Narie Rei

(from magic awakened own social forum)

What a wild look. Girl one is a lolita?

I-

Every scene should include references to how your characters feel. The most exciting fight can seem bland without the anger and primal glee of the protagonist finally getting revenge. A winning goal without a sense of triumph is just a sphere hitting a net. The bigger the event, the more and bigger the emotions.

At the same time, however, you should avoid having characters spend paragraph after paragraph describing every nuance of their exact feelings. The goal is to get the reader to feel with the character and long emotional analyses are not themselves emotionally compelling. Worse, if you do this with a negative emotion, you run the risk of readers putting your story down because they don’t like reading about whiny characters. 

You should also avoid showing an event and then methodically going through every character’s reaction. First of all, not every character is going to have an interesting reaction to every single thing that happens. Secondly, this separates the emotions from the event by only describing them afterwards. Last, you end up with paragraph after paragraph of emotional description with nothing happening, which is just as annoying when spread out over several characters as it is when only one character does it.

They don’t do anything to advance the plot or advance the character development of the characters who do advance the plot

They only do things any character could have done. Your rationale for their involvement in every plot point they’re in is “this character hasn’t done anything for a while” and not “this character is the only person who can do this job.”

They serve the same purpose in the story as another character.

Whether you are writing a futuristic dystopia or a cloud city of dragons, you need to figure out how people get basic supplies. These are often the most overlooked worldbuilding questions since it’s more fun to think about how cultures honor the dead or where the mountain ranges are, but answers are necessary to create a complete world.

-Where does the water come from and how is it distributed?

-Who makes the food?

-Who transports and distributes the food?

-If your world has modern utilities, are they widespread or only for the rich? For that matter, do utilities have to be modified to work in your world (for example, electric lines with anti-magic coating)?

-What happens to trash?

-What happens to sewage? 

-What building materials are available?

-What do people do when they get sick?

-What do people do in the case of a natural disaster?

-What do people do in the case of a fire?

-How are large objects moved?

-How are items that take skilled labor to make created and distributed?