: Re: Where's the middle ground between genre conventions and originality? I've long been interested in writing a fantasy novel. Over the countless iterations I've gone through, one thing has remained

@Sims2267584

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You know when you are going against the conventions too much when you are feeling forced to go against the conventions just for the sake of going against the conventions.

The work then starts to feel like hard work to not be like everyone else instead of putting the effort into meaningful progression of the plot and working on the character traits of your main characters. It starts to feel important to come up with new names, just for the sake of not using known names.

There is a nice chart from XKCD - Fiction Rule of Thumb that shows how the amount of invented words makes the book likely worse.

It becomes hard to read because you needed original names in a language noone has ever heard of and with a lot of apostrophes as if they were Eldritch Horrors in a game of D&D instead of being easy to read because you spent your time making the dialogue flow in a way that feels natural.

It's good to try to go against a few genre rules, but in general the general audience expects the general rules of a fantasy book.

There are different degrees of fantasy of course - you have the knight in shining armor fighting together with the rogue and the wizard against the dragon. Or you have the modern day police force that has help from a single rare individual when it comes to tracking the bunch of assassins that can get somewhere without opening a door or window because magic. But when you want to write about a knight in shining armor and you are forcing him to be a detective you will get a bad book - it's not the story you have in your head because you always have to twist what is in your head just because you don't want to say the word elf.

Most people don't have a problem with unusual characteristics like elves being normal-speed and without magic. Maybe a bit longer living and a bit more peaceful, but more than willing to fight for something they want. Just define your version of elves by showing the reader what is different about these elves. They will expect a few similarities, but it doesn't have to be the complete clichè.

If you feel that you need to make sure that your readers know that these elves are different you could for example change their name slightly - calling them elffes would go a long way in showing how they are very similar, but not quite normal elves. Or you could call magic magik or magick. This has been done before, but it's basically a symbol for "this is a different kind of magic with its own rules, not the D&D-style Sword-and-Sorcery kind". As long as you don't do this with every single race or magic spell or whatever you want to paint differently it wouldn't be considered bad writing, just your personal style.

If you are trying too hard to get something original you will never finish anything - someone has used that word you just wanted to write down before after all...

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