Six MORE Pitfalls Aspiring Fantasy Authors Should Avoid
I recently wrote an article on Six Pitfalls Aspiring Fantasy Authors Should Avoid. In that essay, I discussed problems I see in many fantasy manuscripts that can weigh down a story. Today I am going to continue this series with six more pitfalls to avoid if you or your student is working on constructing a rich, immersive fantasy story. Let’s dive right in!
1. Plot Armor/”Deus ex Machina”
In creative writing, a deus ex machina (“god from the machine”) is a plot device where an unsolvable, hopeless problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected, unlikely intervention. E.g., a sudden twist, a new ability, or a character appearing out of nowhere. It is often considered a lazy or contrived, artificial resolution. This device traces back to ancient Greek theater, where actors playing gods were lowered onto the stage by cranes to bring a sudden conclusion to unresolved plot threads.
Today, this is better known as “plot armor.” Characters with plot armor survive impossible situations because the plot needs them to. Convenient solutions appear out of nowhere, ensuring the characters can always get out of whatever difficulties they face. For example, suppose your hero is surrounded by 50 enemies, about to die, then suddenly is saved by some unexpected intervention. Ancient magic awakens! The eagles arrive! Convenient earthquake! You get the point. The plot needs the character to survive, so an intervention is contrived to save him at the last moment.
This is generally a writing problem that occurs when the author has written themselves into a corner and doesn’t know how to resolve the issue they created. This often comes from not setting up plot points and solutions earlier in the story. Of course, sometimes an author is simply unwilling to let characters fail or die. This robs the story of its richness and diminishes the stakes. Convincing stories need what Tolkien called eucatastrophe—joyful resolution earned through genuine peril. Genuine peril requires the characters to work through their challenges with all the consequences they entail, just as people do in real life. This is not to say you can’t have your characters escape danger, but however they escape needs to make sense in the world in order to be believable.
2. Telling Instead of Showing
People always say “show, don’t tell” when it comes to writing. This requires a little explanation because all writing is, after all, just telling. So, what do we mean here that “telling” instead of showing is a pitfall?
This occurs when an author explains emotions or stakes instead of demonstrating them. In real life, people rarely state their feelings and intentions explicitly. Rather, their emotions come out through their actions or are discerned through other things like tone of voice, body language, etc. Our stories are better to the degree we can replicate that in our writing. For example, consider the difference between the following sentences:
“Marcus was very angry about his father’s death and wanted revenge badly.”
“Marcus clutched the burnt blade, his father’s last gift, and stared toward the Dark Tower without blinking.”
In the first, we are simply told what Marcus is feeling. Notice, however, that this does not create any image in our imagination. We are told what he is feeling, but without any visual clues. The second sentence, on the other hand, demonstrates Marcus’s anger and thirst for revenge through visible cues. The words yield an image, and the image conveys the appropriate emotions without needing to be spelled out. This is far superior.
3. Problems with Pacing
This isn’t so much a fantasy problem as an issue I see with young writers in general. Pacing is the speed at which the story progresses. A story progresses faster or slower to the degree that things are addressed with detail. It’s the difference between accounting for every hour of every day of a journey, versus saying, “They spent several weary days crossing the wilderness.”
Fantasy stories present particular pacing challenges because they often feature grand adventures that take characters on journeys to distant lands, spanning weeks or months of story time. Handling pacing is of utmost importance in these types of stories. There is no right pacing. Sometimes you will need to go slow, and sometimes you will need to go fast. The important thing is to know the difference!
I often see pacing that is too slow when it needs to be fast (e.g., 200 pages of travel/training before the plot starts). And then when it speeds up, it goes too swiftly—for example, a world-ending threat is both introduced and then resolved in the last 25 pages of the book. In other words, the authors go into great detail in scenes that don’t matter while rushing scenes that do.
Writers often pace based on what they find interesting or easy to write, rather than what the story needs. Vivid sensory details (a feast, a landscape, a costume) flow naturally and feel “writerly,” while crucial emotional beats or plot turns require more effort to dramatize effectively. So authors unconsciously linger in scenes that feel good and rush through those that matter but are difficult to execute. A good rule of thumb is that pace is proportional to importance: the more a scene changes the story—advancing plot, developing character, exploring theme, or shifting relationships—the more page time it deserves. Conversely, if a scene accomplishes nothing beyond atmosphere or transition, summarize it in a single line or cut it entirely.
4. Stakes Inflation
Any good story has stakes. Stakes are what the characters stand to lose or gain. They are the consequences of success versus failure that make readers care about the outcome. Good stakes answer: “If the protagonist fails at this goal, what terrible thing happens?” The more meaningful the potential loss (or vital the potential gain), the higher the stakes.
Stakes inflation is a problem that happens when the author sets the stakes too high from the outset, leaving the story nowhere to go. It is common for new fantasy authors to default to “save the world” stakes. This is understandable; some of the greatest fantasy ever written, including The Lord of the Rings, had “save the world” stakes. The problem, however, is that if we introduce “save the world” stakes from the outset, we leave ourselves nowhere to escalate the story, which will keep the narrative momentum flat.
In The Lord of the Rings, the scope of the stakes is only revealed gradually as Frodo (and by extension, the reader) comes to grasp what the One Ring means. And the stakes are consistently raised throughout the series as other kingdoms and peoples come into the plot, and we have a deeper revelation of what defeat will mean for Middle Earth.
When every threat is world-ending, not only does the plot have no opportunity to expand, but it leaves nothing feeling special. Imagine a series in which the first book presents us with an ancient evil that threatens to destroy all reality. How can you make any threat feel scary again? Where will you go in the second book—an even MORE ancient evil threatens to destroy all reality again? It’s just not as special anymore.
Big stakes are fine, but make sure you scale up to them. Leave your story room to breathe. Not every threat needs to be a world-ending existential evil, and certainly not introduced in chapter one.
5. Underdeveloped Cultures
Let’s go back to worldbuilding, the process of constructing your fantasy setting. The opportunity to construct your own world from the ground up—with its own history, cultures, and languages—is one of the most alluring aspects of fantasy writing. Yet so often cultures in fantasy manuscripts are woefully underdeveloped. For example, a culture that is simply “fantasy medieval Europe” with different names, and nothing unique about it. It’s also common to see a lot of “single-trait cultures,” peoples whose entire ethos is defined by a single characteristic (e.g., “the warrior race,” “the wise elves,” “the dwarven smiths”). This makes your characters less memorable and can lead your worldbuilding to seem flat or one-dimensional.
This tends to happen when aspiring writers treat cultures as mere aesthetics (elves = forests + bows, dwarves = mountains + axes) rather than as complex societies with their own internal tensions. Authors create monolithic societies where everyone shares the same values, speaks alike, and wants the same things. Essentially, the race becomes a boring stereotype.
How you remedy this depends on how central your fantasy cultures are to the plot and what each one needs to accomplish within the narrative. In general, you want your fantasy cultures to feel lived-in, with their own internal tensions and distinct values. The best fantasy writers accomplish this by giving their cultures internal conflicts: political factions, generational divides, class tensions, and regional differences. Show disagreement within the group, not just between groups. If you can’t imagine two members of the same culture arguing about how to be a proper elf, dwarf, or whatever, then you haven’t really developed the culture yet.
6. Prophetic of Magical Language That Sounds Too Modern
This comes back to the issues surrounding tone we discussed last time. Prophecy and magic often play a central role in fantasy storytelling. Given this, you want to make sure the way you craft your prophecies and magic does not destroy the reader’s immersion by sounding too modern. This can happen when prophecies sound as if they were written last Tuesday rather than by ancient mystics. They reflect modern modes of thought and figures of speech. For example, consider the following:
“A chosen one will rise when darkness threatens the land. Born under twin moons, they will unite the fractured kingdoms and restore balance to the world.”
This sounds way too modern. For one thing, it is too abstract; “darkness,” “balance,” and “chosen one” are vague fantasy clichés. It sounds more like a book blurb from Amazon than an expression of archaic mysticism. In fact, it sounds incredibly generic. It could be from any fantasy world, because it doesn’t use specific place names, cultural references, or religious imagery unique to your specific fantasy culture.
Fiction Writing Resource
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