TCWT January: So veeeerrrryyyy late.

First off, major apologies for this being so late.

I forgot to pre-write and schedule this post last week since I was going to be out of town the actual day.

This month’s prompt is a fun one in which we can praise writers for what they do best, and condemn all else… Mwahahahaha…

The prompt was “What do you think is commonly done well in literature? Done poorly?”

Done Well

To start off, I will list what i think is done fairly well in literature.

First person: There is a complete first person rage going around these days. You can pick up almost any YA book and, oh look, another first person. However, it is done well by most writers who choose to use it. The only books I couldn’t get into when that were first person are Kidnapped (Sorry Erin! It’s just not as gripping as Treasure Island), Robinson Crusoe, Perelandra, To Kill a Mockingbird (not to be confused with Catching Fire or Mockingjay), and Code Name Verity (I don’t know if this was because of how the first person was, or the over all story, but it was one I managed to finish, but I don’t think i’ll read it again).

Good First Person Books I’d recommend

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Divergent by Veronica Roth

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

and I’ll end with If I Stay by Gayle Forman

Female MCs/Heroines: Sometimes they are cheesy, sometimes dramatic damsels, but over all I find a lot of very good female heroes in literature.

Annabeth in Percy Jackson, Tris and Christina (I personally like Christina more then Tris, she seems more real) from Divergent, Attolia and Eddis in The Queen’s Thief Series  by Magen Whalen Turner, and Hazel Grace from The Fault in Our Stars.

All those heroines share at least one trait with myself, or people I know. This makes them seem very real to me, and so I like them and deem them well written.

What is Not Done Well OR Needs To Be Done More Often

Yeah, okay, i’m expanding that question a bit.

First Person Character Descriptions: Mirrors. Stop with the FMC looking in a mirror. I didn’t realize how often it was done until i read Matched. Figure out some other way to introduce the appearance of you MC if you are writing in first person.

More Boy MCs: I’m sorry, but for the past two years nearly every book I’ve read is in first person from the POV of an FMC. I ahve not found any good books since Percy Jackson, Artemis Fowl, and The Queen’s Thief series that revolves around a boy. Even the male authors are writing stories about an FMC! I recently read Looking for Alaska, which is a romance written from the boy’s POV, but I don’t count romance. I want another good adventure novel that has a boy riding off into battle, or a quest of some kind.

And no, this is not because I like day dreaming about a prince in shining armor, or think i need more fictional characters to fall in love with. It is simply because A) boys need books to! Not all of them read scifi or comic books. I want my little brother to grow up and have a smorgasbord of YA Boy novels to choose from. B) It’s almost as sexist as having no girl MCs to have over a thousand FMCs and very few boys. And C) I honestly like boy adventures and characters more.

Sword Fights: C.S. Lewis skipped over that in most of the Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien knocked out Bilbo in the Hobbit, I can’t remember the battles in LOTR very well because they were so long and I wanted to get to Frodo and Sam…  and I haven’t been able to find a good fantasy novel in a while that had a nice classic sword fight.

Third person: More and better done third person. It seems to be a dying art these days, and the few I’ve found are rarely catching, especially the fantasy. There are some good ones, yes, but I feel those are mostly in juvenile fiction. It is incredibly humiliating to have to go across the library to where all the middle school kids are and get strange looks just to find a good Third Person fantasy book

The Only Book Series That Does Everything (minus the First person thing, these are Third Person) I’ve Listed As Done Poorly/nonexistent is Ranger’s Apprentice by John Flanagan. A must read!

And that’s all I’ve got.

So let me know in the comments below what you like or don’t like in books.

And if you know of a good YA fantasy novel with a boy MC, and an epic adventure, and lots of sword fights, please let me know what it is called and where I can find such magnificence!

Oh and, check out the other posts for this prompt!

5^th – http://whileishouldbedoingprecal.weebly.com/

6^th – http://jasperlindell.blogspot.com/

7^th – https://erinkenobi2893.wordpress.com/ and http://nasrielsfanfics.wordpress.com/ 

8^th – http://miriamjoywrites.com/

9^th – https://ramblingsofaravis.wordpress.com/

10^th – http://semilegacy.blogspot.com/

11^th – http://kirabudge.weebly.com/

12^th – http://thelittleenginethatcouldnt.wordpress.com/

13^th – http://maralaurey.wordpress.com/

14^th – http://dynamicramblings.wordpress.com/

15^th – http://theedfiles.blogspot.com/

16^th – https://horsfeathersblog.wordpress.com/  

17^th – http://www.juliathewritergirl.com/

18^th – http://butterfliesoftheimagination.wordpress.com/

19^th – https://gallopingfree.wordpress.com/

20^th – http://www.alwaysopinionatedgirl.wordpress.com/

21^st – https://deborahrocheleau.wordpress.com/

22^nd – https://irisbloomsblog.wordpress.com/ (you are here… and I am late. Sorry) 

23^rd – https://clockworkdesires.wordpress.com/

24^th – https://introspectioncreative.wordpress.com/

25^th – http://wanderinginablur.blogspot.com/

26^th – https://anotefromthenerd.wordpress.com/

27^th – http://randommorbidinsanity.blogspot.com

28^th – http://unikkelyfe.wordpress.com/

29^th – http://teenscanwritetoo.wordpress.com/ (We’ll announce the topic for next month’s chain.)