ENCYCLOPAEDIA MORONICA: Or, “I’m sorry, all of our subplots are currently busy. Please hold while I transfer you to the Department of Backstory.”

So my sister turned me on to this site, “Limyaael’s Fantasy Rants.” This person basically has read way too much horrible, horrible fantasy writing, and has turned trash into treasure by penning rants on everything from POV shifts to dwarves. (“Dwarves… dwarves are very upsetting….”)

They’re great! They’re fun to read–though doubtless more fun if you’ve read too much fantasy–and I’ve found all kinds of things that are helpful in my own writing. I have a few different fantasy-ish projects in the works, which does make the site more helpful; if you don’t write fantasy at all, the ratio of useless to useful will likely be far lower for you than it is for me. But the rant that gave me the most-needed kick in the ass was the one on servant characters–even though I haven’t written any servants. But “servant” can be read as “any minor character who is in some way class-coded as worse off than or serving the needs of the protagonist,” and the rant really helped me 1) see where I was writing minor characters who didn’t have any richness, any depth, any “offscreen” lives of their own, and 2) get ideas for fixing that. None of the characters I’ll be fixing are in a fantasy story. So the rants’ pertinence isn’t necessarily limited by genre. (One of Limyaael’s recurring themes is POV and how to avoid muddling it, which is an area where I’m still in the “pardon our dust, we are remodeling” stage.)

Also, some of the errors discussed are so horribly bad that realizing you’ve committed one is quite shaming; and as Limyaael points out in a rant about characters changing in the course of the story, shame is a great motivator for personal improvement!

So, if all that interests you, go check it out. I suggest reading the LiveJournal versions of the rants (her LJ is here), since although there’s a lot of randomness and chaff in the comments, I’ve also found neat stuff there, including some corrections to the rants.