/lit/ - Literature

Heh what if i told you all that the book i'm writing is going to be objectively better than yours?

>>19286828
How to write a good query letter for the publisher?

>>19286850
To the publisher? Fuck I'm tired and stupid

Is there a correlation between being a good writer and being a compulsive liar? Or did I just fall for one too many posts where people here brag about using subreddits like AITA for creative writing?

Any reason why this is called the writing general if no one writes?

Days since anything halfway decent was posted:
3
>>19271128

>>19286850
Keep it and the pitch very short. You want to wow them in a few sentences.

>keep passing into extreme depression over the that the book I wrote is really shit and no-one will like it
>halfway through editing it
>keep running into small details or things that happen that I forgot about
>they surprise me in a good way and I come away from a writing session thinking "actually this might be pretty good"

maybe im gonna make it after all :)

>>19286863
Aww shucks, you used me as an example again.

>>19286882

You don't see much dialogue in here.

Looking for some feedback on some sci-fi short stories

This one is about a couple living in post-capitalist Shenandoah valley
https://pastebin.com/1fDaC8xk

This one is about a reporter meeting a mutant fish woman and the world's richest man in underwater Istanbul
https://pastebin.com/4gS0qMbw

>>19286793
I see his point that short stories no longer fill a niche, but then he shoots himself in the foot at the end saying "all writing is bullshit" which, to me, invalidates every other point he made.
I write short stories anonymously, so to him I would sound like an idiot. But I'm proud of what I make and have no intentions of doing it for a profit, so who cares?

>>19286927
The second one has an interesting-sounding premise, I'll give you that.

>>19286927
Will listen in a few mins, i have to rip up asphalt and I often put something on

>>19287027
How do you listen to a paste in post?

>>19286927
>https://pastebin.com/1fDaC8xk
Poorly written. This can easily be improved, but what you should focus on is telling a story that's not just a bunch of inner monologue to explain the character's universe. Then it seemed like the story was about to begin with the narrator going outside his comfort zone and just going back to inner monologue about the time he did and it was bad. There I stopped reading.
>https://pastebin.com/4gS0qMbw
Much better, but the first paragraph should definitely be deleted. Again there are some mistakes that can be fixed. And again the narrator's monologue drags on, but overall it's more interesting; I finished it.
Captcha: GAAYA

>>19286927
I liked these. I think they could have do well to have a more gripping premise though, for example: betrayal and revenge; an unrequited love. Things just sort of "happen" in these stories from what I can tell (a problem i have with my own stories). Very original world building though, and good writing

>>19287056
>>19287195
Oh yeah, on my phone I go "Ok google," "Read it," and it reads the webpage for me. Each one was about 12 - 15 minutes

>>19287205
like this
https://youtu.be/-5sCFkUOLFA

These generals could be improved by having a unique thread question for each thread

How do I write about cultures or time periods I know nothing about? I'm afraid of coming off as an outsider or glossing over negative aspects of living in that place

>>19287212
the editing in this is sublime

>>19287229
obsessive masochist-level amounts of reading. at least a dozen grad-level 500 page texts to get the groundwork, google and resource banks for the details. plus reading any period literature including poetry collections that you can find, and several hours on google maps looking at pictures and streetview.
t. writes that kind of thing

Can someone critique my poem?


Last June we met
on two by two seats,
coated with sheets,
of polyester and sunlight,
diffracting through an opening
in the gleaming,
blue glass,
onto your white knuckles,
criss-crossed
like noodles on chopstick.
Cadaverous faces
Illuminated.

>>19287357
Ah shit, it's actually like this


Last June we met
on two by two seats,
coated with sheets,
of polyester and sunlight,
diffracting through an opening
in the gleaming,
blue glass,
onto your white knuckles,
criss-crossed
like noodles on chopstick.
.
.
Cadaverous faces
Illuminated.

>>19287229
I have notes going into a story set in Persia ~2500 years ago. I got some textbooks on the period to understand daily life and cultures of different people. Talked to a few religious academics also.
I t's not terribly controversial time of history and decent amount of records to understand people then. I'm not sure how publishers would take to a story about Jews and Samaritans back then, but I think it illustrates something cool so I'm doing it anyways even though I'm not Jewish.

>>19287366
No, no, it's actually more like this

Last June we met
on two by two seats
.
.
coated with sheets,
of polyester and sunlight,
diffracting through an opening
in the gleaming,
blue glass,
onto your white knuckles,
criss-crossed
like noodles on chopstick.
Cadaverous faces
Illuminated.

Third person present tense: based or cringe? Your thoughts, gentlemen.

>>19287389
Neat. I wrote one set in persia ~1500 years ago. Needs an edit and a lot of work before I'm satisfied with it. It's tough, right? you can't take anything for granted, even having paper, candles, or common food ingredients you have to look it up and make sure it checks out. Separating old world versus new world foods drives me crazy.
publishers love jew stories, they publish thousands of them. you'll be fine. they can sure never get enough holocaust books published.

>>19287391
Remove one syllable from fourth line, four from fifth line, merge sixth and seventh lines, remove one syllable from eight line, end is fine.

>>19287391
Anon pls don't do this. I'm trying to improve and get real feedback.

>>19287395
As someone who writes part of their story in it, it's alright. I'll go down the middle and say it's based and cringe.

>>19286828
If magic came back into our world in the wake of WWII, how could the governments of the world keep it secret from the population at large?

>>19287395
I've read exactly one book that made it work. 99.999% of the time it's just badly executed cringe

>>19287617
Given modern technology? They would be unable to, without using the magic itself to do so.

>>19284341
>what do you think if an entire novel is melancholic?
>Would feel somewhat one note, need highs to make the lows hit harder. That's basic rising and falling action.
you think?
my one novel is almost entirely melancholic with a few conflict scenes that get almost hysteric, but it's just like a concentrated melancholy and feels contiguous. those i'm fine with. but then a few scenes were kind of lighthearted and funny, almost goofy. and they feel like they belong to a different book. it was so much of a tone break that i have to rewrite them completely.

novels should have a signature tone to it right. that "tour de force" shit is offputting. its like throwing a salad, a pot of soup, ice cream, and burgers all into the same dish and serving it as a big mess of mud.
i mean, can you think of any novels with a crazy tone break in them? am i wrong in thinking this?

Should I publish under an alias? I’m writing a sort of occult fictional story which never explicitly supports Nazis but one educated enough could become suspicious that their symbolic representative is portrayed positively. Nazis are never mentioned either.
Also, I have a fairly generic name

>>19287927
I'm writing a story about a ginger ethnostate under my real name, go for it

>>19287962
>>19287927
stupid question but when you query agents do you use your real name or a pen name?

>>19287927
Not sure. What are the key things to consider when publishing under an alias? How effective is it usually?

>>19287966
I'm self publishing so idk. Self publish or go to an indie publisher

Do you guys outline or just jump into the writing?

>>19287983
PLAN. Trust me. Pantsing is nonsense and the only authors who do it successfully (Stephen King) know story like the back of their hand. Also, even with guys like Stephen King it shows big time.

If anyone has any thoughts on this short scene I'm writing, I'd appreciate hearing them. I'm trying to get better at writing conversations.

Does writing need to have pedophilic undertones in order to be good?

T-tell me I’m gonna’ make it, bros. I don’t even want to be famous or rich … I just want to believe I can write something that’s better than average.

Location --- Earth: Power Complex EU 996
Year --- 3021

THE man in the high vis overalls gripped the lever. His tired eyes glancing at the digital clock augmented to the right of his concrete working cell.

* ninety eight
** ninety nine
*** One hundred
The Hour turned 50

The man pulled on the giant lever with his atrophied arms. He struggled, but eventually the lever dropped with the familiar sound.

THUD - CHUNK -

Then the groan as the entire complex steadily ground to a halt. He glanced outside the rectangular TV-windows and observed as each of the giant pyramid stacks shut down, one by one, stretching out beyond the horizon and to the old mid Atlantic. There was a gap in the acid rain, from which an orange hue emerged illuminating the z-smog and radioactive snow. The chimney plumes, now cut like balloons from their stacks blew steadily upwards into the sky.

The view was unusual for the man in the high vis overalls, most of the time the plumes would disappear quickly in the hurricane force winds that occurred daily in this quadrant. He yawned.

Gathering his belongings (the crust of a nutri-block, the container of his survival kit, his iodine pills, work stimulants and other neccessy-pills along with his daily vaccine pill printer).

Grabbing his Trans-space keys he stood up out of his chair, his bones clicking, and stepped back towards the door.

"Computer, request de-shift for worker Peter A".
'You may de-shift only once you have completed your mental atrophy test, all employees must take this test at least once per we--

"Computer skip"
"Commencing test"

The man in the high vis, who we can now identify as Peter stood completing his IQ and mental tests. It took him approximately 15 minutes. Upon completion he scanned his bio identifier which opened the air lock. Stepping into the lock Peter put on his Surface Suit and helmet, before finally opening the outer air lock.

Immediately his Gieger warning flashed.
Nodding to dismiss it, he sprinted through the acid fog to his parking spot. Fortunately it was only a few paces from his designated work space.

Opening the hatch he stepped into his trans-space vehicle, slamming the door behind him.

"Computer, activate home sequence"
"Activating Home Rocket sequence"

His engines began pre launch procedure. He glanced around him. His TSV was filthy, but he didn't care. Peter cared about very little except avoiding work-social penalties.

His engine shuddered, then spurt out a flame, launching him quickly skywards. He looked out at the desolate power complex, he saw the toxic waves crashing in the depths. The rocket vehicle quickly overtook the towering stacks, which looked like concrete mountains, snow in some places further north capped their peaks. The ship shuddered more violently as it excited the upper atmosphere, then all was still. Peter breathed a deep breath. This was his favourite moment of the day.

"Computer, coffee with milk".
"Beverage Confirmed"

TBC? Y/N

>>19287983
I outline character development and major story beats then improvise the rest. I can't imagine committing fully to either. Plan too much and you kill the magic that results from spontaneity; don't plan at all and you're just floundering around in the dark likely writing filler bullshit. I always have a goal in mind, even if I don't know how I'm going to achieve it. This conversation needs to develop this character's guilt, by the end of this scene these characters need to have drifted further apart--that sort of thing.

I also keep massive documents of prose and dialogue and plot ideas I'm kicking around, but I'd advise you to be careful with this. You can write something good in a vacuum, but then you'll be tempted to jam it into your story even when it might not fit.

This is for literary fiction, though. If you're doing a murder mystery or something then I imagine you'd have to plan the shit out of it before you write a single word.

>>19287983
Don’t just jump write in. That’s for literal retards.

I'm trying to write a song but I dont even play guitar yet
I'm just writing a poem and seeing if it sounds kinda singy. Is this fucking retarded

>>19286927
I actually found it pretty funny anon. Several lines in there (particularly the one about the one cent budget discrepancy) made me chuckle and I think you have a good voice that sets you apart. I think you should work on expanding certain parts of the story, though, like Ramirez's death, and improve your structure. The way you have it set up now makes it a little difficult to follow. Some other small suggestions I had;
>and in the conspiracy fringe
I would put this part in parenthesis.
>so the legend went
I would cut this, felt out of place and prolonged the sentence.
>The boy, an Arab named Yaqoob
This transition feels a little jarring. I would establish she was going to meet a fishing boat with two boys before describing them.
>You see, 9 years ago
This section about the government bonds fits with the tone of the story but is probably unnecessary.
I think you should also cut back on the commas. I tend to use them a lot as well but with how heavy they are it can be a little distracting.
>>19287366
I don't know a ton about poetry anon but I thought it was pretty. I especially liked the line "of polyester and sunlight."

Won't you lend your lungs to me?
Mine are collapsing
Plant my feet and bitterly breathe
Up the time that's passing
Breath I'll take and breath I'll give
And pray the day's not poison
Stand among the ones that live
In lonely indecision
Fingers walk the darkness down
Mind is on the midnight
Gather up the gold you've found
You fool, it's only moonlight
And if you stop to take it home
Your hands will turn to butter
Better leave this dream alone
Try to find another
Salvation sat and crossed herself
And called the devil partner
Wisdom burned upon a shelf
Who'll kill the raging cancer
Seal the river at its mouth
Take the water prisoner
Fill the sky with screams and cries
Bathe in fiery answers
Jesus was an only son
And love his only concept
Strangers cry in foreign tongues
And dirty up the doorstep
And I for one, and you for two
Ain't got the time for outside
Keep your injured looks to you
We'll tell the world that we tried


Thoughts on Townes Van Zandt's lyrics for Lungs?

Fight me: all books on how to write are trash.
All of them.
>do this kitschy gimmick
>here's how to write like an annoying twat
>hahaha he didn't use the letter "e" omg how original
>ooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!
holy shit

>>19288161
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

>>19287983
Why does it have to be one or the other? I do both. If you restrict yourself to just one technique you're in for a bad time.

>>19288419
Is writing really something you can teach beyond literal "This is how you write" kindergarten lessons? You can sit someone down and try to explain to then why their sentence with twelve syllables would work better with ten, or what exactly makes X line work and Y not, but if they haven't already grasped it on an instinctive, emotional level then how can they possibly learn through more writing? The best they could hope for at that point is to formulize aspects of "good prose" and "good stories" and soullessly mimic them without knowing why. Anyone can learn to play piano, learn which key makes which sound and the order to hit them to make which song, but how many people actually LEARN how to compose a beautiful, original piece? You either know, likely from a very young age, or you don't.

That's NOT to say you can't improve at art or that it's all talent, but I think it's inaccurate and dishonest to reduce it to some mechanical, linear, upgradeable progression like it's a fucking video game. Some poor souls don't even have inner monologues. How do they "learn" an imagination? I hope they can and that I'm full of shit, but everything points to this being the uncomfortable truth.

>>19288501
same opinion. if you have to be told something like "characters need to have motivations" then the teaching is useless. you learn how to write by reading. these help books teach superficial tricks and rules that don't actually exist, it can give an assay of techniques on the superficialities, but it's not some step by step method like accounting. at best they can teach some soulless wannabe how to write something that looks like a novel, and leave it to someone else's job telling him it's hollow and worthless. just trash.
i look through them once in a while if i have writers block to see if i can't gleam anything or get a kick and i'm always left angry. it's like looking for instruction on how to speak a language and you get 500 different courses on stilted, unnatural, infantile grammar. "This is a pen. The cat is on the desk." not a one who reads that crap can ever be any good at it.

if these chuckleheads have the time to write all these "how to write a novel" books why don't they go and write a novel instead? useless hacks. the fact alone that stephen king wrote one of these manuals is proof enough they're the merchandise of charlatans.

>>19286828
I did it boys. My YA sci-fi drama romp is done. 93525 words. Goddamn, now to edit this fucker down by at least 10k.

You bastards gave me hope when I had none.

>>19288638
sorry about that

>>19288638
does the world really need more fucking YA s-f/f?

>>19288643
>>19288643
Shame on you.
>>19288638
Congrats anon, it had better be good.

>>19288725
Just think of it as SF/F and ignore the YA?
WHat really is the difference, anyway?

>>19288638
Congrats bro, hope it all comes together. You give me hope that I'll finish drafts 2 and 3 and be on to new stories next year.

>>19288752
SF can be good
YA is never good

>>19288752
they're both overdone trash so you compounded trash with trash and are contributing to the floodwaters of trash.

>>19286828
https://pastebin.com/0dVLWQzq
Description: fantasy story of a mercenary group contracted to kill of a once powerful lord. There are no grand epic battles to this story. I'm posting here in the technical aspects of the story such as word choice and grammar. All other critiques are welcome to. Yes I know it's fantasy I don't go in the direction of litrpg.

>>19288419
Most writing books are far better at teaching you to read better than they are at teaching you to write better. Which makes you a better writer in the end if you also put in lots of practice.

>>19288752
If you're writing a YA SFF book you should probably know the difference, anon

>>19288725
Yes.

holy fuck my first query letter sucked. no wonder it didnt get published

>>19288855
I’m not the anon who wrote the book. But it looks like you don’t know what the YA distinction is, either.

>>19287391
the effect you're trying to convey of the light coming in doesn't quite work for me
>>19288033
the switches between the third person descriptions and dialogue is very nicely paced. Observations between dialogue is a tricky thing to balance.

The imagery of the chins smoothing out like an accordion is a bit weird unless this character is based on a cubist painting or something

>>19287983
For the first draft? Dear me, no.
‘If you’re writing mystery stories or something, you might want to have an outline, because it all has to have a logic and fall into place and have a beginning, a middle and an end. But if you’re writing a novel, the best things just sort of come out of the blue. It’s a subconscious process. You don’t really know what you’re doing most of the time.’
-- Cormac McCarthy
“Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.”
-- Stephen King
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
-- Terry Prachett
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
-- Douglas Adams

wgbros...

>>19287983
I just jump into short stories.

I've never been able to finish a novel, and I worry it's a lack of an outline.

Another day, another portion to do. One more slice to add to the grand bridge that will be my story.

>>19288975
It’s all about the quest to understand ogre bro.

what is your guys advice for under writers?

and how do you know when to put a story down and come back to it later?

>>19288045
Yes, but you could try substituting it with parental bonds rather than sexual ones
>>19288139
That's up to you, bro. Just make sure you write something you can be proud of and don't get caught up in the rules or books you haven't read.

I think my pacing is really weird I’ve wrapped up the major battle the whole story was building towards but that only really brings things back to normal then there’s a tense dinner party which ends with a battle with the king who nobody expected to have to fight but I hope I hinted that would come up because everybody kept saying that fighting him would be a crazy thing to do because he’s so powerful but it still feels like he’s an out of nowhere bad guy.

>>19287983
For me I just jump in, I had a great idea in the shower and just wrote a bunch of paragraphs I feel fucking great about. The only outline is in my head

>>19287983
I can't write outlines because my thoughts come to me as wordless concepts. Writing them simply and precisely is harder than just writing the story for some reason

>>19287983
I outline a little, but it's mainly there to organize my thoughts about the state of the story. When I start there's at least a couple story beats and idea of how characters are and who they might become. As I fill in the outline as I write the 1st draft I include who is in each scene, physical and emotional goals, conflicts, themes, etc. I can keep track of where I'm dropping info too. The outline is not some rubric that tells me how to write. I still discover a lot about the story as a I write and go with what I like the most.

>>19287983
I love my outlines

Outlines are love, Outlines are life, Outlines are god

>>19288970
Very telling that McCarthy comes off as calm and insightful while King comes off as a neurotic retard.

>>19286828
Start of my story I revised from 4 or so years ago. I don't think it can be salvaged.
>There's teeth a-gnashing and caterwauling, too, upon the craggy mountain. Call us Crag-boys.
>On the slopes of these hills, my brothers hunt with their canes, like fishing poles without line and hook. On the slopes of these hills, my brothers hunt for men and domesticated beasts, for there is a great, great hunger in our stomachs. I order them to fan out and search. Hunting in packs of four at a time, one to track ahead; one to keep watch at the rear.

>>19287983
I usually have some idea where the story should go and I skip ahead in scenes but I never outline. I find it doesn’t work nearly as well for me as just letting what comes come.
>>19288638
Congrats anon, no mean feat.
>>19288915
Thank you very much anon, I really appreciate you reading it. I’m trying to sound fancy with my descriptions but maybe I should tone it down a bit kek.

>>19289068
why do fantasy writers bother?

>>19286828
>Want to write for some competition because now I have a purpose for writing.
>End up paralyzed anyway because I can't seem to write unless I'm sure that idea is going to win.
Fuck. Even if I end up writing, will I be good enough?

>>19289299
I should KMS

>want to write a story about the mentally healing powers of beauty
>additional theme is overcoming your past and that even the most terrible things that leave marks on your soul do not define who you are today
>additional additional theme is of letting go of past unresolved sorrows
are there any books that accomplish this feel? oddly enough Lord of the Rings is kind of fitting it just a little bit I'm very un-read and am just now getting to that one.

>>19289299
For fun

How much rhyme is too much in a poem? I always have trouble with putting too much of it in anything I try to write. For instance "what pernicious haunts which fly upon my thoughts; of what day ought to brought. Perhaps a walk would sequester this draught"

>>19289316
>will I be good enough?

Don't think about that. The only way you'll be good enough, and get better at writing is if you just keep doing it.

>>19289599
idk shit about writing or poems but that line is cool and i fucking love rhymes

im anti non rhyming poems if im being real here

Opening from a SciFi piece I'm writing. It's trending towards being novelette length, which is unwieldy. Gonna see if I have another scifi story to write and see if I can package them together.
If this feels like Oblivion, that's because it was. Early on I realized that I had absorbed oblivion into myself and forgotten its existence. The story is different now.

>>19289659
>Early on I realized that I had absorbed oblivion into myself

>>19288273
Thank you anon. I'm trying to get more into poetry. I appreciate your feedback very much.

>>19288273
>I think you should also cut back on the commas
The stupidity of this general... Grammar is not optional.

>>19286861
I write tons of short stories...and even self-published a novel.
https://reddit.com/user/ulatekh/comments/pluf8q/hello/

>>19289599
>rhyming "thought" with "draught"
Is this some big brain move I'm too small brain to understand...

>>19289651
Thanks for the positivity. I just had the idea and quickly wrote the end as it came to me. I now have the begining and the end of it so maybe the body will come easy. I have absolutely no structure to writing as I never really do it. I just write whatever comes and hope it's good.

So far I have
What pernicious haunts which fly upon my thoughts;
Of what day ought to brought. Perhaps a walk
Would sequester this draught

Something
Something
Something

Begone sunrise! Away your painted sky!
For my muse is shy and fears your coming light.
And in her plight, to escape the straining day,
Exeunts this nightly play in fear of coming day

>>19289704
The fifth paragraph of your prologue has dialogue from two different characters without a line break. Go back to that website you like to use.

>>19289724
You racist, sexist, ableist shitlord. I am a Chicano Lesbian They/Them with Autism. It's hard for me to write.

>>19286857
He seems to think so.

>>19287983
There are no rules. Just write what you feel like. Don't constrain your muse.
If you have some prose in your burning to get out, write it. You can always edit later.
If you have a bunch of disorganized ideas, make an outline. I use the open-source TreeLine editor.
If you feel like researching, go do some reading.
If you have to do chores around the house, do them. The forced change in focus seems to bring out my ideas.
To reiterate...there are no rules. Do what works for you. And never get in the way of your muse.

>>19289299
Because there's a huge market for that stuff?

>>19289724
The pottymouth wasn't me.

The change in tone in the two lines of dialog should have made it clear that the speaker changed.

Alright fellas, critique the fuck out of this. I hardly write and this might be the first poem I finish. I wanted to write a song but I don't know how guitars work. I'm gonna change some lines up but this is what I got from today. Any feedback is appreciated

The heathen dances with an old birch stick,
The steeple is the candle wick,
Bootlick or become the Bolshevik.

Forked flesh behind her grinning teeth,
No skin, just scales underneath,
Heart makes heath as those fangs unsheathe.

New love waits in the meadows and by the seas,
She frolics by animals and whispers to the trees,
But your guarded unease shields you from her crying pleas

Minutes lend a hand to sew and mend,
But hours work slow and needles bend,
HAVING A ROUGH GO ABOUT THE LAST LINE

>>19289722
of course playboy, I'm a big fan of that.
> I have absolutely no structure to writing as I never really do it. I just write whatever comes and hope it's good.
based
That poem sounds fucking cool anon

>>19286828
>all these resources
>still can't motivate myself to write

>>19289784
Forgot to add, the end goal is to make this a song

>>19289316
The writing practice is the real prize

>>19287983
Personally I love to outline pretty heavily. I spend weeks ironing out the details and building up the characters before I ever actually write a scene. I find that if I don't outline I just end up spending those same weeks awkwardly writing myself into a coherent plot, which is much more frustrating.

>>19289771
Oh, it is clear. The problem is you making an amateur formatting mistake.

>>19289808
YOU SNARKY ASS WHITE BOY, I DARE YOU TO SAY THAT TO MY FACE, PENDEJO.

>anons post
>every anon stops calling other anons faggots to gather around
>wow amazing post anon
>WOW ANON, if you can prove you made this write my email i want to publish YOU
>writing poems in my comfy house
>fleet of whores with BBL bounce on my cock while feeling bad for me for being so mysterious and edy
>4chan calls me /ourguy/ and i put writing general on the map


one day bros.....

>>19289789
You need some obliqueness in your life and a healthy bit of structure. Visit that store you never go to. Take a different turn. Talk to someone. It will help you break habits and get out of a rut.
http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

First thing I do when I wake up or get home is open my word processor. After basic morning rituals I can write a little before work. Once I meet my goal I start opening other things.
Also have to wear headphones because the past year each new neighbor I have has loud dogs or is loud themself. One of them is some unemployed crackhead looking bum that cannot speak at all. He just makes weird yelping noises, rides a bike all day and randomly starts screaming outside after 10PM. I wish I knew his story but I'm really scared to meet him. Anyways, you got this anon.

>>19289837
A man can dream.

>>19289808
This sort of feels like "Obama's anger translator" from "Key & Peele".

And it wasn't a mistake, it was deliberate.
I'm not constrained by the boundaries of my elementary-school grammar teacher.

Here is my dialogue for a short story about a retarded man who doesn't understand the baby shoes never worn concept
"Okay."
"You didnt think it was interesting at all?"
"No."
"The kid is dead and he's told this story in almost no words"
"Oh okay cool"
he didnt think it was cool and the other fella was being a huge bitch about the whole thing

feel dizzy
>thought i needed only a superficial edit of a handful of scenes
>turns out i needed a substantive edit: completely reorganized, added 25% more material throughout (by wordcount), to rewrite half of it both for improvements and a consistent tone
>went from 22 chapters and 80k words to 24 chapters and 100k words
wonderfully funemployed right now and been throwing myself into the edit since then. trying to get this finished this week.

feels so good, i finally identified what was wrong with it and ripped it up enough to rework everything freely.

>hit a block and stall on my novella
>submissions open up for a publication I've been wanting to have a short story in
>can't get in the right mindset for any of the short stories I've been workshopping
>can't come up with any new ideas
>time is slipping away and submissions will close soon
>finally wring out a semi-autobiographical idea, but it's missing that spark that will make it a story worth telling
>think I'll have to abandon it and go for an old work I'm not confident in
>suddenly make a connection that may make it all click together
Feels good. Now I'm reading a bunch of police transcripts, trying to capture the shuddering, unedited flow of speech in a way that isn't intrusive to read.

>>19289837
Some anon needs to write this fantasy so we can all read it instead of practicing our writing

I started reading the Pale King and motherfucking DFW pulled all the tricks I did but 15 years ago. First I accidentally write snow crash. Now I accidentally write DFW. What’s next? I accidentally rewrite Kafka’s the Castle but it’s an urban planner without a budget? What other books have I accidentally already written?

>>19290345
The first hurdle you need to get over is realizing that there's nothing original in storytelling. Your task is to find what matters to you and spin it in your own style. No one will care if you remade DFW if you are more relatable to today's readers

>>19286828
I've been writing for two years straight with over 70 rejections from publishers. I am beginning to think I am wasting my time. Anyone else feel like they're not cut out for this stuff?
>>19290345
Isn't the solution to read around more before you start a novel concept?

>>19286828
Is there such a thing as an innate writing style? I mean, no matter how much you practice, you’re just perfecting your innate writing style and not achieving some new writing style.

>>19286828
Rate my first sentence desu...
>My demons cannot be drowned wither either bottle or booze; those a-smiling fuckers, they know how to doggy-paddle.

>>19286828
I'm done now. I was never going to become the next Faulkner, the next Nabokov or the next Joyce, but I hid behind the language barrier to avoid criticism for months, maintaining an illusion that was fun to live in while it lasted. I had thought my country's education system to be topmost in the world, but this turned out to be utter bollocks. A child of 18, a person ten years my junior, has a greater vocabulary than I, who had to look up the word “topiary”, and no one likes the expression theory of art anymore, I am likened to a long lost dinosaur.
This will be my final post on /lit/. I've been humiliated and exposed as a fraud. My writing is pretentious, infantile, banal drivel. My observations are dull, my language grade school level. My tenses are mixed up; I use colloquialisms, ellipses and onomatopoeia. I mix tired and trite idioms together to obfuscate their unoriginality with a veneer of irony; I have continued to recite ornate Jewish chimpanzee parables with diminishing returns. The parable seemed very clearly to me to be asking me whether or not the now-grown-adult can choose. I say yes, of course, but that's not my issue.
I was never cut out for writing. I began writing my "book" on January 6th. Since then I've produced 140 thousand words for it, then editing down to 132 thousand. These words are a tide of garbage without value, without insight, without form. The themes of time, space, infinity, memory and pointless duelling are not present in my work. It was never real writing, it was anime and weebshit!
Story arcs, character arcs, narrative arcs, these are all outdated terms. You say what you hear, and only the anime fandom uses the term “arc” anymore. I am a toad! Look how many words I wrote, because apparently literature is bodybuilding and just aimlessly typing will somehow improve my writing. My appetites grew as I wrote, I set a goal of a 100 thousand words when I began, only for the cancerous growth to demand a 137 thousand words soon enough to be completed, then rising all the way to 140 thousand, and still I don't even know what genre it is that I'm writing. Is it autofiction? A comedy? A picaresque? Am I merely shitposting edgelord-triggering diarrhea in neo-emo gothic revivalist gestalt?
Regardless, I have failed, and even in my failure I have merely imitated how people who think they write well but write poorly write, and I couldn't even do that well. "Oh I can do that anytime if I wanted to" I thought, but no. My subject is too obvious, my narration wooden. I have put down my pen. Never again will my fingers click-clack across the keyboard. No more outlines, no more characters. Goodbye. I will take my own advice and go to the rope. Why live if you can't be a great writer, or even a passable one? And why write at all, anyway, if no one is reading anymore and Harold Bloom isn't around to insert us into the Canon? Learn from me! Learn from me!

>>19290853
language is an imitative skill. if you want to write differently then you should be reading different authors.

>>19289758
is there? the fantasy market seems if anything pretty much dominated by a few cash cows. do you think a fantasy publisher is really looking for 10000 more dorks pretending to be brian sanderson when they already have sanderson? or is this a lottery-style delusion where for no reason at all you think you're going to be the one to make it as the next big thing out of the millions that are writing the same thing as you?

>>19288850
Anyone want to take a crack at this?

How do I improve writing as a non native speaker?

>>19290942
this sounds an awful lot like pasta, please let it be pasta

>>19288162
This.

>>19286828
Not specifically writing /lit/ because my tism makes it needlessly difficult for me to convey emotions and visual imagery through text, but for the story I am working on I imagine your opinions could still be helpful.

The first is related to the "Unreliable Narrator" trope, but whenever I read a story with an unreliable narrator I have always had trouble differentiating between "this character is insane" versus "this story is insane" essentially being able to understand when the Character's narration being presented is exaggerated/falsified but not understanding how to convey that myself without it just seeming like the story from the beginning was batshit insane.
For example of the difference, a character in a grounded setting showing signs of delusions and being the main presenter of information would trend towards the unreliable narrator part whereas a story that has no focus and is more focused on literary psychedelics would just be a nonsensical story.
The issue I face in what I'm writing is that the setting itself is not wholly grounded. The main character(s), setting, and plot begins grounded but accelerates to lunacy by the end. The issue with the narrator though is that he is a basket case by any traditional definition and I want to express that visually primarily without it coming across as the story being crazy.

The second from it generally being a complex narrative that might be too big for its own good but relies on its complexity (and by extension the reader's ability to connect many concurrent plot points together without being beaten over the head with it) to actually bring it all together. The story itself doesn't start as complex however and it builds slowly with a few massive jumps at set points. The conflicts are also primarily only large-massive in scale and miniscule (mental/spiritual) in nature so tying large scale problems to a person's mental issues seems like a challenge as well.
Essentially what I'm asking for here are your opinions or experiences with reading/writing complex stories.

Last one is about unconventional storytelling and mostly revolves around some of the plot being focus on unconventional abstractions that by nature would lead to confusion of anyone not going into the moments prepared.
For example of what I'm rambling about. Let's say a story has had time travel elements throughout and at one point the main character wakes up in 16th century London. Then coming down to the dining room of the inn, he sits at a table next to himself and his other self hands him a photograph and silently walks out the building. At no point does the character act surprised by any of this because it's now normal for him. To a reader however this can go one of two ways. If they have even a basic grasp of what time travel is, this scene likely would be lacking in exposition but understandable. To someone who does not understand time travel, this is the point where the story stops making sense.

>>19291566
Shit this ended up being a lot longer than I intended it to be.

So plainly speaking, while I used time travel as an example due to it being the most commonly "understood" abstract concept of reality, the story I've been working on would employ a small handful and I'm rather stuck at figuring out how to bridge the gap between myself and the reader in relaying these concepts without handfeeding it, stopping the story for a lecture in theoretical renditions of reality, or not being clear enough that my target audience can reasonably understand it.

As always, thanks for any opinions, advice, and/or recommendations that I end my life.

does /lit/ have video courses too like /ic/?

>>19290500
Editors read more than writers can, I think theyre better at recognizing if theyve heard your story before once you pitch it.

>>19289784

fend, wend, portent, lament, etc etc

i liked your poem

test

>>19290942
>>19291209
I 'll make sure the next generation is avoided by writers who want to write! All I need now is a pond, a rope and a library science book, and I'll do the rest.
I came back occasionally to post on /lit/. Whenever I did I saw the same people told the same stories, and this time I couldn't hide behind my language barrier. They folded back upon each other, curling up into a ball: morality tales about the schoolyard, showing that history repeats and that everything repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and res, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum. More story beats than I would write in my lifetime, and still it gets boring after a while. I copied and pasted all their stories and just added in the bits I thought might be interesting in-character-esque observations and came up with this tale for posterity. I hope my soul is not going to hell for this travesty, but I don't really care. When I was younger, I read a lot. Now, the only books I read (other than the pathetic thing you're reading now) are fanfiction and media tie-in novels. Even there I am not picky. I'll read fantasy Game of Thrones and scifi CSI New York, and who says it's not original or any good? If there wasn't a market for it, they wouldn't be churning out millions of dollars worth of tie-in novels, over and over again. I guess what I'm saying is that if I have to be a fake writer, I might as well do it in the right company. Or the wrong company. Or no company at all. Doesn't matter to me as long as I can write whatever I want.
The wine makes the little birds dance the cicada's song, and somehow it's always sounded like a bad idea to me even when I was only nine; it only makes the knife in the heart that much that much louder. I can't believe I'm 29. I suppose that I'll miss the world when I'm gone. I received 67 likes on this post. Every one of them seems like it's stuck in his throat, like he's underwater. I repost this to /pol/, where I live. I'd like to see if it gets more comments, something in the neighborhood of the dozens I got on /lit/.
Wait. Wait. Wait. The moon is crumbling away in the waxing, when the walls close in the black tower, the wizard in the icy plane, his candles I set out in honor of his lies. I have been living a lie. I have been living a lie. I have been-
The rain falls down from a cracked glass ceiling, another story that's been told a million times . A story told so many times that it becomes its own thing, with an insular context all its own with absolutely nothing to do with the worldly context. The world is both real and not real, so real it can die with me, so real it only gives life in the moment just before I push the complete button on my suicidal death wish. And then reality comes in, and with it an oblivion that seems to be absolutely infinite in just how expansive it is, perhaps further than my mind can even comprehend.
I am an infinite abyss, I am this nothing. I am nothing.

>>19289898
And that is why you self publish.

Is it any indication of quality if you cry while writing something, or is it just your own mind's perception which is completely subjective?
I was writing a death scene near the end of the novel for one of the main characters and cried, not sobbed but I silently had tears streaming down my face. I can't tell whether that means it must be actually good or I'm just a narcissist who gets emotional over their own shitty writing

This is something I hastily wrote down before going to bed. R8 & h8

>Words have lost their meaning. They've been shattered and scattered throughout my brain like a forgotten, peeled-off refuse alluring to a never-promised and never-fulfilled state of mind--an idyllic, elevated state of mind. The only agency I've been zealously nourishing all those years was that of a desperate, laborious recollection of my previous life in the same idyllic, elevated world. A vain attempt at a desperate revival of a place where all human souls ought to be and ought to become. But should I continue with this wretchedly futile and tormenting task? Should I keep feeding myself empty promises? Shouldn't I just let go of it all? But I can't; for those pestering thoughts always seem to catch up to me like the one inescapable mild fragrance of raging tulips that wafts across your face during a springtime walk. My waking throes are no longer rewarding, they've become detestable and malignant. I am just a distorted image of my past self.

>>19291912
Unfortunately it isnt a sure sign of good writing. It is however a sign that you know what emotions you are trying to convey. You are either close to it or you've already portrayed it well.

>>19290922
For me, this is really cringey and I would stop reading. Aren't bottle and booze synonymous?

I wrote my first chapter and now I've realised my story needs to change because I changed my chapter as I wrote it. Feels frustrating. How far do you guys plan? How often do you have to redo the plan?

>>19291955
It's okay to change it. Change it as much as you feel you need to. Outlines are guidelines.

>>19291952
I think it's a meme

>>19291963
I think it's frustrating because now I'm worried my story makes no sense by changing things. Just have to power through

>>19291935
I wake up every single day with my pitiful ambition of conquering heights of human achievement put to sleep each evening. Copious amounts of sweat from my ailing body cover me as a form of a hapless, prayer-like commitment to a past feat long-forgotten. My body is sending me a signal--it's a signal of a revulsion against a present set of wrongs. I will not let my past be a lie. I will not let the oppressing rulers of the world alter the very essence of my soul by casting it into a vixen of a confluence of brute force pulling my strings. I am the only one who can alter the present with my actions. I am the one with the most power to alter this present with my actions. I will fight these tyrants and I will find the right path to the world of hope. I will seek refuge in the land of the intellectuals if I must. I will find the right path to the land of happiness, where I can calmly treasure life, where I can bask in the glory of the sense of existence. But what I will never forget is that moment of frail adoration of my perfected self--the self that once existed. I cannot forget that moment of blip in the space-time continuum. I am writing this story to remind myself of that moment--to recreate it. I am writing this story to remind myself what I was capable of achieving. I am writing this story to remind myself of my potential. I am writing this story to remind myself of the past. I will fight this corpse of an existence. I am writing this story to rouse myself awake, to stir my sense of gratitude, passion, and zeal for life. For I was a mighty man once. A man whose potential exceeded his own perception of himself. I was a mighty man once. I will be a mighty man again.

>>19291987
If it doesn't make sense after ONE chapter, maybe you should change it again.

>>19292029
It's not that it doesn't make sense. I think it's that the old plan made sense in my head, and now I have to pivot and try and make something new make sense. Instead I keep thinking of the old idea and so it seems disjointed.

writing seems insanely difficult to learn. it's not like drawing where there's just a set of instructions that you have to follow and illustrations that you can copy until you're good to go. anyway what I'm getting at is how do you learn writing effectively when it seems like the only way to get good at it is to write and write until something lands?

>>19292088
Write more.

>>19291856
No, it's because I don't want to wait 1-3 years to get a book published.
Especially one as hyper-topical as mine.
If I release it now, it has a chance to become prophetic.
If I release it 1-3 years from now, it'll just be the news.

>>19292122
Don't be so fucking deluded.

>>19292088
It's very simple. When you're new to art, you start by drawing what you see. You draw enough and you start to notice techniques that can produce consistent results.
So start by writing exactly what you see. The exact scene that you have in your head. It'll be shit just like the stick figures you drew when you were a kid, but keep writing and you'll keep improving. No one pops a mona lisa on the first day.

>>19291955
>writing chapter 2 scene
>read it and realize protag is way too passive which is opposite of his behavior in chapter 1
>need him to be proactive, so make note and keep writing as the consequences of the scene are basically the same
>just rewrote it in second draft
I plan major beats but I rewrite entire scenes when they dont convey what I wanted about emotions and characters. I also just rewrote conversations in the first few scenes. Dont waffle too hard because we all doubt ourselves halfway through the project. Chapter 1 can be rewritten to reflect what you need in tge story, I'd keep those in mind and revisit it after youre done with the first draft of the story.

>>19292123
Also, the first thing one learns in a college-level linguistics course is that there's no such thing as a "standard" English speaker.

The shallowness of your education is showing.

>>19292135
that's a surprisingly good advice even though it sounds so simple. thanks bro

>>19292122
iktff bro. Now people are drawing parallels with COVID when I outlined it in 2018 and just got around to writing it after finishin another project. It's about a GNR revolution that's not compulsory. We're maybe 40-50 years away from what I'm talking about.

>>19292145
What's that got to do with delusions of being prophetic?

>>19292137
That's good advice, thank you. I keep getting hung up in small details when planning rather than just focusing on main beats and getting an entire first draft.

It's my first writing project so I'm finding it quite difficult.

>>19292249
Some things take more work to fix than others. Focus on those first, like character motivation, when and why characters change. It's not an exhaustive list, you have to figure it out yourself. IMO writing a complete story is important first, because you have scenes to compare, analyze the flow, and see how tuning one scene impacts another. You begin to understand as you write how things will fall into place, then second you iron out the plot threads: setting, character, idea, and event. Make them harmonize. From there you are mainly trying to improve the prose to clarify the story, which I think you're most at liberty to change without breaking the story.

I've been reading Stephen King's "On writing", and I have to say, the idea of putting all of your rejections on a nail sounds heartbreaking. Having that shit always right there, looking at you.
Anyone else do that type of thing?

>>19292401
How concrete does a character's motivation need to be? My protagonist wants to restore the family business to what it used to be after her grandmother dies. Is that enough? And how explicitly does it need to be stated?

Anon help me fix this poem. I think it's not good but something tells me i can improve it a lot.

I have tried to do away with vanity.
I have battled with mirrors
only to foster jealousy
of the blind
in hospital gowns and wheelchairs
exhibiting their ugly frowns
at the invisible mirrors.
The mirrors can only be beaten with blindness.
.
.
I am caged by vanity
enough to desire the faculty
of loss for my trinity.
A limbo of mirrors
is what I'm afraid of, fear
of hidden glass, hear
my jarring scream, leer
at my pathetic attempt, bear
self consciousness.
.
.
Vanity drives a red car.
.
.
Alienation as protest.
Sequestered and perfect.

>send manuscript to 5 publishers at once
>ten minutes after sending realize that after changing a characters name, I had left that character's old initials in one paragraph
FUBAR

>>19292456
politely apologize then move out of state, legally change your name, and submit the fixed manuscript.

>>19292470
>legally change your name
Not enough. Get a sex change too.

Son of the Sun is now available in paperback, if hardcopies are more your thing.

If you are interested in ancient history, mythology, or adventure fiction, you might enjoy my debut novel. It currently holds a 4.8 rating on Amazon's Kindle Store, and is in the top 100 bestsellers in Greek and Roman Mythology.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09J8HJJN8/

>>19292584
I'd buy a paperback but it won't deliver to my country. You have my support in spirit.

Have you guys ever felt less interested in writing after getting into a good relationship?

Before my current partner, my writing would be the way of expressing my dreams, desire, anxieties, worries, anything. I’d channel how I felt into these stories. I wouldn’t even have to actively think about writing. I just had this internal drive to write.

Now, after getting with my gf, I don’t really have the feeling. I can tell her everything and she is always willing to listen. I don’t have the feelings that something is being pent up inside me. Nothing that desperately feels like it needs to be expressed.

>>19292406
When I say motivation I mean the thing they are trying to obtain or sustain. Why does your protag care about family? Is it because he desires connection? Does that yearning make him fear being alone and how did he end up feeling that way? Is there some misbelief he has that prevents him from fully connecting with others because he fears loneliness?
That is what I mean, its subsurface. It is the spirit behind your character goals. Characters grow in the story as the conflicts test who they are. If you have a short story that's not character driven, you can still explore your events or ideas in like fashion. There's a reason the event happened, and it's not always clear at first what it all meant. Characters will fail continuously in an attempt to reestablish status quo until they understand what an event really was.

>>19292677
Women are a mistake

>>19292406
Also motivation doesnt nees to be explicit. You need to understand it for it to feel real. You can be subtle and drop hints leading up to a reveal where they confront the problem verbally, but you dont have to. Just depends on how you want to tell the story.
Personally, I like to veil the motivation. I hide the fact that my female character is barren. When asked about her goals, she doesnt mention kids. She looks at another family's children while the protag notices something else. There are lots of these things that bother her and they all stem from the same yearning. Her misbelief though is that she will never be satisfied without them, so she makes a tragic mistake of altering her body to get what she wants.

>>19290500
>wrote for 2 years
>got dozens of rejections
>stop and reflect
>read approx 300 books in 2 years since then
>writing quality improved massively, matured as writer
>going to try again
they were right not to publish me at that time. read donald maas writing the breakout novel. he says it takes 3-5 years to successfully write a first novel that can get published. it's also common for the first few novels you write to all be bad and unsalvageable.

just improoove bro

>>19291912
you cry because of what's in your head. but that's not necessarily what's on the page. you're judged by what is on the page.
>>19292122
>prophetic.
cringe

Should I continue my story about Jamal raping his little step sister? I think it could go over well on Twitter.

>>19292740
Why not improve with reading and writing? I think Bradbury's advice is to read a short story a day and write a new story once a week. After a year could you really write 52 bad stories? You'd have to be pretty dumb. Novels are complex and I think tough to understand all of what's going wrong, but after understanding what makes a good short story, and then good prose, weaving plot threads to make a novel should be easy. And your suggestion works too of course. I've taken a mix of both strategies but mostly writing now.

How do you find time to write between reading, watching movies, playing video games, and furiously masturbating as well and spending time looking for new porn to fuel said masturbation?

>>19288162
Why would planning kill the magic? You simply choose things that make you satisfied.

>>19292790
personally i don't enjoy short stories but that's valid as well. the biggest point is to read massive quantities of all kinds of literature and to self reflect. be willing to completely rewrite it or trash it and start something new if necessary.

>>19292833
I don't play video games anymore. I watch maybe one or two movies a week. I masturbate without porn.

Critique?

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47758/the-plague-of-york/chapter/772193/the-arrival-to-york

>>19292884
Even getting through the first few paragraphs was a pain.
>On the 27th of March, 1349, the wait at York Minster signaled the court, Edward III, from Windsor.
What’s a “wait”? It signaled or summoned Edward III? Or was it announcing his visit?
>As usual, a servant of the court stopped immediately,
Cut the “as usual.” We’re talking about this instance. A servant of which court? Edward’s? What did he stop? Was it jarring to anyone around him that he stopped? Did everyone stop or just him?
>and leaving his mule by the market booths, ran to the main gate between York Minster and the Abbey of St. Mary.
Did you research? This feels like the work of someone who meticulously researched locations, settings, but then assumed the reader knew everything the writer did. You’re giving me proper names of places but failing to establish their significance in any way.
>Immediately, Bootham Bar swarmed with spectators; York never sleeps when royalty is at its door, especially when this royal party, Edward III, has just defeated and captured King David II of Scotland, securing the country’s northern frontier, as well as his personal victory of defeating the larger French army in the Battle of Crécy, furthering his conquest and personal ambition for the French crown.
Okay. Nice bit of history. I thought we were talking about this servant, though. Maybe move this to the front so you start broader (scene setting, history) and then narrow in on the servant. Unless he actually doesn’t matter, in which case we shouldn’t talk about him at all.
> The servant then trudged on through the mud quickly, which had become wet from River Ouse; had passed by the Abbey of St. Mary, and approached the gate, but so slowly that the men and women, with that superstition which plague the foolish, asked one another what witchcraft had befallen the stranger, yet those few versed in the arts secretly judged it nothing to do with black magic, for his skin seemed not to bubble with boils, and behind the servant, who stood at the entrance, were eight minstrels carrying buisines, and further behind was a young man, who, with eagerness and cautiousness, paced back and forth upon his horse, and held back from crushing the procession.
Oh, now we’re back to the servant. Was that all one fucking sentence? REALLY?
> The anxiety of the crowd was too much for one that he could not wait for the ceremony to be over, but jumping into his litter and ordering the gate to be drawn immediately, sought to close the mile-long distance between himself and the court, which he reached as it began to queue along Bootham Bar. When the young man on the horse saw the old man, he left his band of courtiers and galloped closer, and, leaned down to the horse’s right shoulder.
Young man? Old man? Who are they? How do they relate to the servant from the start? What’s the servant even trying to do? Is he excited by the procession? Annoyed?

>>19292977
Ooh. That’s a wait.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wait_(musician)
I’m sure you’ll insist “pfft, uncivilized swine doesn’t know what a wait is.” I’d counter though that, as a writer, you might want to say something like “the waits, standing on the parapets in their red regalia, blared their horns, signaling the arrival of Edward III.”
Anyway, I have to say that opening is shit. You’re supposed to try and hook the reader. Set up what the story will be. Instead you wasted it on an unnamed servant all so Adrian can go “huh, I thought I knew that guy. Apparently not.”
Maybe you want to reframe this from Adrian’s perspective instead, considering he’s an actual character.

>>19292677
Did you make this post only to brag about your gf? Consider suicide

>>19292977
Your criticism was good but
>Was that all one fucking sentence? REALLY?
is pure reddit. How about we stop pushing modern writers to be the same mediocrity and let them use the techniques used in the classics?

>>19293110
Fuck you, Jew boy!

>>19293040
lol this is basically the opening to the count of monte cristo so it is servicable to say the least

>like a plot point/character/location/idea/etc in an existing ongoing story
>writers immediately drop them and never use them again
>in most cases it's been decades since they were last used

I've half a mind to just steal and combine all of them and write something that utilizes the potential I think they have

>>19293314
Are you that reader of mine that claimed that a lot of my good ideas are underwritten?

copywriting is a great job but damn it really makes it harder to write after work. you get to a point where words lose their meaning and writing like that makes things way worse.

Is introducing an innocent child character from a race that has been mostly evil throughout the story as a way to show there's good in them a cheap move?
I also have a character from that same race that would appear before that kid character does and lose his life to free one of his creations but he's in a position where it could be argued that he did it just to spite his ruler.
idunno if that helps with my question.

>>19293365
Races aren't "evil" or "good". People are individuals. Only animal follow instincts beyond their control.

>>19293365
>ooooohhh look at this innocent child! Now you must question everything you previously thought!
yeah it's pretty cheap. you've got to set it up earlier and have the kid actively do something that is good. you can't just say he's innocent and expect people to nod along. demonstrate it, dammit.
What I would do if I was writing a character like that, I would introduce the kid early on. He'd be the cutest little fucker you ever met. Saying hi to all the elderly folk and petting the neighborhood cats on his way to school. But he's adopted or an orphan and he is unaware of his lineage. Then at the midpoint, it's revealed that he's supposed to be evil and that gets him thinking about why he didn't turn out evil. Maybe now that he knows he's evil, that sends him on a downward spiral into evilness. Or maybe he's part of a social experiment where the powers that be are trying to see if evil people can be reformed. Maybe he's an mk ultra victim and he's actually been evil this whole time and he wasn't being polite to elderly people on the way to school, he was putting rocks in their cereal on his way to commit a school shooting.
I don't know, something like that but isn't stupid right. If you want to throw a good twist in there, I've got to be invested in the character who is affected by or causing the twist. Otherwise it's like you pulled some bullshit out of thin air. Make me ask, "what happens next?" and I'm not going to ask that if I don't care about the character.

>>19293365
I don't think anything is cheap so long as you do it well.

>>19293387
But IRL black people are all kind hearted geniuses on the verge of curing cancer until an EVIL WHITE PERSON guns them down.

>>19293387
Well, yeah, but due to past conflicts, cultural differences, and this race being kind of alien things got to the point that they came to be thought of as evil by most characters in my setting.

>>19293459
I'm definitely going to treat her as a character and not just a plot device but I'm kind of set on introducing her late into the story. She is also first introduced as an assassin/monster of the week in the middle of an arc where those become common and there's absolutely no way to get her into the plot without making her a child soldier. The only reason she isn't killed on the spot is because the protagonist refuses to kill children, or if it can be helped, but again I feel like this type of innocent wounded puppy kind of character being used to redeem a group that for the most part has been morally abhorrent is a bit cheap.
Should I just add more characters to cover different angles instead?

>>19293478
Sorry, anon, I'm not confident enough in my writing for that.

>article requires description for at least 10 lead medical companies in a specific area
>trying to write unique descriptions for 10 fucking medical facilities that all do the same thing
>each resource including the home website for said medical facility(s) is nothing but buzzwords and arbitrary marketing language about their vision and mission
>because this is a new category of articles we're writing now, this is the only thing in my queue for this entire week
like trying to describe each apple in an apple tree
hope your day is going better than mine lads

>>19292833
Write 500 words, still have 23.5 hours to do whatever I want
Usually though that's not enough and I want to do more once I get the first 500 out

>>19292833
I don't watch movies or masturbate very often and play occasional multiplayer games with friends but this still doesn't make me a great writer or reader.

>>19293110
Because you're not a classic author, most of you retards forget what you were trying to say halfway through your ugly, convoluted sentences, which you can't punctuate right, and nobody is going to sit there and try to decipher what the fuck went through your weed-addled mind when you had the bright idea to type that shit out.

>>19292833
Much like the other anon, if I can get at least 500 words out on a chapter wip for the day then my obligations are over and I can have the liberty of doing what I want; including writing more if I'm in the flow at that moment. That's just in theory though, in practice I can get pretty damn lazy. Been binge playing Bannerlord this week so it's throwing my productivity off, and Super Robot Wars 30 comes out tomorrow. Wish I asked this week off, feels bad bros...

>>19292833
>How do you find time to write between reading, watching movies, playing video games, and furiously masturbating as well and spending time looking for new porn to fuel said masturbation?
I stopped watching movies. I switched to f2p gacha because you pretty much can only play 15-30 minutes a day. I also stopped dating because it wastes time and none of them actually appreciate writing until they see you succeed. I still feel like there are lots of corners I could trim to save more time, but the biggest time-hog is my 40hr/wk job, which I'm afraid to quit. I'm trying my hardest to put in 40 more hours into writing, but it's hard to get used to.

>>19293760
This. There’s a world of difference between a practiced writer using a long sentence to convey a complex thought to give a sense of disorientation to the reader vs. an amateur who shit out a massive run on sentence because he doesn’t know better. Yes, either way there’s a long sentence to read, but anyone who thinks that means they have equal merit is a fool.

>>19286863
I am so glad you stopped posting my story.

Have you thought of anything lately that you'd like to explore in a story later?

>reading about Fermi Paradox today
>one of the explanations offered was that every ETI makes the same conclusion: to leave this universe and create another one
Unrelated to that I also imagined a scene where a private investigator meets a client that wants him to track down an abstraction, in this case hypocrisy, which has recently gone missing. The PI almost rejects the offer, but accepts it because sincerity annoys him (also the money would be nice)

>>19293789
Is this display from scrivener?

>>19294958
I wanted to write a prequel short story that revolved around what's basically a sci-fi Dien Bien Phu disaster but I haven't fleshed it out too much other than the concept.

>>19294964
Yes

>Crit
>>19289659
>screaming stream
Good use of rhyme here
>sloughs off me, pulled down by the cumulative masss of sweat, piss, and vaccompressed shit
I assume the vaccompressed is like a type of compression in a vacuum? It reads well enough if only I did not know what it meant.
>nuclear powered
You might want to add a hyphen.
>Briefly, I'm horrified
Can you express this in a more show-y way? I think it's too tell-y.
>conjures no image
A little repetitive, you might want to change it to something else.
Overall, it was interesting and left me wanting to read more.
>>19289784
>Bootlick or become the Bolshevik
Eh, this dichotomy is a bit cringe, especially in the 21st century when Bolsheviks aren't that relevant anymore.
>Forked flesh
Her tongue? It isn't exactly clear.
>Heart makes heath as those fangs unsheathe.
This is alright but it's a little too "homey" feeling for my tastes, when the person ought to be frightened.

>>19288970
>“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

I really like this. I'm writing the first draft to my first novel and its the only creative writing project i've done in like 10 years since high school. I was sort of worried since i realized i was "pantsing" but honestly this whole time ive just been figuring out the story. Then I planned to outline and rewrite several times over.

>>19295055
1800s-core in a bad way. there's a middle ground between this and the sterile mass produced garbage they churn out nowadays.

so i wondered why i seem to hate most novels but really love a few like crazy, what specific quality that might be. at first i thought "soul" but really, not necessarily, it didn't quite fit between what i aspire to write and what i detest that it could be summed up as soul vs soulless. and then i stumbled across this term
>A "roman à thèse" is a novel written for the sole purpose of illustrating and defending a philosophical, political or religious doctrine. This type of novel was created during the Enlightenment as a way of expressing and advocating a thesis
i had always implicitly assumed all novels ought to be like this and i'm surprised to find that it's only a special subset which set out to do this. everything i write and want to write would qualify as a thesis novel.

is this why i'm dissatisfied with other novels and think theyre wastes of time? what does /wg/ think of them? (disclaimer: what i write is not some harebrained one note shit like "right wing good" but i do set out with a specific goal)

>>19295160
Makes sense to me. I write with the same thing in mind. Do understand that the draw of your story is not to defend that philosophy, but rather the character's journey that ultimately supports the philosophy. With rhetoric as structure, it may become too didactic and less interesting.

>>19295107
I knew this place was dismal, but that is the first chapter of the famous "The Turn of the Screw" by one of the most lauded American writers, Henry James. /lit/ again shows how insufferable it is.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/209/209-h/209-h.htm#chap01

>>19295242
who? Sounds like an asshole

>>19291935
Who are you quoting?

At last, the moon appears, a grey bowling ball behind the bleak mesh of the fogged up window.
Two spheres, facing one another. The gap they fill, the miles dark and secret as a talisman, becomes overwhelming.
Past the still frame, the space-pod slides down a cosmic inch, and fits its landing threads into the surface. The gliding of moon-stone as it fastens its feet is a quiet destruction, with mobs of the pale stuff plunging silently outward. Astronaut X feels something stinging in his insides. Astronaut Y feels heavy, native, serpentine, the way he erects himself immediately at the gate; the unconscious bravery of the sight makes X want to puke.

>>19293354
I need to find and acquire more freelance work anon, got any ideas?

Also don't you feel like copywriting immensely improves the readability of your prose?

>>19295229
the thesis is the thread in the background that connects everything. of course the story is in front. i guess i'm more surprised that there are novels who don't do this, apparently, and don't try to have any deeper meaning.

>>19295357
yeah. investigate the name copypress on job sites.

And kind of? It definitely makes me more conscious of grammar and conciseness, but in my opinion prose and this type of writing are both water dyed different colors.

>>19295394
You're right. The warning I mentioned is generally from writers who eschew contrivance. Instead they advocate discovery from the subconscious. There's some truth to the subconscious aspect, it's allowed me to learn more about how I felt about my theses. What I take issue with is the idea that theses in stories are disingenuous. Our subconscious sublimates philosophy anyways, so why not try to pin it down some and explore it from there?

>>19295444
>What I take issue with is the idea that theses in stories are disingenuous.
that has to be cope from retards. you can't write an entire novel about something you don't care about investigating. and a thesis novel doesn't have to have an exact conclusion. you can empathetically present both sides and their merits and demerits, all without telling a single lie, supposing you have a functional heart and mind. imo after excitement over the surface details of the plot actions and twists, how cool and heroic the characters are, blah blah blah the shit fans obsess over, the sticking point is in the thesis below it. that's how a story gets pinned to the back of some reader's mind and has them mulling it over for a decade after reading. a lot of books on the market are about as deep as those "live laugh love" decoration signs. those are like pies where the pastry looks great and baked golden and you cut it open and there's nothing inside.

just finding this specific term really helps me summarize exactly why a lot of market fiction frustrates me.

>>19292584
Thanks for making the paperback version!
I've ordered one, as I said I would.

>>19288033
I like it. Personally I really liked the accordion analogy, it helped me visualize the man, even if it's somewhat absurd. Last sentence made me laugh. I want more, to know more about these two men, what they're doing. Good stuff!

>>19295344
nice prose but terribly vague execution. though to even write nice prose in this website is a rarity.

1200 words between yesterday and today to replace a lousy passage with a good one. I feel so much better now.

>>19296068
based and yona pilled

>>19288850
>>19288850
I wasn’t able to read all of it anon but from what I read you should work on your sentence structure. In the first sentence for example;
> Armour they wore over their wool coats shined so brightly that people hundreds of yards away could witness their splendor.
Should be formatted like;
> They wore armor over their wool coats that shined so brightly people hundreds of yards away could witness their splendor.
You can understand everything you’re saying though so it’s nothing too bad, but having an editor take a look at the full thing might not be a bad idea. Sounds like a cool premise, good luck my man.

What's the longest time you've waited for a reply for a text you sent to a publisher?

>>19296343
The idea that you'd even send something to a publisher is strange to me

>>19296437
Self-publishing is a direct admission of your own worthlessness. You have nothing of value to offer so nobody is willing to publish you. Rather than remedy this, you publicly humiliate yourself. Sad!

>>19296450
Implying the scum of the earth dont control the publishing business....

if you can at least write 500 words a day that would be more than 150,000 words a year. Kinda crazy now that I think about it

>>19296464
Word count doesn't matter if they're the wrong words.

>>19296467
Just edit down to 80-90k words

>>19296467
yeah but what I'm getting at is you don't even to quit your job, cocaine, or whatever magical bullshit if you're just willing to be consistent

>>19296456
Woah cool it with the antisemitism

>>19295055
Thanks so much anon

The forked flesh and the scales, trying to say she was a lying bitch. I think the bolshevik line is kinda cringe
I was trying to say lack of religion leads to you either being a commie or liberal bitch (stole the idea from leo strauss). i feel very pretentious


I'm not sure how to critique yours anon. I liked it, I'm dog shit at writing so idk what to say. I liked commodious
>>19291686
thanks friend, want to kiss ur cute head

>>19296526
I thought he meant liberals. You know, the kind who would insist your story needs a queer poc relationship to be marketable.

Does anyone else ever have the strong desire to use the same concepts or characters in two entirely unrelated things/worlds?

>>19286828
Here's a little thing from a project I was doing a while ago. I would have a friend give me a one-sentence prompt and write about a page, then weave it into the next prompt. Was told to write a page about a dog named Alexander the Great.


Alexander The Great
Part 1.
Hunger, food, and a need to run.

>>19296841

Alexander did not feel particularly great, it’s not easy being a dog in the crowded streets when your human is homeless and depressed.
Well what could a dog do, you can only wag your tail so hard right?
To be fair his human had been surprised by Alexander’s growth rate. He’d found Alex the Great in a back alley sniffing through garbage that was baking in the sun around four years ago. How was he supposed to know the tiny puppy was the result of an Irish wolfhound crossed with a great dane? His human was passed out right now anyway. He’d been having trouble sleeping except for the earliest hours of the morning. That suited Alexander though, he always enjoyed his extra hours of freedom before the majority of humans were up. In the earliest hours, only his regulars were awake to notice him. On their way to respective jobs or hiding spots after a night of panhandling, they seemed to feel less of a need to rest their watchful eyes on his back. No matter how great Alex was, the multitude of astonished eyes sometimes put him on edge. What do you do when every single passerby is staring at you, whether from awe or fear regardless? Anyway, who cares about the collective “not his humans"? The best thing about his tiny pack’s land was its ability to always be alive. When Alex took scent of the city he enjoyed its exhaling breath, steam billowing from random sewers and the best literal street food anywhere and everywhere, with the most fun rats to fight for it.

So why the disgruntled dog?

...By now Alexander knew his human wasn’t sleeping. When humans sleep you smell the food off their breath, not the sweet souring of their eyes. So what to do, his human had always found a way to provide... is it so bad that he would do so now in death...?
Alexander knew better than to waste the opportunity early twilight provided.
Twenty minutes later, he was lapping up the blood that had surrounded his muzzle, his paws were beating the pavement. He didn’t know the shouting he’d heard wasn’t even directed at him, just like he didn’t know his human’s foot had smelled so sweet because of his years of diabetes. The great dog did know it felt good to be running again. For a dog like Alex, it doesn’t matter whether you are chasing or being chased, all that matters is the exhilaration of his paws pounding dust into the earth behind him.
Dislocated fleas flew through the air when the mutt’s eyes whipped open, the canines cuspids snapping as he slid to a halt in a random back alley.
There was good food here, the aroma filling his nostrils compelling him to search around. So much fresh meat waiting for him, it was time to dig around and find it, the mutt’s wet nose pushing through the remains of bloodied paper when the butcher came out to smoke, startling the dog. It’s a scary thing to finish the race, Alexander knew this already. There was more waiting for him here but now it was time to go.

>>19296849
Part two is a prompt about a vegitarian butcher so that's what it's leading into.

>>19296812
Yeah, Christopher Moore does a good job doing that with Minty Fresh and a few other characters.

>>19286828
You know, someone is adding all your writing into a folder somewhere and they're going to sell your writing to publishers themselves?

>>19297235
people in here would have made it already if there was something worth stealing

>>19297236
But I have made it already, anon.

>>19297245
yeah well I haven't

>>19297247
Are you using submittable and reading the places you send to?

>>19297285
I haven't even written anything yet

>>19297302
Just use a pomodoro timer and get to fucking that page with your silver tongue, you devil, you.

>>19297310
kek yeah. you too bro

>>19296275
Oh that makes sense I'm gonna go through and do some more editing. Number one point to get was to get across a clear story. I don't have prose yet so just keep things light and fast. Thanks bro

>Dear Anon, thank you for submitting your manuscript. Unfortunately we are writing to inform you that we do not feel your work aligns with the values and direction of this publication nor its intended audience. However, we welcome further contributions at a later date.

>>19297645
At least they responded to you!

My daily 2k is done, God bless the endeavours of all fellow /wg/ writers!

>>19297645
shit like this reeksof some kind of corruption going on behind the scenes. if women are already the primary buyers of fiction, why would you need to change your fiction to appeal to women?

The first time I discovered something words cannot express I was around 4 years old. My mother had taken me to the grocery store on a bright summer day, and returning home I made the mistake of looking straight into the sun.
Instinct and reflex made me close my eyes and turn my head, but it was too late, my retinas had taken a hit. Opening my eyes, I saw a green spot. Here now was a New Thing I had never seen before.
"What's that green thing?" I asked my mother.
"What green thing? You mean the mailbox?" she asked in return.
"No! The green thing!" I said, pointing at the spot before my eyes. It was there, clear as day. Yet she couldn't see it, and soon enough it was gone.
A sense of disquiet settled over me for some time because of this incident. I figured out the green spot would reappear should I again look into the hot summer sun, but this discovery meant little to my developing mind. The point wasn't what the green thing had been, but that there was no way to express my experience of it.
I never really took to drawing as a means of expression. The lines just wouldn't go where I wanted them to, and as an impatient child I wouldn't sit still long enough to get better. My art form was Blu-Tack. A big ball, the size of my fist - as a child - and anything at all could be made from it. All blue, of course, and sticky, but no matter, it could be shaped and returned to nothing endlessly. I would make little people, because people were interesting. I would make heads separately, without features, and then make noses and eyeballs separately, and then use a special tool to make orifices to insert them. This tool was a little fighter plane I got from a Kinder egg. I'd use the tip to make eye-sockets and the wings to make the line of the mouth. I'd insert the eye-balls into the sockets and teeth into the mouth. I'd make torsos and legs and arms and hands. I'd roll up tiny little strands like noodles to use for various things, like the beard of Santa Claus.
The Blu-Tack was constantly being handled by the grubby, greasy fingers of a child, so it took on a grubby, greasy texture. It attracted dust too, and changed to a darker hue. It began to smell, which didn't bother me but bothered others, and so one day mother got rid of it.
"It's covered in bacteria!" she said, but I didn't know what bacteria were and was simply injured by her betrayal of me and my art.
I had heard clay could be shaped and sculpted, and though to try that. I even knew where clay could be found, but I wasn't allowed there.
I went anyway. I needed clay. I left the house and walked down a gravel road along the muddy old river separating our neighborhood from the fields. I eventually came to the stone bridge, which I wasn't allowed to go past alone. I checked to see no one was around and kept walking ahead, until I came to the wooden bridge I'd sometimes crossed on walks with mother. I crossed it, thumping loudly on the planks to make the troll under it think I was a big ram.
1/2

>>19298010
Unless it is some YA drama crap i doubt they'll be willing to host anon's manuscript if that was the main reason it was refused.

>>19298055
On the other side of the bridge things were quiet. The road climbed a hill and plunged between an impenetrable hedgerow on one side and a thicket on the other. The thicket was on the side of the river, and after a while I dove into it. In the summer nettles would deter me, but it was fall now.
The riverbank was tall, steep and covered in mud and fallen leaves. The river seemed to be so far below, and to a child it was quite a distance. A slip and a tumble might send someone all the way down into the water. I carefully descended. My brother had come down here for some reason a while back and had complained how his shoes and pants had been soiled with clay, so it must've been the right stuff. And I found it!
It was cold and slippery and didn't feel nice to the touch. I clawed at it and tried to make something but it just stuck my hands and wouldn't take shape like my Blu-Tack had. I grew frustrated and angry and decided to climb back up, but I couldn't. The steep slope slipped under my sneakers, my hands couldn't find purchase. There was just no way I could get back up the way I'd come, and if I tried I'd just fall down and into the river. I didn't want that.
The only solution was to seek another way up. I went back toward the bridge, the road hidden from view by the trees somewhere up there.
I stopped. I couldn't go to the bridge, the troll lived there. I turned around. What was the other way?
I walked on the riverbank for a long time, or what felt like a long time to a child. I kept slipping and tripping and my clothes got dirty and wet and my nose was runny.
The trees and bushes grew sparse, and at last I came to a place where the hill was gravelly rather than muddy. I climbed up and started making my way home by the road again. It wasn't as long a trip from this direction. I ran over the bridge without looking back. It was only when I could see my house again that I realized the state my clothes were in. I couldn't go home like this, mom would know I'd been somewhere I shouldn't. I ducked into another thicket and went into the woods, down one of those hidden paths us kids had made that the adults all knew about but we thought they didn't.
That's where I found the dead bird. It was a pigeon, perfectly healthy save for a missing head. The throat was there, stretched out and looking obscene. I could see right down the neck hole. The had was nowhere to be seen.
What had killed the bird? How had it died? Why was the head missing and yet no other signs of predation were present? I was young, but not so young that I didn't know animals ate one another. No animal did this. A person must have. But what manner of person?
In my mind, the only people who knew about these paths in the woods were other kids in the neighborhood. One of them must have done it. But why? Why would anyone kill a pigeon?
Further down the path I found another dead bird. This one had its head but the wings and feet were nailed to a plank of wood.
2/3

Anons, I'm going to college for a CS degree at 23 years old. I have to take English communication modules and write essays and stories. I have not written anything since high-school. I want to fix my grammar/punctuation and write well.

How can I improve these things?

I don't remember any grammar rules like tenses and stuff, but I'm a native speaker.

>>19293680
Lol. Still, good luck

>>19298127
The plank and the nails were things we'd found and hoarded so we could eventually build something out of. As I searched the thicket, I discovered more dead birds. One was a mallard with its legs and beak missing, another was pigeon with an open belly and the insides scooped out.
I didn't like any of it, but I wasn't scared. Children have a wonderful capacity for irrationality, and the troll under the wooden bridge scared me far more than dead birds. I also found a piece of rubber, like a balloon, with snot inside it. That's what I thought it was, at any rate.
Our secret base had a kettle, and I went to find it. I filled it with river water, that somehow always looked cleaner in the kettle than it did in the river, and used handfuls of leaves to wash the caked clay from my clothes as best I could. I was even wetter now, but mom wouldn't know where I'd been, and that was just as well. I poured the rest of the water into the balloon to fill it up. The balloon was transparent (I would've called it a "you-can-see-through) and the snot swirled inside it quite visibly, mixing into the water. I tied a knot around it. A nice water balloon, just waiting for someone to hit. If I threw a water balloon at someone, maybe I could tell mom we'd been throwing them at each other and she'd believe that that's why I was wet. I left the dead birds were they were and went looking for someone to throw my balloon at.
Around the corner of the storehouse I found some older kids. They were in a ring with their backs to me so I snuck in closer. I had to get close enough to throw and hit them but far enough to still run away.
I stopped in my tracks when I saw what they were doing. They had pulled out their wieners and were comparing them.
"Look, I've got the little stubbly things," on was saying.
"I don't," said another.
"You think I've got syphilis?"
"Maybe."
They all turned around with a start when they heard me giggle. I threw my balloon and ran. I heard it splash and ran even harder. Their steps were close by.
I rounded the corner and fell on my ass. I'd hit the solid wall of Izzy, the janitor.
"Hrmhp," he grunted.
Then the boys rounded the corner. One of them still had his wiener flopping out and was holding the remains of my "water balloon".
His expression when he saw Izzy was the second time I experienced something I couldn't express in words.
3/3

>writing scifi story
>friend thinks it's more Southern Gothic than scifi
>he tells me to read Cormac McCarthy
I think Flannery O'Connor affected me alot.

I find the success of the Dune movie heartening. The public has an appetite for rich, interesting fictional universes , the kinds of worlds that can only be built and fully fleshed out by literature. There's something about picking apart the mechanics of a fictional world like a clockwork that people find satisfying. I've always wanted to write something on that sort of scale.

>>19298206
>success of the Dune movie
Last I checked it hasn't even turned a cent of profit. Reminder that marketing budget is just as big as the production budget, and thus the movie is twice as expensive as they tell you on Boxofficemojo

>>19298204
Reading McCarthy is good advice.

>>19297645
>>19298010
>write terrible trash that no one wants
>IT'S A CONSPIRACY BY WOMEN ARRGGHH I HATE WOMEN SO MUCH

meds

>>19298204
>>19298237
With how much people wank McCarthy, I'm starting to regret ever reading his works

>>19298264
>WAAAAH STOP LIKING SOMETHING YOU'RE WANKING YOU'RE WANKING
I just said it's good advice. Calm down.

Advice on writing old women?

>>19298277
Shut up, fanboy. You will never write like McCarthy

>>19298298
And I have never tried to.

>>19298297
the only two major female characters in my story are immortal because i dont like it when women get gross and wrinkly

>>19298206
lol people see blockbuster movies because of their ad campaigns and most of the ticket sales for something like dune came from people that would laugh you out of the room for talking about "the clockwork mechanics of a fictional world". it's just dudes who like that it looks like a video game and women that want to fuck the leading twink. dream on.

>>19298181
Oh shit this was great

>>19298356
Thanks. I made it up as I went along and had no idea what I was doing but it was fun to do anyway.

>>19298297
What exactly are the old women doing in your story?

>>19298431
It's one old woman, and she's going into the hidey-hole her late husband used to hide his moonshine distillery in. She discovers something further down the cave.

>>19298435
Was her husband an alcoholic? Was she drinking with him? What happened to her husband? What was their relationship like.

>>19298546
No
No
He died because people tend to do so in their 80's
They were satisfactorily married for 60 years

>>19298206
Let's be real, how many normies do you think actually followed the plot and worldbuilding from beginning to end? Tons of people love Harry Potter, LoTR, and Star Wars too and many of them couldn't actually tell you why anything in those films happened.

>>19298558
In that case there are a few things to consider. Old people in that kind of age range tend to just go about their business, they probably want to have piece and quite in their old age, she probably expected for her husband to pass away but it still left a whole in her life after a man she lived with her whole life was suddenly not there. Another thing is that old people tend to do things just to keep busy, so stuff like helping around the house working in the garden stuff like that. Generally she's probably feels like she's tired of it all.

>>19298648
She also had an argument the evening before with her son's wife about moving into an assisted living facility. She lives in the countryside you see.

>>19296450
you clearly have no idea what youre talking about
>text
>publisher
damn dude
>>19297235
good luck to them fabricating the other 98,000 words of the novel based on a 2,000 word clip.
>>19297245
wut dat?

>>19298749
>you clearly have no idea what youre talking about
Maybe, but at least I can spell.

>>19298758
yikes cringe fedora

>>19298761
Poems everyone! The lad figures himself a poet!

>>19298768
shiggy diggy

>>19298213
I don't care if it's making a profit, I am glad it is getting made.

>>19298323
You're probably right, I suppose I'm the one who likes to see the fictional world get implemented well. I don't care if the plebs just want to see twinks or flashy explosions if said twinks and explosions happen within a well-realized setting.

>>19298603
Probably few, but there are many dune fans who read the books who thought this was a fateful adaptation. The plebs are good for the money.

>>19298877
>fateful
faithful

>>19298323
Also, just to digress. You do see cultural phenoms like Game of Thrones where people do get absorbed in all the plots and intrigues -- the clockwork-- part of the fiction. They might come for the sword fights, tits, and hot actors, but they stay for the drama and schemes and betrayals. Dune's plot is simpler in most of its details at least in the first book, and as a two and a half hour movie it has much less room to breathe, but there's also that potential.

>>19297235
They wouldn't be able to since my writing has been available on a free platform for a year now and is ongoing. Each book is also pretty much far above what a publisher would even accept, anyway.

>>19286828
you know, my writing doesn't look as bad in this new font as it did in the old one

>>19297235
Joke's on them, 2021 saw one chapter published so far.

I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna be a nano "winner" this year. What should I write though?

you're already a "giga" loser

>>19299546
What do you want to read? Write that.

>>19299817
i don't want to read i want to write!!!

>>19299823
Think of something you would be interested in reading, write that story.

>>19298749
>wut dat?
Submtittable, I have several green boxes.

looks about time for a new thread lads

>>19300160
not yet

Chapter 54 released.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/40361/erased
Just in time for the new thread. The worst sort of impulse I've run into is deciding I want to add an additional chapter in the middle of the book. But three out of the four that I've done I've really been happy with. Its just drafting 3k words and then editing takes me a minimum of three days to do. two to draft and then one to edit. and that's when drafting goes well. There's never enough time in the day, it turns out.

>>19300160
This hasn't even hit the bump limit, newfag

I'm thinking of starting a Wattpad page for my fanfics.

>>19300289
Nah it's full of 12 year olds.

>>19300289
I'd even go as far to suggest Spacebattles over wattpad. Or AO3. Or both, even, never hurts to have multiple eggs in your basket for greater discoverability.

I just remembered I have "The Short Story and the Reader." I will be looking into it next month and read a little every day. It's about 500 pages long and analyzed narrative techniques of lots of short stories by plot, character, setting, time, POV, symbolism, structure, style, beginnings and endings. It's from 1975 so no stories after that time period.
>analyzes Flannery O'Connor's "The Artificial Nigger" twice as well as two of her other stories

thoughts? this is the first poem i've ever written

>>19300319
AO3 is pretty overwhelming as someone who never used markup beforehand. Maybe I'm just a normie though

AO3 is the most fucking annoying website
>TRANNY GAME OF THRONES #ROBB STARK YASS QUEEN #BET YOU DIDN'T THINK CAITLYN WOULD BE JENNER #BOYS WITH TOYS #BRAN WITH RAISINS #EDMURE MORE LIKE EDMUTE #DON'T ASK QUESTIONS BITCH

>>19300482
I automatically tune out stories where the author uses tags to comment or summarise. Chances are they aren't worth reading and they were written by a 14 year old girl. It's also a sign of insecurity, prefacing the project with sarcastic notes about the content before the reader's even judged it themselves.

>>19300319
Never even heard of spacebattles. Is it worth trying out over Royal Road?
Has anybody tried putting their story out on sub stack, or would discoverability be a major hurdle?

>>19300552
Never hurts to put it on multiple platforms as I said. It's hard to say if Spacebattles is good or not from my experience since I made bad decisions one after the other and probably scared away readers from giving it a try. On RR I have like 48k views and some 200 followers, but on SB I only have 21 readers and 2k views.

I have heard that it can get overwhelmingly toxic with politics and stuff like an anon attested to before. But I do not ever venture anywhere outside of my fiction thread. I have zero comments there but I've heard that readers on SB are usually as receptive as Scribblehub sometimes if a lot harsher (again, just from other experiences, since it's a flop on there in my eyes) so if you're looking for critique, it might be worth checking out: it's actually in the subforum desc that you should expect such.

For what it's worth, some of the biggest stories on Royalroad were first posted on SB—Beware of Chicken as a recent notable example. The Fanfiction subforum is typically absurdly fast so much that you'll get bumped off into the later pages in a matter of minutes since it has tons of readers leaving comments on fictions. It's a forum first and foremost, so it lacks many discoverability that other dedicated platforms have (not including Wattpad).

>>19300752
>>19300752
>>19300752
New Thread

How do I learn how to write a decent intro? I get stuck thinking about that, and when I've written things, people always rag on me for how bad the intro is.

>>19300960
Start with either:

Powerful statement
Distant observation
Allegory

>NaNoWriMo next week
Going to try to bite the bullet and writing a novel I've been putting off for years, anyone else have any experience with Nano? The pace seems pretty grueling, but having some structure makes me think I'll finally be able to get over my fear.

>>19298130
Help pls.

No, I watched GoT for the naked chicks.
The plot was some political bullshit involving a bunch of assholes I could care less about.

>>19299546
Write a cheap Western about a cowboy named Biff, and his sidekick Ricochet.

>>19300463
I wrote my novel in markup using Pluma.

do you think that even a shitty plot can be saved with good prose?

>The boy woke up in a pile of ashes. The sky was as the ash around him, a diminishing grey that caused him to blink away the dust surrounding him, as if he had been buried here for quite some time. Around him lay bare nothingness; the only stirr that moved was the tentative movements to sit up slowly and finally rise. His legs were numbing cold, but with a bit of movement they began to gravitate toward warmth, but not without stiffness. His voice was dry and would no doubt choke if he tried to use it, if anything to break the soundless place he found himself in. Then there was a soft strumming. A man with a guitar, in the distance.