McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Your Pet Urban Fantasy Cliche Peeves
LizW65:
Okay, so taking into consideration all the peeves thus far aired, what can we come up with for a story? Let's start with the protagonist: (s)he must be the normal, well-adjusted product of a happily uneventful childhood, with lots of family and friends, a good-paying job, and a stable, long-term romantic/sexual relationship with someone who isn't a brooding but sexy vampire/werecreature/faerie/witch/wizard/whatever. (S)he most definitely is not the Chosen One nor is (s)he mentioned in any kind of cryptically worded prophecy. Any supernatural powers (s)he may have are not derived from sex. The paranormal threat/antagonist should be from a mostly unexplored mythology or a newly created one. And it has to be written in third person. What have I missed?
Galvatron:
well I would certainly be intreseted in reading a book like that, and if I was to come across one in my weekly trip to the book store it would come home with me simply because its new and fresh.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: arianne on May 08, 2013, 04:43:59 AM ---I keep hearing people say that this is original, but I could never see it myself. Sure, I've never heard of any other fictional vampires who sparkle
--- End quote ---
"You're not using enough gunpowder."
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: LizW65 on May 08, 2013, 04:41:04 PM ---Okay, so taking into consideration all the peeves thus far aired, what can we come up with for a story? Let's start with the protagonist: (s)he must be the normal, well-adjusted product of a happily uneventful childhood, with lots of family and friends, a good-paying job, and a stable, long-term romantic/sexual relationship with someone who isn't a brooding but sexy vampire/werecreature/faerie/witch/wizard/whatever. (S)he most definitely is not the Chosen One nor is (s)he mentioned in any kind of cryptically worded prophecy. Any supernatural powers (s)he may have are not derived from sex. The paranormal threat/antagonist should be from a mostly unexplored mythology or a newly created one. And it has to be written in third person. What have I missed?
--- End quote ---
Interesting. You've ruled out a lot of the cheap-and-easy overdone ways of generating significant conflicts in UF; the next question I'd ask would be, what sort of significance can our protagonist have in, or to beings from, the underlying mythology without falling into Chosen One trope ? What gets those beings interested in the protagonist's life ? To my mind, it would have to be either a more subtle sort of mythological significance, or just some sort of random chance - I can totally buy story setups where one random coincidence drags the protagonist into contact with the rest of the story and everything else is consequence of that, but not really more than one.
(I am kicking around a UF notion myself, but it's not going to fit here because a couple of things in it are commenting on the tropes we are trying to explicitly avoid in this case; the protagonist isn't close to her birth family, and does not have many friends basically because she has some of the kinds of surety and stubbornness that many UF protagonists have but exists in a world where rather than this being admirable and heroic it is obnoxious and offputting to people, and while it gets her into trouble, it's very much not the means by which she gets out of it. Also she has no romantic life because she's essentially asexual and considers the whole idea vaguely icky and something that makes people behave stupidly.)
o_O:
--- Quote from: LizW65 on May 08, 2013, 04:41:04 PM ---Okay, so taking into consideration all the peeves thus far aired, what can we come up with for a story? Let's start with the protagonist: (s)he must be the normal, well-adjusted product of a happily uneventful childhood, with lots of family and friends, a good-paying job, and a stable, long-term romantic/sexual relationship with someone who isn't a brooding but sexy vampire/werecreature/faerie/witch/wizard/whatever. (S)he most definitely is not the Chosen One nor is (s)he mentioned in any kind of cryptically worded prophecy. Any supernatural powers (s)he may have are not derived from sex. The paranormal threat/antagonist should be from a mostly unexplored mythology or a newly created one. And it has to be written in third person. What have I missed?
--- End quote ---
I'll take a 3rd-person Case of The Toxic Spell Dump any time you feel like writing one...or a Khaavren romance ftm.
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