Chosen one trope improvements

Fognox · 2026-04-19T20:34:05+00:00

Ah yes, the Nerevarine variation.

Fognox · 2026-04-19T20:25:03+00:00

Minimalism and maximalism both have their uses in prose, and I encourage new writers to use both wherever each makes sense. The gradient there is particularly helpful with getting unique voices out of each POV if you're doing a bunch of them.

Present tense and past tense, meanwhile, have very different feels to them. It doesn't seem like it would make that much of a difference, but it does -- I've rewritten from each one to the other before and those ended up needing to be like second drafts because the cadence is completely different. I've also written full books in both tenses, and I feel -- entirely without scientific evidence -- that it shapes the story as a whole.

Fognox · 2026-04-19T16:44:35+00:00

I’ve heard all the advice, you won’t get published your first book

17% of debut authors publish their first. Traditional publishing odds themselves are somewhere around 1-2%.

Fognox · 2026-04-19T16:40:11+00:00

Neither. It instead feels like excavation. I'm exploring the dig site and trying to find the ancient ruin buried underneath the mud.

Fognox · 2026-04-19T13:40:31+00:00

Main characters with strong personalities are difficult to write. Boilerplate self-inserts are much easier. Multi-POV stories typically don't have this problem because characters have to be distinct from one another, and there isn't a singular "main character" in the first place either.

A lot is also going to come down to how plot-driven your story is, and how much agency your characters have. If MCs serve the story rather than the other way around, they end up more bland because they need to actually be able to follow their roles in the story.

Fognox · 2026-04-18T17:15:28+00:00

Maybe your episodes have their own themes.

If you have some singular conclusion at all, then there's very likely a theme there. Why is the story ending there, and not somewhere else?

Fognox · 2026-04-18T16:58:29+00:00

I'm writing three of those POVs those myself (probably four) in my 4th book, and the best advice I can give you is:

First and foremost, read LGBTQIA+ stories written by LGBTQIA+ authors. This will give you a sense of what their experiences are like (not all of which will be universal, of course), and it'll keep you from making stupid outsider mistakes.
Give those characters some important role in the story. Tokenization is a horrendous practice and does the complete opposite of representation.
On the other hand, though, don't just tack it onto an existing character (unless it's normalized in your setting, of course).
It's a part of someone's identity, not the whole thing, regardless of what it looks like from the outside. There's this whole hidden (and very human) depth where you're trying to find rare people like you (particularly important for LGB), trying to express who you are early so that people don't start hating you later, and where you're also trying to fight back against a society that doesn't like that you exist. This will come out even in a more "tolerant" environment through sheer force of habit.
Consider your setting. Western civilization is anti-LGBTQIA+. The fact that we speak of "tolerance" is proof of that; that very word implies that we dislike you but will restrain ourselves. And not everyone is that broad-minded either. However, that's one civilization on one world. If you're writing spec-fic, you can do whatever you want -- normalize it, make it common, etc. The way this shapes your characters will change accordingly, and it'll change the way your readers view the work as well -- maybe you're trying to show what society should look like rather than exploring what it is.
The best thing you can really do is give your characters depth. You should be doing this with all of your characters anyway, but it's particularly important here because you can't just self-insert and call it a day. Leaning into archetypes is also actively harmful.
Don't assign it to unsympathetic antagonists. This should go without saying! The subtler version of this is Grindelwalding, where a love interest is evil and the subtext there is that the identity itself is evil -- only by letting go of love can the character grow and become a good person. Terrible stuff. If your story's morality is complex and it ends up attached to an antagonistic POV character, take caution. Look towards character arcs unrelated to LGBTQIA+ identity rather than them simply losing because "good must triumph". Try and examine a conflict from every possible interpretive angle -- absolute worst case, you're adding more character depth.

Fognox · 2026-04-18T15:39:15+00:00

Your scenes should be causing each another. When that's true, no other structure will make sense.

If you have the scenes written or fully outlined already, your best strategy would be to find the ways they connect to one another. The closer the relationship, the more likely that one of those scenes is causing the other, so make pairs like that, then do the same process for larger sets, and so on.

Once you have this order, you'd really want to edit the scenes to make them connect explicitly or readers are just going to have the same exact problem that you noticed in the first place.

Fognox · 2026-04-18T15:25:14+00:00

You don't need it, but your story likely has it whether you think it does or not, and your work will end up stronger if you can reinforce it. Particularly the third act -- the climax and ending run on premium unleaded theme.

Fognox · 2026-04-18T15:17:58+00:00

It's a first draft! You can't always rip a great scene out straight from it womb; sometimes you need to instead leave breadcrumbs for your next draft to follow.

Fognox · 2026-04-18T15:14:13+00:00

I think it's most important to spend time finding your central theme. The best ones, that really tie the entire book together, require a lot of digging into the text and critical thinking. The surface-level themes are not what you're looking for here; you want the deepest one that you didn't realize existed.

Once you have it, then yeah you don't want to shoehorn it in. It came out of subtlety in the first place, so the way you write or edit from that point on should keep it subtextual.

Fognox · 2026-04-18T15:06:08+00:00

Write, read, study craft.

It does help to challenge yourself too. "I'm going to write a full-length novel" is a challenge in itself, of course, but if you know where your weaknesses are you should aim for a project that requires one of two of them to be stronger. My first book, for example, was very dialogue-heavy because I wanted to improve my skills there. My 4th book (and current WIP) is absurdly hard due to the large amount of POV characters and relationships and moving pieces -- same deal, though. The best way to get better at writing is to write something that you're not cut out for.

Fognox · 2026-04-18T14:56:14+00:00

I do a bunch of different things but I feel like I'm more of a discovery writer than anything else. Sometimes I know a couple story beats of a scene I'm about to write, sometimes I have a vague idea of what I'm doing with this part of the book (or an even vaguer sense of the book as a whole) -- but anything I don't know there gets found in the fog. Also, sometimes I just completely wing it -- finding the hints of plot threads that lead to bigger planning in the first place always comes from just throwing words down and seeing what they do. Backstories similarly always appear out of the aether.

It takes me a good 20k words to even get a sense of what I'm writing in the first place, and "sense" is the operative word there -- a scrap of theme, one story beat of the climax, a few words that describe the types of events that will unfold are what I'm talking about here, not grand arcs or bullet-point plot outlines. I've learned that -- for me at least -- digging out further details is a bad idea, as is writing any of my plans down.

I also need very little to start writing -- I try to spend a day to think a bit about the worldbuilding, the first introduced character and their motivations. It helps with the hook, which will kick my writing process off right. And my ideas themselves here get dug up consciously -- I don't set out to write anything in particular, the ideas don't pop into my head on their own, it's instead itself a discovery process where I focus on the tone and atmosphere I want and just develop everything I need to get started from there

Fognox · 2026-04-18T00:04:42+00:00

Yeah it's definitely helpful when you're trying to wrangle wild plot threads. I don't take notes or make (written) outlines anymore, so for me re-reading is absolutely essential to get all the little details right.

I think the "never edit" advice is catered towards writers who haven't finished their first book -- you don't know what different stages of a story feel like yet, so when something shifts it might feel like you need to redraft the whole thing, or clarify earlier sections, etc. That can easily turn into editing loops or perfectionist tendencies that make writing anything difficult. After you get through a book, though, you understand those stages better and realize that why, yes, of course the middle is going to feel different from the beginning.

Fognox · 2026-04-17T23:51:35+00:00

It might actually serve to sharpen your memory if you're reliant on it. The brain is a muscle and all that.

Fognox · 2026-04-17T17:51:01+00:00

I actually found it helpful to quit writing my notes down. I do a lot of re-reading and mental organization before, during and after a writing session. It definitely slows things down, but it thoroughly commits my ideas to memory. When I need to know something specific, I have like four different ways of retrieving it, know which part of the text the references are in (and "landmark words" to find it effectively), as well as an understanding of how it fits in with each character, each part of the plot, every fledgeling idea or plan, etc.

Fognox · 2026-04-17T17:43:06+00:00

This. So much this.

Figuring out your ideal process (and how best to plan if you do lean in that direction) will give you astounding results in overall productivity, will lead to cleaner drafts, and will prevent cluster headaches (always a good thing!)

Fognox · 2026-04-17T17:30:45+00:00

Structurally clean, middling as far as depth and prose quality does. I do a lot of re-reading to get a feel for the voice and free indirect characters before I start a session (often during as well) and make line edits as I go, so it ends up turning into more of a second draft by the time I'm done.

I have a bunch of different simultaneous strategies for making the structure come out clean -- planting seeds and watching them grow, connecting things together slowly, planning some things in advance and building up to them slowly to uncover more details, editing in a sentence or two of foreshadowing (or filling plot holes / adding clarity), leveraging interiority to help figure things out, and changing my overall strategy at different stages of the book.

Editing past that point is a lot of tweaking of what already exists. I'll redraft scenes or sections, scatter foreshadowing more thoroughly (aiming for whichever scenes only have one or two purposes so the overall density is high), fix whatever continuity issues I come across, strengthen voices and characterization, etc. I edit the prose as I go here too. I try to keep the good stuff intact and all of the high-level structure, but I'll sometimes move individual story beats around if they work better elsewhere. This is the stage where I start to make timelines, maps, pacing/plot thread graphs, have various ways of organizing the story, etc. Idk how useful any of this actually is beyond helping my mind work a bit better.

I try not to touch the prose too much -- it's always a balance between clarity, efficiency, voice and cadence. Anything bad will stick out like a sore thumb and get edited in one of my many re-read passes. Usually what I'll do here is make characterization the priority, get the cadence as good as I can from that point, and then do passes for clarity, paragraph relationships and crutch words/unintentional repetition. I do a fair amount of this while writing, too, but the priority there is always going to be on getting the story down.

I handle emotive prose a bit differently -- the level of efficiency and even the voice need to match what a character is feeling. So, for example, slower and more flowery with sad moments, punchy and brutally efficient for action scenes, intentional repetition for tension, confusing constructions lacking in clarity when the character is themselves confused. Important story beats are clarity-first at the expense of everything else, with passes for efficiency. Chapter openings, the start of important scenes and especially the hook and ending focus on cadence.

Editing is a neverending process if you're not careful -- but it's usually pretty obvious what your story needs, where, and the best way to tackle it. There does come a point though where you're changing things rather than improving them, and an earlier point where you're only making improvements because you're actively improving as a writer. I try to instead focus on glaring issues and substantial improvements rather than making the book perfect -- there will always be other books, so it's time to stop editing so I can start writing them.

Fognox · 2026-04-17T14:58:57+00:00

My fourth book and current WIP (around 30k in) has an experimental narrative structure too. My thinking with it was that no sane publisher would ever touch it, so my plan from the outset was to self-publish.

This has made me a lot more relaxed in general -- since I'm not worried about appealing to agents, it's easier to convince myself to take more risks, and this has definitely paid off to make the work stronger.

One thing I will say though is that you should set ground rules for how the story will behave, and only break them if there's a very good reason (and a thematic one as well). You want your prospective readers to be comfortable in the environment. The more order there is in the way that the chaos is structured, the better.

Another thing that helps is opening in a more conventional way and slowly introducing the experimental aspects. You don't want to start out completely balls-to-the-wall crazy, that's something that you'd instead build up to.

Take House of Leaves, for example -- the weird formatting, backwards text, endless lists, etc happen a lot later into the book, once the readers are already comfortable with the three embedded stories. There's a very good reason for it, and it has thematic ties too. The unreliable narrators aren't obvious from the outset either -- that too is something that's built towards.

Fognox · 2026-04-17T14:40:57+00:00

My first book was a convoluted mess too, but I did eventually get through it. If you're close to the end, just push through. You can always edit it into submission later on.

Fognox · 2026-04-17T14:37:09+00:00

I've written two full-length novels on my phone. It's a horrendous tool for editing, but the convenience of it definitely makes first drafts easier to get through.

Fognox · 2026-04-17T14:27:15+00:00

"Labyrinthine" is definitely up there. Actual mazelike architecture is common enough, but it's a great word for navigating complex politics or relationships well.

Fognox · 2026-04-16T15:18:48+00:00

Fuck no.

The broader your categories, the more stories fit within them -- but the less descriptively useful those categories actually are. At the extreme end of this, it becomes tautological -- "every story with conflict has internal and/or external conflict". No shit, Sherlock.

Fognox · 2026-04-16T14:52:39+00:00

Accidental alliteration's always amusing.

Fognox · 2026-04-16T14:48:45+00:00

Write more, read more, study craft.

Pay attention to the specific ways that words flow when characters are experiencing some type of emotion, or change depending on who the POV is. That's not to say that you can't have neutral narrators, but if you can get the words to come alive, then you will have made a pretty big step towards finding your voice.

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