you could have a higher magic world, but magic is just common place, but you have to worry about the restrictions of magic.

In fact, that’s another reason why you want to consider your magic level of your world. In a world with a lot of magic, a lot of problems are going to be solved by magic. Especially in stories about the hero overcoming lack of magic or just overcoming without using magic, you have to set-up a world where magic wouldn’t make that much sense to be used. That means the Harry Potter swish and flick magic might be too simple for your world because it doesn’t expend energy or resources. But if you can only cast a spell from a faerie circle, during a full moon, while dancing around in a circle and doing a chant in the fresh dew, you could have a lot of magic, because that magic is just hard to do. At the same time, if you are using magic, you don’t want to fall the other direction of making it too weak that there would be no reason to do any sort of magic, because the technology of your story works more effectively.

Finally ask yourself where your magic comes from, that is going to make a huge difference. Is it that it’s divine magic and anyone can get access to it if they believe in the right deity whether that deity is good or evil? Or does the magic come from within and some people just inherently have it like in The Magicians or Harry Potter? If you just have to truly believe in a deity, people are going to have magic, and there’s going to be a lot of it because people will believe since they can see very tangible proof. But if it’s an inherent ability, than you can decide how few or many people get to have it based off of how much magic your story needs.

These are just a few things to consider. It is interesting to look at it for books, but as well for RPG’s where you can take something like Dungeons and Dragons and turn it into a low magic setting. What do you do when a player wants to play a Wizard? It can create interesting stories as your players might have a rare character or you might not let them start out as a magical character at all.

What are some examples you like of high or low magic worlds? Have you played in a game where it was very high magic or very low magic?

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I think the biggest reason that there aren’t more of them is because publishers and writers want something that feels familiar. A writer can feel like it’s their own unique twist on something that is familiar and safe, and a publisher can look and see how well things have sold. Now there is plenty of variety within the standard epic fantasy that we often think of and that we see published most often, but there’s always some medieval feel to it that feels normal and allows us to jump into a world quickly and pick up the edge cases about the world that are different from others.

What are some of the tropes of fantasy that are used often?

While it’s less the case now, it often feels like fantasy is the clear good versus evil. Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are both clear examples of this where there is clearly a good side and there is an evil side, and there really isn’t ground in between. Sometimes you really want that delineation, but fantasy can lean too much so into the good versus evil and it simply being that and nothing more.

Also there is the medieval feel, or what we attribute to a medieval feel. There are going to be knights most likely, though they might be called something else, a king, either good striving against the evil forces coming to the lands or evil keeping the people oppressed so a rebellion must rise up and there’s not all that much in between. Lots of castles, sprawling forests, and generally a lot of what you’d expect from Robin Hood shows up in your standard epic fantasy. Even in urban fantasy, there is often some leftover feel of the medieval period. In the Dresden Files, the wizarding council holds old traditions, in Harry Potter, Hogwarts is literally a giant castle.

Finally, while it’s not in all fantasy, there is very often some form of magic. This is often where fantasy diverges the most as different people use different things for magic. It could be that the magic comes from the divine, it could be that magic is steeped heavily in ritual and must be done at ritual locations, or it could be a quicker and dirtier magic that can be done on the fly. Magic can be fine and precise wielded like a scalpel or it can be swung around like a club, bludgeoning everything. So there’s plenty of leeway for magic, but it is something that is commonly found in fantasy.

That’s epic fantasy, is all fantasy like that or are there different types of fantasy?

While that might be the type that people think of when they think of fantasy thanks to Lord of the Rings, it certainly isn’t the only type of fantasy out there. There’s paranormal fantasy, urban fantasy, low fantasy, dark fantasy, or even steampunk would qualify as a different type of fantasy. Probably the biggest growing type of fantasy falls into that area of urban fantasy. The Dresden Files series is one of the biggest or Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman are two of the better known. But TV shows like Grimm also fall into that Urban Fantasy sub-genre of fantasy.

There are a few that I really want to call out, though, the first being Urban Fantasy. This is one of my favorite genres of fantasy as taking a modern world and putting magic not just into the world as a whole, but a densely populated area and really focusing the story down into that world can be done so well. In all of Neverwhere, Grimm, and The Dresden Files, there’s a grittier side of the world that you don’t a lot in fantasy. That grittier side of things is what sets it apart from contemporary fantasy which would qualify as something like Harry Potter where it’s in a modern setting, but doesn’t deal as directly with the modern nature of the world.

Another one can either be modern or not, but it’s a non-standard medieval fantasy. That’s a long name, but basically, it’s looking at fantasy that really goes outside of the normal sword and sorcery that you can see and takes us to another world or part of our world than London or the medieval European equivalent. An example of this is the Daughter of Smoke and Bones trilogy. Those books are set in Prague, so different location than normal, but they also deal with a very different subset fantasy with how they talk about a number of fantasy tropes, which you can see from above, and the creatures that you see. You don’t really have your standard goblins, trolls, and faeries. It’s often a bit jarring not to have your standard fantasy tropes, but it’s also refreshing to see fantasy step away from it’s roots and branch out into new areas.

Finally is a sub genre of fantasy that I want more from, and that’s the Weird West. But this can also fall somewhat into historical fantasy as well, so I’ll use that genre so I can talk about  more things. But in the Weird West genre, you’re getting something that we’re familiar with, because of westerns, and adding in some mix of magic, steampunk or advanced technology, aliens, or monsters. The movie, Wild Wild West is an example of what Weird West can be. But when you expand it to look at other parts of history, you see it around WWI and WWII, even something like Wonder Woman which falls under the umbrella of Superheroes, but the movie was as much an alternative history fantasy movie as it was a superhero movie because of Wonder Woman’s backstory and Ares being a Greek god.

Now, there’s so much more you can go with into fantasy. And a lot of what I’ve talked about with world building before for RPG’s or just in writing in general you can pull into fantasy as well and use it to help shape your thoughts around fantasy. I’m going to be doing a follow up article soon on magic and high, medium, and low magic as well as different ways of using magic that I touched on here in this post.

But I’ll leave you with the question, what are some of your favorite genres inside fantasy, and some of your favorite books or TV shows or movies in that genre?

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