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Had to choose between writing a fantasy novel or a mystery novel for my NaNoWriMo project
Last November I couldn't decide between a fantasy world with dragons or a murder mystery set in a small town. I picked the mystery because I already had a plot outline with 3 suspects and a detective named Carla. It went way better than I expected, I finished 50k words in 28 days and now I'm editing. Has anyone else struggled picking a genre for a big project like that?
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max_brown1mo ago
Oh man, I did the EXACT same thing last year. I had this epic fantasy idea with a whole magic school and a map I drew out, but I went with the mystery because I felt like I could actually FINISH it without getting lost in worldbuilding. And you know what? Carla sounds like a GREAT name for a detective, way more real than some fantasy name like "Xylanthia" or whatever. The thing about mysteries is you can just follow the clues and the structure kind of writes itself, where with fantasy you gotta explain why dragons exist and what their poop looks like.
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jakewhite1mo ago
My buddy Tom spent 3 months building a fantasy world with 8 kingdoms and a magic system based on musical notes. Never wrote a single chapter.
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