: Re: Is the "what" more important than the "how"? Or in other words, is the plot/story more important than how it is executed? I'll use as an example a fantasy I'm writing. If I boil it down

@Holmes449

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How is far more important than What. Look at successful entertainments (by how many they sell, not whether critics loved them or not), and the settings are mostly standard fare, many of them set in real life, a city or town or school that has almost nothing unusual about it at all.

Fantasy is the same, how many different authors have you read with interchangeable dragons, wands, and spells? Even if they are "original" they are generic, you can easily imagine Tolkien's walking sentient trees in some other author's fantasy, or a spell by one wizard appearing in another book by a different author.

Now I certainly think that original setting can play a role and be fun and interesting to see, in some scifi books setting is the major player (a recent movie, The Martian, is an example).

But still, what supercedes all of that is plot and character. The setting can only hold the interest of the reader for a short time. What holds their interest, and keeps them turning pages, is not seeing the next wonder of your world, but seeing what happens next. It is that suspense of events that captivates them. Setting, your rules of magic, your political system are all support systems for that suspense.

To achieve this suspense, you need two components: Characters that interest them, and a reason for them to try and accomplish something that will not occur without them, something near the limit of their abilities so neither they nor the reader feel the outcome is in the bag, and a reason for them to struggle hard against what will happen if they do not succeed. In many novels this is a struggle to the death against a villain, in others it is a struggle against a life of loneliness, in others it is a struggle to survive or to save somebody else, or a struggle to save a population of people or animals or a culture. In many novels it is a struggle against some deception in order to reveal the truth, a moral struggle.

How you tell the story is more important than your setting, having a protagonist the reader likes, and a struggle the reader wants them to win, that is more important than whether your setting is original or not.

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