The Inquiries of a Novice Writer.

For the past year I have been working on a story. It's quite the piece of work, and I'm almost to the point where I can start writing that beautiful story I imagined. But I have a question. Or an inquiry, as the title suggests. There are dragons in my story. My question is, which would be better: an order of Dragonrider Knights, or an order of Knights who train use iguana-sized dragons as living flamethrowers? Dragon sentience is not an issue in my story, if that helps. I feel like Dragonriders are a tad cliche, but the second option just seems a bit bizarre. Maybe a better question to ask is, could the Dragonrider cliche work, and if so, what would be necessary to make it work?

edited 14th Feb '14 8:52:32 PM by Kallaeum

Any cliche can be effective if its done well. After all, we're at the point in human history where there's more or less no such thing as an original story/idea.

As far as the dragons, I would go with the dragon riders. If they breath fire, it could possibly be used as a weapon. But then again, I write mostly action/military/thrillers as opposed to fantasy, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

I don't think either idea is inherently 'better', but I think both ideas lend themselves to different types of stories. Having full blown dragon riders will mean having to deal with the logistics of your characters having access to gigantic creatures capable of flight and fiery breath (depending on the nature of your dragons of course). So obviously any threat they face will have to be tailored to meet those strengths, or else you risk ruining any sense of tension. If you're going to include dragons in your story, then the story should let them be dragons: If you find you're coming up with reasons for the dragons to be missing or incapacitated more often than being awesome and devouring their enemies in order to make the story work, then perhaps full blown dragons are too big for the sort of story you want to write.

The iguana style flame throwers is less cliche, I think, though that is by no means a measure of the quality of the idea itself. It would work better if you want to keep the scale of the story smaller, so travel is still a problem and more mundane things can still be credible threats.

In both cases I'd say that the key to making them work (cliche or no) is to make sure that the underlying conflict and characters are interesting.