The Sword Master’s Son-in-Law

– A Self-Reflection Named Postscript

A Self-Reflection Named Postscript

To everyone who has stayed with “The Sword Saint’s Adopted Son” until the very end, I offer my sincerest gratitude. It was a woefully lacking work, and I believe it was bound to be.

Thinking of it as a learning experience, I aimed for completion rather than a remake, and I’ve succeeded… halfway.

Why halfway when it’s finished? Because the story turned out a little shorter than I intended. The goal was between 100 and 120 chapters… and I fell short.

Truthfully, I thought the pacing was quite fast.

But there were many comments saying it wasn’t, so without even realizing it, I cut out all the extraneous details and sped up the plot even further. Then, when I came to my senses, I had already moved onto the final episode.

Of course, I could have forced in extra episodes at the end to increase the count, but it would have felt like nothing but padding, so I decided to simply conclude it early.

Next time, I’ll pay more attention to the pacing, I promise ㅠㅠ.

Now, getting to the heart of the matter, let’s reflect on this serialization.

First and foremost, my biggest mistake was writing the story based solely on the premise. I just took a premise from the Wuxia genre I’d been wanting to try and adapted it to fantasy, and started serializing it without a plot.

A protagonist who learns a unique, passed-down martial art from a reclusive master.

That protagonist’s master passes away, and with the help of a friend of his master, he becomes a retainer in the Namgung Clan.

That friend turns out to be the Supreme Head of the Namgung Clan.

Anyway, the story I envisioned was about the protagonist gradually going from being a retainer to becoming the adopted son-in-law.

But the content of “The Sword Saint’s Adopted Son” is completely different, isn’t it? Yes, when it changed to fantasy, the content was entirely rewritten.

So, I struggled every day to come up with the story.

Then a natural question follows.

Why did you write so hastily without a plot, relying solely on the premise?

A very valid question indeed.

The truth is, it was because I was thinking, “What if I tried to complete at least one work before school started?” With that thought in mind, I wrote and uploaded in a hurry, and because it seemed better than I expected, I just kept serializing it.

So, because I started serializing with hardly any preparation time, there were many deficiencies in character development and episodes.

My mistake was being too vague from the very beginning out of haste, or setting things up with only short phrases.

My second mistake was serializing without any backlogs. I feel like my writing crumbles a little when I’m pressed for time with serializing.

For that reason, I’m planning to make sure I secure a proper backlog for my next work. (Actually… doing a 7-chapter upload to move to Plus a little earlier was a major poison for me. From that point on, my backlog became endlessly insufficient.)

My third mistake is a little related to the first, and that was the character development. I feel like I made the character settings too simple.

For example, the character Asia Messiah had no other traits besides “tsundere,” and that made her feel like she lacked a core.

So, through this opportunity, I’ve learned how to create characters, what points to set up in advance.

In other words, I’ve gotten a feel for the ‘waifu’ element.

And the rest of the mistakes are minor ones that arose internally within the work.

I will definitely fix these problems in my next work.

And I’m planning to study writing techniques for a while before I return.

The reason I want to study is because the story flows with the protagonist’s perspective at the center.

So, I thought the protagonist’s subjectivity was heavily involved, and that’s how I wrote it, but it seemed like a protagonist who talks to himself a lot to the readers.

Now that I think about it, I can definitely see it that way too.

Right then, perhaps I should delve deeper into the descriptive, or maybe even scrutinize what exactly makes my work sound like a soliloquy compared to other popular stories. I’ll return having studied just that.

And of course, while I’m studying, I intend to examine other works and understand how to best write compelling characters, too.

Once again, I extend my gratitude to everyone who saw ‘The Sword Saint Family’s Adopted Son’ through to the very end. I shall return with the next work in a more evolved state.