With just what you've given, I would probably look at it, look through it, determined that it was pretty damn cliched and then figure out whether or not the writing was good enough to warrant a read. Unless you're a -really- good author, I'd probably set it back down.
My advice would be to kind of follow or expand what you've sort of alluded to thus far. Make it a damn good drama story, with complicated relationships, shit going down all the time, a world in which not everything ends happily, nor are all of the characters happy, nor, perhaps, are they ever allowed a break. Whether it's a tragedy or not, give it some really deep substance that has to do with the characters.
And only then think about how the elements work.
The difference is, there have been more works of literature than anyone will care to count about people having control over elements and then doing things with them, and more often than not their personalities are basically representations of their element and their character, if it's not shallow, is probably copy-pasted from a website that gives you the meaning to being born into the traditional Chinese elements. Now your story isn't about people having elemental powers. It's about drama and shit going down and making the reader have empathy for your characters. Only these characters also have elemental powers.
I'm also writing a book, with a sort-of-but-not-really-similar plot, that I've been writing off and on for pretty much forever (I wrote snippets I didn't know would help shape my thoughts into a book back in 7th grade English). The main character has had her entire world destroyed, before her very eyes, at a young age. She has been forced to kill for survival, and wants to murder for the only purpose she finds left in life. She has been driven 'insane', but only because that's how everyone else would look at it. The goal is to challenge the reader to judge if what she's doing is actually evil, if morality is just so black and white. The goal is also to stick you inside the mind of a crazy person and make you empathize and enjoy the experience, while telling the story I want to tell. At that point, it really shouldn't matter that she has powers over ice and death, nor that it's set in a fantasy world.
That's what I mean.
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Topic: Karnewarrior Writes a Book (Read 3685 times)