When you're making an Epic, how do you make it so.....well Epic?

2128408 Well, I suggest asking one of the very well known authors... for advice...

2128408
You can't make a film adaptation of it with fewer than three films.

2128408
You have to think and write on a grand scale, not just focusing in on a little area for the entire story. If you're interested in an example, look up Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. That's a modern epic of amazing proportions

2128408
Spend 3 years planning it.
like me...
kill me pls

But seriously, avoid filler. If something happens in the story, make it have good reasoning behind it. Only write what moves the plot forward in some way, and have your characters posses deep backstories and create a world with incredible lore, diverse areas, an interesting setting, a great villain if needed, and an astounding conflict. The plot is most important, and all things connected to it.

And whatever you do, don't pull a Somber.
2128424
I'm assuming he means epic as in something of legendary quality and maybe length on top of that.

2128420>>2128408
It's very much a style of writing, and you have to go into it knowing what you need to do. Epics tend to involve lots of worldbuilding, deep character development, and carefully constructed, complex plots that require a lot of work on the readers part. For that or other reasons, epics are not very well received or represented on fimfic, and most that are epic length tend more often to simply be longform fiction works as opposed to real epics.

2128521
I'd have to agree with you. The largest 'epic' I've seen here has about the same word count as a 700-800 page novel and are fickle beasts at the least.

2128408

An epic can be defined as "a story that emphasizes human drama on a grand scale." They tend to concern the lives of many characters, the fate of entire nations, and sometimes spans years or even generations. They can be very difficult to write due to the immense amount of planning stories of such scope generally require.

2128408

Step 1: Read The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Step 2: Borrow liberally.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Profit!

Well, I found myself with an epic with Monster in the Twilight nearly by accident, but I'll pass along what I learned:

Go big or go home: Epics are epic, they are not small ball. Turn up your descriptions, things do not simply explode, they detonate in a hail of shrapnel (or in my case, an entire hive made out of Nitrocellulose). Don't be afraid to wound a main character severely, or even kill one (Chrysalis) while the characters fight against the odds. Now the flip side of this is don't do these things just for the sake of doing them, there needs to be a purpose behind your destruction, a method to your madness, and be CLEAR in your writing. Heck, I still have a couple people who think I killed off Twilight's parents in the first chapter because Twilight thought she killed them.

Conflict: You can do an epic even with small things if you do them right. Look at Couchtavia for a good example. She's just moving a couch across town, but SS&E can crank up the tension in the situation like nobody else by being DESCRIPTIVE.

Characterization: Make your characters live and breathe. When they bleed, they hurt, and make the reader hurt too. They have emotions, and transitions through these emotions, so don't go from elated to crying in one shot (like I do too much). They have plans, they have schemes, they want things, they want to avoid other things, and the reader should know this. The more the reader emotionally invests in the character, the more firm your hand on their wallet as you guide them through the story.

Plot: Have one. Have a good long string that goes through the whole story, with thick cables and wandering loops, but still goes from the beginning to the end. If it doesn't advance the plot, kill it. Stab that chapter right through the neck and drop it in the river. You can write more. That applies to paragraphs and sentences too. Read them out loud if you need to.

2128567
Well, that's epic sized ... but that doesn't make it an epic. Mines the only one I've actually ever found.

1. No filler. Everything needs to happen for a reason, even if it is a tiny reason, or it turns out to be a reason for something later on in the story. Otherwise the story just stops dead.

2. Plan your story out before you write it. Plan out where the characters go, what happens to them, what encounters they have, what other characters they meet, all that. Otherwise you'll end up with a meandering story that goes nowhere.

3. Make it big and long. If you're going for an epic, bear in mind that the original meaning behind the word was a story that was big, grand and long. No short stories, no casts of less than 10 characters, no tiny problems. If an epic is what you want to write, you have to make the story big.

4. Consult the Hero's Journey. This is a story structure that has been used in stories for millennia. And it is a pretty good standard story structure for an adventure story, if that is the kind of epic you mean. However, do not use it as a crutch, instead use it as inspiration for your own structure.

5. Lots of characters. An epic story needs an epic cast, so fill it up! Having alot of characters that are encountered throughout the story gives a sense of scope and realness to the story's world. And be sure to develop them all at least a bit, and try to find ways to connect them together. For example, in a story I'm writing, I have my protagonists split into 2 groups. One group meets a royal character in one land who is depressed because his son has been kidnapped by the villains. Meanwhile, the other group of protagonists are kidnapped by the same villains, and end up meeting the son!

6. World building. Like before, this is a nice simple way to add scope and size to your story.

7. Develop. This is where alot of epic writers falter: Just because you have lots of characters to follow, is no excuse to not develop them as characters. They need some sort of story arc or personal journey that the reader can follow along with the main storyline. Just look at Lord of the Rings, nearly every major character in that series has its own story arc that gets resolved by the end.

That should help get you going!

2128605
As far as that goes, even though each piece of the story may not be quite as big as yours, Applejinx has a mature story that has 4 parts of over 150,000 words each. To tell you the truth, it really takes you for a ride with how well it's done.

2128408 Well I know how I try to do it, which is to make sure that there's interesting and engaging stuff going on. Lots of plot twists, action scenes, suspenseful scenes, and engaging dialogue.

Whether I succeed at this is another matter entirely

2128408
All epics have a very major human theme to them, and most of the things happening are wrapped in symbolic imagery used to support that theme. Think of a concept or an idea that really interests you, something very human. Like the fear of being forgotten about, the need to be in control of your life, the tendency for us to dive head first into fist of fantastical escapism, or something like that. You need a solid idea to explore that will add extra meaning to your work.

2128408
A good video for 4. point that 2128613 made:

Hmm, I'm kind of writing an epic... so I'll take a stab at it. I'm taking it one step at a time. I have a general end point in mind, and I follow the characters as they lead me through the story. There are different ways to approach epic stories, though a fundamental, which has already been mentioned, is making sure there is a purpose to the events that happened, and the fallout of characters' actions make sense. Figure out your themes and follow them.

Nobody wrote an those great epics in their first attempt at writing. You need to find your style, learn it, explore it, and then use it. You also have to be willing to write it and more so, you have to want to write it. An epic story has to be created with passion or it is going to fall flat. Don't just brood over it thinking about how awesome it could be. Start writing it out and find out just how awesome (or less than awesome, as is sometimes the case) it is. Have the characters interact with each other. Get a hang of them, and the world that they are in.

I'm sure others have said similar stuff in far more eloquent prose.