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Originally Posted by mr ploppy
I always thought that was a bit of a cop out, and it always makes me groan when I see it used. Oh look, they're allergic to sea water, they've never encountered bad breath before so we can defeat them with that, they have a big arrow on their chest pointing to a small hole in their armour what could it possibly mean?
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Well, some common sense needs to be used when creating the weakness. For example, the creators of "The Blob" were smart and used cold as the creature's weakness. Cold is the enemy of pretty much anything, so it makes the perfect weakness without being silly. Even I thought long and hard about proper weaknesses in order to satisfy the rule of balance. Another way to look at it is, make a weakness, but don't make it easy to get to. Take a look at Ender's Game. Orson Scott Card forced his characters to really go out of their way to get at that weakness. Sure, he had a super weapon that would wipe out the buggers in a single shot. The problem was, it was difficult to use and had a lot of shortcomings. So to use his strength to attack their weakness, Ender had to go way out of his way to do it. That's one of the ways that an author can create a good weakness that's not totally stupid or convoluted in order to maintain the balance of power in a story.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dadioflex
13. Until you have a measure of success such that the average man on the street knows who you are, you shouldn't be making lists telling writers what to do, or not do.
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HAHAHA. Maybe so, but I am a teacher at heart (I actually do teach author classes along with my publisher) so I enjoy sharing my experience and knowledge with others to help them learn in hopes that they won't make the same mistakes I did. Or the same mistakes I've seen others make. ^_^;;