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No, you world is not too dark Before I continue, let me clarify that statement: your world is not too dark for most people, and equally dark (or darker) settings have seen wild success. Settings ...
You need Karmic Justice. Great Pains = Great Rewards. Readers expect suffering of heroes to be rewarded by success, and suffering of victims to be revenged. If good guys die in war, they want the ...
For a few points of comparison: Our protagonist and her community live in a broken world ravaged by war. They are forced to work while enduring medieval conditions. Every year two dozen people are...
Yes. Yes. And yes. When I write, my rule of thumb is: if I start wondering whether something is too much, too off, or too something, it probably is. The author is the mind and motor of the story...
You've certainly ramped up the grimdark a bit! That said, I can think of a number of successful fantasy series which aren't a million miles away from yours. John Wyndham's The Crysalids is almost...
This is not a problem; get over your own prejudices. I know people married for thirty years with a 13 year age gap, and with the woman older than the man. They started dating when he was 28, and sh...
There is nothing wrong with such a pairing - unless one is fifteen. A cousin of mine had been dating for years and finally found the one. He called me to tell me about her, but was initially emba...
No. Winds are not waves. You can describe each of them if you wish. Billowing and petulant have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Billowing means "filled with air and swelling outward....
Generally, I would start with "On this spot on/in [full date or year of deed] [event occured i.e. 500 people gave their lives for the Union][reson it matters in a big picture i.e. and the belief th...
There are no pros. The cons are people will not read them more than once, so your story becomes confusing, and they will stop reading altogether. They may sound exotic to begin or appearing once or...
YOU DONT! You make the Villain as relatable and human as possible and then you make the hero kill him mercilessly and then make the hero and the reader question their own morals and maybe discover...
Every writer must wear two hats, writer and editor. All cases of writer's block, no matter at what part of the process they occur, are because your internal editor is overriding your internal writ...
@LHH I'm posting an actual answer in response to your comment above. Firstly, I gathered it wasn't the actual scene. There's nothing wrong with posting your actual writing so long as you are askin...
That's a thing I read often about on Twitter from colleagues. The most common approach is: Let your character do what he wants. There is a reason that your character developed this way and make way...
Taking a life of their own is exactly what your characters should be doing. They should have enough of a "character" that a reader can predict how they would act in a given situation. That's what m...
I'm going to assume the passage is written in the perspective of a character, rather than in the point of view of an omniscient narrator. The two primary uses of dialogue are to: Advance the sto...
Since you are writing in the fantasy genre, is there any reason that the poetry needs to be in a human readable tongue? I can imagine that humans, living among other older species, might know j...
Steal it! For a ritual setting, the poetry is plausibly old stuff, so find some very old poetry in the public domain, and look for passages you can steal. You don't have to attribute it to anybody...
I am not sure what "under what circumstances..." is supposed to mean. Whenever you want! IRL violent psychopaths are perhaps 0.1% of the population, one in 1000. With about 3 billion adults on t...
A thoroughly despicable character with no redeemable qualities can be absolutely likeable. Avoid conflating the notion of likeable with any form of goodness. Plenty of irredeemably monstrous char...
There is a phrase that I picked up somewhere and integrated into my life. It helps tremendously with interpersonal relations, but it works for writing as well: Nobody is the villain of their ow...
I don't agree that all characters need to be likable. Take Joffrey in Game of Thrones (I've only seen the HBO shows, not read the books). He is absolutely despicable, we can't stand him.
Soap opera scribes are not bad writers, they are writers whose (often considerable) craft is turned against the aims of more substantive writing. The defining characteristic of soap operatic writi...
We are good at pattern recognition and if you keep the bizarre names to a minimum you should be OK. Long is fine, so long as they can be scanned and not confused with one another. I rather like T...
When you talk about the "translation", do you mean that you are writing your book in some language other than English and you are translating between English and your native language to ask this qu...
