Recent content by Devor

I don't want to get into a big back and forth, but I do want to respond to this one point. Romeo and Juliet was written in 1597, England. It's set in Verona, Italy, somewhere in the 1300s. Here's an excerpt on this setting from the play's SparkNotes page. And, what I want to say here, is...

They're only similar on the surface of a beat sheet. Romeo and Juliet, Westside Story, and Titanic all have significantly different takes on their themes of romance and family pressure. Of relevance, both Titanic and Romeo and Juliet use their archaic romanticized settings to build up the...

If your goal is just to tell an amazing story, then this is absolutely true. But if there's something you're trying to achieve thematically, it does start to make a difference. To give a really specific if kind of rambling example, if you wanted to tell a story that looks at life working in...

Better…. for what? Using the real world comes with the baggage of the real world, which can affect your story’s themes. A fantasy world is better for getting readers to a clean slate where they’re more open. A modern fantasy world is somewhere in between. So it depends on what you’re trying to do.

I'm not familiar with a lot of eco-friendly fantasy novels, but there were some RPG-like board games I've seen recently which hit the eco-themes pretty well. They all involved exploring the big monster threats as having a natural role in the ecosystem that needs to be protected. It's a little...

My setting has twelve magic systems, even though the story only focuses on the one fairy magic type, but it's important to me that they have an illusion of balance, even if I know the bare minimum about the other eleven. That may sound random to mention here, but the gods are included as part...

So, the first question is: By telling an eco story, are you trying to get a real-world-applicable message across? If so, what is that message? And would your primary audience be people who already like eco-friendly messaging, or people who don't? No message - message for an eco-friendly crowd...

So, I hate hearing this as an answer to a question, but I think in your case the answer is to start writing. Write a short story, or a scene, or google some writing prompts, and get some words on a page. Then think about a scene from a book or movie you like and try to write it out over a few...

When I see videos with authors and editors talking about this stuff they call it blocking, the little filler actions you put in a scene, probably a borrow from script writing where they have to worry about framing the camera to catch these actions. It's hard to make them interesting, but still...

Here's the framework that I use for economics in my story. A country needs five goods to survive: Grain, Wool, Timber, Stone, Iron If you're missing one, you need to import it, which makes you weak and reliant on others without it. If you have a huge supply of one, you can trade it off in...

It's impossible to say with any certainty without knowing a lot more information about what you're doing with the plot. But my gut is saying, end chapter 1 with the character walking into the funeral, and begin chapter two with a brief page or two describing the funeral, leading into a scene...

I'm going to echo pmmg a little. Scibophile has great tools for editing. I wish we get a license or something to use their tools here, but that just isn't a thing. We're limited to the tech that's available on the market, which doesn't always work the way we would want it to. Ideally, the...

The trope I refuse to write is anything where the MC has special unearned skills and abilities. That covers stuff like the Chosen One, the summoned hero, the Returner, Isekai, and so on. I’ll read, watch, and enjoy them well enough. I’m not trying to judge people who use them. They’re fun. And...

Yeah, lead characters do have a way of attracting attention. I wasn’t hoping they’d be ordinary people who blend in, so much as ordinary people who stepped up. But it just didn’t work that way with the elaborate needs of the plot when looking backwards at the reason each character is where they...

I've got one, but I won't say exactly what it is. I specifically wanted to avoid a certain character trait so that my heroes could be closer to ordinary people. But as the ideas came together, I needed to give the character agency in the plot's backstory. This trait was the only way this...