A key question in fiction: where does your protagonist sit on the proactivity scale? Do they pursue goals beyond the everyday? Survival or escape by themselves aren’t active goals. Something has to drive change and transformation, to become better by the end than they started at the beginning.
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When it comes to engaging readers, imperfect heroes are better.
Put another way, perfect heroes are dull. Imperfect heroes are better because they have doubt, they have conflict, they have the capacity for failure. Perfect heroes are boring. Don’t believe me?
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Whatever the genre, the author has to decide what immediately matters. What’s the emotional core of the story?
Hold back on the world-building. Cancel the info-dump. Readers don’t care about your world unless you give them characters to care about first. This is how story works. Pile on the world-building before the characters and what you have is a setting, not a story. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Middle Earth, St Mary Meade or Pemberly.
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Explosive beginning, great ending, so why does your novel suffer from Sagging Middle Syndrome?
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Author and writing coach Joe Nassise brings us The Three C’s of Story: Characters, Conflict and Consequences.
His analysis is so simple, it approaches genius. Nassise lays out three elements:
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With a prequel novella in the works for my fantasy series, I’m finding more troubles with prequels.
Prequels naturally take place before a story that’s already written. This could be two centuries (House of the Dragon), or a few days (Rogue One). The core problem with prequels is the ‘before-ness’ of the story.
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Lisa Cron guested on a podcast last year discussing internality and backstory, where story lives and breathes.
Listening back to Joanna Penn’s interview from 2021, writer and coach Lisa Cron asked ‘why does story matter in every book we write, no matter the genre?’
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Here is the difference between passive and active characters; decision-making and agency.
Passive characters meander through a story while stuff happens to them and all they do is react. Proactive characters take decisions and make stuff happen for themselves.
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Crafting Distinct Voices sets nine questions designed to tease out a distinctive voice for individual characters. Given the sparse dialogue I’m writing in my fantasy series, any prompts are worth considering.
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I worked out the central premise of Amazon’s Rings of Power: Galadriel’s Study in Psychopathy.
I resisted talking about this because it’s become mired in gender politics almost as toxic as Republicans versus Democrats. Let’s ignore the politics and call it what it is: bad writing.
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