are you an aspiring writer? feeling unmotivated and need to laugh? try r/fantasywriters

Stephanie Myers did an impressive job with Bella Swan, and I'm not saying that to be sarcastic. She truly embodies specific traits common among teenage girls and immature women-- enough to make her seem like a real person and impossibly relatable if you're a young teenage foid ( OMG HOW IS THIS SO ME????), but it's only just the right amount to her a blank slate for self inserting.

Many YA writers have tried and failed to make a wish fulfillment series with as much "connection" as twilight. They fall for things like "twilight is problematic, and THAT's why people hate it. THIS has a yas slay queen main character because women stronk"

(lmao dumb most neighbor people hate twilight because teenage girls and annoying women love it)

Those attempts fall flat, not because twilight isn't a full of crappy lessons if you're a woman trying to be less pathetic, but you can't just drag this audience into a wish fulfillment they don't identify with, your main character has the audience attached to their leg with a chain, as if the audience was a 30 pound ball. Your character has to maneuver with the audience attached to them and carry them around by hand and really bring them into every moment-- u need to be continually accounting for their position.

What makes Twilight good, is that Myers continually places you in the frame of reference of Bella's experiences in sometimes AN ACTUALLY TIGHT AF poetic way using sounds, smells, kinesthetic senses. Sometimes she misses and it's cheesy and those are the excepts that get clipped and made fun of in a giant circlejerk, like she didn't have a few bangers of gut punching descriptions in there that make you want to read them more than once.

to be clear I have never read twilight through, but I've skimmed it here and there and understand what made it popular

...you can really see the Jane Austen influences and I really struggled to read Austin through...it was ok but kind of boring. I probably would have been exited about Sense and Sensibility as a teenager if it had one of the characters grappling with the fine details of the experience of how it feels to breathe in a new vampire body that doesn't actually need air. The boring parts of twilight are also boring tho, just like Jane Austen books and the like

SHOW MORE

Ironic, because just like redditors, Asimov was also an AIDS-ridden faqqot libertarian.

Fundamentally, execution matters more than ideas.

This is the fatal weakness of worldbuildingcucks. They're all ideas but no implementation.

There's a reason 'ideas guy' is a scoff-phrase. Anyone can be one.

The Democratic RethugliKKKan Party will collapse by 2030.

In my mind it's like like "aspiring game developers" that don't know a single programming language, can't even fricking draw or make pixel art, but have PLENTY of fantastic ideas for a game.

Learning to describe simple things in a way that commands attention is like a game developer learning how to call a function that plays an animation on the screen.

Plenty of "aspiring game developers" are people who can't code or art, but a most of them get mocked or told to hit the books and come back when they can at least recreate flappy birds and in their digital medium of choice.

This kind of advice doesn't show up often in most writing communities. There's people who think writing is just raw ideas + ???, and they assume if you have good enough ideas the ??? is probably just time and raw effort and the amazingness of your ideas ( I am the ONLY person with a vivid imagination) will cause it all to come together.

If you are a painter, raw ideas + time + effort won't take you from your base skill level of left, which is an arcylic painting done in every "sip and paint" wine mom class and commonly sold by 15 year olds on etsy who's mom's forced them to make an account after finding out their kid was ✨talented✨, to the skill of the painting on the right (COCKATOOS, oil on canvas, Tatiana Rezvaya, 2022)

Artists who even approach the skill level on the right have done their hours doing things like painting 6" squares with lemons next to a reflective pitcher, or painting cardboard boxes full of apples. To paint feathers and that kind of luminescence, you need to develop a careful learned touch, and you aren't gonna find that in a wine and paint arcylic class for bored moms. Most good painters have been outside with their drawing pad, learning from life, even if they are sketching and not painting.

SHOW MORE

Thanks for the tips

That’s a pretty ironic quote coming out of Elder Scrolls though. Story is the last thing I think of when it comes to Bethesda, and all the ES main characters are pretty egregious examples of “chosen one” protags.

ive seen almost all his lectures more than once. its useful as a starting point but pretty surface level once you have a better grasp of storytelling. imo the real secret is capturing what works in other genres and studying relentlessly real historical weirdness and people who found success in the industry who aren't Stephen King and the like

The state of the publishing industry really does bother me

It stinks, it sucks, im r-slurred

add to this a lot of fantasy is frickin long

It's funny because the whole LOTR trilogy is ~1k pages. So like 300 pages per book. Modern fantasy writers would be wise to take some lessons from that I think.

I made my way through the latest Stormlight book (1k pages I think). Shit was a real drag to get through. It's a real shame because I enjoyed the general plot / story beats. But it took forever to get from one interesting moment to the next. Felt like a 200 page story being stretched to 1k.

Fascinating how all popular fantasy series seem to trend towards that. I wish these bastards would have some disciple.

Spent more time writing ff7 fanfic and less time trying to throw girls off balconies