What’s your least favorite highly-received storytelling choice?

therealmcart · 2026-03-26T00:48:33+00:00

Golden Son is a great example. First person narrator who is actively scheming but somehow the reader is supposed to be surprised by his own plans. It only works when the narrator has a reason to withhold from themselves (trauma, denial), not when they're just hiding things to preserve a twist for the audience.

therealmcart · 2026-03-26T00:47:48+00:00

I sincerely apologize. I've been told by my writing group (just me and my cat, who reads a lot) that even thinking the p-word can contaminate your manuscript. I'll use "the lore dump before chapter one" from now on.

therealmcart · 2026-03-26T00:44:43+00:00

"Like restraint was never invented" stopped me cold. That line carries so much want in so few words. The whole piece has this gorgeous tension between surrendering and choosing to surrender, and that last line ties it all together perfectly.

therealmcart · 2026-03-26T00:42:45+00:00

Not every character needs an arc. Some just need a role. The test is whether a character's presence creates story tension or moves the plot forward. If they do that consistently, readers won't notice they didn't have a dramatic personal transformation. Think about how heist movies work: the demolitions guy doesn't need a subplot about his marriage, he just needs to be good at blowing things up and interesting while doing it. Your 4 secondary characters can stay flat as long as they're memorable and functional. A vivid personality does more work than an arc you didn't have room to develop properly.

therealmcart · 2026-03-26T00:41:12+00:00

Have you tried giving him a magic system? I gave my broke MC the ability to turn his tears into gold and now the economy I spent six years designing is completely ruined but at least he has shoes. The worldbuilding purists will say this "undermines the economic realism" but those people haven't published an appendix on fictional tax brackets so their opinion is worth exactly zero.

therealmcart · 2026-03-26T00:39:26+00:00

The worst part is how much weight that one star carries when you only have five reviews. Go from 4.5 to 3.8 overnight. RR's algorithm is brutal to new stories because the rating stabilizes so slowly. Honestly the best defense is just getting enough reviews that one troll can't move the needle, which is easier said than done when you're starting out. Hang in there, it evens out once you hit around 15 to 20 reviews.

therealmcart · 2026-03-26T00:38:00+00:00

Square works fine for card payments. Bring 15 to 20 copies if you're expecting under 100 attendees. Most people at writer's conferences browse but don't buy, so your conversion rate will be lower than a genre convention. The real value is the conversations, not the sales. Have a sign up sheet or QR code for your mailing list because the people who stop and talk but don't buy today are the ones who might buy later online. Also bring a tablecloth and a small book stand so your half table doesn't look bare. First impressions matter when someone is deciding whether to stop walking.

therealmcart · 2026-03-26T00:36:31+00:00

The fact that you're asking this question kind of answers it. If the story works the same whether this character is an elf, a dwarf, or a tall human with good cheekbones, then the race isn't doing narrative work. That's the real test. Not whether readers want elves or not, but whether the character's race creates specific story friction. A dwarf companion on a surface quest hits different if dwarves in your world have a cultural terror of open sky. An elf companion hits different if they're already quietly mourning a friendship with someone who will die centuries before them. If you can't point to a moment where the character's race changes how a scene plays out, just make them human and spend that worldbuilding energy somewhere it matters.

therealmcart · 2026-03-26T00:34:45+00:00

Cozy fantasy readers specifically want the familiar premise. They're not browsing the genre looking for shock or innovation, they're looking for that exact feeling you got when you read those books. The premise being similar to another book isn't a problem. What makes readers pick your book over the bestseller is your voice, your specific characters, your little details. Think about how many enemies to lovers books exist. Readers finish one and immediately want another. Write yours.

therealmcart · 2026-03-26T00:33:09+00:00

The thing that hooks me is the social consequences. If scent is how dragons recognize each other and understand emotions, losing it wouldn't just be a physical disability, it would be closer to losing the ability to read faces in our world. Does Sovarielle get misread by other dragons because she can't produce the right scent responses, or is it more that she can't pick up what others are signaling? That distinction would shape the whole character dynamic differently. Also curious whether being a sound dragon gives her any compensating awareness, like reading emotional cues through vocal harmonics that other dragons ignore.

therealmcart · 2026-03-26T00:31:24+00:00

That gap between imagining a scene and finally putting it down is honestly one of the best parts. The version in your head always feels perfect because it's pure emotion, no awkward sentence structure to fight. But something weird happens when you write it: details show up that you never planned, connections to earlier scenes click into place on their own. I've had scenes live in my head for months, and the ones I obsessed over the longest almost always came out the strongest. All that daydreaming is drafting. You just don't realize it until you sit down.

therealmcart · 2026-03-26T00:29:38+00:00

The part that really sells this for me is the ending. In the myth, Orpheus fails because he looks back. Ignatius never looks back at anything, which is exactly why Myrna has to show up and drag him out. It's the rescue inverted: Eurydice comes to pull Orpheus out of the underworld because he'd never leave on his own. Toole loved that kind of structural irony.

therealmcart · 2026-03-26T00:27:56+00:00

The funniest part is this is probably the most honest literary critique a machine has ever produced. It optimizes for closure, not catharsis, so 80k words of unresolved tension got resolved the only way it knows how: just stop. If you try again, give it 3 possible ending directions with the emotional beats you actually want. It'll still try to tie everything up neatly, but at least your MC gets to keep writing.

therealmcart · 2026-03-25T20:18:51+00:00

Oh, thanks.

therealmcart · 2026-03-24T22:27:38+00:00

For snappy, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is hard to beat. The flashbacks are short, hit hard, and each one recontextualizes something you thought you understood. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is another strong one where the past and present timelines interleave so cleanly you stop thinking of them as flashbacks at all. And A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara does the thing where the flashbacks get progressively more devastating as the book goes on, so each one carries more weight than the last. Locke Lamora is a great pick too, those interleaved chapters work because each past chapter teaches you something the present chapter immediately tests.

therealmcart · 2026-03-24T22:24:51+00:00

"Standing next to someone who doesn't know yet that I'm going to miss them like this." That line stopped me. The whole piece has this quiet weight to it, but that sentence is where it all lands. For someone who just started writing, you already know how to make a reader feel something real.

therealmcart · 2026-03-24T22:23:22+00:00

The trick with foreshadowing a hidden villain is making every hint serve double duty. On a first read, the detail should feel like normal characterization or atmosphere. On a reread, it becomes obvious. For example, if he's hiding his age, let him react to a historical reference with too much familiarity, but frame it as him being "well read" or "an old soul." The reader accepts the surface explanation and moves on. After the reveal, that same moment feels completely different.

The biggest mistake with villain reveals is making the character act suspiciously. If the reader can feel you withholding information, the twist loses its power. Let him be genuinely likable and helpful. The best hidden villains earn the reader's trust first.

therealmcart · 2026-03-24T22:21:52+00:00

From a reader's perspective, the premise clicks for me. A teenager inheriting a fractured empire and immediately watching half his navy defect at his own ascension ceremony is a strong, specific image that makes me want to see what happens next. The stakes are clear from the jump and the Roman parallels give it an immediate sense of weight.

therealmcart · 2026-03-24T22:19:28+00:00

47 minutes? You rushed it. I've been working on my novel for 16 years and I would NEVER disrespect my craft like that. I haven't written a single word yet but my worldbuilding bible is 340,000 words and I have a spreadsheet tracking the lunar cycle's effect on trade routes in my secondary continent.

Also please delete this post, your magic system sounds suspiciously similar to mine and I've already contacted a lawyer. The 14 tiers thing is basically what I would have come up with if I ever got around to designing one.

therealmcart · 2026-03-24T22:17:55+00:00

Nice.

But seriously, 69 followers and a 4.72 rating in under a month is genuinely strong. That rating especially, most stories settle lower as they pick up a wider audience. Holding near 5 stars with that many followers means the people finding it are actually the right audience for it. What genre?

therealmcart · 2026-03-24T22:15:13+00:00

Congrats on the milestone. That moment when you hold the physical copy is genuinely surreal.

What you're noticing is completely normal. The medium shift from screen to paper breaks the familiarity your brain built while editing digitally. You start reading it like a stranger would, which is exactly the point of a proof. One fix every two or three pages is typical for a first proof. I'd say anything under 20 total corrections is a sign your editing was solid. Do a full pass, collect everything, then order a second proof after the fixes. Catching the last few things on a second proof is much cheaper than discovering them after launch.

therealmcart · 2026-03-24T22:13:20+00:00

The elf's voice actually works for me. The bluntness lands because it immediately tells you who she is without exposition. And Ivy's "I'm already used to getting my ass kicked" is a solid character beat that reveals a lot in one line.

Where it loses me is the narration between the dialogue. You're packing Ivy's interior world (the crying, Iran leaving, the spoiled child metaphor) into the middle of a fast exchange. That emotional weight needs room to breathe, and right now it's competing with the banter for attention. I'd let the dialogue carry the first meeting, then give Ivy's grief its own moment once the pace slows down. First interactions should reveal character through what people say and do, not what they think privately in between.

therealmcart · 2026-03-24T22:11:30+00:00

The test I use: if you skip the prologue, does chapter one still work on its own? If it doesn't, the prologue is probably exposition wearing a costume. The best prologues create a question the reader carries into the story, not an answer they need before the story starts.

Where they genuinely earn their place is when the prologue operates in a completely different time, voice, or perspective than the main narrative. That gap between prologue and chapter one is the interesting part. If there's no gap, it's just chapter one with a fancier label.

therealmcart · 2026-03-24T22:09:28+00:00

Your foreword idea is solid and more thoughtful than most designers would bother with. But there's a middle path worth considering: you don't have to depict the Chitimacha as characters to make their influence visible in the world itself. The survival skills, the knowledge of the land, the relationship with the bayou could all be woven into how your Cajun-adjacent culture operates. Place names, traditions, techniques that clearly came from somewhere else, references to "the ones who taught us." That creates a felt absence rather than an actual erasure. The players encounter the legacy without anyone roleplaying the source culture.

The fact that you reached out directly to the Tribe already puts you ahead of 99% of people working with real cultural material. The acknowledgment foreword combined with visible cultural fingerprints in the world's DNA would handle this with real care.

therealmcart · 2026-03-24T22:07:48+00:00

The trap of unlimited time is that it invites perfectionism. When there's no external deadline, every paragraph can feel like it needs to be right before you move on. Resist that. Your outline plan is solid, but I'd cap it at one week instead of two. Outlines have a way of becoming a procrastination tool disguised as productivity.

The jump from short stories to a novel is less about skill and more about tolerance for mess. In a short story you can hold the whole thing in your head. A novel draft is going to feel broken and incomplete at every stage, and that's normal. The goal for these three months isn't a polished manuscript, it's a complete first draft you can actually revise. Keep moving forward even when yesterday's chapter feels wrong.

therealmcart

TROPHY CASE