10 Things Fantasy Readers Hate (Writing Advice)

I asked 348 fantasy readers the number one thing they hate to read and I'm about to share with you the 10 most common responses along with sharing some thoughts and advice on how you can avoid this in your own writing based on my experience of having written four fantasy books and a video game so that you can be learning from this data to write better fantasy stories yourself we had over 10,000 words worth of responses for this entire survey and some of the answers really surprised me as we go through them you'll learn which of these 10 Things I personally dislike the most along with a few instances where I actually disagree with the answers provided in the survey let's start with number 10 modern language and anachronistic terms a lot of readers say that they're pulled out of the immersive experience of reading a fantasy story when they come across phrases or saying or slang that doesn't quite fit with the world's time period or setting for example this response from the survey said I don't like when modern sayings or words are used if the fantasy has a medieval Renaissance Etc setting words like okay what's up take me right out of the immotion not saying dialogues and narration must be super ancient sounding or complicated but I prefer it when neutral or period appropriate terms are used anachronistic elements ideas and speech including internal thoughts that don't mesh with the story's established setting such as the environment the history the technology culture Etc or tone I totally agree with this whenever I'm editing fantasy stories for my clients I always pick this stuff up because it's really shattering to the reader suspension of disbelief to come across something that feels like modern American slang when they're reading a story that's meant to be set back in the you know 1200s or the 1300s or whenever the sort of technological period of your story is supposed to be and I would also encourage you as a writer to not just think about anachronistic terms coming up in dialogue with slang and sayings but also in the similes and the metaphors and the figures of speech that you use throughout your story as well both within dialogue and also just within description for example if your story is set on a space Colony that has none of Earth's Flora then don't describe people as being busy as a Bee because there's probably no flowers for the bees to pollinate in that setting likewise if you have a fantasy story that follows a desert dwelling tribe it might not make sense to use the phrase this person looked awkward like a fish out of water because that tribe probably doesn't have a ton to do with fishing and it wouldn't really work its way into their vocabulary number nine is slow pacing and filler content readers really dislike plot lines that don't feel like they progress or Advance the story so we had one response here saying I hate it when the characters don't try to make any progress them trying and failing to make progress towards their goal that's fine but having them not actively trying to accomplish their mission for chapters on end makes reading it so tedious and boring slow transitions between events such as transit or setting up/ preparing to do the actually interesting thing such as organizing things Gathering traveling at least if it's unessential to the main plot yet highly detailed these are all things that readers really don't appreciate and we've got another comment here about filler plot lines that are irrelevant to the actual story as a whole so my thoughts on this are how fast or how slow your story feels has nothing to do with the word count or the page count and everything to do with the sense of progress the reader is experiencing as long as something changes in a meaningful way from the start to finish of each chapter you write readers are going to feel like there is advancement and forward momentum in the story and as a result you're probably going to avoid any major pacing issues of course you do need to make sure that that advancement and that sense of progress relates to the central spine and the central premise of your story so that it doesn't feel like a pointless diversion it's also really important to vary your scene formats here's a big diagram of lots of different scene formats you can use in your writing but the problem is that many times when I'm editing a fantasy story for a writer I see the same scene forn apps used over and over again for example you might have two characters talking in a room then they go into a different room and they talk some more then they go back into that first room and now there's a few other characters with them and they're all talking again it's the same scene format repeated over and over again if on the other hand you have your characters talking in a room and then they need to sneak into a palace to try to steal an item and they have to solve all these Clues and these puzzles to kind of get that item out of the safe and then they're arguing with each other while they're fleeing the guards across the rooftops of the city as they attempt to escape now that story feels a lot more engaging because you are varying the scene formats there's probably four or five different formats you're using there and as a result it does feel like there's more meaningful progress in the narrative and then lastly when it comes to fixing pacing on a sentence by sentence level the biggest piece of advice I always tell writers with this is just change up the lengths of your sentences so if you have a five-word sentence five-word sentence five-word sentence Etc starts to feel really staccato really repetitive and the reader will begin to go to sleep but if you go five-word sentence 13w sentence 2word sentence 20w sentence it creates a much better sense of Rhythm and flow and the actual micr level pacing of your story will work a lot better and you'll notice this especially when you read your story out loud which you should definitely be doing as part of your editing process number eight forced humor a lot of readers in the survey said that they really hate when comedy is croward in a scene and it undercuts a serious emotional moment or it just feels like it's been forced in there but it's not very funny and this one response probably articulates it really well I split it up over a few lines here forced humor I hate it you can crack jokes when the time is right but please do not break the mood of scenes for the sake of unfunny jokes I imagine the reason behind most of these scenes is simply the result of writers two scared to make their readers upset in sad or scary scenes or whatever but all they do with these scenes is annoy everyone please writers if you want to make an emotional scene commit to it or don't even try but do not ruin it halfway through yeah this might be the thing that annoys me the most out of everything on this list and I think a culprit here as much as I loved a lot of the early Marvel movies I do think that they were responsible for bringing in a lot of these kind of joking quips and a lot of uh using humor to undercut serious moments of emotional tension in the narrative and I really don't enjoy that aspect of what Marvel movies have kind of created what it really comes down to here is the difference between posos and beos so posos with a p is when you are attempting to create an emotional appeal from the reader so you're trying to get the reader to feel uh something deep on an emotional level whether it is a sense of love and connection to your character or anger or giv I'm with you to the end of the L uh Injustice or disgust or whatever it is it's trying to extract an emotion from your reader beos is kind of the opposite spelled with a b and it's when you undercut a moment of serious emotion with a joke or with a quip now sometimes you can do this really well as a way to create satire or to create genuinely funny moments of humor and Terry Prater in the disc World Books is a master of using beos like this but quite often bethos is just really irritating to read because you've built up this extremely great emotional moment uh or this sense of progression within a character and then you just undercut it and you kind of like Sucker Punch the reader and often leaves a bad taste in their mouth and it often is something that writers use to cop out of actually having a moment of genuine emotion because the fear and I think the thinking behind a lot of writers when they use bethos is oh well if I'm the first person to laugh at myself and to say oh you don't need to take this too seriously then I don't have to be worried about the emotion falling flat and the reader doing that for me instead it's almost like if I call out the fact that oh that wasn't really that serious then it saves me and it's a bit of a protective bubble that's not the approach I would suggest going with in your story I think you want to be developing the skill of being able to write genuinely impactful emotional moments I made a whole 30 minute YouTube video on this called how to craft emotion in your fantasy story or how to create emotion in your fantasy story rather I'll link that in the comments down below and also in the description too if you want to check that out number seven shallow magic systems so a lot of readers said they dislike magic systems that feel too simplistic or unoriginal or too IL defined in their rule set so we've got this comment here badly established magic systems that leave you guessing what the exact consequences of someone using magic powers are another survey response when the magic is so powerful and so reliable that the protagonist has two easy a time that's a really good point no limitations for magic and then something a bit more in-depth with the responses here which I thought was quite interesting and worthy to unpack I hate magic systems that base themselves off obscure artifacts or Elder language incantations especially with no explanation this is still the same response continued this sword can create fire why because it was forged in a volcano by witches okay I don't know it needs to make sense ground itself in some sort of deeper system where the witches already pyromancers did they Infuse part of their souls into the sword did they make a PCT with some God did they eat some rare plant that changed their bodies details facts and I appreciate the the fact that this person has put details and facts in in capital letters because I think that's one of just the best ways to improve the Magic in your story is to really drill down Into the Depths and the backstory behind why things are the way they are to me limitations and consequences are what make magic systems interesting magic systems that just give your characters Godly Powers with no drawbacks for me personally I don't enjoy reading about that sort of thing and it's probably why in my own fantasy novels I've definitely tended towards more hard magic systems with really defined rules and consequences my first published book fires of the Dead is pretty much built entirely around this magic system where you can use your blood to sort of link your soul into a fire so it might be a campfire it might be just a little uh lamp light it might be a huge bonfire and once you've created that connection with this fire you can then draw energy from that fire to create your own Flames but of course as you do that it does reduce that fire and will eventually extinguish it now the cool thing when you have lots of defined rules and constraints for your magic system is you can then create these emergent problemsolving solutions that arise from the combination of rules you've created so for example in of the Dead which by the way you can listen to the audio book for free on Spotify uh it's only about 3 hours long it's quite a short noela but most people read them one sitting there's a scene in this where my main character wisp who is a pyromancer is trying to Ambush this Camp of bandits in a forest at night these Bandits are all G gathered around a campfire there what wisp does is he puts a bit of his blood on the tip of an arrow shoots that Arrow into their campfire and it therefore creates a bond between him and fire so he's able to then suck the energy out of the fire plunging them into the darkness so that he can begin his Ambush and another detail I really love from this magic system too in this world pyromancers have to bond themselves to an ancestral flame which is sort of this huge bonfire that's kept underneath the Citadel of these few Noble family houses and this fire basically houses all of the minds of the ancestors of that family so it's kind of this group mind thing uh this G to entity of hundreds of minds and souls in there that guides the actions of the pyromancers that draw flames from it and also once all of your flames that you're connected to as a pyromancer are extinguished you die as well when I ran my magic system contest a few months ago I saw a ton of amazing soft magic systems that all of you guys sent in as well you can make any magic system great it really just comes down to development and how you use that magic system to create interesting consequences and to force your characters into difficult decisions in many ways the magic users are more interesting than the magic system and lot of times we get really caught up thinking about the intricacies of our magic system but most writers will benefit more from really drilling down into how it impacts your characters number six miscommunication as conflict so this was actually a bit surprising to me that something so specific uh came so highly in this survey I did of the readers but we had a lot of readers say things like they hate miscommunication I hate when a conflict could be solved before being blown out of proportion if two people would simply talk to each other pretty pretty much the plot of Kinga overblown conflicts that can be resolved by a simple conversation between characters conflict only happening because two characters refuse to communicate like humans and pointless bickering over misunderstandings I really strongly agree with this of course you can do it well and as with every single thing in this video all of these things can be done well and you can probably think of good counter examples to literally everything that readers say they hate here because stories are subjective and if you're skilled enough you can get away with anything as an author and also something that one reader hates might be something that another reader loves and next week I'm actually doing a video about the top 10 things that fantasy readers love that was also another question I had in the same survey so make sure you've subscribed to the channel if you haven't already but I really do agree with this kind of miscommunication as conflict thing I think it is a Trope that I personally find quite annoying and I remember years ago hearing this uh fridge note theory of Storytelling which is if your story could be resolved by a character writing down on a posit note a explanation of why they were behaving in the strange way they were behaving and they put it on the fridge and when the other character came into the house and saw that note it would clear up the miscommunication conflicts between them then you probably have somewhat weak uh you probably have somewhat weak sources of conflict and tension between your characters here so think about that with your own story could this be solved by just like a well-written text if so then you may want to adjust um why these characters simple miscommunication is being blown so out of proportion the fifth most common thing that fantasy readers hate info dumping so this is really probably no surprise um this is a thing that fantasy authors tend to get a bad rap for and it's a very delicate skill to try to solve this uh in an elegant way in your story but infodumping essentially refers to when you're giving excessive information to readers usually about your world but it can also be about your characters as well and the problem with this is that it interrupts the flow of your narrative and it usually isn't of too much interest to your reader so some quotes from the survey here I hate extraneous World building do I really need to know how the dwarf's economy work Works to understand if Dwarven economics is never relevant to the story looking at you tolken uh overly long descriptions of characters plot backstory World building Etc lengthy Exposition that is only there to explain SL showof the effort of the author particularly especially when it is filled with needlessly complicated names of places and people that ultimately don't matter so my thoughts on this are it only feels like info dumping if the reader does not want to read it the second that you make readers want to experience your info dumping then it is no longer info dumping it's just information that is progressing the plot or developing your characters so your goal as a fantasy writer is to make readers want the info dump to build up curiosity and suspense and these questions within them so that when you do finally deliver information about your world they are eager to receive it now saying this as a broader note about World building not every fantasy story needs crazy intricate and in-depth well building and law sometimes that stuff can just be a bit of a background element and the focus is far more on your characters and the plot there's really no one right way to approach your narrative and I think sometimes in the fantasy Community we do shame writers who don't have the Thousand-Year history of their world all worked out but there's absolutely nothing wrong with that approach if you know that you're wanting to write a more character Centric story for example now of course having said that if World building does interest you for this story then go ahead make it intricate make it develop to make it deep but usually you're better off only conveying 10 or 20% of your well building understanding to the reader and allowing the remaining 90 or 80% to be underneath the surface kind of like this huge Iceberg where you just see the tip poking above the waters but you know that there's all this grounding down deep underneath it number four poor character development so as you'd probably expect a lot of fantasy readers in the survey said that they really hate shallow characters that feel weak and flat and onedimensional we had this survey response saying I hate characters who try everything and fail yet still somehow succeed because of their great luck or because of God helps them so kind of DSX marer there I hate generic evil groups or individuals for example in Harry Potter it's clearly Gryffindor good slitherin bad I prefer when the book doesn't tell me who the good and bad guys are to let everyone have nuance and allow me to make my own judgments I think in general one of the strongest ways to develop the characterization in your book is to show us that groups of people or societies of people or races of people or whatever it is they don't always have to have the exact same Outlook towards things because that's actually how real life operates as well you can pick people from one particular group and they will have their own subtle disagreements or maybe major disagreements within that group another comment from the survey said they hate flat characters with no character arcs I've got a little bit of thoughts on that I'll get to that in a minute and then we also had this longer response here which is well worth reading out when the protagonist is either a self-insert character specifically written for the reader and thus lacks any personality or motivation in comparison with the rest of the cast or a protagonist that is so overly righteous to the point of being ridiculous such as not offering a valid reing for not killing an antagonist yeah I really don't like protagonists who will happily kill like 20 henchmen who probably have families and are working hard to support themselves with this you know villainous job but then they get to the main uh villain who has you know murdered tens of thousands of people or whatever it is and they allow them to just you know live freely and then Escape in the next book or whatever main characters who kill are great because if they're going to kill these little side characters and these henchmen then you really need a good reason for them to not defeat uh killed the antagonist as well so I agree with just about everything that I shared in these survey responses here except for that note about flat characters so flat characters obviously there's flat in the sense that they're just like boring and they're uninteresting but the idea of a flat character Arc where a character doesn't actually change or progress is not necessarily bad let me explain what I mean here so broadly speaking with character arcs you've got three options youve got a positive Arc where a character becomes better you've got a negative character Arc where a character becomes worse so you know a tragedy for example ex Le often does this and then you've got a flat character Arc where the character does not really get better or worse now the focus in a flat character Arc is not on how the character changes but rather how they change the world around them you take someone like Sherlock Holmes for example he doesn't really change much in story to story I suppose if you're reading some adaptations maybe that's different but certainly in the original artha con and Doyle short stories he doesn't really change that much the focus instead is on observing how he goes and solves this crime and that's actually where the enjoyment comes from from seeing how he impacts and processes the world around him so flat character arcs are not necessarily bad saying that I personally do prefer reading stories where a character does actually evolve either in a positive or negative sense to me that's just more interesting but you can do flat character arcs fine as well number three gratuitous sex and violence so we had a lot of readers saying that they really don't like explicit content uh particularly when it comes to violence or sex in their stories so we had readers say they don't like too much spice or spar I don't mind when characters Kiss or the light stuff but I hate it when it goes to really inappropriate stuff and other reader saying sex they don't like it graphic or otherwise sex and violence I hate shock value violence death Gore Etc that does nothing to meaningfully enrich the story and then another reader said they hate overly horny characters so this again is something where it's totally subjective there's certainly a lot of readers who just don't want to go near this stuff and if that's your taste like no judgment no one should tell you what you should be reading or shouldn't be reading or whatever life is short read the book you want to read um or don't and of course on the other side of that there's huge swats of the fantasy genre that are explicitly marketed for the fact that they have lots of smarty content in them and there's lots of readers who will probably only read that stuff or only go towards those types of stories but for me personally I think this stuff here is a fundamental part of the human condition and if you close yourself off from exploring it in your stories you're really robbing yourself of an opportunity to to deepen your characters and to kind of create new opportunities for for conflict and growth within their life I do think weirdly enough the solution with this stuff is actually very similar to what I said for info dumping earlier it only feels like infodumping if the reader doesn't want it and sometimes when it comes to you know gratuitous sex or violence or whatever it is it's not that you necessarily need the reader to want this stuff but it's that it only feels gratuitous if it doesn't make sense to your story or it doesn't feel organic or natural to your story so I would not really approach my writing with the mindset of hey I'm going to include a bunch of sex and violence because I want to include that but would more be looking at does this feel organic and natural and important for this plot and for these characters stories that I need to tell if it is then I'm going to include it if it isn't then I'm not going to include it and some fantasy books in particular that use sex in a fantastic way to develop characters and build conflict and even build the world include uh Blackstone Heart by Michael R Fletcher Jade City by Fonda Lee and also a little hatred by Joe abomi what you really want to be doing is thinking about sex in the same way you think about an action scene how does this action develop the characters and progress the plot that's the same mindset you should be applying to sex in your stories number two poorly executed tropes so a lot of readers said that they hate uh common cliches like the chosen one or medieval European settings or kind of typical black and white morality where it's very clear that there's good and bad guys so one survey response said they hate the classic Chosen One tro where the protagonist is obviously going to save the world and no matter what happens he always wins let's have a little variety maybe the chosen one is meant to destroy the world where he's not chosen for anything important or he doesn't know what he's actually chosen for give me some original thoughts another survey responder said they don't want another medieval European setting and we had a lot of people say this in the responses as well another thing readers hate are predictable twists and plot uh generic endings for your story and the same cliche Dungeons and Dragons deal so I suppose using kind of typical fantasy characters uh and settings here and this is one where I do agree with some of these notes but I also push back on them a little bit the word tropes gets a bad rap a Trope is simply an element of story so you have your characters sitting around a campfire talking while they're traveling across the country that's a Trope the campfire talking scene that's a Trope you have a character discovering her magical abilities that is a Trope it's something that we've seen a million times before and the thing is tropes are integral to your story you cannot write a book without having tropes in them so complaining about a story having tropes is a little bit like complaining that your trees have wood you just can't build a story without these things but of course if you execute a Trope badly and you pick a tro that has been done a lot of times before and you don't bring anything original or fresh to it then yes it will feel like a cliche and it probably will alienate your reader but what defines a cliche is when something is done in an unoriginal uninspiring and Bland way whenever I'm talking to writers about this such as in my fantasy outling boot camp that I'm running at the moment I always talk about this in terms of degrees of difficulty so some troopes are going to have a low degree of difficulty because we just haven't seen them much as a reader before they they feel quote unquote original and so therefore it's kind of easy to step over that bar there's other tropes where because the reader has probably seen them done a billion times before there is maybe a higher degree of difficulty because you're comparing your approach in your story to like 20 other stories that they've read before with similar elements but it doesn't mean you can't still clear that bar and it's worth noting too that readers come to your story for the tropes there's readers who love stories about found families that is a trope there's readers who love morally gray characters that is also a Trope and these different tropes are the things that you're using to get readers in the door you're communicating them through your cover through your title through your blur sometimes even through you know the first few chapters of your book as well and so they're the things that you get readers to come in with and hopefully through your exploration of them you can then add your own twist and you can introduce readers to other things that they didn't realize they were coming to the story too in the first place I really think it's key to actually lean into the tropes you enjoy the most and I'm made a video on this channel talking about seven fantasy tropes that work every time I.E they're just the ones that work every time for me they're seven of my particular favorite tropes for example Kingdom of Dragons my latest book has a magical School a floating city and dragon riters which are all common tropes you've probably read about before but hopefully through my own experience of you know having been an architect in the past I can use that to create a floating city that is more well thought out than maybe most other floating cities out there and through my own exploration of the Dr hopefully there's a sense of freshness and originality and my unique Creative Vision that will impart a certain different spin on these tropes as you read them and I think that when you write about things that you love and you bring your excitement and your curiosity that really creates a genuine sense of freshness that conveys over to the reader and stops the tropes feeling cliche and instead just makes them feel really enjoyable to read and hopefully when you read Kingdom of Dragons you'll find a lot of that excitement and that freshness in these affir menion tropes as well and this brings us to the number one thing that fantasy readers hate based on my survey of about 350 people or so which is forced romancers so readers really hated the idea of romances that feel forced or unnatural or just lacking a bit of spark between the characters so we had you know some readers just straight up say that they just don't like romances in their stories which you know you you probably expect there some readers who are not interested in that there's another response here saying I hate unnecessary romance was smart that doesn't contribute to the story line uh another reader complaining about love triangles because they're rely done well the main complaint they had here is that often it's very clear who is going to pick who in the love triangle but their comment here which was good is that you should try to have two equally compelling choices for your love pyramid don't make it too obvious another reader said they hated romance with no chemistry uh and another reader said they hate love triangles or insta love it's cringey I actually think the insta love one is is a fair point here of course as with all these things can be done really well so my thoughts on this similar to the point about how readers hate sex and violence or Le some readers hate that stuff it's the kind of thing where you know there are some readers who just won't touch romance and then there's other readers who romance is the most interesting aspect of a story for them and it's worth noting that romance is the most popular and bestselling genre of fiction out of all the genres I think it goes romance then it goes kind of like crime mystery thriller and then fantasy surprisingly which is good news for us is in third place and has actually been rising a lot in popularity in recent years thanks to all the TV and movie adaptations of varying qualities I suppose but of course writing a great romance has a really high degree of difficulty and there can be a weird stigma we feel sometimes as writers about describing our book as a romance to someone else I was chatting with one of the writers in my boot camp about this the other week about how she felt hesitant to describe her book as a romance because yes there's romantic elements in it but it's about so much more to it as well and I think there's just a real fear that a lot of us writers have about our books being dismissed as a stupid romance and it actually reminds me a little bit of that scene in The Princess Bride which I saw with a live Orchestra the other day it was in incredible experience there's a scene in that movie where the young kid as his grandpa is reading this book to him the kid asks is this a kissing book but then over the course of the story he actually warms to the idea of these characters falling in love with each other and he asks if they're going to kiss towards the end and again I think romance is an important aspect of the human condition and so it's important to explore in your stories if you feel compelled to a well executed romance is just one of the great pleasures of reading because it offers you an opportunity for connection and vulnerability and growth between two characters that is really hard to get in a lot of other ways perhaps the best way of saying this is that a great romance is going to make your story amazing and a crappy romance is going to make your story really suck it's almost this amplifier that either creates an awesome outcome or a bad outcome but it keeps your story from being in that sort of boring middle Zone it's something with high risk and high reward for me personally I've had romantic elements in quite a few of my fantasy novels although it's only really with my video game Siege of trein where there are romantic options you can have with some of the non-player characters and then it's only really with Kingdom dragons that I brought the romance to the Forefront and part of that was because I felt like I really needed to develop as a writer before I had the skill to pull off a good romance in my stories and also some of the other stories i' written in the past the romance just wasn't really that organic or that important to the plot here but with Kingdom of Dragons It's a major source of tension and narrative Drive throughout the whole story so it became a really important element and based on the feedback I've had from my early readers it seemed to work really well in the final story if you enjoyed this video and you want more fantasy writing tutorials you might want to check out this playlist over here where I cover the most common mistakes I see new fantasy writers making all the time based on my experience of having written four fantasy novels and having edited dozens of fantasy novels as well over the years I cover character mistakes description mistakes plot mistakes and a whole lot [Music] more

Channel: Jed Herne

Views: 203,370

Keywords: writing, writing advice, writing craft, story, fantasy, author, jed herne, authortube, booktube, wizards warriors words, self-publish, indie, publishing

Id: LU4Z33YshcU

Length: 28min 51sec (1731 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2024