(09-13-2025, 02:44 AM)drakensis Wrote: If you want to get into UF, I recommend trying the Symphony of the Sword. That's long but it builds up gradually as our main viewpoint is also a new arrival learning about the universe she has entered.Oh, okay, thanks! Symphony of the Sword is probably a really good jumping-in point given how prolific updates were a few years ago. I’ll give it a shot.
My writing advice for this is to remember that you need to be mean to your main character, SI or otherwise. Give them a big adventure and then remind them that "adventure" is someone far away going through hell. A first act that sets them up with promise and shows the reward off in the distance, a second act where the reward is yanked out of reach through personal flaws and/or outside enemies, then a third act where the protagonist wins through.
To use UF as an example, the first couple of parts are act 1 - the build up of the WDF as the grand forces of good. Then Exile hits and smashes all that. Finally, part 4 is the act 3 where the main four have to face their flaws and overcome them to claw victory back.
As for the ‘ding your main character’ - absolutely. Other SIs of the era (and often of this modern day era, don’t get me started on Cyberpunk Edgerunners fanfiction) don’t work because they don’t try to do that. And, hey, over in my screenwriting MFA they talk about how to use that challenge to give a character an arc, though maybe there’s a learning point there given how much I’ve struggled to make an arc have meaning and blend with the ostensible fun part of a feature’s pitch… ugh.
Hell, even in the long-running fanfics I’m working on, I struggle to make arcs concise and / or precise. Stuff just keeps happening, keeps building. I’ve been increasingly anxious that non fight scene chapters don’t make the reader squirm the way they ought to.
Well. Huh. Maybe taking a second shot at something shorter in the EPU style with structure in mind could be a learning experience. Worth thinking about.