Azure Scepter

Page 187

I won't go into detail about Volume 5, as it mainly uses about ten chapters to quickly wrap things up. By this time, the enemy's strength has finally decreased to the expected normal level, but Trier has already become a Saint, so any actions the enemy takes are actually quite ridiculous...

Through the aforementioned failures, I've learned two lessons: First, overwhelming combat power is a shortcut to destroying the realism of the world—instead of locking down a specific level stage, it's better to design multiple level stages and then narrow the differences between them, or give different levels unique mechanics, rather than simply increasing numbers. This avoids the absurd nested progression of using a wooden stick to fight a crayfish, then using a mithril stick to fight a hellish crayfish, and finally using a +12 invincible holy stick to fight a void-time crayfish...

Secondly, it's crucial to carefully design the strength of enemies. The sense of oppression should be conveyed through specific events, rather than simply presenting stats, a dry increase in level, or a mere plot device. The black dragons, whelps, and infernals in the early stages of *Stormwind* serve as excellent examples of this. From a top-down perspective, their numerical values ​​are actually quite average, but the sense of oppression they create in the story is astonishing. It must be said, the Torpedo Master truly is a Torpedo Master.

The above are my reflections and takeaways from this book from the perspective of the enemy's combat strength.

1.2. The protagonist's combat abilities are poorly designed and chaotic.

The problems in this regard are firstly reflected in the rapid increase in combat power, which has already been analyzed in detail in the previous section, so it will not be repeated here. Secondly, the problems also lie in the unreasonable upgrade path. Finally, the problems also lie in the lack of character cards and combat power node outlines, which result in a lot of upgrades being superficial and the sense of realism in the story is greatly damaged.

To be honest, this book has a lot of elements in its combat system and many original settings, but I got stuck on the issue of leveling up – I insisted on maintaining the Paladin/Mage opposition instead of creating a new class. This rigid thinking resulted in the Paladin's abilities barely being shown in the actual story. In the first volume, the Paladin's abilities only served to resist death detection and gain respect; all the other exciting aspects were provided by the Mage class. Looking back now, the Paladin class even had a somewhat irritating effect – although the protagonist is bound by a vow of vengeance, this also led to a lot of potential oath-breaking. This zero interaction between the Mage and Paladin classes only improved in the third volume with the ridiculously self-created Nine-Ringed Holy Slash, but frankly, it was too late by then. If I were to rethink it now, I would definitely redesign a hybrid Paladin/Mage class, so that the skills gained from leveling up could be fully utilized, instead of the current system where a lot of things are stitched together on one hand, but completely useless on the other.

Besides, since there were no character cards, I couldn't remember any of the later gains. Every time I needed to level up, I had to spend a lot of time searching for past chapters and then writing them again. This made the gains from leveling up seem like a joke, and it also made me very depressed while writing—I realized that writing about leveling up was like Sisyphus pushing a boulder, endlessly and futilely. Tormented by this feeling, I had another flash of inspiration (which, as it turns out, is extremely harmful when it comes to the sudden inspiration of a fool like me). In the middle of the third volume, I decided to give the protagonist a real boost, which led to the absurd move of directly ascending from level 15 to Legendary...

To be honest, I felt great when I wrote it, but as a price, the already crumbling power structure was completely destroyed by my writing, and the story went from "somewhat realistic" to "outrageous".

Through the above fatal problems, I have drawn the following important lessons: First, you must have a combat node outline. The combat node outline must be organically combined with the story outline, location outline, interpersonal outline, etc. You must never let these be separated again. You must plan the whole situation and be prepared before you start writing.

Secondly, you need character cards to record all your gains in a timely manner. Only by recording your gains and improvements can these gains be meaningful.

1.3. The utterly chaotic power distribution of supporting characters

When combat power explodes, the ordinary people who form the foundation of the world's narrative completely lose their meaning. In a world filled with meteorites, frozen time, and hellfire, I feel that an army composed of mortals is utterly meaningless except for sending themselves to their deaths. However, without them, the entire story's tone becomes bizarrely surreal, creating a paradox. In short, the expansion of combat power is inversely proportional to the realism of the world's narrative. The more realistic and grand the world is portrayed initially, the more ridiculous and empty it appears once combat power inflates.

When the combat power collapsed, many of the originally planned supporting characters lost their meaning. The various supporting characters who could have driven the main plot became insignificant in the face of the Holy Slash that could tear through time. For example, the brave militiamen, mercenaries, merchants, desperate citizens, and even nobles all lost their inherent significance. Depicting them would be pointless because their combat power was so weak that they could not influence the development of the story at all. Their fate was completely unrelated to themselves. On the contrary, their fate was only related to the thoughts of a few demigods who had superhuman combat power but whose behavior and wisdom were not necessarily stronger. This is completely contrary to my own creative philosophy, aesthetic viewpoint, and even values. I cannot accept such a world. But unfortunately, the story eventually moved in the direction I originally pursued due to various factors.

Besides, as their combat power increased, Futia and Noy's combat power also secretly increased... At the beginning of the first volume, Futia and Noy couldn't possibly face hundreds of zombies head-on, but by the end of the first volume, hundreds of zombies were just a piece of cake, and by the fourth volume, it had increased to the point that Futia could just draw her bow and all the zombies would be reduced to ashes in a rain of light—every time I think about this, I want to laugh, but I can't laugh at all, after all, this pathetic joke is a product I seriously created.

However, the rate at which the combat power of such important supporting characters expands cannot keep up with the rate at which the combat power of the enemies and the protagonists expand. As a result, some team members who were quite important in the early stages become mere accessories later on. And because they become accessories, there is no need for any romantic subplots. I will explain this point in more detail later.

Writing experience summary: You can assign roles to supporting characters based on their professional skills, such as tracking, unlocking, comforting others, gathering intelligence, etc. This can effectively prevent them from being kicked out of the main storyline due to their rapidly increasing combat power. Alternatively, the fundamental solution is to prevent their combat power from exploding in the first place...

2. Role Issues

Even disregarding the flattening of all characters due to the explosive increase in combat power, the characters themselves in this book have significant problems. Generally speaking, these problems can be categorized into four areas: character motivation, character development, character homogenization, and romantic subplots.

2.1 Confusion regarding character motivation and goals

To be honest, the confusion surrounding character motivations is a major problem that has been bothering me. Motivation is closely related to a character's personality. In *The Amber Sword*, Brando's rescue of Elune and Princess Griffin didn't require any additional reason. However, this book is different. I set the protagonist as rational and self-interested, which makes the initial self-rescue reasonable, but the subsequent rescue of the town feels very out of character. I could, of course, try to patch it up by saying it's the influence of the positive energy of the paladins, but frankly, this is a mistake I made. Although it may be hard to believe, my own personality is indeed lawful good, which means that if I don't carefully consider things, I unconsciously put my own views into the story, which completely deviates from Trier's character setting. This leads to serious out-of-character moments. After discovering the out-of-character moments, I have to patch them up by adding self-interest to these morally motivated actions. But in the end, this is a serious lack of writing skill, resulting in confusion about motivations.

Aside from the main characters, many of the phased goals and strategies of the various parties involved in the game are irrational at the volume level, and many actions are even quite nonsensical, bordering on suicidal. For example, in the first volume, the smooth talker throws away his own life, and in the third volume, the succubus works hard but fails to grasp the main contradiction... Alas, although this is essentially the aftermath of an explosion in combat power, it also reflects the weakness of my contradiction design and my own conflicted psychology when designing enemies. On the one hand, I hope the enemies are exceptionally intelligent, devising strategies that readers will find brilliant. But on the other hand, when I actually come up with such strategies, I painfully realize that given the huge difference in combat power, Trier cannot counter the enemy's strategies through strategy alone; he can only rely on brute force after upgrading. So, all things considered, it's better to appropriately reduce the enemies' intelligence and choose some less thoughtful strategies... To be honest, this reduction in intelligence is completely contrary to my creative philosophy.

At the event level, the breakdown of goals needed to achieve the motivation is quite unreasonable. Many goals and plans have no causal connection whatsoever. Even though I can't convince myself, I can only grit my teeth and continue writing. Essentially, this is still a disastrous consequence of an explosion of fighting power. This is my first self-reflection, and it's still due to my insufficient understanding of events. An event is nothing more than time, place, people, cause, process, and result. Events and places can be skipped; as the saying goes, events are long when there's something to do and short when there's nothing to do. However, in the early stages of writing, I didn't understand the essence of appropriate detail and brevity. The design of events should revolve around clues and characters, rather than following a normal timeline (in other words, write the timeline under conflict, not create conflict on the timeline). Following a normal timeline while demanding intense conflict leads to bizarre short-term goals and erratic behavior, causing many people to become ridiculously distorted.

Writing experience: Choose primal desires as character motivations whenever possible, and avoid overly profound or obscure ones. For example, the simplest motivation is survival, and revenge is also a good motivation. The motivation should be consistent with the character's personality.

2.2. Character Development

There are many problems with the characterization of Trier. First, on a design level, Trier is too serious and too thin. Furthermore, because of the large gap between Trier and the author's personality, I found myself quite disoriented when writing without careful consideration. In addition, Trier's extensive use of internal monologues replaces plot development, causing the conflict to occur only within the protagonist's mind rather than externally. This is a disaster for a commercial novel written in the third person.

In addition, many villains do not need a character arc; they can simply be stereotypical villains. However, for villains with an arc, it is necessary to lay the groundwork in advance (namely, Oris). The villains' motivations are also quite important; they should also choose clever and creative strategies in their conversations, actions, and plans, just like smart people.

Finally, the biggest problem in this part is that I wrote a lot of meaningless character development in this book. Recently, many people in the Whirlpool Academy forum were discussing whether the Chekhovian theory applies to online novels. Here, I want to offer my opinion—it depends on the proportion. For example, if more than 10 parts of a story have no necessary connection to the ending, then the pacing is actually broken. Unfortunately, this book falls into this category... First, we need to clarify who should be given more attention. Then, we need to answer why there is meaningless character development. Finally, we need to clearly explain what constitutes meaningful character development.

The biggest pacing problem I made while writing this book was the mistaken belief that all characters, from every perspective, needed extensive character development, a point that became particularly evident in Volume Two. Frankly, the Apostolic Guard in Volume Two isn't important, but because I needed them to highlight the protagonists, I wrongly gave them a lot of character development. I designed their backgrounds, inner conflicts, desires, and goals, but the problem is that readers don't care about these at all (and frankly, they shouldn't care; even I yawned when I reread it). In reality, they only needed to act as cameras; their thoughts could be explained in a couple of paragraphs at most. Giving each of them a whole chapter is extremely abstract, a complete disaster.

Besides these, there are many characters whose existence is completely unnecessary due to their explosive combat power, such as mercenaries and mechanical liches. However, these were characters requested by readers. At the time, due to a lack of writing experience, I did not realize the consequences of adding these characters. But in general, these were all extremely disastrous mistakes.

2.3. Emotional scenes amidst disaster

Based on my writing experience over the past two years, the most important lesson I've learned about writing romantic scenes is that the driving force behind a romantic scene should not be emotion itself. Any romantic scene motivated by emotion will receive negative reviews.

The right emotional driving force should be the character's discovery of their own truth, but this truth should not deviate from people's basic moral views.

To put it simply, the romantic subplot in Noe's story is essentially about uncovering the truth, but the motive revealed in the end is purely emotional. Coupled with the shocking nature of necrophilia, it unsurprisingly garnered a huge amount of negative reviews, with many considering it highly toxic. Alas, I ultimately paid the price for my own fetish.

In reflecting on the failure of the romance storyline with Noy, I made a mistake in attributing the cause. I thought the reason people disliked the romance was because Noy was in the enemy's position. So, I planned to write a standard, almost literal, romantic relationship. Guided by this flawed theory, the second victim was Fythia; I wrote a tsundere elf who relentlessly pursued him. But as the saying goes, failing to consider the context leads to mistakes. This felt too abrupt, and people couldn't accept a romance storyline for the sake of romance, so that also failed.

Disheartened, I decided to push forward with the main plot. Coincidentally, Edith's main plot was actually part of the romance. In this situation, the romance didn't receive any criticism (of course, it's also possible that readers were finally poisoned by these horrific romances...). So I realized that the driving force behind a proper romance should be the character's discovery of their own truth, and this truth should not deviate from people's basic moral views.

—Due to time and space constraints, I will only provide an overview of the main issues and takeaways below.

2.4. One-dimensional character traits

The confusion of motives, the weakness of the strategy, and the author's lack of careful consideration ultimately led to the overlap of the personalities of many enemies, which is a very undesirable mistake.

3. Story structure issues

3.1. A serious imbalance in the overall structure of the story

First, the second volume, which serves as the "inheritance" section, is clearly not long enough. Second, these four volumes, as the "introduction" of the larger "introduction, development, transition, and conclusion" section, have set the bar too high, making it impossible to write anything more. The final result is a clear top-heavy structure.

3.2. Weakness of the main perspective in the single-volume story

The main reason for the shift in the protagonist's perspective is the explosive combat power; in addition, the protagonist's design is too simplistic and I did not understand the perspective correctly at the time.

3.3. Dragging out of individual plot points

There are too many useless characters. I want to increase the interaction between readers and the story, but this has led to a large number of unnecessary supporting characters.

There are too many useless scenes. Scenes don't simply develop according to the natural timeline; they develop according to the conflicts between the characters' storylines. Scenes that are irrelevant to the storylines should be discarded.

3.4. Bloating in a Single Scene

I failed to properly distinguish the purpose and significance of each scene, which led to unnecessary twists in many simple informational scenes, causing the plot to take a strange turn.

4. Writing Habits

4.1. No outline was initially provided; a detailed outline was written on the spot.

The outline of the entire book actually only includes the first 10 chapters; the rest was written and conceived on the spot, which is really unacceptable.

At a minimum, there should be an outline of character motivations, a climax of the story, a battle power milestone, a region outline, and a relationship outline.

4.2. Waiting for the feel and inspiration to come.

These things can't be waited for; they can only be actively activated through writing. If you can't write them down, then you should choose to learn.

4.3. When typing, the typing speed is slow because it is done on a word-by-word basis rather than in sentences.

This method forces you to think according to sentence structure, thereby improving your creative speed. It also forces you to accumulate Chinese sentence structures, which are essentially the logic of information unfolding.

4.4. When typing, there is a lack of overall thinking, resulting in disorganized chapters.

When typing, one should know the purpose of what they are writing and its position in the whole, so that they can grasp it at a higher level.

4.5. Frequent breaks in updates

There's really no way to solve this; maybe we'll find a solution in the future.

5. Issues with writing attitude

5.1. The overall perfunctory approach to the story

Without an outline, this is the best way to cope; thinking that everything will get better on its own is just wishful thinking on the part of a madman.

5.2 Perfectionism in the Details of the Story

When writing about scenery, I want to write something poetic; when writing about battles, I want to pursue dynamism; when writing dialogues, I want to write unexpected and insightful words. But once these are written, I feel that the chapters are bloated and meaningless, and I want to delete them. So I write and delete, delete and write, constantly depleting myself.

Dear readers, this is my self-criticism. I hope I can write another book. If I do, I hope I can flexibly correct these lessons.

See you all again someday.

—You guys are sincerely lying down and messing around.

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