Verago

...can anyone be expected to come up with a totally original plot? Humans have been writing for thousands of years, and writing fantasy for hundreds...
All the good creatures and ideas for creatures are taken. If you see a creature that drinks blood, you say, "Oh, a vampire."
A short person with high stamina: "Oh, a dwarf."

Magic. Biggie. Every imaginable, reasonable way to use magic has been done before. The Elements are overused, Words of Power are rip-offs of ancient Native American magic, brought into recent knowledge by Ursula SeGuin (Or however you spell it.) in Earthsea.

How the heck do you make the reader care? Why does the reader want to read your story over someone elses, when, if they're fantasy, odds are, they're going to be very similar?

How do you avoid cliches? Nearly everything in Fantasy has been done before, half of it to the point that no one wants to read it.

Sorry. I'm a bit frustrated right now.
Answers would be appreciated, comments welcome, and suggestions would be great.

Robgb

There are no original plots and you can't avoid cliches. But you CAN be engaging and entertaining and try to find new ways to say the same old thing. A simple way to void a cliche, for example, is to actually embrace it, only find a new way to word it -- give it a clever twist.

The same thing is true for plots. You might, for example, combine a couple of genres to create something new.

The way you keep people reading, however, is very simple. You give them characters to care about. You give them living, flesh and blood people with living, flesh and blood problems and you put them in the middle of a situation that's beyond their control. As long as your characters are people we can root for, we'll follow them.

It usually helps to just do this: write the kind of story YOU love to read.

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Robert Gregory Browne
Anatomy of a Book Deal
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A Measure of Darkness
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Verago

Yes, Colfer did that very well in Artemis Fowl.
Elves, dwarves, evil genius. Sounds cliche. But it is't.

Verago

I like your thinking.

mswietek

What if he were afraid of the dark? Or if he didn't live for millenia? Or if they weren't evil, as normally portrayed, but more like tigers. Or if he didn't kill his victims, only bled them a bit? Or if the ay he extracted blood was through a single claw on his palm?

There are tons you can do around the vampire theme, while still making it fresh and not the typical vampire stuff that's popular.

What if he felt claustrophobic while underground? Or had no idea how to mine for squat? Again, it's not that you can avoid everything that's been done before. Just give it your own spin.


I still cared about Roland of Gilead (Stephen King's Dark Tower Series) even though gunslingers have been done to death. It's about the situations you put them in and the way they react to things. Rangers have been done to death in fantasy. If you put a Ranger in your story, make his personality different, even if his skills are similar to other Rangers. Make him complex. Neither black nor white, give his personality shades of gray. Have him make tough choices. Have him think and feel. Describe him well and we will care for him. We may even think, "He's a Ranger, but I liked him better than Aragorn!"

Fantasy is a genre and all genres have certain expectations. If you did something that had no connection to any fantasy whatsoever, it probably wouldn't be considered fantasy. So don't worry about having a grizzled mage. Just make his personality stand out, and we will follow you. And to be honest....as much as people claim to hate fantasy cliches, most of us are perfectly happy to dip into a story that has elements which are similar to what we read before. It's familiar, it's comforting. Of course, you don't want to carbon copy the whole thing...

We've all been frustrated by this at one point or another. Just keep writing.

Michael

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Stewart

Not necessarily. I think you are living off a Bram Stoker image that has since become stereotypical of the vampire.

I recommend you do a little research into vampire legends around the world, and you'll see how varied the legend truly is. Since Stoker's Dracula is based on a Wallachian, you can move away from the Roma vampire, and try other territories such as Greece, the Slavic nations, India, Japan, the Phillipines, Malaysia, the Celtic nations, and the Nordic nations.

That's just the vampire as you know it. There's also psychological vampirism in which, rather than blood, the vampire feeds off a person's lifeforce.
I'll let you into a little secret...magic sucks! Unless you know exactly how to use magic in a narrative then it will become nothing more than a convenient deus ex machina.

How do you make the reader care? By making your characters interesting - even if unlikable - and playing with the reader's emotions.

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Verago

Good advice.
Especially the part about the deus ex machina.
My magic system is going to be new, in that it combines the principles of Alchemy and telekinesis with traditional magic, and a few other things.

One of my characters is based off of the psychological vampire.

And most of all, I appreciate the tip on the different types of vampires. If not for the story, for the curiousity; I'm going to look them up.

Saponification

Uh, don't write within genres. Borrow stuff from everywhere. No, that isn't original, but you can cobble stuff together in a way that is unique, sexy and stylish. Just make sure you acknowledge it: no one will take you seriously if you think you've invented it.

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Metta.

Verago

So true...
Thanks.