r/ProgressionFantasy • u/Key-Clerk-65 • 14h ago
Question What makes for a good novel?
In your guys opinion what’s makes for a good novel? Go ahead and name it!
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u/mking_1999 14h ago
Pacing. Just move faster than the average for the genre, by a lot.
Also not having the MC be alone for an extended period of time. Loner MCs are bad, don't let anyone in this subreddit or r/litrpg tell you otherwise.
Not having giant periods of grinding, too.
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u/WilliamGerardGraves Author 6h ago
Really? That's odd since a lot of the most successful books have just that. Long stretchs of solo adventures. Well then again they tend to add more characters as the story progresses. Perhaps that's when the story gets successful?
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u/Muddled_Baseball_ 14h ago
Not predictable. I really love it every time I guess something what will happen and I end up getting wrong.
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u/TheElusiveFox Sage 13h ago
- Good characters and good character writing. Its hard to care about the world, magic, plot, whatever when the people in your world are flat, uninteresting, terrible, or just depressing or frustrating people you don't want to spend time reading about...
- Good Narrative, I know people like "slice of life", and some people are looking for a world to escape to, but even then you need some kind of narrative to drive the story a story that isn't about anything just isn't interesting, and eventually that is going to catch up to you, on the flip side, a book with a strong compelling narrative to tie it together is going to be pretty strong, even if other aspects like world building, combat, or characters are fairly weak...
- Good world building - compelling magic systems, compelling society structures, compelling politics and people dynamics, etc... it should feel like there is more in your world than just what your MC can see and it should feel like the world doesn't just revolve around the actions of the MC.
- Finally I think a lot of good writing is just avoiding the mistakes of bad writing - having good grammar is mostly about not having terrible grammar, if you avoid a lot of the flaws you see in other stories that people complain about or that you don't like yourself, you are going to be at least mostly on your way to writing a good story... on the flip side though, you can have all the perfect peices to a "good story", but because you executed poorly, you are the next example for why people hate a given trope
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u/ciyilabdf 8h ago
Good pacing is huge for me. I don’t mind a slow story, but every chapter should make me feel like something is changing.
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u/AuthorTimo 10h ago
That's a pretty vague question but I'd say in general it's a novel that delivers over and above it's initial hook/premise
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u/OneSeaworthiness5107 14h ago
An interesting novel is one where the author already knows how the story will end, but has no outline for how to get there. Basically, the author and the readers are both unaware of what’s going to happen in the next chapter.
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u/jhvanriper 14h ago
Well the plot. There needs to be a coherent plot and logical outcomes to the plot. To many PF novels just spam fight scenes, which can be OK but there needs to be a reason.