This Fantasy Novel Can Teach Wonders to All Authors Including You

Make your story vibrant and overwhelming by checking the factors I have mentioned below

Saanvi Thapar
The Writing Cooperative

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Image of a candle burning in a mysterious environment by Marko Blažević via Unsplash

My, my, my.

My eyes shed tears of delight and reverence when I closed Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora. The Gentleman Bastard series managed to blow my critiquing mind away and stole my heart.

The reader inside me swooned. The writer inside me died.

The number of details finely presented, the exquisite nature of the character personalities, the pleasingly overindulging prose, the vast and realistic world, the intricate plot —

I can go on forever.

In simple words, I found the novel perfect. Period.

Books like this always turn on my analytical skills. I ask myself what makes the read so special and what lessons can I apply to my writing.

The result is this article I believe every author should get hold of.

Lesson 1: Reaction, not drama

The Lies of Locke Lamora’s strongest part was the dialogue. Engaging, realistic, and fresh, it pierced my heart.

This element brought life to all the scenes the book had.

To make your novel exciting, you will obviously put a lot of stuff that will take the characters (and the readers) unguarded.

Adding a lot of exclamation and question marks along with capitalized letters, curse words, and fainted characters sounds like the “realistic” option. Except it’s not. This backfires.

Humans are unpredictable, and, at times, absolutely amazing.

Writing the usual reactions you expect when an alien lands can be boring and predictable. Even the most sensible of people can have vagaries in times of extreme shocks.

Melodrama rarely works in your favor.

Instead of dumping drama, why don’t you create some resistance and add unique reactions?

For example, if aliens land in front of the most “sane” character, won’t it look better to make him stay calm and say something witty rather than scream and faint?

To do:

To excel in this art, apply the ‘ten ideas a day’ concept. For every major event, pen down ten different reactions of the victim. Choose what you feel is the most wholesome one.

Lesson 2: Deliver what you promise

I had this one major complaint with the fantasy book The Night Circus: Its blurb blatantly lied to the readers.

The blurb promised, among other things:

  • A fierce competition,
  • a duel,
  • the duellers trained since childhood,
  • the duellers falling headfast into “love”, etc.

NONE of this happened in the dramatic sense the author promised.

The duel was not really a fight — it was just the creativity of two different people running parallelly. The competitive spirit? It went into negative numbers. And don’t even get me started on the “love” they felt; the chemistry was blander than bread.

This led me to rate the book two stars.

The cover of The Lies of Locke Lamora promised a great lot of thievery and heists, morally grey characters, and supernatural forces. And Lynch did it. Surprisingly, he delivered all that he promised, and more, in an interesting way he said he’d.

You don’t have to even guess my rating of this book.

To do:

Do not break your promises! Especially to the people (readers) who spend green notes for getting to see them delivered. Never take the readers’ trust for granted.

Lesson 3: The ‘third’ way out

Three is the magical number.

Throughout human history, it has had a unique significance.

Everything special — good or bad — is bound to happen when this number is included in some way. It’s the number of times — past, present, future; birth, life, death; start, middle, end. It’s often the magic number in fairy tales, like the three pigs, musketeers, and fairies.

In The Lies of Locke Lamora, too, I noticed this magical pattern.

The author made me care so much for Locke that I wanted him out of suffering on the first try itself. However, every way out presented itself on the third try only, in the most surprising and pleasing way possible.

To do:

It’s always wise to add magic. Let this number be prominent in your story.

Lesson 4: Forget the structure

Google “novel structure” or similar words and you would find hundreds of results loaded. There are beat sheets, outline guides, and websites to jot down the three major plot points with other elements in advance.

When I first found out these sophisticated techniques, I was overwhelmed.

I was just getting started with my story, and being more of a gardener than an architect then, my heart initially wasn’t into it.

The Lies of Locke Lamora, however, (being a thief’s tale), proved to me how to break the rules the right way.

The book followed no structure whatsoever. It had powerful, important, and long flashbacks. I could not place my fingers at the plot points in it. The ending phase was longer than usual but satisfying enough.

To do:

As I have explained here, rules are created to give a path to a neophyte writer to get a grip on his or her writing.

They can help one write better, but either a complete carte blanche or obsequiousness towards them will prove harmful.

Understand why they were created in the first place, and when required, break them.

Lesson 5: OVERWHELM!!!

Every great novel has at least one aspect that pokes the reader hard enough for him/her to give it a good rating.

The Night Circus, though not my favorite, got top ratings. This is because it excelled magnificently in one part of the book. The prose. For some people, the beauty of the sentences was enough to feel the magic of reading.

On the other hand, George R. R. Martin doesn’t have beautiful prose. Yet, people are crazy after Game of Thrones due to the finely developed characters and the realistic vibes it emanates.

The Lies of Locke Lamora had a lot of things that made me gyrate.

It had hella good characters and dialogue. The overindulgent prose described the world beautifully! And the plot twists … enough to say, they would make the reader scream.

To do:

Your book will have a lot of elements. Each one of us will like some of them, and discard others. Not everybody can like your work.

Hence, polish at least one thing amazingly to win the majority’s heart.

Summary

It is not easy to write a book.

You’ll have to toil a lot to make it come to a considerable level. Scott Lynch worked his ass off to bring this series in shape.

What you can learn from Lynch:

  1. Carve out unique reactions for each character.
  2. Don’t deter from your word.
  3. Use the magical number three.
  4. Don’t give a damn about the rules if you don’t want to.
  5. Blow the reader’s mind away with at least one part of your work.

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Student, writer & reader. Sharing my ideas and tips to help you become a better author, thinker, and human. Newsletter: https://teenwrites.substack.com/