: Re: How does one avoid bland, generic fantasy while they write? I have been mulling over the plot and characters for an elaborate fantasy work for a number of years now. The longer I mull things

What has worked for me in the past is to simply concentrate on telling the story. I'm assuming you are on your first draft and have yet to complete even that. In that case, you need to spend less time analyzing and more time telling your story. If you spend too much time reviewing as you write, you'll end up with a case of paralysis by analysis.

Sometimes what causes a writer to start reviewing their work prematurely is a lack of focus or direction. If you don't already have an outline or at least a timeline of events, then maybe you should concentrate on that. The main idea is to just let the words flow, no matter how contrived they may seem. You will have plenty of time to go back and edit for style later.

Another consideration is to stop comparing your own words to what you have read in other fantasy novels. More importantly, I would recommend refraining from reading any fantasy at all while you are writing. I have found that reading a fantasy novel by another author proves to be very distracting when trying to write my own. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with copying another writers style, so don't assume that your readers will be critical of it.

Lastly, make sure you have at least a couple of good beta readers who will give you honest feedback. Let them help you to decide if your content is too contrived or too generic. It is very easy for us as writers to be overly critical of our own work. We end up spending so much time trying to refine the story that we never end up completing it.

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: How do you build good per-book and global indexes? For our SDK, we generate individual documents (PDFs) and one big HTML doc set (CHM file) from the same Docbook source. Each book has an

: Re: How does one avoid bland, generic fantasy while they write? I have been mulling over the plot and characters for an elaborate fantasy work for a number of years now. The longer I mull things

More posts by @Turnbaugh521

: How do I decide if writing expository scenes that won't be in my finished novel is useful, or procrastination? I tend to burn out developing my stories before they even reach the page, so

: Will blogging my fiction limit its ability to be traditionally published later? Somewhere, don't ask me where, I picked up the idea that publishers don't like works that the public has already

: How do I balance reading time with writing time? It's rare to find a how-to-write book or blog that doesn't have this advice: "Read. Voraciously. In all genres, especially your genre of choice,

: How do you build good per-book and global indexes? For our SDK, we generate individual documents (PDFs) and one big HTML doc set (CHM file) from the same Docbook source. Each book has an

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: Re: How does one avoid bland, generic fantasy while they write? I have been mulling over the plot and characters for an elaborate fantasy work for a number of years now. The longer I mull things

More posts by @Turnbaugh521

: How do I decide if writing expository scenes that won't be in my finished novel is useful, or procrastination? I tend to burn out developing my stories before they even reach the page, so

: Will blogging my fiction limit its ability to be traditionally published later? Somewhere, don't ask me where, I picked up the idea that publishers don't like works that the public has already

: How do I balance reading time with writing time? It's rare to find a how-to-write book or blog that doesn't have this advice: "Read. Voraciously. In all genres, especially your genre of choice,

: How do you build good per-book *and* global indexes? For our SDK, we generate individual documents (PDFs) and one big HTML doc set (CHM file) from the same Docbook source. Each book has an

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: How do you build good per-book and global indexes? For our SDK, we generate individual documents (PDFs) and one big HTML doc set (CHM file) from the same Docbook source. Each book has an