Are you ready to unleash your fantasy ideas and finally write that book you always had in mind?
If the answer is yes, then the only thing that might be holding you back is the fear of failure. For obvious reasons, and none can blame you – life has its own set of distractions, and while there is no easy answer to success, there are some potential pitfalls that newbie writers must avoid while writing their first fantasy book.
Here are five amateur writing mistakes to avoid at all costs and save yourself a load of first-hand embarrassment.
By avoiding these mistakes that typically most newbie authors fall prey to, you can get your work published with a boost of confidence.
Developing Main Characters without Emotional Needs
You must look at your main characters as emotional beings and also portray them in the form of emotional beings. It is quite easy to make one’s characters into chess pieces that do whatever you need to do to move the plot forward.
But you must aim at developing engaging characters that have clear emotions integrated into all their moves. For instance, you must aim at developing a basic human want, such as wealth, love, revenge, and meaning.
The entire point of creating emotional want and intertwining that want in the character description is to make the characters concrete. The underlying reason is that you will want your audience to feel the tension as they watch the characters get closer to their goals.
Always remember that concrete emotional needs and wants are trackable, and your readers want to feel the tension as the characters slowly move towards their goals – or away from them.
Forming a World with a Lack of Perspectives
As a fantasy writer, you might have started writing your story with a “what-if” fantasy scenario to set your world apart from your own world. For instance, you might have aimed for a what-if situation where birds predicted the future, or maybe dolphins had healing powers.
Now once you have your perfect fantasy world scenario, you will need to look at how your scenario affects the entire population in your world. For instance, you might want to picture the following scenarios:
- What type of person is successful in your world?
- What type of person finds it most challenging to live and go through everyday life in your world?
- What is funny about your world?
- What is annoying about your world?
- What type of person would gain the most from a dramatic shift in your personal world?
- What type of person would desperately want things as they are in your world and go to great extents to prevent any change from happening?
You get the point – with a diverse set of characters and a diverse set of reactions, you will be able to establish a richer world. Once you have written the entire story and know exactly what is going on in your amazing world, only then will you want to avail the services of the best fantasy book cover designers.
Don’t Establish Your Book on Your First Idea
As you build your fantasy world, you will come up with loads of ideas – a whole world living in elaborate tree houses, a dark fortress with a doomed nation living on the edge of a volcano – a wardrobe that opens to another world.
However, perhaps none of the ideas is as original as they could be, which is why you should never settle on your first idea. It is important to mention here that you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel; however, you will have to challenge yourself and come up with your own personal perspective and twist and aim at giving the audience something they might have never seen before.
Keep Raising the Stakes
Suppose that something happens early on in your fantasy world to shake the world of your main characters, such as the call of adventure. Now there is no problem, but the problem might occur when you forget that once the stakes are raised, you cannot just glide to the end of your story.
That said, throughout the entire story, you will want to keep ratcheting up the tension with greater stakes. This can happen because the problem is much worse than the main character thought, or the problem might be much more personal than the main character thought.
Whatever it is – if you don’t raise the stakes, it can get a lot harder to pull the audience throughout the story. You will want your readers to be on the edges of their seats while following you through the entire story.
Avoid Info Dump
Once you have developed your fantasy world, it is all too easy to want to share every little detail about it. For instance, you might be intrigued to share the baking system of the third kingdom living on another planet.
As a rule of thumb, you might want to keep in mind that the audience only needs to know enough detail to understand the specific conflict going on at any given moment. The last thing you want to do is overburden the audience with loads of information.
Ideally, you should aim at keeping the audience centered with enough background information to make them understand the imminent conflict – but not too much more.
Final Thoughts
There is so much more going on in fantasy than just avoiding potential mistakes – there is character building, world-building, magic building, word choice, and so much more. That said, as a newbie author, you can also immensely benefit from signing up for a writing course so that you know what is expected of you as a fantasy writer.
You might as well want to read a bunch of books by different fantasy writers and best-sellers to get a better idea of your genre while familiarizing yourself with the structure and style of fantasy writing. Once you have your first copy ready, you will have to look at it from the reader’s perspective and see whether they would like the story or not.
