Fiction Scribe

I mentioned clichés yesterday…

I’ve left my favorite questions.

3. Is your main character the heir to the throne but doesn’t know it?
7. Does your story revolve around an ancient prophecy about “The One” who will save the world and everybody and all the forces of good?
8. Does your novel contain a character whose sole purpose is to show up at random plot points and dispense information?
10. Is the evil supreme badguy secretly the father of your main character?
13. Does “a powerful but slow and kind-hearted warrior” describe any of your characters?
19. Would “a fearless warrioress more comfortable with a sword than a frying pan” aptly describe any of your female characters?
21. How about “a half-elf torn between his human and elven heritage”?
27. Does your novel contain a prologue that is impossible to understand until you’ve read the entire book, if even then?
28. Is this the first book in a planned trilogy?
29. How about a quintet or a decalogue?
30. Is your novel thicker than a New York City phone book?
34. Is your novel based on the adventures of your role-playing group?
35. Does your novel contain characters transported from the real world to a fantasy realm?
36. Do any of your main characters have apostrophes or dashes in their names?
37. Do any of your main characters have names longer than three syllables?
41. Do you have a race prefixed by “half-”?
44. Have you done up game statistics for all of your main characters in your favorite RPG?
47. Do you think you know how feudalism worked but really don’t?
49. Could one of your main characters tell the other characters something that would really help them in their quest but refuses to do so just so it won’t break the plot?
50. Do any of the magic users in your novel cast spells easily identifiable as “fireball” or “lightning bolt”?
53. Heaven help you, do you ever use the term “hit points” in your novel?
54. Do you not realize how much gold actually weighs?
55. Do you think horses can gallop all day long without rest?
56. Does anybody in your novel fight for two hours straight in full plate armor, then ride a horse for four hours, then delicately make love to a willing barmaid all in the same day?
61. Does your hero fall in love with an unattainable woman, whom he later attains?
63. Is your hero able to withstand multiple blows from the fantasy equivalent of a ten pound sledge but is still threatened by a small woman with a dagger?
64. Do you really think it frequently takes more than one arrow in the chest to kill a man?
65. Do you not realize it takes hours to make a good stew, making it a poor choice for an “on the road” meal?
67. Do you think that “mead” is just a fancy name for “beer”?
69. Is the best organized and most numerous group of people in your world the thieves’ guild?
72. Is “common” the official language of your world?
74. Is your book basically a rip-off of The Lord of the Rings?
75. Read that question again and answer truthfully.

Read all the questions here.