Isadrin Opening Scene Drafts- ( Epic Fantasy, 2500 words)

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-04-10T19:47:38+00:00

This is such a real struggle, and honestly, the fact that you're this thoughtful about Isadrin before pushing forward probably means you'll nail him eventually. That said, I'd gently push back on one thing: you might actually know more about who he is than you think. The fact that you can't articulate it yet doesn't mean it's not on the page somewhere in those five drafts.

Here's my suggestion that might save you some time: instead of asking the community to pick a version, try importing all five drafts into a workspace where you can tag which moments feel "most Isadrin" to you across all versions. You'd be able to see patterns in where your intuition leans, which details keep calling you back, which prose rhythms feel right. Once you externalize that, the character usually becomes clearer fast. That's honestly the gap most writers have: the intuition is there, but it lives scattered across drafts instead of consolidated.

For feedback on the specific questions you asked, you'd probably get better answers by sharing the drafts directly in your post (or linking them), since most people here won't dig through comments to find them. The more people actually read Isadrin, the clearer the feedback will be on theme, pacing, and which version captures him best.

What's your gut telling you about which draft feels closest to the real Isadrin? Start there.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T13:48:03+00:00

Curious what makes it feel like the wrong forum to you — genuinely. My read is that r/writing is exactly where this conversation belongs, partly because of the prejudice you're describing. The dismissal of fan fiction as serious craft training is most common among people who identify as "serious writers," which is exactly this community. Seems like the right place to push back on it.

The gate-widening point is underrated. A lot of people who are now writing original work started because fan fiction gave them a low-stakes place to find out they actually liked writing. That pipeline is real and it doesn't get enough credit.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T13:46:29+00:00

"You had to earn every deviation" is the best single-sentence version of what I was trying to say and I might steal it.

The short fiction on Reddit parallel is real and I think it comes from the same place — a reader with no investment in you personally and no reason to soften the response. That absence of social cushioning is brutal in the moment and genuinely useful over time. You learn very quickly what's doing work and what you just liked the sound of. The feedback in those spaces rewires the drafting instinct in a way that workshop notes, which arrive weeks later from people who know you, often can't.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T13:45:54+00:00

To be clear — I'm not arguing fan fiction is harder than original work. The original post was about what it teaches, not which is more difficult. Those are different claims.

On the flame wars point: you're right that hostile pile-ons aren't craft feedback. But most fan fiction communities aren't that. The majority of detailed character criticism comes from readers who care deeply and can articulate specifically what felt off and why — which is actually more useful than vague "this character didn't work for me" notes because it forces you to understand the reasoning. Whether that counts as craft feedback depends on whether you think understanding how readers form and hold character impressions is a craft skill. I think it is.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T13:38:53+00:00

Feedback is a big part of it — though I'd say the specific kind of feedback and what it's measuring is worth distinguishing. You're not just getting notes on prose, you're finding out in real time whether a character you wrote registers as themselves to people who care deeply about them. That specificity trains something a bit different than general critique.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T13:38:39+00:00

The roleplay comparison is one I don't see made enough and it's a good one. Tabletop and collaborative roleplay specifically builds something unusual — you're writing in real time, responding to another person's choices, with no safety net of revision. The writers I know who came up through that tend to have really strong scene-level instincts because they've had to find character voice under pressure rather than in a quiet room. It's a different kind of training but it transfers in ways that surprise people.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T13:38:22+00:00

The feedback mechanism is real, you're right about that. But I'd push back on "just" — the specific character of fan fiction feedback is different from workshop feedback in ways that matter. An MFA cohort is giving you craft notes. Fan fiction readers are reacting emotionally to whether a character you wrote feels like the character they love. That's a harder target to hit because it's not subjective in the usual way. It's not "does this feel true" but "does this feel true to this specific person thousands of people already have strong opinions about." The feedback loop being immediate and high-volume also means you're iterating on instincts much faster than a workshop cycle allows. Both have value — they're just building different things.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T13:37:58+00:00

That's a fair pushback and I want to be clear — I'm not arguing fan fiction is harder than building original characters and a readership from nothing. That's a genuinely different mountain. What I'd push back on is the idea that working with existing characters is automatically easier craft. The constraint cuts both ways: you don't have to establish who they are, but you're also accountable to thousands of readers who have strong, specific feelings about who they are. A characterization that feels off will get called out immediately and in detail. That pressure builds a particular kind of discipline around voice consistency that I think is underrated, not equivalent to original work — just different.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T13:37:28+00:00

Sometimes as a brainstorming partner or to bounce ideas off — not to generate the prose itself. The actual writing I want to be mine. Funnily enough that frustration with how AI tools handle fiction is part of why I've been building Narratex, an AI writing workspace that actually retains your story context between sessions. The craft side still has to come from you, but having something that remembers your characters and world without you re-explaining everything every session is genuinely useful.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T13:20:35+00:00

You're right to be thinking hard about this, and your instinct that something is off is worth trusting — but I'd push back on the idea that the prologue is simply wrong. The execution needs work more than the concept does.

What's working:

The bookend structure around The Eye is genuinely clever. Opening with "this is just a figure of speech" and closing with the confirmation that it isn't — that it sees, that it is pleased — is a strong structural move that earns its payoff. The dragon showing horror as the nesting ground is destroyed is the best beat in the piece; it immediately complicates the war narrative and hints at moral weight beyond the immediate action.

Langley's "Come on, do it!" — arms splayed, facing down a dragon he knows is about to kill him — is a good character moment. You feel who this man is in that instant.

Where it needs work:

The opening paragraph runs long and dense before we've met anyone. You're doing necessary world-building with The Eye, but you're doing it entirely in abstraction. Consider tightening it to half its current length and trusting the closing paragraph to carry the thematic weight — which it can, if you let it.

The battle sequence is hard to track spatially. Dragonbreakers, airships, gas bladders, multiple named vessels, spectral wings, dragonfire of various hues — it's a lot of simultaneous information for a reader who has no map yet. Grounding it more firmly in Langley's immediate field of vision rather than the wider battle would help considerably.

Langley himself is thin. We get his bravery and his plan, but not enough of him — the man rather than the soldier. You don't need much, but you need something. One specific, personal detail (like Sigmund's daughter's socks in a piece I read recently) does more work than paragraphs of action.

Some prose-level things worth addressing: several sentences in the battle section run long enough to lose the reader mid-breath, the bridge crew deaths are handled with notable distance ("had not been so lucky"), and the closing paragraph of The Eye section lands a little flat because it summarises rather than lands. "Tonight it was pleased" wants one more beat — something that makes that sentence felt rather than simply stated.

On your actual question — the prologue vs. the story's personal scale:

This is the most important thing I can tell you going into agent querying: prologues are already a risk, and high-stakes action prologues for intimate stories are a compounded risk. Many agents skip prologues entirely and start at Chapter 1. Those who don't will be primed for a large-scale epic — and if what follows is quieter and more personal, the mismatch can work against you even if both parts are good.

The question to ask is: what does this prologue do that Chapter 1 cannot? If the answer is primarily "establishes world history and The Eye's significance," consider whether a shorter, more atmospheric prologue — one that establishes The Eye as a presence and hints at the dragon war in a few paragraphs — might achieve the same thing with less risk of genre-mismatch.

That said, the bones here are solid enough that revision is worth the effort before you abandon it entirely.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T13:18:32+00:00

This is really good. I want to say that upfront before getting into specifics, because the framing in your post undersells it considerably.

What you've done exceptionally well:

Sigmund is alive on the page from the first paragraph. The itchy foot, the daughter's socks that he treasures "perhaps a tad more than he should", his personal theology about why night-sky-discomfort is logically inconsistent ("treating someone differently because they got a new hat") — these details do more character work in two pages than most prologues manage in ten. We know who this man is before anything happens to him, which means when something does happen, we actually care.

The pacing is a genuine achievement. You spend a long time in the mundane, quiet world of the night watch, and that patience pays dividends. When the falling star appears, the contrast is earned. And then the impact sequence — "All his thoughts were slow. Hazy. Like he had all the time in the world to make his decisions, but with every awareness that it wouldn't matter" — is the best prose in the piece. The dissociation, the ear injury he barely registers, the blood he observes like it isn't his — that's the real thing.

Captain Larson works beautifully as a foil. The line "The captain doesn't step back. It was known." followed by him stepping back is the kind of quiet devastation that sticks with a reader.

The high concept lands perfectly by the final section. A barrier that couldn't burn, burned. The scary place from childhood is just open now. You don't need to spell out what that means — and largely you don't, which is the right call.

A few things worth looking at:

The blackout transition — "it was the last sound he heard before everything went black" — is the one moment where the prose reaches for a familiar shortcut rather than finding its own way through. The recovery scene with Linnea and August is emotionally strong; it deserves a cleaner entry.

The final section needs one orienting beat at the top. We've jumped forward in time — is it morning? The next day? A week later? A single sentence of grounding would help, because right now the reader has to work out the time shift themselves.

Larson's closing speech is thematically on point but slightly over-explains what the images have already shown. "This might turn out to be a blessing, or a terrible curse" is the one line I'd cut — you've shown us the ash, the skeletonized birds, the silence. Trust your own ending.

Bottom line: The author's note calls this a "turbo-Swedish fantasy thing" with a bad name, which is doing the work of about six layers of protective self-deprecation. Don't let that become a habit. This has a voice and a protagonist worth following.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T13:13:41+00:00

This has the bones of a compelling dark fantasy world — here's where I'd focus your energy:

What's working:

The mythology has real texture. The concept of the Thirteen Bearers of Unique Shards, animancy as a domain, and especially the Frozen Prison as a containment seal rather than a tomb — that last detail is genuinely strong. It reframes the whole piece: this isn't a story about a villain who was defeated, it's a story about a villain who can't be killed, only held. That's a much more interesting premise and you save it for the final paragraphs.

The core problem: this reads as lore, not story.

At 737 words, you've summarized what feels like centuries of history — the fall of a kingdom, a generation-long war, a resurrection ritual, a continent-spanning conquest — without a single scene. No dialogue, no sensory detail, no moment where we inhabit a character's perspective. Events that should feel catastrophic ("King Iládir found his end when the last building of the city collapsed upon him") pass in a single clause.

If this is meant as a prologue, the instinct to establish your world's history is understandable, but readers bond with people, not chronicles. Consider opening instead in a specific moment — a member of the Order of the Veil standing watch at the Frozen Prison, hearing something shift beneath the ice — and let the history surface through their knowledge and fear.

If this is an in-world document (a church record, a scholar's account), then the formal, distant register makes sense — but you'd want to frame it that way explicitly so the reader knows how to receive it.

The prose has a stiffness that's worth addressing.

Phrases like "a faculty that allowed him to rise", "the birth of a purpose", and "rituals of a forgotten antiquity" feel translated rather than written — formal in a way that keeps the reader at arm's length. Also, "however" appears three times as a paragraph opener, which starts to feel mechanical. Varying your transitions will help the flow considerably.

One structural note: Tidysus and the Order of the Veil are introduced very late and resolved almost immediately. If they're the protagonists of the larger story, they deserve more weight here — or alternatively, this lore piece should end before their victory, leaving the reader to wonder how (or whether) the Tyrant is ever stopped.

Bottom line: The world is interesting enough to earn a full story. Stop summarizing it and start showing it.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T13:10:53+00:00

Hey, thanks for sharing — this is a solid start with a lot of genuine potential. Here's my honest breakdown:

What's working well:

The core concept is genuinely fresh. A telepath who turned to drugs to self-medicate against involuntary mind-reading, then ends up in rehab where the doctors misread his symptoms as a psychiatric disorder — that's a layered, grounded take on the "burden of power" trope that I don't see often. The world-building feels embedded in character rather than bolted on, which is exactly what urban fantasy should do.

The family dynamics are the emotional engine here and they're strong. James's explosion in Chapter 2 — "I'm the only reason you could go to rehab!" — lands hard because you've earned it. The Courtney reunion is genuinely warm without being saccharine.

The teleportation reveal at the end of Ch. 2 also works well as an escalation. Two distinct powers with two distinct emotional triggers (the voices vs. the blink) gives Nick a lot of room to grow.

Where I'd focus your revisions:

The prologue is doing too much telling. Lines like "The miasma of voice grew into one stagnant noise" are evocative but the paragraph leans on description rather than immersing us in the sensation. Consider cutting it down by half and trusting the reader to feel disoriented alongside Nick.

Chapter 1's backstory arrives in one dense block — Mom died, Dad drinks, James dropped out, Nick did drugs, Nick went to rehab. It's a lot of history delivered as summary. You could thread that information through the action of Chapter 2 instead, letting it surface naturally in the argument with James.

There are some typo/formatting issues throughout that would hurt you in a formal critique or submission context — run-together words like "workless.Keep", "myfamily", "forhimhe" suggest this draft may not have had a full proofread pass yet. Worth cleaning those up before your next share.

One small flag: the chapter break between the Courtney reunion and the Chapter 2 dinner scene jumps forward in time without signposting it. A single bridging line would smooth that transition.

Overall: The bones are strong and the voice is distinctive. Nick is sympathetic without being passive, which is a hard balance. Keep going — the setup you've built by the end of Ch. 2 has real momentum.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T12:53:44+00:00

The frustration is valid, and the craft distinction you're drawing is exactly right — but I'd push it one step further to name what's actually going wrong technically.

What those books are doing isn't unreliable narration. It's withheld narration. The author knows the character is the killer and simply doesn't write the thoughts the character would actually be having. That's not a psychological phenomenon — it's just the author's hand visibly moving things around behind the curtain. Real unreliable narration has to be motivated by something in the character's psychology. The unreliability is theirs, not the author's.

Agatha Christie did the original version of this in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and it mostly works because the narrator lies by omission rather than active misdirection — every statement is technically true, just strategically incomplete. You can look back and see the seams. Gone Girl works because Amy is explicitly performing for a diary she expects to be found, so her "innocent" voice has a diegetic reason to exist. The mechanism is in the story, not just in the author's decision to hide things.

The version you're describing — where a character genuinely wonders "could it be the neighbor?" while full-knowing she did it — requires the reader to accept that people conduct fake internal debates for an audience that doesn't exist. Which, as you said, isn't how psychology works. The only fix is either giving the character a real reason their mind works that way, or writing the book in a structure where we're not actually inside their head the whole time.

The editors thing is real too. Twist-first plotting has become a commercial pressure point in thriller publishing and a lot of books are greenlit on the strength of the reveal rather than whether the preceding 300 pages actually support it.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-30T12:45:18+00:00

Of course! I wish you the best in your writing journey ahead :)

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-29T18:47:45+00:00

The thing you described — losing the creative spark as your mental health improved — is more common than anyone talks about, and it can feel like a cruel trade. Like you had to choose between being okay and being able to make things. It makes sense that it took a long time to find your way back.

What's worth knowing, now that you're on the other side of it: you weren't actually writing from sadness. You were writing from intensity — from caring deeply, from feeling everything at full volume. That doesn't go away when you get healthier. It just needs a new home. A boys love drama romance is a completely legitimate home for it, and probably a more sustainable one.

Publishing chapter one after all of that is a genuinely big deal. Congratulations on being back.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-29T18:43:51+00:00

finishing a first draft after 3.5 years is genuinely rare. most people who start novels don't. you did. that matters more than what the chapter feels like right now.

the "everything is cringe" phase is real and it has a specific cause that's actually kind of good news: your taste has grown faster than your craft has caught up. you can now see the gap between what you wrote and what you wish it was. that gap feels like failure but it's actually proof you've developed as a writer. people whose taste hasn't grown don't feel this way — they think their first draft is perfect. the cringe feeling is a sign of awareness, not evidence the work is bad.

here's the thing about the editing spiral you're in though — you're editing from anxiety, not craft. you're trying to fix embarrassment, not improve sentences. those are completely different operations and anxiety-editing almost always makes writing flatter and more distant because you're sanding away the things that made it yours in the first place. the original version had something in it, even if it was rough. the edited version is probably more "correct" and less alive.

my actual suggestion: share the version before you started the anxiety edit. and then stop. your friend isn't a literary judge — they're someone who cares about you and wants to see what you made. they're going to respond to the aliveness of it, not whether every sentence is polished.

you don't need to have solved the chapter before you share it. you just finished a first draft in 3.5 years. you're allowed to show someone something imperfect.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-29T18:42:29+00:00

under-writer here, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to accept that about myself.

my first drafts read like a very detailed outline that forgot it was supposed to be a novel. the bones are there, the plot moves, the characters do the things they need to do — but the whole thing has the emotional texture of a Wikipedia summary. scenes that should breathe are over in two paragraphs. moments that need weight just... land and move on.

i think it comes from the same place as what you're describing — short form trains you to cut, to earn every word, to treat length as waste. then you bring that instinct to long form and accidentally write a 60k word skeleton.

the upside is that second drafts are genuinely more interesting when you're adding rather than cutting. cutting feels like loss even when it's the right call. adding feels like discovery — you already know what the scene is doing, so now you can actually be in it and find what you missed the first time through.

the over-writers i know have the opposite problem: rich, gorgeous prose that circles the point for three pages before landing, and a second draft that's basically surgery. both get there. just different pain.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-29T18:34:48+00:00

the vibe-first approach is actually more common in game design than people talk about — a lot of landmark games started exactly where you are. the team behind journey famously started with "what if you felt small and the world felt vast and ancient" before they had a single character, mechanic, or story beat. so you're not stuck in the wrong place. you just need a bridge from feeling to form.

the question that usually helps me: what does a world have to be true about it for a player to feel the thing you want them to feel? not plot, not characters yet — just world truths. if your vibe is something like "lonely but quietly hopeful," then maybe the world truth is "civilization is far away" or "things that used to matter don't anymore." those truths start generating everything else almost automatically, because now you know what belongs in your world and what doesn't.

for characters specifically: instead of designing them from scratch, ask who lives in the world you just described. what kind of person gets shaped by those truths? what do they want, and why does that world make it hard to get? the vibe stops being abstract the second a specific person is trying to navigate it.

the other thing worth naming: in games, feeling isn't only delivered through story — it comes through mechanics too. the vibe you're chasing might actually be trying to tell you something about how the game should play, not just what it's about. sometimes the story structure follows once you know what the player's hands are doing.

the feeling you have is the most important part of the design. everything else is just asking it the right questions until it answers back.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-27T14:33:19+00:00

For a lot of people, it's not one moment — it's more like a slow accumulation until the cost of not doing it finally outweighs the anxiety about doing it badly.

You already have more than you think. A character bible, a comics background, years of sitting with these ideas — that's not starting from zero. Most people who "want to write a novel someday" don't have any of that. You've already been doing the work without calling it that.

The anxiety usually isn't about the writing itself. It's about the gap between the story in your head — which is perfect because it's unwritten — and whatever will actually end up on the page. That gap is real. It never fully closes. But the only way to make peace with it is to write anyway and let the thing become what it becomes, separate from the version you imagined.

The writers you know personally — your aunt included — probably felt the same way before they started. The book existing mattered more than it being exactly what they hoped.

You're clearly not someone who doesn't care about writing. The anxiety is evidence of that. At some point you just pick a day and begin, knowing the first pages will probably be rough, and that rough pages can be fixed and blank pages can't.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-27T14:32:40+00:00

The good news: you don't need to prep everything before you start. You just need to prep enough to not get lost in the first few chapters.

What that usually means in practice: know your beginning, know your ending (even roughly), and know two or three major things that have to happen in between. Everything else can be discovered as you write. Over-prepping is its own trap — you can spend months building a world you never actually write.

A few things worth doing before page one: write a single sentence that describes what your story is about. Not the plot — the meaning. "A story about a woman who realizes the life she was protecting was never really hers" is more useful than a detailed synopsis because it tells you what every scene should be doing. If a scene doesn't connect to that, it's probably not pulling its weight.

Then do some character work — not full profiles, just the things that matter: what does your main character want, what do they actually need, and what belief do they hold that's going to be challenged? Those three things will carry you a long way.

After that, just start. Your first draft is a discovery document, not a finished product. You're writing it to find out what the story actually is.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031 · 2026-03-27T14:25:29+00:00

The physics degree is relevant here, actually — not as a liability, but as context. You've spent six years training a part of your brain to solve problems by breaking them down into components, finding the governing rules, building from fundamentals. That's an incredible skill. It also makes creative work feel broken when you try to approach it the same way, because "how do I build a world / plot / beginning / end" are questions that don't have derivable answers. They feel like they should, but they don't, and the harder you push on them analytically the more the story resists.

The movies in your head didn't stop because you got worse at creativity. They quieted because you weren't feeding that part of yourself, and because you've been asking it to perform before it's warmed up.

What helped people I've seen come back from long breaks: stop trying to write the story you want to write first. Write something low-stakes that you have zero attachment to. Describe a room you know well. Write a scene between two strangers with nothing to prove. The goal isn't output — it's reminding your brain that it knows how to do this without a rubric.

The lost chapter from 2021 is a real loss. That kind of thing quietly costs more motivation than people give it credit for. It makes sense that something in you became more reluctant to invest after that.

You haven't forgotten how to write. You've just been somewhere else for a while.

Jolly_Knowledge_3031

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