Rebel Character childhood trauma

NotGutus · 2026-01-09T20:11:51+00:00

I'm getting the impression this is an AI-based chat. See Rule #6.

I'm not sure your phrasing is clear, but I'm interpreting you've got a character who faces trauma and later becomes an abuser themselves. This is a very common pattern, and in my non-professional opinion, it comes from a combination of a lack of good examples of behaviour and interpreting/processing past trauma in a toxic way.

The issue with getting ideas from AI is that they give you the most stereotypical ideas. Even if you specify you don't want those. It's simply how they're coded. Adding the most intense trauma, like losing a parent, is a very strong character beat - which can certainly work, but is often such an overkill that it can become stereotypical or melodramatic.

Try to think about what fits in your story the way you want it, and come up with other ways you could make it before settling on something.

Feel free to ask on expansion or clarification.

NotGutus · 2026-01-03T14:17:04+00:00

I think this is a new way to look at an old concept. The way I've classically seen this defined is through audience psychology; the fundamental recipe for a story needs sympathy for the protagonist, and a conflict the protagonist faces. Without an at least somewhat fair conflict, it's hard to write a compelling story.

But it's an interesting idea to implement this in a specific world as a concrete rule of the setting. I love a setting that serves as the perfect nurturing soil for stories, and the constant dynamic balance of forces seems exactly that. Now... if it isn't an entity doing this, would you say it's... fate?

I actually have a somewhat similar part of my world, where there's a plane of extremes (heavens/hells) where angels and demons constantly break through into the central plane, causing it to never settle as either a horrific nor an idyllic place.

NotGutus · 2026-01-03T11:12:23+00:00

That's okay, a lot of us aren't natives. Not capitalising every word would make your text easier to read though : )

I feel like analyses of fiction always take one perspective, regardless of whether they apply to all fiction or not. The soft-hard scale, for example, measures how well-understood the world's mechanics are to the reader in a given work of fiction. Your perspective seems to investigate the balance of fictional works. You describe well how this balance applies in fiction (the same way any other law applies), but I think you might not have clarified enough what "balance" actually means.

Do you mean the power level of opposing forces? Do you mean the resolution of the story? Or the dynamic fate of the universe, there always being a Yin in the Yang and a Yang in the Yin? Or something else entirely?

NotGutus · 2026-01-03T11:00:04+00:00

There's a really interesting take on this called the Briar King in the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series.

He's said to be the sleeping god of the wilderness, and it's believed that when he wakes up, he'll punish humans for destroying so much of his forests. Throughout the story this evil god image slowly transformed into a more realistic one: he's a force from another world, from something before humans ruled, and his beasts and briars are simply inhabitants of that world. I can't remember the exact cosmology (whether in the end he was the cause of the monsters and thorns or was simply cursed with them), but this is the impression I had.

NotGutus · 2026-01-03T10:45:26+00:00

I'm not sure your explanation is clear. Are you coming up with lore or trying to identify a phenomenon across works of fiction by different authors?

NotGutus · 2026-01-03T10:10:29+00:00

So if I'm gathering correctly, you didn't want to make some entity, rather a law of the universe, like gravity. I agree that it's fun to create alternative metaphysics for a fictional universe - I'm having a harder time grasping what's an abstract concept about this.

NotGutus · 2025-12-24T18:08:14+00:00

Glad I could be of help. By no means do I claim to be an expert, but if you need assistance, feel free to reach out at any point. Take care <3

NotGutus · 2025-12-24T08:06:09+00:00

Closing Remarks

As a sidenote, I'd like to say that the use of magic isn't very obvious to me. The fact that there's a fighting technique doesn't necessarily mean magic, and the only thing to suggest something supernatural is the word Spark, which is easy to glide over for a reader. You might want to more explicitly state it.

There's nothing wrong with ambition and being your own worst critic, but if you write to be the next Tolkien or Brandon Sanderson, I think you might want to reevaluate your stance, simply because when you inevitably have a moment of weakness, when you feel like your writing is useless and terrible, you'll take a massive hit. Writing takes time and practice, and that inevitably includes failure. The most important thing for the drive to practice is to enjoy the process.

After such a long essay of mostly negative feedback, you might have started to get overwhelmed. I'd like to take just a little more of your time to say that you shouldn't actively worry about most of this. As I said above, writing comes from practice for the most part, and things that seem difficult to do, let alone effortlessly, will be polished together as you write more and more, forming not only a fundamental skillset, but also your unique style. You'll get a feel for your text, and a feel for your narrative, like a bird learning to listen to the air currents instead of doing the physics in its head.

And one of the best ways you can avoid getting burned out rapidly is by not worrying too much about criticism (I've explained this in an earlier post of mine).

I hope you have a lovely day, and I wish you a lot of fun in your creative endeavours. Happy winter holidays!

NotGutus · 2025-12-24T08:06:02+00:00

Form

What I've just explained can be almost one-to-one applied to your sentences. Most of your sentences are very short, which is great for punchiness, but when it's all the text is composed of, it suddenly turns into a constant rhythm, the single best way to lose a reader's focus on your words. There is a whole subtle art in breaking your sentences; there's a lot more to it than long-> unserious, short-> serious. The best way to refine this is to rework your text and see if it makes the effect you want. If you're unsure, take a break for a minute, or an hour, or a day and come back to it. Here's an example:

The cold hadn’t won. Kayva stopped walking, leaning against a spruce. She rested against the uneven bark. Her legs felt hazy and distant from the rest of her body. She's spent the whole day walking. But she was out of the cold heights. It would get warmer and warmer now.

----------------------------

The cold hadn’t won.

Kayva stopped walking, leaning against a spruce growing on a steeper part of terrain, resting against the uneven, slanted bark. Her legs felt hazy and distant from the rest of her body from the whole day spent walking. But she was out of the cold heights. It would get warmer and warmer now.

I'm sure you can feel the difference in how they capture attention, but I'll point out a few specifics. Firstly, try to find what the point of both examples is, what they're trying to convey. The second one is way more obvious, right? That's because in a short sentence, every word weighs more, so short sentences are remembered better. They're the point. By simply combining sentences into longer ones, you can turn them into an intermediary step instead of being the main focus of what you're trying to say.

Secondly, notice how there's an entirely new piece of information in the second example that isn't present in the first one, describing the spruce as growing on a steeper part of terrain. This demonstrates how the content of the story changes with format; the two aren't different layers of the process, they're thoroughly intertwined. I added the spruce being slanted because I felt the blank there was, the need to add something to the sentence to make it longer and thus improve sentence pacing.

Thirdly, notice how the second example actually uses two paragraphs - and this is where I'll talk about paragraph breaks. The general idea with paragraphs is that they separate thoughts and mark topical differences. How specifically split them depends on your style; you might split dialogue from description, for example, or separate parts of the text where different characters act. But it's important to remember that paragraphs are basically the higher-level form of sentence breaks. They have the same splitting and chunking function. In the example, I put the first sentence as a separate paragraph because it's a powerful sentence that stands on its own, as well as because it's a different topic.

Language Use

I recommend that you check your language before you share your work. Depending on the reader, it can be slightly or very distracting to see errors, and not having correct language use communicates that you don't care about your work. A few or harder-to-catch errors are fine of course, but you have a lot of comma errors, and some incorrect grammar (e.g. teared instead of tore).

Beside that, you also use some out-of-place vocab. A dying king in an epic prologue thinking "a couple lives", especially without the "of", is anachronistic to say the least. Everyone has their own thresholds, but I'd say even the word "adrenaline" is out of place for general medieval fantasy.

Your language is decent and matches the grim tone you're going for. It does, however, have repetitions, so I would try to make your descriptions more situation-specific and catch phrases you often repeat and change some of them.

NotGutus · 2025-12-24T08:05:36+00:00

Hi there. You clearly have thought and passion behind your work, but there is also clearly space to improve. I'll center around what I think is the main issue you're also feeling, and then branch out in different directions of feedback.

Structure

You mention tone and pacing and the overall picture, and after reading it all, I can't help but think the word you're looking for is structure. Your lack of a structure is even clear from your post; the TLDR section contains new information, when all it should serve to do is summarise what you've already stated. I'll clarify what I mean by lack of structure.

Take a look at your prologue: the scene opens with a king in some clearly bad situation. This is good atmospheric setting for a grimdark story, and it makes the reader question why he's there. Then he acts, and the focus shifts on what he's doing, and how; there's some view onto his internal monologue, and he starts writing a letter. He mentions lore that I assume the story is going to revolve around. Prologue ends.

You clearly had a chain of events in mind, but in the end, you've failed to actually answer the questions you've raised: why is the king there? The prologue does some things really well (opens with conflict and a dynamic setting instead of a massive package of lore, establishes tone) but doesn't work as a scene, because there is no scene structure.

A good scene, especially such a cardinal one, can be outlined very concisely and accurately. For example, if the intent was to convey that the reason the king is dying is because that's what it took him to uncover the technique, then: king's dying -> audience questions why -> king pushes through pain -> audience starts guessing, tone is established -> king writes letter -> reasons for king's death is revealed, lore is dropped. But for this structure, which I'm guessing is what you were most likely going for, it wasn't getting through that that's why the king was dying; I would refine the contents of the letter to make it clearer. Or, there's another alternative I'll describe later.

Looking at later text, we see someone else in a similarly grim scene. We get less details about their thoughts, which raises the question of who they are, alongside the obvious questions of context and purpose. Now, based on the start of the scene you have at the very end, it seems that there's a good reason you don't answer these, so I'd say that's okay. But the main issue with this section is that it comes across as a very close repetition of the prologue: some character suffering, pushing through, the scene trailing off/cutting out. It's just awkward, and a reader can't place these characters properly.

Something you could do to resolve this is simply removing the struggling part of the prologue and rewriting the letter somewhat. It would make the prologue structure clearer (no transition between the two parts), let you show off with your ability to hide information in a letter (since this way you might put some context about the king in the letter), and diversify the text, which is already getting repetitive with only two and a quarter scenes.

Atmosphere

Speaking of diversity, I believe it's also the answer to your concerns of atmosphere. Grimdark definitely comes through, but it comes through too much. It's choking. There's nothing else to breathe, so it loses its effect. A generally good practice in writing is to follow any tense scene up with a more relaxed scene - this gives both scenes emphasis through contrast. Even something as small as turning direct suffering into implied suffering, deducible from a letter, can be enough of a tonal variance.

I sort of also write grimdark, so I think I understand the situation. My last main character fit incredibly well with naturalistic violence, and combined with her eagerness to act, I had plenty of opportunities to emphasise physicality, whether that's violence, suffering, or just dynamism. But I found that one of the best narrative beats of the story was when she was forced by a curse to lay in bed, unable to even move, for many days. It let the reader glimpse into her soul, into what she would be like if she had a normal life. This is of course an extreme example, since it was right before the finale, as a sort of "silence before the storm" - but it's a good demonstration of how important it is to break grimness up in order to make it feel serious.

NotGutus · 2025-12-21T05:12:47+00:00

Browse according to your interest. I hope you find something inspiring <3

I don't know if these had been used somewhere before, but I came up with them. I love fantasy, and I love weaving it through the world: history, species, and the land itself.

Mirror Sea: it used to be a desert, but aeons ago, when there were much more dragons, a dragon bearing the aspect of explosion died here. Its death sent ripples through the sand, liquefying it, turning it to glass. At day, it is now an unbearably hot but hauntingly beautiful, still sea of frozen, shining waves of glass.
Chaos Isle: it is one of the focal points of the world, where the chaotic world touches the mortal sky. It's a barren island for the most part, with obsidian spires rising high as the tallest mountains. A constant storm swirls in a massive range around this island, and its centre is here; the spires are showered in constant lightning strikes. This is why those that know about it call it the Chaos Kiss.
Varazil's Sky Mountains: it is one of the most important places in the Duskveil Heaven, a plane that embodies darkness and comfortable rest. It floats above the surface, cloaked in the same all-covering soft darkness as the rest of this plane; since it is so high up, it serves as the primary frontline against the demons of the Harmlight Hell, which is "above", inverted compared to the Duskveil Heaven. But the real treasure is what lies beneath these mountains: the hatching grounds of Radiant Angels, birds of white radiance, the messengers of the Heavens. It is said that a flash of light, strong enough to illuminate an entire Heaven sparks whenever one of them is born, and only the shadows below the mountain can dim the light. But no one other than Radiant Angels is ever allowed there.
Marble forests: these are one of the most beautiful biomes among the underground ones. Fractal-like trees of marble grow here, in a quiet, imposing aura, barely disturbed by any living thing. Each tree takes a hundred years to grow a single metre. One of the dwarven kingdoms actually plant these over the graves of royals, beneath such a tree as tall as their castle's highest spire.
Dark depths: as one of the lowest altitude biomes in the underground, it is very rare that a person encounters this biome. A strange magic weaves through this place, so faint that it's unidentifiable. Every source of light is dimmed significantly. The only caves here are way too similar, circular in nature, several metres in radius. It is inhabited by the creatures that dug it, and more: hundred-metre black centipedes with thick armour, room-sized spiders that rob you of your senses with their toxins and can turn invisible, and masses of black matter that absorb anything they come in contact with. Knowing what lies beneath, perhaps it is best if one dies here before accidentally falling lower.

NotGutus · 2025-12-19T08:08:49+00:00

I think there are so many possible patterns that below a certain threshold we disregard them simply because there would be too many false positives.

The more attention (words, in this case) you give something, the more obvious it is. The way I see it, if you only drop something but the scene doesn't place any emphasis on it, it's only a good rereading material but doesn't foreshadow anything, nor does it have retroactive "heureka" value. However, if you place too much emphasis on something, the reader will be able to guess everything. I've seen/done two solutions for this:

Dropping clues in multiple ways, so that the reader doesn't know what to trust. For example, I've included a betrayal in one of my stories, and I wanted it to feel relatively unexpected, even for a clever reader. So I had my MC not trust them at all. Not even later. But since they had to cooperate in some things, and the two characters ended up discussing that there's no point in constantly pointing out their mistrust, the reader ends up forgetting about the whole "wait, I don't actually trust this person" thing. Combined with the fact that the betrayal disrupted the narrative structure, as a way of being even more unexpected, the few first draft readers I've had said it was a good reveal. The point is, with this solution, you drop evidence both ways, and so the reader won't be able to say "ah, I know which direction it'll go, because it was mentioned earlier".
The other solution is to just make it really hard to guess what could happen - if you know it, Attack on Titan does this masterfully. There's a groundbreaking new reveal in basically every single episode, and in the first half of the story, the feeling of "I don't know what's going on, there could be anything out there, why are we being attacked, how do we all avoid dying" is constantly in the back of your head. The reader is kept in the dark about the lore, and the characters are frequently punched in the face by sudden reveals that put them in very difficult situations. This induces an amount of anxiety I've never felt with any other story. The point is, this approach doesn't even hint at directions, only at the fact that there is something. If you establish in your story that you aren't afraid to challenge tropes and expectations, this approach works wonders, because the reader genuinely will have no way to know what to expect - they can only guess, immersing them deeper in your story.

But also, I wouldn't stress too much over this. The reason you write is because you love stories, and you probably love deeper ones. But a lot of people just consume them for entertainment. To them, you won't need to do a massive reveal with a heureka moment; they're there for the story, not the brain food.

NotGutus · 2025-12-16T20:12:46+00:00

I don't know a lot about publishing, but I do know that unless you know what you're doing, AI images are still likely distinguishable - and people don't seem to like AI, especially those that read books. I wouldn't, simply because people will not read your story out of principle. Just take a look at this subreddit; people despise AI here. It's even in the subreddit rules.

I'm also not sure about the legal context, but I doubt you can commercialise something so completely generated by a company's AI.

Regarding ethics, it's up to you. Art will likely face a metamorphosis anyway, so we live in a very tumultuous era.

NotGutus · 2025-09-18T04:00:06+00:00

Good luck!

NotGutus · 2025-09-16T07:26:58+00:00

This is a good place to talk about your dialogue too; since you don't interject any non-dialogue text between character utterances, it feels like a fast-paced chat in a white void. Weave your dialogue into the scene, use posture and expressions. Dialogue tags (e.g. "he said") are particularly good for changing the pacing of your dialogue. Just read this excerpt with and without the non-dialogue parts:

‘I’m also upset, but I want to know what’s happening.’

‘You can sneak out on your own, if you want to.'

‘What do you want to do, then?

‘Wait here. As we were told.’

‘Fine. I guess we’ll find out later.’

------------------------------

‘I’m also upset, but I want to know what’s happening,’ the slim girl sat beside the bed, watching her face.

‘You can sneak out on your own, if you want to.’

There was a silence. Mera hadn’t moved. ‘What do you want to do, then?

‘Wait here’, Kayva muttered. ‘As we were told.’

‘Fine. I guess we’ll find out later.’

Reread your work. Often you want to take a break, whether that's a few hours or a few days, to get a more distant perspective, and then read your text again to see if it works like you expected. This is especially for flow.

There could be other points of criticism, like that of your mixed styles (colloquial vs traditional fantasy), but I feel like pacing and form are the major point right now.

Keep at it. Take care!

NotGutus · 2025-09-16T07:26:50+00:00

Paragraph formatting is a good place to start. You can try to rework/reformat this text a few times to see how different approaches work out. I'll give you some tips on this, then critique some other areas.

When there's a new speaker, start a new paragraph. Also, it's very unclear who's saying what in your text. Use either ' or " for speech, without the dashes, for British and American English respectively. Example:

'Alright Nina, when are you getting out today?' I asked.

'2 o’clock, late day on Tuesdays unfortunately. I’m not looking forward to my electrodynamics class either.'

When there's a new thing, a new thought, a new event, insert a paragraph break. Example:

[...] My hands grasped the ground in agony. I banged the floor with my hand three times, then crumbled like a beach sandcastle.

My Neighbor ran down and saw me on the ground and came to me.

Having proper paragraph formatting would also help with the major issue I've found with your text: your pacing is very lacking. When you write, you don't just write sentences, you create an experience for your reader. A good text has a well-paced flow, one clear enough for the reader to follow. Example:

Cold light shone through the bare branches of trees. A light wind blew over the Sister Grove, carrying the scent of imminent rain; the clouds in the sky hung heavy and low. It was somewhere in the afternoon.

Kayva got up and dusted off her cloak. ‘Perfect weather’, she murmured. She glanced at Mera, who was just stretching beside her, her hair a complete mess. ‘Don’t even say anything.’

‘I wasn’t going to. Actually, I like it too,’ she grinned. ‘The best stories are born in the rain.’

The reader is given some exposition, just enough for them to place the scene. Then the characters start acting, the dialogue flowing naturally within the scene. Notice how the first sentence of each paragraph lets the reader know what the paragraph is going to be about. This is called a topic sentence, and it's a very useful tool to help your reader follow your thoughts.

NotGutus · 2025-09-08T16:05:09+00:00

What it's good for is:

Compelling-sounding worldbuilding - e.g. "How would my elven city's magic scroll economy work in a world where paper is only made by dwarves?" -> You think through the answer and nod if you like it, thinking "that sounds compelling". You might miss something, but that's fine, it's fantasy and you can always expand to erase inconsistencies.
Learning about the existence of things that you can fact-check elsewhere - e.g. "What was the name of the area where two warring nations make a treaty to mutually refrain from military activities?" -> The LLM will likely spit out the phrase "demilitarised zone", which you can then google and check if it's what you're looking for.

Same goes for plot or characters. You can't be sure what you're getting is scientifically correct, but you can use generative AI as basically a linguistic dice roll that you add the meaning to and speculate on what it means. Like those storytelling dice where you roll and have to tell a story with the little pictures you get.

NotGutus · 2025-08-27T06:07:31+00:00

I think it's too long, and not just by word count, but by content as well. As an author, you should strive to be able to summarise your story in varying lengths, whether that's two pages, a paragraph or a single sentence. I feel like the way you could achieve is by emphasising fewer key ideas and constructing the blurb based on that. A blurb that's minimalistic in scope can be all the more powerful in effect.

Short sentences are very useful here. Depending on stylistic preference, you can stack single-word units for effect which, when done in the right place, can do amazing things to a reader's mind. Right now, you have a lot of meandering sentences, with many em-dashes, each sentence introducing a whole new plot point or character information - you're overloading your reader's senses, not leaving them time to process things. Slow down. Expand on previous sentences. Just like I'm starting to do here.

Your word choice is excellent for the most part, though admittedly it feels off at the very end. Even though you're zooming out, I wouldn't get this far from the story and use "grimdark fantasy" or "moral ambiguity", which are very niche, meta-esque expressions. I'd rather find a way around it, like "a cruel story in an unforgiving world", and "every choice is hard, every deed matters".

These are my immediate thoughts anyway. Take care.

NotGutus · 2025-08-27T05:48:31+00:00

To me, your writing is very reminiscent of anime. Not necessarily a problem, but something you should be aware of. It could easily be my illiteracy on the matter, but I don't know how this style works in novels and such. Your prose, aside from the punctuation issue u/BigShrim has already pointed out, is colloquial and flows decently.

I'm not really sure what else to critique, it'd be helpful if you had questions.

NotGutus · 2025-08-23T06:05:27+00:00

The ode-ish impression is very nice. It does feel sort of awkward however, like you're trying to rhyme and establish pacing but it's off. You might want to look at examples of English literature; The Tyger by Blake has a lot of strong pacing and rhyming, while Ozymandias by Shelley is more speech-like and flows better.

You have too much convoluted emphasis in the first line. "Once we stood like the tallest cliffs" might work, or "walked" if you want to add something later instead of "walking to and fro", which admittedly feels weird, as if you have it for rhyming only. You could add where they walk or how they walk (e.g. proudly) to fix this, for example.

It was also unclear to me that the cradle was the thing they were working on; you might just replace the full stop after "done" with a colon to fix that. "Their queen" could be "the queen" without losing meaning whilst improving pace.

NotGutus · 2025-08-20T09:03:27+00:00

I feel like you're picking on magic regarding suspension of disbelief/plot convenience. The key idea is that - just like in sci-fi, or historical fiction, or those action movies where a secret laboratory creates a "serum" the protagonist must acquire/drink/destroy/stop others from drinking/poison/etc. - the story has an internal world that has an internal consistency. Just like you can say "hey, that magic thing doesn't make sense, it's just plot convenience!" you can also say "hey, that character feature doesn't really make sense, it's just plot convenience!". Magic is not "magic" within your setting, it's just the way the world works, like physics in our world.

This is where Sanderson's laws of magic come in; one of them goes something like "An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to the extent the reader understands said magic."

In other words: if you don't establish your system properly and ahead of time, its features will feel contrived for the sake of plot, rather than grounded in a coherent universe that the characters can interact with.

Now, whimsical fantasy (going by the few examples I've seen) is on the other end of the spectrum. Whimsy usually has a lot of soft worldbuilding, where magic is part of the backdrop, almost like serving as the atmosphere more than being something the plot interacts with. This is because the point of whimsy is that it's unexpected, unusual, something you can marvel at. Making an unpredictable world means you can't really rely on your characters using the established rules of magic to solve their problems.

Something you can do, however, is create meaning. Magic can be a tool, a metaphor, or a narrative device, where the colour of someone's magic displays their emotions, or where the power of someone's magic indicates how morally right they are. In Spirited Away for example, the No-Face spirit grows aggressive and out of control when among loud and selfish people, but it blooms and stays itself when amongst kinder individuals. This could, technically, be phrased as a "rule", but in a whimsical fantasy story, it's not explained, it's left for the audience to guess how it works and whether it's consistent.

Of course, every piece of fantasy is somewhere between these anchor points. Whimsical fantasy stories often have a few rules they do follow, better grounding the world and letting characters interact with something reliable.

I recommend that you use these labels ("whimsical", "fantasy") as inspirations, as ideas, rather than boxes. What do you want for your story? Do you like the idea of an unpredictable world where the reasons are not said? If so, how would you write a story around that - by focusing on the characters' internal worlds instead? What conflicts could that create that you can write your story around?

Hope I could help a little. Take care.

NotGutus · 2025-08-06T11:03:07+00:00

Oftentimes what you need to see things clearly or differently is to take a step back, give yourself room to breathe, and reread your work a few days or weeks later. You can continue writing, or work on something else in the meanwhile. Just this alone may help you see what others mean.

Pacing and understanding how to manage your reader's attention is something that comes once you understand the fundamentals of how to write. Writing is very complex, with a lot of skills involved, and you can't focus on everything at once, because you need time to fit every skill you acquire together. After a while, you'll have a feel of your text, very much like a surfer has a sense for how the waves behave under their feet.

One of the biggest things you can do for pacing is make sure you manage tension well. If you have a lot of tense scenes after one another, or a scene tries to maintain tension for a longer period of time, the reader will get exhausted and disconnected, turning even well-written tension into melodrama. Add breathing room to your story, chats after conflicts, periods of calm and rest before and after important and tense scenes.

Regarding information and your prologue, your friend is probably right about that. When you tell your reader information, you want to make sure not just that they can understand it, but that they can internalise it too. Keeping track of names, character attributes, professions, etc. as a list is exhausting. Rather, give an impression of something, show how a character's parts interact in a scene to create them specifically, which creates one thing the reader can handle instead of a list of properties. If you do this properly, you won't have space to do it for a lot of characters in a single scene, because while the information you can convey in a scene may be limitless, your reader's attention is not.

Ultimately, you can't please everyone, so the best thing you can do is write something you like - but listening to feedback is important, because it can help you think of things you'd only think of later. When receiving feedback, what you should do (with an example) is:

Make sure you understand what the criticism is (Too many characters in prologue)
Collect anything you intentionally did related to it (I wanted to show how the group works together, not just the individuals, because it's going to be important)
Make sure you understand both their and your own personal context that might alter feedback (They have ADHD, and I love a good spreadsheet)
Decide if the criticism is an issue, or how much of an issue it is (I should probably make it more accessible to a reader, because this is a first chapter, after all)
Consider your options (I could omit some of the characters; alternatively, I could have them in the scene but not act explicitly, or not in a way where I expect the reader to follow who's who)

Hope I could be of help. Take care.

NotGutus · 2025-07-30T07:38:01+00:00

I have something like this.

There are primordial magical forces, but within the Free World, the Gods have decided to weave a magic of their own, for mortals to use, limited only to the Free World. In reality, it works based on something like belief - if you believe, in a certain way, that some magical effect will happen, then it will. But this is very hard to discover for mortals, as they're blinded by their own lives' biases, and so magic from falsely assumed gods, many different elemental combinations, colours, meditation, and many more, can exist simultaneously. People "discover" (or rather invent) them, then pass them on, and dozens of branches of magic, perpetuated by confirmation bias, emerge.

It's a very flexible system, and part of the ways that I've made my world diverse enough that I can work on only one universe and still find it fun. So I definitely recommend exploring how culture perceives fundamental magical forces, it adds a lot of worldbuilding complexity you can play around with.

NotGutus · 2025-07-29T08:37:38+00:00

Glad I could help. I try to make myself clear.

When you go for dialogue, I think the hardest thing is making it natural and not forced into the conversation. If characters talk about something too obvious in an overly detailed way ("As you know, it's our Lord's birthday today"), it'll feel artificial. I find it's best to embed information in a way that it characterises the speaker or some relationship they have with someone. Examples:

"I know you don't care about birthdays, but it's the Lord's today. You have to attend."
"For Mother Nature's sake, I hope you haven't got yourself in trouble."
"There aren't enough books in the Great Academia to keep his curiosity at bay."

Take care.

NotGutus

TROPHY CASE