Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon
Book 4 Author’s Note

I’ve been thinking about this particular author’s note for four books. I write one every book, usually just as a summary of what I think the book is about, a little bit of extra behind-the-scenes perspective for people who didn’t quite get enough content from the novel proper. This one, though, is going to be a little different.

To start, let’s get you some of that novel-perspective you crave, just so it’s out of the way. In this novel, I took Tulland from The Infinite Dungeon, which we had learned served a dual purpose. First, it was what it was always represented to be. It was a place that people went to die, a nigh-inescapable suicide run for people who had accomplished all they could in life, and who wanted to get a little bit more out of their deaths than a plot and casket.

It was also much more than that. In book three, we learned that The Infinite also served as a furnace for refining already great souls into something greater. It took the heroes of humanity from a thousand worlds, put them through a trial, and determined thereby where their souls would do the best good the next time around.

Tulland, a farmer and fighter, was sent to a world with plenty of problems with both monsters and famine. I don’t know that this is the most creative thing, but I’ve been building up logistics as a solution for all things for three books, and I liked the idea of him not only saving a world, but also feeding it and improving it. By the time he leaves Aghli and goes back into his universes great soul recycler, he’s accomplished all of that,

For readers of Deadworld Isekai: Yes, Aghli might be Gaia. You can decide that for yourself. I made it both fit and not fit well enough that you could choose your own extent of crossover, as fits your needs.

The cast of characters for this story was kept intentionally small. There are a lot of survivors, but really only three new characters. There’s Amrand, a trainer. I figured Tulland’s biggest weakness is still that he’s only had a class for a short time, and even intensive training over short times still leaves gaps in understanding. Amrand isn’t nearly as strong as Tulland, but by the pre-blight standards of Aghli, he would have been a great hero. He’s more than qualified to instruct Tulland on the theoretical side of things.

Yuri is to some extent a slight reimagining of Lily from Demon World Boba Shop, something close to what she would have been like in as a professional adult had she lived in a not-so-nice world. She is the energy-specialist equivalent to Amrand’s skills-and-movements specialties, someone who can see the forces beyond things like Tulland can, if in a more general way.

Aghli’s System is a character and you can usually sense a bit of personality behind the system-to-humans veil, but it was kept intentionally obscured for most of the book. I wanted there to be at least one mostly normal system working in mostly normal, non-tricky ways in this series, and it serves that purpose.

Otherwise, we have the three main characters we’ve had for most of the series, hopefully evolving in ways that made sense to you. Tulland grows even stronger and learns how to use his class in all the ways it was intended to be used. In the end, we get a bit of an explanation for why he’s always driven to try for greatness despite his overall nervous, fearful nature. He’s been great for a long time. Whoever he might be in this life, the world-saving stuff is just a habit for him.

Necia remains about the same strength through the book, and also remains Necia in the same way. She’s the anchor for the story, a supportive person who is dependable at all times no matter what. There’s never any question of if she’s going to be willing to do tough things, or of her running away from danger. Again, most of her actual character development happened in the first few books, after which she was basically perfected for what she needed to do, story-wise.

The System is mostly expanding off who he became in book three, rather than who he was before that. He’s Tulland’s friend, a relatively trustworthy helper, and a source of knowledge. The fact that he has a friend after being lonely for a very, very long time is amplifying how important he finds the few people he does have to talk to, Tulland especially.

The System is a little underpowered in this book, outside of handling Tulland’s rewards for him. I tried to play this by Disney’s Aladdin’s Genie rules, where he’s still very much a system, but somewhat weaker and removed from power now that he doesn’t have a world or even an official purpose. That said, advice is valuable. He’s seen a lot of things, watched a lot of adventurers develop, and can give Tulland pointers nobody else could.

At the same time, he’s not exactly a human. He views the passage of time differently and handles sadness and loneliness differently. If he didn’t, he’d have gone mad a long time ago. That he slowly changes to be more human isn’t surprising, but that almost nobody notices or cares about this is telling. It’s a slow process, one that isn’t complete even at the end of Tulland’s lifetime.

Outside of the main cast, there are many extras both seen and implied, filling out the world without really being an active part of the story. Theoretically, I could have introduced a thousand of them. As usual, I tried to get away with as small of a cast as I could - just the necessary people the story needed to happen, plus a few extra people to bounce storylines off of and give them the right spin.

All in all, this story functions as a very long epilogue, just making clear how and why Tulland and Necia will be all right, even after their time on Aghli is done.

If that’s the least involved “what was happening this book” explainer I’ve ever done, it’s because I’m hoping to do something else here; a more complete guide to how I think about writing overall, fifteen or so novels into the process.

No writing guide is definitive. I’m going to be wrong on a great many things, and there are going to be even more things I’m wrong about when we start thinking about how the advice relates to you. As you read this guide, I encourage you to disagree with every single thing that seems wrong to you. If you feel that impulse, it probably is wrong in relation to how you write.

Where you find yourself agreeing with me absolutely, be even more suspicious. You are you. Even the things that make sense here probably need customization to be tailor-fit to your needs.

The first rule of preparation is not to let preparation get in the way of actual writing.

The second rule of preparation is not to let preparation get in the way of your writing.

It’s actually rules 1-1000 inclusive, with the exception of rule 577 (Video games make it harder to write). I think this one rule is so important that I dream about telling people not to do so much prep work, that prep work is usually poison, and that more good books have been killed by it than probably any other reason.

To start explaining why, it’s important for me to say I don’t think all prep work is bad. Most of this writing guide is actually going to be about various kinds of prep work and how I approach them. Even writers like me who hate prep work and avoid it when they can need to do at least some. You need an idea of where you are going. You must have an idea of who you are writing a story about. You can’t get away with not knowing what the story is about, at least in an elevator-pitch sense.

That’s the minimum you need, but you can do a lot more. Confusingly, the actual maximum you can do before you start to run afoul of the don’t-do-too-much preparation rule is potentially infinite. Any amount is okay, so long as it’s actually helping you eventually write something.

You might ask how many potential writers actually run afoul of over-prep to the point it prevents them from every starting writing. The answer is depressing. It’s something like “damn near all of them.” I know of probably dozens of people with a novel idea in their pocket that they carry around with them that they all swear they will start writing once they do just a little more prep work. If they can get just one more character fully fleshed, they swear that then they will type some words on a page. If they can get one more plot arc completely projected, then they’ll start working.

They never do, they never will. They’ve been caught by the advice of a zillion writing books that tell them there’s a way to actually fully prepare for the act of writing, and there just isn’t.

Do you want to write a book? Great. Want to do prep? Fine. But if you’ve been procrastinating a week, when are you going to actually get done with your prep and start? A month? A year?

Let me tell you a secret: I’m aware that for most of you it’s already been longer than that. Stop prepping. Start writing.

Now that I’ve said that, here’s how to actually prep for writing stories. First, get an idea of what your book or series is about. Usually, this is a paragraph. Here are a few samples:

1. A man is reincarnated as the chosen champion of a planet in peril, only to arrive thousands of years too late. The planet has been glassed, the last living thing besides him died a millennia ago, and the only companions he has are a LitRPG system that wants nothing more than to sweep its mistake under a rug and a lonely, holographic adventurer’s companion who wants nothing to do with him. He needs to find food, water, and a way to survive in a completely dead world.
2. A young man is tricked into a suicide run through an endless, inescapable dungeon. Worse, he’s facing down all those dangers with the weakest class imaginable. As a farmer, he has to find a way to turn hostile plants into powerful allies, survive longer than forever, and escape The Infinite dungeon.
3. A man who worked himself to death is given a chance to choose a single word to guide his placement in a new home. He chooses nice, and gets it. The demon world is a place of friendship, satisfying work, and where family is easy to find. Now he just needs to find where he fits, and how something as simple as tea can help people live even better lives.

That’s your high-level description, and believe it or not, it’s enough to get started on, plot-wise. There’s a saying that everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face, and it applies to writing as much or more as it does fighting. The moment you write your first chapter, you are going to find little bumps in the road and twists in the wood grain that are going to force you to make changes both small and large. You can’t plan for everything, which means the more rigid your plan is the less it’s going to be able to conform to what the story wants and needs at each point.

When people ask me how much story prep they need, I generally tell them to know how the book begins and ends, and to work from one to the other. I also tell them not to be afraid to change the ending, or to alter the beginning. Of course, you can do more than that if you want. You can have ten defined plot points, or a million. But it’s the same thing as overplanning; if it’s keeping your story from being what it needs to be, you are doing it too much.

If I plan anything adequately, it’s characters. I’m not saying I do plan them adequately, because I’m pretty seat-of-the-pants with them, too. But I feel strongly that characters are more important than any other prep you can do, simply because in large part, it’s characters that write flexible stories. Rigid stories write their characters, which can work sometimes, but that means both your characters AND your story are reliant on your planning. If you don’t succeed at the nearly impossible task of perfectly planning every aspect of your novel, it’s all going to fail at once.

You can start from wherever you want, but at some point you are going to be using whatever flexibility you’ve left yourself to definite your characters regardless. I’ve seen a lot of approaches to this, but I think broadly they boil down to two specific approaches:

1. You define your characters by who they were - their background, their skills, and their stories at the time they are introduced. You lead with this, and then consider all their reactions in light of this.
2. You define your characters by how they’d react to various things, and then reveal who they are to yourself and your readers as it becomes relevant.

Both approaches work, but #2 is much quicker and more flexible. If you introduce a cookie salesman, it’s only important to know how he’s going to react to the act of selling a cookie unless he becomes a bigger, more important character, at which point you can decide those things in a way that more perfectly fits the story as it exists at that moment.

If you go with the “who is this person” for every character, you might just have a better idea of how they’ll react in every possible situation, but that’s going to take a lot of time, and determine who they are entirely when you’d probably be better served by letting them grow as the story grows. Again, both things work. Again, you can tell where my preferences lie.

When I sit down to try to take a run at who a character is in the approach #2 sense, I try to make it quick and dirty. First, I find what the core of that character is. For my favorite character I’ve ever written (Ella from Demon World Boba Shop), that core was someone who is mad at you for being hungry because that means she couldn’t feed you earlier. That core came with a side dish of having a house where you could smell the food from the street.

Arthur’s core was feeling like he wasn’t nice enough to belong with nice people. Tulland’s core was a determination to not let the fact that he had failed mean that he had actually failed, logic be damned. Matt’s core was being so generally good natured and used to disaster that he minded every terrible thing that happened about 25% less than made sense.

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Villains are the same way. I base almost all of mine on deadly sins, although I’ll leave which as an easy-to-solve mystery for you to think about.

After you have the core, you do what the core says. If the core is guy who very much likes being a landscaper, that’s going to fill you in on what he’d do every single time you see him as a landscaper. It’s only if you suspect he’s going to reoccur enough to have to react to things that aren’tlandscaping that you have to flesh him out more.

When that happens, I try to make a list of ways that person would react to a bunch of situations. The items on this list can absolutely vary, but I try to do a mental run through of how they’d react to all these things:

1. Seeing a person they love get married
2. Seeing a person they hate get married
3. Seeing a person get hit by a car or falling piano and instantly killed
4. Seeing a person get hit by a car or falling piano and not getting instantly killed, and the ensuing emergency situation
5. Someone approaching them with violent aggression on the street
6. Being given the wrong food in a restaurant
7. Having to wait an hour for their food in a restaurant
8. Getting fired from a job they liked
9. Getting fired from a job they hated
10. Bumping into someone they are attracted to but haven’t talked to much yet

And so on, and so forth. Some of these questions don’t make sense for certain kinds of characters, and that tells you something too.

Please note that what you are trying to do here is not to come up with an exhaustive list of how the character responds to absolutely every possible thing that could happen. What you are instead trying to do is get a feel for who they are generally that you can run with.

The really good news is that people are pretty complex, often irrational beings. They aren’t always consistent. Your character may very well react to a wedding in a variety of ways, and it’s okay to leave the room for that. But you can also think about how they wouldn’t react, the things that are out of character for them.

You can think about what kinds of reactions you want to emphasize (which taken as a whole define the direction the character develops in) in the moment, so long as you know what kind of person-range you are dealing with.

The best part about this, at least for me, is that sometimes people have reactions to things that are consistent with who they are, but aren’t what you expected. When you get this, you should thank the heavens and run with it as far as you can without completely disrupting the story. Sometimes this is going to mean that two characters get into an interesting fight (they have to, if agreeing is outside of both of their reaction ranges) or agree even though they hate each other (if disagreeing is impossible for them.) It’s a thing that drives the story organically, growing in interesting, real-feeling directions you didn’t necessarily expect.

I find setting to be a little less easy to go easy on than characters and chapter-by-chapter story. This might be because I’m just not that great at settings (I feel this is kinda true) but I think it comes down to something different - reality has a bunch of rules we are all aware of. If you stab someone with a knife, they die. If you jump, how high you go is a function of how strong your legs are, how good your form is, and how much you weigh. It’s not hard to write a story that occurs in normal reality that doesn’t violate people’s intuitions about the kinds of things they might see.

You still can mess up setting (putting a Walmart in a town of 40 people, or on the moon) but it’s a bit harder and tends to happen in different ways. If you find a setting you love in the real world, avoiding this kind of mistake is mostly a matter of research or pre-existing knowledge. You can find out what small towns are like. You don’t have to research it.

Meanwhile, writing in a world that doesn’t match baseline reality is a different game. If there’s a weak point in a book like Harry Potter, it’s not the characters (who are generally pretty damn good) or the story (which does its job just fine to the tune of making the story the most successful fantasy series of pretty-much-ever).

Where it fails, if it does, is the magic system. It’s a meme - Harry is very good at yeeting people’s wands, and nothing else. Nobody is that much better at magic than him (that we see) except Hermione, who we hear about being better a whole lot better than we see.

And then, on the other side of things, Voldemort and Dumbledore are using entirely separate systems that don’t need words to work, can do literally anything, and are in an entirely different sphere of power.

If you figured out how every broad aspect of your world works beforehand, it wouldn’t be wasted time. This isn’t just about keeping things consistent. That’s an important enough element that I try to keep spreadsheets on all my MCs, but it’s not the only thing. It’s also about knowing how powerful someone can be. It’s about knowing how much stronger the big bad guy is than a level one warrior. It’s about knowing if your character will ever be able to fly, or resurrect the dead.

When I think about this, it’s generally something like this list:

1. How powerful is the strongest person the main character has ever met?
2. How powerful is the strongest person the person from 1 knows of?
3. How hard is it to get from where the main character is to there?
4. If the character has some advantage (a magic box that makes stat potions or a broken skill) how much does it make them stronger initially?
5. How much does it make them stronger over time, speeding up their progress?
6. Does the same advantage make them overpowered?
7. If it shouldn’t, how are you controlling for it?
8. When your main character meets a very normal class or very normal person in competition or combat, what does that look like?
9. If they meet someone who is special or overpowered, what does that look like?

Of course, this is all very specific to magic-and-swords worlds, but it’s useful. Think about it in terms of Gandalf. He reacts to most danger by running away from it and giving advice. Every now and again, he manages to do something in actual combat, but despite the fact that he’s a wizard, the most magic we ever see from him is catching pine cones on fire and turning on a flashlight.

This would all be very stupid if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s perfect for his universe. This is a place where the strongest threat is mostly strong because it can subjugate monsters that are all perhaps a bit stronger than the average person is, and that humanity (and other good fantasy races) mainly keep alive by being very brave and relying on their warrior-type outliers to hold the line between the bad guys and the rest of the world. Gandalf being decent with a sword makes him one of those outlier types, his wisdom makes him able to help lead them, and his magic is just a bonus on top of that. In a story where weakness triumphs over strength and it takes a united good-guys-team of everybody who can fight in all of middle earth, it qualifies him to be a player. It does not make him a one-man (one-Maia?) solution.

Superman, on the other hand, isn’t supposed to be balanced. It’s a story about a very super man, and about how great it is to be him. There are a couple guys in the whole universe who are threats to him, and he basically always beats them up. It’s the right balance for his world, and his story.

It’s the mismatch that kills you. If your character is supposed to be weak, you need to plan for that; you need to know how someone who can grow gets capped in a way that keeps the story interesting. If he’s strong, you need to plan even more. You need to know how someone who can beat almost anybody up stays interesting when nothing is every very hard for them.

In Deadworld Isekai, the main character eventually gets powerful enough to do mercenary work on other worlds. He’s not that strong, but he’s weird, and he gets lucky enough that his weirdness tends to counter some very conventionally strong enemies.

In Demon World Boba Shop, the character ends the series not knowing how to fight. He can make tea, the tea can do some things of limited use, but in the end I had to plan for a story that was interesting despite the system not being particularly combat-oriented or exciting.

In How to Survive at the End of the World, the main character eventually becomes strong enough to be one of the main players in the universe, a top-tier fighter in a galaxy packed with them. I had to plan for why that would make sense in someone who at one point almost got killed by a lizard infestation, and to try and make it not feel cheap or unearned.

I’m not saying I succeeded at all these things; the reviews are generally good, but certainly sometimes mixed. But this is absolutely something you need to spend time on. A consistent world, one that feels like it could exist, is a hard thing to create whole-cloth. You can handle some of that on the fly, but not all of it.

As above, I tend to think of the greatest threat to writing as being the writing you never end up doing. Second to that, I think, is writing you do but you never do anything with. Some people are very satisfied writing things for themselves, just as an exercise or a way to pass the time. I suspect most people who write aren’t. Deep down, they want the work to be seen and appreciated by someone.

That’s why the second biggest threat in my book is something like “being too afraid to do what you need to do.” Some people never actually take the next step from writing something to showing it to anyone. When you don’t do that, you miss out on all the opportunities to improve you are likely to get outside of the sheer, absolute word count of dedicated practice. For most people, though, the process of showing the work to someone is painful.

I’m here to tell you a shortcut. Not a great shortcut, but there are no great solutions in this particular part of writing. The shortcut is this: basically nobody is going to be able to give you the feedback you need to take your book from bad to good, and especially nobody is going to be able to tell you how to take a book from good to great, or from great to wonderful.

Think about it: how many published authors do you have access to? Because those authors are the ones who know how to do the thing you want. They are the people that wrote things that got noticed, sold, and read. The other people are people who fundamentally haven’t proven they know how to do that, telling you (often with a surprising amount of confidence) what they know you have to do to accomplish what they can’t.

It’s possible they are right. But it’s unlikely.

I tell you this because recently another writer came to me terrified, having found their alpha reader didn’t like their book very much. They were going to them, in some ways, to have them say the book was good. They wanted confidence, and this person didn’t give it to them, and it made things very hard.

This is not what feedback is for.

Think about books you’ve read that you didn’t like. Did you not like them enough to keep them off shelves and out of your hands? Did your opinion actually make them bad, despite their success, or was it just not your thing? The people who give you feedback are subject to the same kinds of variations in taste, you know. One man’s mind-numbingly boring is another person’s cozy and relaxed. One person’s unrealistically violent is another person’s badass.

The only way to control for those kinds of variations is to do the easy thing, decide you are the authority on your own work, and to write it. Then feedback gets to be a really easy thing. You send your stuff out to other people, ask them to find problems or things they like, and only make changes they suggest when you agree with them. If they don’t love it, you understand that’s normal, and you keep going.

The hard part of that is that you are going to be putting a lot of work into something that might fail, and you will then have to do all the work of trying to find agents or submitting directly to publishers using your own confidence, or at least over the objections of your own fear.

Editing can be done alone or after feedback, but it follows the same kinds of rules. If you want to cut something, do. Don’t cut something you like because you are afraid of it, or you think someone else might not like it. The only good reasons to take something out are because you think you could do better, or because leaving it in causes enough of a problem in the story that you can’t keep it whether you like it or not.

I want to really emphasize that none of this means ignoring all feedback, or disregarding your audience entirely. I take a lot of advice from a lot of different sources, from novices to editors to other writers. But I only take it when it makes sense, when they point out a problem I haven’t seen and I go “oh, yeah, I probably should fix that.” Anything else is letting someone else write the book, and that never works. It can’t. If there’s success to be found, it’s going to come from you. But you have to be brave enough to take it.

I’ve talked a lot about how I try to include some interesting, important thing every 2000-3000 words. I think that’s about as often as someone’s “Is this still interesting to me?” mental monitor refreshes, so I try to make sure that every time they consciously or subconsciously ask that question, the answer is yes.

That’s not a hard and fast rule. It’s the way I can make things work, I think it’s a good idea, but your pacing may vary. The reason I bring it up again is that I’ve been asked what qualifies as an “interesting or important thing” a couple times now. I think that’s worth looking into.

Like I talked about above, I think you need at least a starting point and ending point to write a novel. Let’s say you, personally, have a strong mental image of five points in the novel, five moments in which the character or the story are experiencing something really important. They might be an emergency or a date. They could be a death in the family or the death of a hated enemy. It doesn’t matter, except that each point is something you are working towards.

Since not every moment can be breath-taking action, there’s a danger that sometimes you spend ten thousand words not particularly advancing the plot or working towards a goal. People eat lunch and get coffee in real life and you want to show those kinds of things, but if some of them aren’t pushing towards the goal, you are going to get in trouble.

If you want generalizable advice, I’d tell you to reread everything you’ve written every thousand words at your most hyperactive, and at every five thousand words at your most lethargic and apathetic. If there’s nothing that will either delight the reader or move the plot forward in those words, it’s going to be really hard to defend against an accusation that your book drags or moves too slow.

At the same time, there can’t be a fight on every page. Real people eat. They sleep. They find themselves in weeks where nothing much happens, or in periods that require planning but that aren’t actively executing those plans. For action to matter, there have to be moments of rest.

I suspect your balance of rest-to-action-or-other-important-moments is different from mine, but it’s important that you are paying attention to this. People who read your books are paying you with their time. They have to get paid back for it occasionally with stuff that hits hard enough to keep them satisfied, or they are going to end the deal.

If there’s a theme you’ve noticed in this piece, it’s probably that I want you to write. I’ve written a bunch, and I can tell you the quickest way to get better is to just put words on the page, to reread later and figure out what you want to keep, and then to write some more. Anything that stops you from doing this is poison.

That’s why I’m consistently saying not to give too much power to planning, or feedback, or even the editing process. It’s why I’m saying to pay attention to things every couple of thousands of words. If you are actually writing, those thousands of words move pretty quickly.

All the advice here? I think it’s pretty good. I really do think that there are helpful tools here that will help some people here. But someone who takes every bit of it (or the advice of better writers) and doesn’t write is going to be much, much worse than someone who gets over the various reasons they are using to keep themselves from writing, works through a few hundred thousand words, and figures out their own writing and the way they want to approach it.

There isn’t really any right or wrong way to do it. I mean it. There’s just good and bad executions, and those track with practice so close they might as well be the same line.

So get out there and write some stuff. Write it well. Hell, write so well you put me out of business. But do it.

Thanks as always. I only get to write because you help by reading, and it will never, ever go unappreciated.

RC

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