McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Your Pet Urban Fantasy Cliche Peeves
Wordmaker:
Yep. I was working on a YA book a while ago, and I'd made the main character's mother a single mom who was a fairly cold and unlikeable woman who treated her son badly because of a curse he was under.
His romantic interest was originally to have just her dad as a parent, and the town sheriff. But I realised that this could be read as saying that single moms can't handle the responsibility, so instead I made the sheriff a woman as well.
Galvatron:
--- Quote ---I'm pretty over the dom/sub, alpha/beta thing. There's not much new that's being brought to the table on that topic, and very few authors truly explore the idea in a rational way (as opposed to shallow kink fulfillment). I think Jacqueline Carey is the only one who has who I find interesting still.
--- End quote ---
I totaly agree, its not that its a bad idea but its been done so many times I just want something new
Dom:
Yeah, I've been using some of the same techniques with "foils" to balance out my character casts...if I have a "minority" character of some type, and I see they're turning into a bad person, I try to insert a foil for them. So if I see my only woman in a certain set of characters is someone I don't like, I'll insert a foil for her. Or in one of my novels, I have a lot of Deaf people, so I try to run the gamut of personalities for them so as not to imply I'm correlating [bad trait] with [Deafness].
To return to the original topic...I also get irritated with shallow Urban Fantasy that doesn't give things a new twist or have any particular strength or new aspect to bring to the table. But I'm not sure there's much that can be done about it, because I recall when I was younger, you had the same thing going on with traditional fantasy, and also pulpy science fiction, where the shelves were flooded with mediocre work for whatever sub-genre was "in".
Mandy_The_Dandy:
--- Quote from: Wordmaker on May 03, 2013, 11:12:52 AM ---Personally I'd like to see more protagonists that don't have all that many supernatural powers. I love underdogs, and there's no better way to create an underdog than put a regular guy up against sorcerers and monsters.
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That actually sums up the premise of a story I'm working on. My main character works at the magical equivalent of an antique shop and is what you would consider a non-action guy (he's the bookkeeper) whose boss keeps dragging him along into dangerous situations so she can have someone do the grunt work. Doesn't help that she's got a history of being on the wrong side of the law and doesn't care much for staying on the straight and narrow, much to her lawyer's dismay.
Anyways, most of his antagonists are either physically or magically stronger than him, so he learns to defeat them through guile and trickery (a few times he learns it from being duped himself). I want to write it so that he'll get better at these methods as the story progresses, and the antagonists get more difficult to fool.
Wordmaker:
Well I'm sold. Write it, get it published, and I'll buy it!
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