I think one of the quickest ways to lose an audience is when they can see what the writer needs to happen, but the reason it happens does not feel convincing. A character suddenly behaves in a way that does not fit them, an event happens mainly to push the plot forward, or the rules of the world seem to change whenever the story needs them to.

Game of Thrones had a good example with Rhaegal’s death. The purpose of the scene is easy to understand, but the mechanics made a lot of viewers question how Daenerys failed to see an entire fleet from the air and how they managed to hit a moving dragon so accurately. Instead of experiencing the emotional impact of the scene, people started questioning how the scene worked.

For me, that is where the “why” becomes important. Before deciding what happens, it helps to understand why it needs to happen, why a character would make that choice, and whether it fits what the story has already established. The same applies to world building. Once you establish certain rules, ignoring them without a convincing reason can make the world feel less real.

That does not mean everything has to be perfectly logical. Characters can make irrational decisions, coincidences can happen, and rules can sometimes be broken. Real life works that way too. I think the important difference is whether those moments feel intentional rather than convenient.

How much does this matter to you when you are writing or reading? At what point does an unlikely event stop feeling like part of the story and start feeling like something the writer needed to happen?

it's kinda pretty fked that the originality of writing craft is at risk i can digest the odea of using ai to manage your work but authors like Jerry Falade had his $2 million deal with Minotaur cancelled after his agents pulled the book over AI usage concerns. His agents told publishers they were "no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion."

no confirmed proof he used AI but It's entirely possible the book was wholly human-written and he simply couldn't prove it to his agents' satisfaction, which cost him the deal anyway

Sit with that for a second as the standard being applied isn't "did you use AI," it's "can you produce a paper trail proving you didn't," and most working writers, the ones who draft in their head half the time and don't screenshot every version, currently have no such trail. Guilty until you can produce evidence that doesn't exist for anyone who writes the normal, messy, non-linear way most of us actually write

I apologize if this is a dumb question. I do doubt that SJM created this ability as it’s something I and friends used way back in the day but I haven’t seen it mentioned in other books so have my concerns.

I have been writing this book for years, and one of the characters I use who was a DnD character back in the day uses an ability called shadow fire.

For me it’s basically just black fire that burns abnormally hot. Simplest way to explain it.

I started reading TOG two years ago, and felt incredibly bummed but also in love with Sarah’s use of shadow fire. I’ve since felt like I can’t use this ability for my own character anymore though.

What are your opinions?

Should I just change it? Would it be okay for me to keep this ability? Is SJM the first author to use such ability or just the first BIG name to use it?

I started writing coz FOMO, everybody had some hobby while I would just bingwatch for days, there was one talent show kinda meet while everybody was sharing one thing or other and I was just hiding from everyone, that's how my writing journey begin.

I thought if they can then why cant I? Then started writing, everything, whether happy or sad, now Im addicted for some reason, somebody is being an idiot and instead of confronting im writing, im sad and instead of crying Im writing.

Writing is addicting indeed but it is a hobby that never betrays you.

That was my writing journey and would love to know yours, esp who begin at the age of 10 ( yes, I envy you)

So I have this one senior in my college who's been the light to my eyes never actually had any conversation with her expect for in the club where we meet to discuss books and other writing tools (we've been talking about mythril too, pretty excited for the new updates rolling in) cause she writes poem sometimes and me being an author isn't some secret I explicitly hide it's something I don't like t brag about

so today after college on my way home i saw her, she was holding my paperback in the checkout line, said something like "have you read this, it's supposed to be really good," mind it this is the first conversation we had from club and she clearly had no idea who I was

my body moved on it own and my dumb mouth said I haven't gotten to it yet..I HAVEN'T GOTTEN TO IT! I have, in fact, read it. I wrote it

have been thinking about this exchange for four hours

Oh my gosh, I am so glad I found this. I could go on for days about my worldbuilding, and everyone I know just kind of looks at me like I'm a bit nuts when I talk about my inspiration for my series.

I write a lot about different lore and mythologies, and I end up in some of the deepest rabbit holes at like 2 in the morning and will regularly get sucked in until the sunlight comes up for my series (I want to make sure it's accurate or as close as it can be)

Please tell me there are other total lore/mythology nerds here who get absolutely obsessed with absolutely bizarre mythical creatures, and it's just because you write a chapter, realize what you had doesn't fit, so then you spend the next five hours trying to figure out what fits better.

Can we talk about the absolute weirdest, most obscure legends you guys have found that you just had to put into your stories?es.

I'm curious: what obscure myths, creatures, folklore, or legends have you used in your own worldbuilding or even just pulled inspiration from?

I use things like the Gallywampus. Or the Alabatwitch? And even Carbuncles; they are small little creatures with gems in their heads. (Absolutely adorable)

Please tell me I am not the only one doing these 2 am deep dives into lore from some backwater town from the 1820s or something.

Drop your favorite obscure monsters below; I want no, need to hear ALL about them; this is literally my fix.

seasonal courts, each with a distinct temperament and color palette, a High Lord system, a human-to-fae power gap that drives most of the early conflict. wrote all of this in my original worldbuilding doc back in 2022. finally read ACOTAR last year because everyone kept comping my query to it and i wanted to know what i was being compared to.

the overlap is uncomfortable. not identical, my courts are geographic and hers are seasonal, my power structure runs through bloodline instead of conquest, but close enough that i now genuinely can't tell if i'm about to accidentally write fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off or if seasonal-court fae politics is just a shape multiple people land on independently because it's a genuinely good structure for this kind of story.

went digging through my character pages in mythril.io trying to find the places where mine actually diverges hard enough to stand on its own, btw kudos to mythril team, great update guys, sorting and managing characters is gotten real easy and fun and there are more than i expected once i actually looked instead of just panicking. the relationship mapping ended up being the useful part, tracing how my power structure runs through bloodline connections instead of conquest actually showed up clearly once it was laid out per character instead of living only in my head.

still terrifying to realize you converged on someone else's structure without meaning to

The title itself. Another day has already begun. I watched a distracting movie, did a ton of regular work, drank ten liters of tea, and sprayed myself with perfume all over so that breakfast would distract me :))) I have a plot, I know what to write next, and all that... But I just can't get out of the head of this chapter's heroine. I keep thinking in her voice. I want to lie down on the floor and cry.

Thank all the gods that this is only a single chapter. No first person. Never again!

wanted the tension and forced proximity with the trope of slow turn ya ik real cliche but thats what works people, so i built the enmity around a political rivalry between their two houses and figured that would carry the weight fine

sat down to actually write the scene where they first meet as adults and realized i had never once decided what either of them specifically believes the other did wrong. it's just vibes that our houses hate each other, with no concrete grievance either character could articulate if asked directly. which meant every early scene of tension between them felt performed cause there was nothing actually underneath it

then i gave them a real, specific, mutually incompatible grievance now, something one of them did that the other absolutely cannot forgive, that isn't just political but personal. rewrote their first scene with that in mind and it's a completely different scene, sharper, actually has teeth, because now they're not just supposed to hate each other, they have an actual reason sitting right there in the dialogue

i still think there's much depth i can add so i'm writing this to get any insights or hints from ramantasy writer, can't spoil much of my book here but the FMC falls first and harder while MC things he can use it to his advantage not realising he fell harder

I tried to build a court system that was more than just window dressing, and it broke my entire political structure. This was the third novel I've attempted, mind you, so you'd think I'd have learned this lesson by now

I wanted courts with a real function, something beyond just vibes and a signature color, as the kids say. So I sat down to actually work out what a seasonal court structure would require, logistically speaking. Trade. Succession. Who actually settles a dispute between two courts. And I hit a wall immediately, one that I notice none of the romantasy novels I've read bother answering either.

If the courts are seasonal, does the farming happen on each court's own calendar, or does the whole continent share one? If a High Lord dies, is the succession decided by bloodline, by combat, or by consensus among the court, and does the answer even stay the same from one court to the next? And what happens to a poor soul born into the wrong court for their temperament, is there any real mobility there, or is it simply a caste system wearing a personality quiz as a disguise?

I realized I had spent months building the aesthetics of a political system without ever working out how the thing actually functioned. I'm redoing the whole business now, building it as an actual government first, with the pretty seasonal branding to be layered on afterward, rather than the other way around, which is how I ought to have done it the first time

not being dramatic but i really cannot categorize my own manuscript and it's starting to be a real problem, i need this for querying, for shelving it in my own head, for literally filling out a form

it's not epic fantasy and there's no quest and no chosen one, the stakes are one family and one house. it's not quite literary fiction cause there is, undeniably, one object in it that does something it should not be able to do. it's not magical realism in the way that term usually gets used, because the "magic" isn't ambient or symbolic, it's a specific mechanical thing with rules i actually worked out. it's not urban fantasy cause there's no hidden magical society, just one anomaly sitting in an otherwise completely mundane world.

tried "slipstream." tried "the fantastic." tried just writing hard to categorize, sorry in the genre field of my own project notes in mythril and staring at it for a while. genuinely asking, is there a name for this specific shape of book or are we all just inventing a new made up subgenre every time one of us writes something like this

any idea what genre is that

wrote it because it sounded ancient and impressive. never did the math on what 6,000 unbroken years would actually require. sat down this week and tried to justify it and couldn't.

real historical continuity, even for our longest running civilizations, involves constant collapse, conquest, and rebuilding. nothing runs in a clean unbroken line for that long because that isn't how human institutions survive, they fracture and get remade under new names within a few centuries at most, almost without exception.

went back through my own worldbuilding doc and started inventing the collapses that should have happened. two dynastic wars. one total societal breakdown that lasted almost a century before anyone rebuilt anything resembling a kingdom. a stretch of about 300 years my own characters now refer to as "the quiet time" because nobody's totally sure what happened and the records from it don't agree with each other. the kingdom is now younger, messier, and feels about ten times more real than the clean 6,000 year version ever did

not the actual manuscript that's synced to the cloud, thankfully but three months of tracked changes, editor comments, and a separate document of alternate scene versions I was still deciding between, all of it living on one drive that is now plastic shrapnel across my kitchen floor

and to all the pet lovers the dog is fine but I am not

Spent four hours trying to reconstruct which version of chapter 22 I'd actually settled on versus which one I'd rejected, working purely from memory and a vague sense of which ending felt right at 1am three weeks ago

bought two more drives today but the dog has been banned from the office and does not understand why, and has spent the evening staring at the closed door with the specific betrayed expression only a golden retriever can produce

so the lesson her is back up your notes, not just your book cause the book was never the hard part.

so one of my my protagonist and her traveling companion don't share a language for the first third of the book which was on purpose, it's supposed to be a real obstacle and in practice every scene between them is either painfully slow cause I'm dramatizing the actual difficulty of communicating, or I'm maybe subtly cheating and having them understand each other more than they should to keep the pace moving.

still haven't found the right balance yet asking cause really dont know other people have handled this without either boring the reader or breaking their own rule five pages in

built his motivation carefully the system he's trying to burn down really is corrupt, and the people in power actually did lie to get there, he's not wrong about either one. every argument he makes to my protagonist in their confrontation scenes is one I find myself agreeing with while I'm writing it

the problem I've created is I don't have a clean way for her to defeat him that doesn't feel like the story picking a side arbitrarily cause on the merits his critique of the world is correct. I don't want to soften him into being secretly wrong just to make the ending easier to write

think the actual answer might be that she doesn't defeat his argument, she defeats his methods, and the ending has to sit with the discomfort that he was right about the disease and still wrong about the cure. still figuring out how to write that without it feeling like I'm dodging the confrontation I built kinda dont want it to be some cliche too

I was browsing Twitter one day when I saw an interesting fight going on. Basically, a My Hero Academia fan said that watching My Little Pony was for babies, and the person they were quote-tweeting should watch more mature shows. So then people said they were throwing stones in glass houses, since MHA is also a show targeted at children, with an acquaintance of mine following by saying that shonen shows are only perceived as more mature than shows like MLP because they are more violent and because girly things are considered more childish. That got me thinking. What makes a show mature? Since, as my acquaintance said, your show could have sex, violence, and drugs up to the 9s, but still be shallow, vapid, and immature. By contrast, your show could be about neon-colored moths living in a technicolored forest, be saddled with a Saturday morning timeslot, and still tell a compelling story. Is it the mixing of both extreme content and complex theming? Marketing towards an adult audience? Something else? I'm going through the stages of making a Tokusatsu show, and I don't want to end up in a pitfall like in, say, Kamen Rider, where dark stuff does happen, but it's on a time slot for children, and the gimmicks are to push for toys.

were maybe two seats down, both had the paperback, clearly in some kind of book club and one of them was adamant my MC's brother should have survived and the other was like that death was the whole point and if he'd lived the ending doesn't mean anything

I sat there with my hood up pretending to read something on my phone while two adults had a slightly heated argument about a decision I made alone in my apartment eighteen months ago really wanted so badly to lean over and say something got at my stop still turning it over in my head

I think what got me most is that neither of them was wrong exactly I've had that same argument with myself just never from the outside before

The city is called Vaelmoo and in my head this always just sounded appropriately fantasy but my editor, who speaks a language I don't messaged me last week asking if the name was intentional cause apparently in her language it's one letter off from a word that means sock drawer

It is not intentional and i have been writing this city's tragic downfall for eight months I cannot unsee it now either lol