# Epic or other?



## Medina (Jul 31, 2011)

Hello, there. Me again looking for the opinions of furry writers and readers alike. When it comes to anthropomorphic fiction, especially those unrecognized works of art posted on the internet, do you prefer stories that are â€œepicâ€ in scope, meaning that the plot and setting is very detailed, complex, and presents tales of larger-than-life proportions, or do you like stand alone short stories where the descriptions are short and the plot is broken down to the bare essentials to get the point across? Looking at a number of stories by furry authors (including myself) out there today, I find an emerging trend leaning towards the more larger, episodic novels in which the main characters confront forces, both internal and external, that are grand in scale. What I want to know is what you like and why? and for those who have produced or read the larger sagas, can you give any advice on potential problems I may encounter in writing my own massive manuscript. With 50 twenty thousand word chapters outlined already, my collaboratively written manuscript seeks to break 1 million words. 

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Sincerely,
Medina


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## Zhael (Jul 31, 2011)

In my opinion, the furry part is irrelevant. Any story you wish to write should reflect the audience you intent to write toward.

For me, personally, I prefer long-form stories with plenty of detail and plot development that can be read in one setting.  Episodic novels and stories are interesting, but it takes a lot to interest me, since, the way I see it, I'd be investing my own time and effort into reading something that may be disappointing and not worth it.  I despise the skin-and-bone form of writing because it takes nothing to do; I'd be much more interested in being given the plot and climax and imagining the steps in between myself, as I feel I'd be much more satisfied with it.

Excuse me, I'm all over the place.


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## sunandshadow (Aug 4, 2011)

I don't think I agree with the definition of epic in the first post here.  To me epic means stories with a cast of hundreds of characters, usually about war or international politics, often with some kind of involvements of gods.  I don't like stories like that.  On the other hand I very much like a novel or series of novels with a well developed fantasy or science fiction setting, and I very much like major characters with deeply developed personalities, and I like plots of at least medium complexity.


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## M. LeRenard (Aug 5, 2011)

Medina said:
			
		

> especially those unrecognized works of art posted on the internet


I'm just going to say right here that this clause brings the issue of quality strongly into play.  I see a lot of 'epic' stories being published on FA or on other free art sites that are just plain miserable, made much more miserable due to their length.  And from my experience, less mature authors tend to write longer works (this is probably due to them not being able to express their thoughts coherently or effectively, so the text rambles like crazy and explodes in volume).  So on FA, I stay far away from 'epic' stories (unless I happen to know the author is good, of course).
That said.... my favorite books have always been those that are epic in scale.  My favorite games, too.  My favorite sci-fi books of all time are Arthur Clarke's Space Odysseys, with Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy coming in at a close second, and my favorite fantasy books are The Lord of the Rings.  And hell... my favorite literature book is Les Miserables, which is hugely epic in just about every way.  One of my favorite games is Breath of Fire III, in which you follow the main character from birth through adulthood and watch him cross the whole world, a raging ocean, and a near infinitely expansive lifeless wasteland to go meet God.  Doesn't get too much more epic than that.
So basically what I'm saying is, epic scale is hard to pull off, but tends to have the best result, in my opinion.

So what makes an epic story disastrously bad?  For me it comes down to pretty much one thing: boring and/or obnoxious characters.  Let's take one of my favorite fantasy series to rag on, The Wheel of Time, as an example.  The story is pretty stock, right?  It's just a farm-kid who gets involved in some great destiny fate of nations magic battle evil whatever.  But hey, this plot's worked in the past.  I liked the Chronicles of Prydain, and I liked Harry Potter.  So why didn't I like The Wheel of Time?  
Well... frankly, I fail to see why anyone would want to read 500,000 pages about Rand al'Thor and his ragtag band of stock friends.  We've got Rand, who has a noble heart and pretty much nothing else, Matrim, who is good at gambling (I honestly don't remember anything about him beyond that), Perrin, who's just... um... a blacksmith, I guess, and every single female character in the series (who are all the same character, just with different names).  Bottom line: I didn't like any of them.  In fact, the only character I kind of started to like was Moiraine, and 



Spoiler: Plot point



she disappears a quarter of the way into it and is never seen again.


  So that whole series ended up being a gigantic burden to read.  I only read it because I wanted to be able to say that I did, since it's currently the longest novel series in existence.
So basically what I'm saying is, if you want to write an epic... please, for the love of all good things, make it interesting in every respect that you can.


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