: Re: How do I ratchet down expectations in a genre that seems to have gone gonzo? I've done worldbuilding and extensive plotting for a Book 1 based around a "detective" (not a literal detective

@Angie602

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You're worried that your own work is similar enough to a popular take on the genre, but substantially different from it -- so readers might be coming to it with the wrong expectations.

That's a very fair thing to be concerned about. There are a few ways to approach this, and they all have to do with setting expectations and with making promises to the reader.

The good news is this: Readers are more than happy to press the reset button. If you tell them "Listen, my story doesn't have that kind of gonzo explosion of supernatural presence," then they will 100% roll with that; for plenty of them, it'll be downright refreshing.

The trick is to make that expectation, that promise, clear to the reader -- and to do so as early on as possible. You don't want them to be going through four books until they finally go "Oh, hey, I guess this world doesn't have fairy zombies in it (yet)". You want them coming in, and learning the rules pretty much right away.

And you do that by portraying a solid, compelling world, that feels like it has ground rules. Lay down the rules, and the reader will pick them up and be glad for them. They make sense of the world; they prevent the feeling that the author can pull some new random magic out of nowhere whenever they get stuck.

Promise the reader that your fantastical elements are specific, limited, well-defined. You can have questions and mysteries and loose ends, but have those questions be well-defined -- not loose, wishy-washy Entities of Broad Rule-Breaking Power, but specific questions with specific details, that need to have an answer that "makes sense."

Here's an exercise for you:

Write up your rules. Literally, write down all the rules and limitations you're setting for yourself. "No robot vampires," "The only true mythologies are the Aztec one, and Scientology," etc. etc. Write them down so that you have a strong sense of them.
Novelize them. Have a character -- your protagonist, or a colorful side character who's voice you like -- speak a long monologue, explaining all those rules from their own point of view. Use their voice. Speak the rules from their lived experience of them. Let them tell us what burning mysteries still remain.

This whole bit probably won't make it into your story as-is -- that would be a fairly dull infodump -- but it will give you a strong sense of what the world's rules are, and how you can weave them in. Who knows what; how certain details look to the characters experiencing them.

Hope this helps, and all the best!

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