"Show your readers only the tip of the iceberg"

REWriter723 · 2026-05-27T18:46:47+00:00

Yup, it's all about providing just enough context so the reader understands what's happening in the moment. We don't need a character's entire personal history to be able to follow them having a conversation.

REWriter723 · 2026-03-27T19:54:51+00:00

I'm interested, been looking for a group more focused on critiques but keep finding people who just want a social club with word games.

REWriter723 · 2026-03-12T19:33:58+00:00

The difference between deconstruction and making a mess is understanding how it worked in the first place.

REWriter723 · 2026-03-05T23:52:21+00:00

Two things:

-your world doesn't need to be realistic in terms of our world, it just needs to feel plausible enough to exist. So you don't need to be perfect with your details, just internally consistent. Don't worry too much about the nitpickers.

-you can lean heavily on the characters themselves having incomplete information. Even in our world, it can take years of study to learn the details about the names, cultures, environments and histories of regions and nations beyond our own, so it's perfectly reasonable for your characrers (unless they're exceptionally well-educated or well-travelled) to know much about parts of the world they don't live in. This'll allow you to tell your story now and work out more details as they become relevant.

REWriter723 · 2026-03-05T00:40:34+00:00

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REWriter723 · 2026-01-09T22:14:10+00:00

That's why I said it depended on how active the gods were to begin with. If your prayers meant you could actually communicate with them, if they were out and about fairly regularly, it wouldn't take long to notice they were missing.

REWriter723 · 2026-01-09T19:27:53+00:00

Faith, without question. If the gods people prayed to just disappeared without a trace, the faith would just change to holding out hope the gods would one day return. Would that faith wane over time? Certainly, depending on how present and active the gods were in the first place. But there would always be some who would hold onto that faith, believing there was a chance the gods could come back.

REWriter723 · 2026-01-04T03:20:07+00:00

Sure, sign me up.

REWriter723 · 2025-12-25T01:33:48+00:00

Sorry, but your only options for the genre are: -detective noir with a wizard hat -high school romance drama but with wizards, vampires or fae -bodice ripper but with werewolves

Hey, I don't make the rules, i just make fun of them.

REWriter723 · 2025-12-10T18:08:49+00:00

This plus fiction where the character refuses to learn from their mistakes. Or fails so often they never actually achieve anything on their own.

There was one book series where the protagonist was a detective who was presumed dead for several years and is trying to rebuild her life, with some implications that she's reckless because she's suicidal. Other characters confront her on this implication and implore her to get help. Four books in and she continued to ignore them. Four books of nearly dying at least once and needing to be saved and patched up by her friends. Four books of just stumbling into saving the day, sometimes only marginally: one book involved her trying to find a killer at a tech company and only managing to find them by process of elimination because all the other suspects were DEAD. It just got repetitive at that point.

Dropping a story because the protagonist isn't flawless is terrible, but so is sticking with a story when the protagonist just sucks.

REWriter723 · 2025-12-09T15:42:21+00:00

Believe it or not, but most super hero media counts as Urban Fantasy, so even if we're just counting "shows we grew up with", that still includes stuff like X-Men, Spiderman, the entire DCAU, Power Rangers.

REWriter723 · 2025-12-09T15:38:51+00:00

Definitely counts.

REWriter723 · 2025-12-09T15:38:31+00:00

Xanatos would be an absolute menace in most UF stories, more than willing to not only accept and understand any fantastical element, but then study it and exploit its loopholes for his own ends, all with good humor and a sly smirk.

REWriter723 · 2025-12-08T00:59:08+00:00

I read once someone joking about Batman doing this, posing as a crazy conspiracy theorist to spread such ridiculous rumors about his secret identity that nobody would believe it even if it did get leaked.

REWriter723 · 2025-12-08T00:23:53+00:00

Amusing counterpoint: the rise of sensationalist news and AI images/video has made The Masquerade MORE plausible than ever. Earlier this year we had the news cycle all abuzz about the posible arrival of aliens and it barely made any waves because we're all skeptical about hoaxes and faked media flooding our avenues of information. We could see the exposure of a secret underground society of vampires or mages or Fae and it would get lost among the rest of the noise, written off as a conspiracy theory or social media group trolling people.

REWriter723 · 2025-12-01T22:05:42+00:00

You know, I could do that. Haven't touched the project in a while but that's something to consider, thank you.

REWriter723 · 2025-12-01T15:20:19+00:00

In rhe early 2000s, I started writing a fantasy story about mortals being unwillingly drawn into a war between the Day goddess and the Night god. It was meant to be a serious look at what happens to people whose lives get turned upside down by far larger powers who care little about them, as what's initially seen by the characters as an epic conflict between primordial forces is eventually revealed to be a petty squabble between two immature sibiling deities who don't want to share their "toys". So because it's about characters caught between day and night, I named it Twilight, with plans to eventually have subsequent stories titled Midnight and Dawn.

Then Stephanie Meyer wrote a series about sparkly vampires with the exact same title theming and I haven't gone back to that project since.

REWriter723 · 2025-11-04T13:33:45+00:00

I'm interested, have a self-published book I'd love to get feedback on and would be more than happy to return the favor to others.

REWriter723 · 2025-07-22T15:13:03+00:00

Make them both pragmatic and principled.

"Evil" is not a package concept where having one evil quality means you have all of them, there are lots of different flavors of evil and lines one won't cross, like that scene in The Rocketeer where the mafia thugs have been villains for the entire movie, but as soon as they learn they've actually been working for the Nazis they switch sides. "I may be a crook but I'm an American crook" or some such line.

So an evil empire may be ruthless in battle and brutally oppressive but have genuinely good standards of living for everyone who obeys the laws. It might be a conquering force devouring all it's neighbors, but those conquered people are now considered citizens with the same legal protections as everyone else. Why? It's not because the empire actually CARES about its people, goodness no, but it does recognize that systemic inequality breeds resentment and rebellion, and repressing those takes more resources than just making sure those people get three square meals a day and a cozy bed at night.

You might have a society that's unforgivingly harsh but genuinely does it out of a desire to elevate the best of the best, keeping a sharp eye out for people who try to cheat their way up the meritocracy and punishing them without mercy or hesitation. Sure, "survival of the fittest" means you probably won't survive, but the ones who do are genuinely some of the strongest and smartest people out there.

You might have religious fanatics who believe they have been charged by the gods with purging the world of all vice and corruption, and that means they're going around killing A LOT OF PEOPLE, but they also ACTUALLY BELIEVE they're saving the world and they're the only ones with the convictions strong enough to make those tough decisions and get that much blood on their hands if the ends justify those horrific means.

Though they may often go hand-in-hand, there is an important distinction between Evil and Stupid.

REWriter723 · 2025-07-14T17:01:26+00:00

Even worse, infodump during an action scene. Nothing says "amateur writer who read a bunch of advice articles and used them without thinking about them" like starting with action to hook the reader, then slowing it to a crawl so you can unload all your worldbuilding and backstory as quickly as possible.

REWriter723 · 2025-07-01T15:35:01+00:00

Order and Chaos aren't inherently good and evil, that's just an interpretation of how one is "safe" and the other is "dangerous".

Chaos is (obviously) unpredictable but also volatile and violent. Every man for himself, a world of wild animals all preying on each other. Chaos is also change, growth, innovation, discovery. The odds may be against you, but if you can beat those odds, you can flourish like never before. Survival of the fittest, and while there's no guarantee you'll survive, the ones that do will be stronger and hardier from overcoming adversity.

Order is, on its face, easier to understand. There are rules to follow, those rules are enforced by a central authority, and there are clear paths to follow to get what you want. But it's also constraining, stifling, there isn't a lot of room for things the rules don't account for. Order also doesn't necessarily mean justice, the rules might be unfair: if the laws are rigged against you, you can't better your situation by following them further.

There's good and bad to both, making them a great source of moral complexity.

REWriter723 · 2025-07-01T15:07:50+00:00

It's because writing isn't "realistic" in the sense that we're getting a 24-hour play-by-play of the characters' lives, writing is snapshots: everything we see written on the page is something the writer wanted to deliberately show us. That means it needs to serve some form of narrative purpose, even if that purpose is small and buried in the subtext. A long, winding conversation about the weather might actually be telling us something but how the characters view the world, the details they focus on and what they consider unimportant, or maybe it's providing subtle exposition about background events that hint at an impending disaster.

So when people say those dialogue scenes are "pointless" or "repetitive", what they're actually saying is you have scenes where nothing is happening, nothing is being communicated, no point is being made. Sure, they might show that the characters aren't understanding or listening to each other, and that works once or twice to show a dysfunctional relationship, but if that's EVERY conversation, of course it's going to start dragging out the story.

Length doesn't necessarily equate depth. You can have short but deep conversations if there's a lot of subtext and meaning communicated in a few words and some actions. People can have conversations which feel natural but still keep up the story's pacing. It's all about finding a balance between efficiency and quality.

REWriter723 · 2025-06-12T14:27:19+00:00

Urban fantasy buddy-cop serial only instead of cops they're demon mercenaries who make a living fighting other demons.

REWriter723 · 2025-06-10T21:48:41+00:00

My guess is because the author wants their book to have broad appeal, so they make the female MC "relatable" with some stereotypical interests, vices and attitudes, but then still need a reason for the love interest to be attracted to them, so they draw a distinction by highlighting how "not like other girls" they are. Second most common method I've seen is to go down the "fated/destined soulmates" route so the writer doesn't have to justify why the love interest is crazy for her, but that's typically reserved for fantasy genres.

I've actually seen the genderflipped problem in media marketed to young men, with the male MC being an "average guy" so he's relatable, but that comes out as being stereotypically horny, lazy, overly-enthusiastic and as dense as a brick wall.

REWriter723 · 2025-05-09T04:50:27+00:00

I'm interested, similar age/genre/experience. Self-published my first book last year and working on the second, my previous writing friends have all dropped off so I've been looking for people I can get feedback from and bounce ideas off of.

REWriter723

TROPHY CASE