Mist and Shadows

Today sees the last part of working through the Fantasy Writing Clichés to Avoid list from Obsidian Bookshelf.

Magic, Too Cheesy
Fireballs shoot from one’s hands!
When I started I was guilty of this with over-the-top cheesy magic. I got over that phase though when I grew up. The magic that exists now is of the much more subtle variety and fairly limited; not as limited as in Lord of the Rings, but not all powerful either. Some people can speak with animals or see through their senses or even accomplish some limited shape-changing. Others can control the growth of plants. Healing is limited, being little more than speeding up the natural regeneration of the body; you can’t heal what is lost or destroyed. There is some limited control of storms and weather, though it is notoriously easy for getting out of control. The most common types of magic are mind-work; reading and detecting thought, misdirection, causing fear and panic and similar things.

Prologues.
Please, God, don’t give us an event that happens 50 years before the action.
Ah, prologues. What fantasy doesn’t seem to use them? I know I did. All. The. Time. I’ve since stopped. I rarely use them nowadays, instead just getting on with the story. If an event in the past is relevant, it can be worked in tot he story as I go along.

Races.
Elves, Dwarves, and especially Orcs can drop the property values in your neighbourhood!
Very guilty in the past. I had them all. In fact I had so many different creatures and races it was a menagerie.
Orcs were the first to go, replaced by a semi-nomadic, horse-riding race of herdsmen who are called hobgoblins by most.
Elves. I hate elves now days with a burning, burning hatred. They are so clichéd, so over used that it is sickening. When I initially used them they were your stock-standard elves. Over time they changed into something rather different, but eventually my hatred of elves got the better of me. Parts of their culture went to the hobgoblins, and what remained was an evil race that was something like a cross between a vampire and a wight.
I had always been a fan of dwarves, so they had to make an appearance. As I progressed they became more and more formidable until they were probably too powerful. Now days they don’t look much like conventional dwarves and tend to keep to the deep deserts where they work at task beyond the ken of most.
Most other races got axed as well over time, with only a few surviving. Others include minotaurs, a race of insectoid-men who live in the arid lands and some fairly unique dragons. There are a couple of others (giants and trolls) whom may still make the cut.

Telling Instead of Showing
Let us readers draw our own conclusions.
I think we all starting our writing with this problem, but as we improve we get past it. Well at least I hope I have.

Viewpoints, Too Many
They all start sounding alike!
While I often have a number of characters, I think I do try and follow this with only a few main characters, with the odd occasional viewpoint from one of the others. I’ll have to go back over old writing and see how I actually do do it.

Villains, Two-Dimensional
Why DO they want to destroy the world?
I don’t do Dark Lords any more. There are no overtly evil nations or races. Villains aren’t out to destroy the world – after all they live in it as well. Mostly they are after power and the heroes just happen to be in the way. Or in one case, the villain is simply trying to recover his baby daughter the heroes abducted.

And that concludes the list of clichés to avoid, for now. I will now have to find some other topics to post worthy of discussion.

Continuing on working through the list of Fantasy Writing Clichés to Avoid as listed on Obsidian Bookshelf.

Fight Scenes.
The improbable and the overly detailed.
Improbable? No – I like to think I keep it realistic. Overly Detailed? Maybe. I like writing good long fight scenes, while at the same time keeping them a bit hectic. I guess you could call them on the gritty side, for which I take my queue from a few of my favourite authors, like David Gemmell and Bernard Cornwell. If they are overly detailed, then so am I.

Flashbacks.
Try not to use them AT ALL!
Very rarely use, so I get a pass mark for that. And if they do crop up, it is generally only a line or two, a person remembering something someone had said or done. Not looking into a pool of water and going into a long winded recount of every detail type flashback.

Heroine, Too Pissed-Off
Girls just want to kick ass!
I can safely say I have never fallen into this trap. My Heroines are normal people – well as normal as you can be for adventuring types – and don’t fall into the traditional traps of being either 1) A bimbo or 2) more blokey than the blokes.

Horses.
Apparently, you don’t guide with your thighs.
I admit to knowing little about horses, but I am certain I’ve never had anyone guide them with their thighs. Many of my characters walk everywhere anyway, horses not being cheap. They weren’t like cars after all where everyone had one. And if they don’t ride, I can’t make many mistakes about horses.

Info-Dumps.
Don’t drop all the details on your reader all at once.
I admit that I have, and still do, info-dump at times. It is hard not to when trying to convey important bits of backstory. Something I still need to work at not doing as much of. I could whack it all in an appendix or footnote, but that may seem a little pretentious 🙂

Languages, Arcane.
Leave it to the readers’ imagination.
I’m not Tolkien. I don’t have his gift for languages. As such I don’t make an effort to make up in story languages. There may be the odd phrase or word (Yes and No for examples), but normally it is just a mention that someone is speaking in another language, one the characters don’t know, and maybe a description of how it sounds. It is safer that way – just look at how jarring a lot of these made up languages appear when used by other authors.

Tomorrow we shall conclude the list of clichés to avoid.

Continuing on from yesterday’s post, looking at the Fantasy Writing Clichés to Avoid list from Obsidian Bookshelf, seeing how I fair.

Characters, Names.
Don’t create names that sound randomly generated by software!
I go about names through a couple of steps. First, work out which culture they belong to in the world. People who come from Tirhan and Shekan have different styles of names than those from Chelos or Maedar or Tuafi. Each region has an Earth equivalent culturally, so I come up with names that sound similar to real Earth names. Then I run through the name a few times, modifying it here and there until I get a name I like the sound of.

For example, Tirhanites have names like Abhiala and Khiria (females) and Kazniah, Kesiad, Elial, Elaniah, Achiar and Elezair (for males)
Maedari names include Heric, Halir, Halraen, Cavraen, Jal, Awn, Raevak, Taenar, Ravaian and Laetan for males and Jaessa, Fianna or Remaia for females.
A Chelosian may be called Palidas, Adrasto, Kiriastas, Lastrasios, Skanaos or Lachanon.

Dialogue, too Modern.
Yo, baby, no slang. Okay?
I write dialogue much as I speak. It isn’t archaic, nor is it slang. Just simple conversational speech, normally. I do toss in a few Australianism from time to time, but most of the world won’t know them so they can pass, and plus most of them are also seldom used nowadays anyway.

Dialogue, too Weird.
By the Deity’s private parts!
Ah yes, I used to do this – back when I was young and though coming up with such expressions was the norm for fantasy – Phoenix’s Teeth, Mother of All Horses, that kind of thing. It fell away long, long ago and I don’t even have anything closely resembling it any more.

Dialogue, too Wordy.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Most of my characters are fairly plain speaking folk who use everyday language much like me, as previously mentioned. No thees and thous and foreasmuches. There are the occasional more wordy, intellectual types who do at times use more flowery speech and dialogue, but that is to make them stand out a bit from the others, to show they are a bit different. It is not like we haven’t met people in real life who use big words all the time to try and impress.

Dreams.
Freud thought they were the royal road to the unconscious.
Again, one I did one use, but seems to have fallen out of favour. Sometimes people to have visions, but they tend to be brought about by shamanistic type rituals or forced onto people by outside forces. One thing I recently worked on did have a dream, from the POV of the villain. It was one he was forced to have nightly by outside forces, reliving a terrible day in his life that changed his character. It was put in to flesh out the character and shoe he wasn’t quite the one-dimensional villain he had appeared to be earlier in the book.

That is enough for part two; tomorrow we continue to work the way through the list.

Recently came across a post at Obsidian Bookshelf called Fantasy Writing Cliches to Avoid.

I’m going to make my way through the list over a couple of days and see what I have and haven’t avoided.

Architecture.
An historic castle is sometimes really tiny!
I seem to have avoided this by not really having castles. There are palaces and there are forts, but given the lack of a feudal period with knights and the like in my setting, castles never really featured.

Appearance of character.
Keep it to a minimum.
Yes and no. While main characters do get fleshed out more, it is usually only a few lines, not whole paragraphs. Others can get a more basic description. For instance, Abasan is described as wiry, dark-haired man with a narrow face. I do like to give basic details; hair and eye colour, height and body type. Facial hair or scars. That kind of thing.

British Culture.
Don’t make your British readers laugh their arses off.

Pass this one. I’m an Australian and write, I think, with an Australian style and language. At least I try too.

Characters – Ethnicity
Why is everyone a Northern European?
Can announce I pass this with flying colours. One culture, the Maedari, are of this type, but they are alone. There are others who are Mediterranean or Slavic or African or Semetic or Indian in appearance, as well as others. A good, broad spread.

Characters, Mary Sue.
We don’t want a too-perfect version of yourself!
Maybe once, but not anymore. I hope. None of the current crop of characters look anything like me really, or act like me. They have flaws and weaknesses to balance out strengths.

We will look at some more of these tomorrow.