3 Key Takeaways: The Hurricane Wars by Thea Guanzon

This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7358499920510324001

I’m a professional ghostwriter and these are my three key takeaways from The Hurricane Wars. Look how gorgeous this edition is. This is the Fairyloot edition.

And can we just take a moment to appreciate the forest of bookmarks that I was able to put in this book. Oh, I’ve got so much to get stuck into. My first key takeaway is this.

Use an opening line that defines your genre. This is really clever to me. So this is the first line, not of the prologue, okay, but the first line of chapter one.

So there is a short prologue before. But, wartime weddings were all the rage in a land where every single day threatened, quite emphatically, to be one’s last. But the skies could rain stones for seven nights without ever hitting an available officiant.

So this is a fantasy book set in a war-torn fantasy country. Straight away, we know that it’s wartime, but the main thing we’re actually talking about here is weddings. And as I was reading that line, it actually struck me that it reminded me of the first line of Pride and Prejudice, which talks about, of course, a truth universally acknowledged about a bachelor moving in next door and how that can affect the eligible maidens of the county.

That tells me, immediately, that though this is about a fantasy war, it is a romance. And it also tells me that I’m going to expect a wedding in this book, which I do receive. And let’s talk about this line, the skies could rain stones for seven nights.

Raining stones? I mean, we do have hailstones, okay? But raining stones sounds a little bit more unusual than the kind of weather we get. And actually, the magic system of this book is based, at least somewhat, around weather. So the fact that we’ve brought that in, in the very first line, is frankly masterful.

I’m actually in awe of this first line. That’s a great genre-defining, expectation-building first line. Congratulations to the author for that.

My second key takeaway is this. Artwork can be a really special touch. I think many of you have probably seen my other video, in which I talk about the little ship that flies across the pages as we go through the book, and gets closer and closer, and finally flies off to the side before the end of the book.

Now, there are also other ways in which authors can use illustrations within the actual manuscript. So I’m not talking about things like a nice cover, nice endpapers. Obviously, those are nice to have.

But even in a standard edition paperback, if you look at the top of every chapter, there is a little piece of artwork like this. And this is not the only book, not even the only book that I’ve read recently that does this. This is a book that I worked on for one of my clients.

And here, you can see the chapter headings have a floral pattern behind them. This is a fragile enchantment, and this also has floral illustrations at the top of each chapter heading. This book also has seam dividers, which are needle and thread.

Very cute. What I’m getting at here is that artwork within the actual framework of a book can really make it feel special to the reader, and make it feel like they are reading a special edition, even when it’s a normal paperback. My final key takeaway from The Hurricane Wars is editing related.

I know, you guys love it when I rip into books and destroy them, and the editing that was or perhaps was not done before the final product was released into the world. So here we go, just for you guys. Tone down the adverbs and adjectives.

We don’t need to have quite so many in every single sentence. It annoyed me a little bit in this book. The author got away with it because I adored the story, I loved the characters, but sentences like this one did take me out of it a little bit.

By the world father’s untrimmed beard, it was colder than the night emperor’s heart out here. That’s way too much description in one sentence. And here’s another one.

Over a long-sleeved chainmail tunic, he wore a belted cuirass of black and crimson leather with spiked pauldrons and scaled crimson arm guards connected to black gauntlets. The fur-trimmed hood of a winter cloak the color of midnight framed his pale face, the lower portion of which was shrouded by an obsidian half-mask embossed with a design of two rows of wickedly sharp wolfish teeth captured in an eternal snarl. Wow, that’s way too much description.

And I know that in fantasy we can do this a little bit more than we can in other genres, but please, I beg you, do not add a descriptive word to every single noun that you are describing. It’s not necessary. Actually, in most cases there is usually a way to say it that doesn’t require you to use a descriptive word in the first place if you just carefully choose the noun or the verb that you are using.

Someone doesn’t need to quickly run, they can sprint. Someone does not need to madly laugh, they can cackle. There are ways to get around using quite so much description and I really implore you to cut down as much as possible.

If you go through your manuscript after you’ve written it and you find that every other word is a descriptive word, an adverb or an adjective, just start taking them out. We talk a lot in writing advice about taking out words that end in -ly, but I think it’s then possible to fall into a trap of using words that don’t end in ly and going okay well this must be okay then. I’m not saying take out all of the description in your book and leave it to be just plain nouns and verbs.

You can use some. I’m just saying maybe you don’t have every single noun or verb have a descriptor attached to it. You don’t need that much.

Just breathe and allow the words to do the work for you instead of working so hard to build and add on to them. Those are my three key takeaways for The Hurricane Wars. I did love this book I have to say so if you enjoyed the book too let me know of any other books that are similar that you have read that you’ve enjoyed because I would love to go into more like this.