/lit/ - Literature

Posted this in the last thread but go no replies. Comments are appreciated.

https://pastebin.com/qZLy4Ky3

>think about writing a sex scene
>listen to this
https://youtu.be/3OElFzo8qr8?t=881

Nevermind. Sex scenes sound absolutely terrible.

>>20055752
Sex scenes rarely feel congruent with the rest of the narrative. It's like a switch is flipped and then 'sex mode' goes on. I dunno how you'd fix that sort of thing.

>>20055700
Who said it was the end of the conflict? This alien isn't the big bad.

>>20055804
I think sex scenes can work if it's only implied and not described. you can only read
>She placed her lips on his penis, gently licking the head repeatedly. Every flick moistened the tip as she allowed her saliva to drip down his rock hard shaft. her mouth opened wider, sliding in the warm flesh deeper into her mouth. His moans enticed her to pleasure him more. Hearing his gasps gave her pleasure. She quickened her pace. Sweeping her tongue alongside the bold thick member. The girl became more emboldened, quickening her pace, squeezing his cock with stiffening pressure between the tongue and roof of her mouth. She wanted more.

Sounds terrible.

>>20055839
If it's just an unbashedly smutty novel it's whatever, but when it's just inserted in it feels like one of those low-budget movies that have softcore topless sex sceens in them that take up 15 minutes and do nothing else.

>>20055814
You did. So you better end it now or I'm going to get real pissed. Only thing worse than a bad ending is none at all. Hurry up now.

>>20055836
There probably should be grammar books and other reference books in the OP. I suppose we take it for granted as we are predominantly English speakers, though even natives can fuck up their grammar. So here are some books.

The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know - June Casagrande
The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English - Roy Peter Clark
The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation - Bryan A. Garner
Writer's Digest Grammar Desk Reference: The Definitive Source for Clear and Concise Writing - Gary Lutz & Diane Stevenson

>>20055752
Sex scenes are fine, just don't be autistic and literal. When characters are at a dinner party eating a great meal you do not say "she cut a pieces off of the steak and then raised it to her mouth pausing just a moment to consider its size before opening her mouth and shoveling it in. She chews 32 times, swallows, takes a sip of wine. She cuts a piece off the steak..." You describe everything but the literal event, you let the reader fill in the autism.

>/wg/ Writing Garbage
You will abhor garbage writing.
You will strive for personal excellence.
You will demand the best writing and read the best books.
You will try every day.
You will make it.

>>20055877
Another reference book that should be owned, I think, is The Oxford Duden Pictorial Dictionary. If you go and download a pdf of this book I think you will see the value. It is organised not alphabetically, but by topic e.g. anatomy, architecture. You wish to know the name of that thing that goes around the doorframe? Go to the architecture section and look at a door and find its name.

Also, in the OP, that 'additional related reads' is useless.

>>20055881
I would normally agree with you, but I also realized there are people that can't visualize anything and need things spelt out to them.

>>20055904
Those people don't read, they watch movies.

>>20055888
fuck you and your trips. now I'm not gonna write at all

>>20055904
Visualisation is a weird thing, because I personally don't visualise a scene as a full thing, even when it's minutely described. I latch onto a few key and some minor details and basically construct mental 'stills' of the scene's moments as it plays out. I also generally have a hard time compositing character descriptions into a visualisation of them, but I'll still have a general enough idea that it can work out.

>>20055930
i think the idea is flawed. In literature you never come across "An apple." as a standalone statement, there is always context and that is what most people "visualize." The character bits into the apple and the readers mouth salivates and they crave an apple. Only autists literally visualize every aspect, the average person takes context into account.

>>20056006
>The character bits into the apple and the readers mouth salivates and they crave an apple
This has never happened to me or anybody I know I think you're just odd there.

>>20055912
I can barely visualise anything, and I read.

Awareness of the scene in >>20055881 isn't like any of the options in >>20055904. It's mostly positional and kinetic, with visuals coming across in broken flashes. I'm aware that she's at a dinner party, that she's sitting in a chair eating a steak, and that other people are there. I can taste the tannins in the wine, which I imagine is a pinot noir, and imagine the feel of the glass in her hand. I can run my mind along the shape of the chair and tell how far away everyone's legs are from touching. This non-visual awareness, which I think of as proprioception, takes little effort to build and feels natural.

When I do get visual flashes of the scene, they're uncontrollable, static, consistent with proprioception but often inconsistent with previous visuals, and gone in a heartbeat. Forcing visualisation takes effort. It's as if the visuals are translated from a native language.

>>20056013
Plotfag? I am saying that the idea evokes an emotion, not an image.
>>20056014
What I was saying is that most people do not feel a need to visualize, they empathize, they feel the emotion. This is what literature is about and you sound normal. Visual memory is not the strong point in humans, it is something that must be trained for most. I can create an entire scene in my head down to the tiniest detail, but I am not really visualizing the literal detail but my reaction to it. I can visualize an apple or a scene if I want to, but what does that accomplish? I think this is just backlash to the increased watching of movies and the like and most people do not realize that when they visualize an apple they are not actually creating an apple in their head, they are remembering an apple from their past.

>>20056047
I personally don't empathise much at all, but I am an odd one myself, so I don't know.

>>20056086
You do, that is what you were doing when you were being aware of those things at the dinner party, you may not empathize with the emotion they feel but you do with what they experience, the tangible. This i the gray area between sympathy and empathy, you are constructing the scene through your own experiences to create a new experience, a hair breadths away from literal empathy and exactly how we teach our children to empathize.

>>20056237
I'm not that guy, I'm >>20055930 different from >>20056014 I don't really 'feel' anything that's described. I mostly just visualise. I can empathise with emotions, but never with sensations or whatever.

>>20056254
Sensation is ultimately closer to sympathy, but once you create an entire scene through those sensations you have ultimately crossed over to empathy because the whole is something which you have never experienced.

>>20055862
He's not, in case you're wondering. This is actually somewhere near the middle of the narrative.

>>20056471
Is just 'the biggest fucker they have coming at the protagonist group' or is it 'they thought this was the big bad but it really is not'?

>>20056482
The former. And calling it a "Group" is a really strong way of putting it. They seem to understand each other, but not enough to consistently "Team up"

>>20056524
Well, the mutual kill aspect of these two being the heaviest hitters on each side putting each other down can keep the stakes relatively the same. As you've described it way back when, it's somebody who probably didn't NEED to die to do this, but felt like he'd lived his life and went out on his own terms? Maybe work with that some.

>>20055278
I have a habit of making a placeholder title and then being so attached to it by the end I keep it anyway

so i just did the math on having writing as a career.
Assuming i self-publish @ 2.99 in amazon I would need to sell 1394 books a month (@ 4.99 it would be 836) for a year to make around 35k a year....
If I break that down to number of books. If I self-publish 3 books a year (which is really pushing it) and they each sell the average of 250, I would still be behind by 4825 sales needed that year. In fact I would need to sell 9 books a year (while meeting that average to make anything resembling a substandard wage). Thats writing around 2100 words a day for a year (not even including editing time).
And this is assuming no costs inputted or the time it would take for all the misc things that are needed to publish a book.
Bros it really doesn't look good.

>>20056543
It's the latter.
And there's no real "Sides" here. Many monsters are outright wild cards.

>>20056639
No one buys books. No one reads. If you are here to make money then woe betide you and your foolishness. There is no money in this. None. This is not a career. It is not a get rich quick scheme. This is a Go Poor Quickly and Forever scheme, and a Be Scorned and Abused By Your Fellow Man scheme and a Fast Track to Being Told to Get a Proper Job scheme.

If you want money get a job or be born to the right parents.

>>20056657
I just want to write and NOT work
how hard can that be?

>>20056663
You have to luck out and get decently popular enough. It CAN happen, but it's unlikely.

>>20056673
maybe i'll just start writing erotica.....

>>20056678
You can get away with a lot lower quality in that but it's also even more of a crapshoot.

>>20056678
New Adult with Booktok. Tik Tok seems to really make surges for new authors. I'm trying to get into the Booktok game

>>20056692
>selling your integrity and soul for money
Hemingway is rolling in his grave

>>20056663
basically impossible. that's the truth of it. almost no one makes any money from this shit. that's why if you aren't writing from the heart and for the passion of the work itself then you are just wasting your time. you do it for free or not at all. because the world doesn't care. this is, unironically and without exaggeration, a dead industry.

>Philip Roth estimates the audience for literary fiction in America to be 120,000
>Nan Talese, Senior Vice president at Doubleday, puts it closer to 4,000

>85% of books sold are nonfiction
>50% of all mass market paperback sales are in the Romance genre

>about 1% of novels submitted to major publishers each year are published
>if you can get an agent and they can get it published you might get a $2k advance
>the average income of a successful author is less than $5000 a year
>an author can expect anything from 3% to 25% of the cover price of a book to be paid to them (after advance is paid off)
>most authors never earn anything except their advance as they don't sell enough copies

Royal Road bandwagoner here.
What do you guys think of putting images on your chapters?

>>20056698
he's trying to make it. It's the easiest way to do it.

>>20056713
I feel like there is an untapped market though.
Although the tv industry and movie industry has taken over the majority of peoples entertainment needs, I still feel like there IS a group of people interested in a world of pure imagination were you can literally make ANYTHING happen.
And since the internet has made today's market of 1 billion+ English speakers open to anybody willing to write and publish, I think the market is bigger then ever (maybe not in the traditional publishing market were the ONLY market is america)
Maybe I'm wrong, but I have the feeling that today's writing market is similar to how the rocket industry was before elon musk came. It's ready to become bigger, its just lacking that one huge thing that changes the meta.
its just so hard to see what that one thing is....

>>20056728
>Maybe I'm wrong

you are

>>20056730
maybe

>>20056718
I go even further

>>20056728
>>20056730
Tehre is an untapped market. I'm telling you guys. #booktok is where you have to go. Sales have increased 10 fold with tik tok. With 3 billion people in the english speaking world, you have to be able to just get 300,000 of them to read your book

>>20055750
this is very good. most of what i have are quibbles.
only important marks are the first "across" and "burrow"
draping a veil implies it's across the thing
burrow is the wrong verb for an action involving water. "[verb] through water, burrowing into silt"
i wouldn't use "skirms" but it's your writing.

>>20056728
>>20056730
>>20056736
>>20056790
We know what the big thing that changes the meta will be. It was actually foreshadowed with video games. It's gambling and paywalled content.
Look at all the video games that make truckloads off DLC, pay to win, lootboxes, gacha, and RNG drop rates. People will grind like crazy as long as there's a known chance they can get what they want. Writing is heading in that direction, I'm 100% convinced, and pic related is why. People fucking FLOODED this kickstarter in days at the chance of getting mystery books. It had nothing to do with Sanderson or anything he's ever written. It was always about the mystery and the gambling. What could it be? Don't you want to pay to find out? Even an ancient game like CS:GO still manages to have a huge and thriving cash community that pays for weapons obtained from lootboxes. Secret books by established authors will unload so much money into author pockets that it's insane no one has thought of it before.
Paywalled content we're already seeing success with Patreon. People will pay for premiums if they think they can get ahead or advance farther faster. Any p2w MMO is like this. If you can get a brand built for yourself, then you start doing lootbox mystery books on top of paywalled content, the $25M or whatever Sanderson made is just the tip of the iceberg.
You watch out these next few years. Shit is going to get super popular with contemporary authors, then everyone will be doing it.

>>20056790
Oh is that all? You just have to become an empty fucking Tiktok NPC shilling yourself there and on every other social hellhole to make below minimum wage? Wow what a goldmine.

Just get a job.

>>20056806
>Just get a job.
a writer must never bow so low

>>20056805
I don't know how good that type of stuff will go with literary fiction though, maybe with fantasy or romance.
But lit is full of too many stuffy old white women to ever use this type of tech

>>20056786
>>>/co/

>>20056806
>Just get a job.
Don't be an idiot. Writing is ALWAYS a secondary hobby/income.

My current job allows me the time and pay to write.

>>20056713
Source?

is my Magnatron author here tonight? I'm in a shitposting mood and need someone to berate.

>>20056847
>berating one of the two people in the thread that actually write
Anon...................................

>>20056850
hey it keeps them on their toes. you're all gluttons for pain and attention.

>>20056713
>the average income of a successful author is less than $5000 a year
Averages are always heavily skewed, by that metric I am a massive success as an author, I made $22k from writing last year and I am still a literal who. Most authors are people who just write occasionally as a sideline and have no interests in making it their sole income, they just write the occasional article on their area of expertise or the like. $2k advance is also probably insanely low, I got $4500 with just having a few short stories published.
>>20056839
I doubt he can give one.

https://www.scribd.com/document/551280851/Unfiltered

Thoughts?

>>20056713
>the average income of a successful author is less than $5000 a year


Oh good, I doubt I'll make much more than $2000 this year, so I guess I'm doing OK.

>>20056805
I know NFTs have a justifiably garbage reputation at the moment, but the tech along with crypto wallet/social media integration could lead to some really interesting innovations related to book publishing in the coming years - things like tracking your book purchases/books completed via social media or matching you to people on dating services based on books read. Or allowing the resale of digital copies with a small kickback to the creator.

whats /wg/ net income from writing?

>>20056867
I lie on my resume so about 90,000 USD. Does that count?

Which sentence is better?

>Adah’s eyes grew heavy from her inebriation

or

>The heavy eyes of inebriation closed the window to Adah's soul.

or

>Adah stumbled about, her eyes closed from the self-induced drunken state.

>>20056872
third

>>20056872
Your focus should be on how Adah is affected by her inebriation so I suggest a passive voice sentence like
>Her eyes grew heavy from her inebriation

>>20056867
I've made about $550 in my entire life from writing. But I only started like last October.

>>20056872
Inebriation caused her eyes to close.

>>20056867
$0

This fucking beta reader is useless. I'm ready to just publish it and let people be disappointed in my book.

>>20056897
post it here. I may give useful advice or I may just list insults in roman numeral form.

>>20056866
I had thought about that too, where your book is published as a series of NFT pages with each new resale giving some money back to the originator. It would actually be really neat to see which pages demand the highest value and why. I'd place my bet on a long-awaited sex scene or particularly stirring monologue passage.

>>20056872
You shouldn't mention the inebriation at all. All you have to do is show her drinking and then show her stumbling around and getting sleepy. The reader will then happily fill in the blank. This, I feel, is one of the things people misunderstand about "show don't tell". It's not only about description or concrete language but about allowing the reader to construct the narrative in their mind without unnecessary interference from the author, as well as to use that natural inclination to create surprise.

>>20055839
This, something as simple as one naked character slipping into another's bed when there has been some build up is all that is necessary. When I read a detailed sex scene, I just assume the writer has jerked it a couple of times to that scene

>>20056918
This is a very valid point, if you were to see someone coming out of a club slurring their words and stumbling about, your natural assumption would be they are drunk, you wouldn't need someone to tell you this.

>>20056921
I usually skip sex scenes. They're always just these end of chapter fillers. But I only read airport novels so that could be it.

>>20056918
I like that advice.

This is what I have so far.

>>20056932
Pronouns and names do not need to be repeated unless you switch to a different character, work on sentence structure.

>>20056870
no, unless you count imaginary money as real money. But as you can see in this mathematical graph real money is on this axis and imaginary money is on that axis, so they are in reality perpendicular to each other.

>>20056921
I like a little bit of sauce in my sex scenes. Something just enough to spark the engine, but not explicit, and not cop out fade to black. Like
>He was on top of her then, hands pulling clothes from his body while hers eagerly undid her own. In moments they were half naked, laughing at the awkward few pieces that stubbornly refused to let go, and in the next their arms and legs interlocked and they rocked back and forth together, making love and sweating, until he was too exhausted to thrust anymore and she was spent and satisfied.

>>20056945
jokes on you I don't understand graphs or perpendicular

t. nurse and retired infantry man

You will never be a real writer. You have no talent, you have no insight, you have no focus. You are a delusional man twisted by vanity and self-deceit into a crude mockery of literary potential.

All the “validation” you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you. Your parents are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “friends” laugh at your awkward "wit" behind closed doors.

Audiences are utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of literary analysis have allowed readers to sniff out pseuds with incredible efficiency. Even hacks who “sell” seem uncanny and unnatural to a reader. Your sentence structure is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a few people to open your KDP sample, they’ll turn tail and bolt the second they get a glimpse of your banal, droll prologue.

You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be ok, but deep inside you feel the depression creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight.

Eventually it’ll be too much to bear - you’ll buy a rope, tie a noose, put it around your neck, and pull a DFW, still mistakenly hoping until the last second that your suicide will lend a sense of depth to your work. It won't. Your parents will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to think up compliments for your latest short story. They’ll bury you with a headstone marked with your birth name, and no passerby for the rest of eternity will ever know that you used to refer to yourself with two first initials. Your body will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a selfpub that is unmistakably mediocre.

This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.

>>20056872
All three are bad.

>>20056876
>>20056879
>>20056894
And you three should not be giving writing advice.

>>20056918
Listen to this guy.

>Her eyelids grew heavy
Is all you need, in proper context

>>20056958
I'll give advice when I want to who I want. I'll give it more often now.

>>20056956
all i do is write smut so does this still apply to me? I think not!

>>20056958
post something you've written so I can make fun of it you fucking pleb.

>>20056956
>Thousands of years of literary analysis have allowed readers to sniff out pseuds with incredible efficiency.
bold of you to assume we bother pretending.

>>20056967
based and pornographypilled. how many synonyms for "vagina" can you list?

>>20056972
just cunt, and i use it exclusively.

>write simple sentence
NO YOU DUMB FUCK ADD SOME MORE DETAILS
>write detailed sentences and paragraphs
NO YOU DUMB FUCK JUST WRITE A 5 WORD SENTENCE AND GET ON WITH IT.

I'm so confused.

>>20056932
does she need to scratch her crotch? I never scratched my crotch when I'm drunk.

>>20056978
Writers are spergs, yes. But if you truly are confused, unironically read some books you want to write more like.

>>20056978
do what you want. the plebs that stand around giving advice haven't shared their work with you, so why should you trust them?

>>20057002
because i'm an amateur writer and others here have more experience and knowledge than I do.

>>20057007
Post something you've written and I'll attempt to give you a thoughtful response. Lots of people are going to say a lot of different things. Best thing you can do is collect as much data as possible.

Nothing too long. Don't be a dick.

>came up with yet another character whose only purpose is to have a tragic death
How do I make it not that predictable?

>>20057007
that's dumb. experience and knowledge are overrated. the first time doing a thing is highly prized in every facet of society. that also applies to the method/prose/form/narrative of writing. no one rereads exact translations of the illiad by different authors, they search for ones with different prose. anyone who says otherwise is a lying pseud.

>>20057020
MAGNATRON????? is that you???? I know it is. I wrote some more for you. no need to be coy, tell me you want to hear it. to read it. to steal it and pass it off as your own.

>>20057018
i'm literally this faggot
>>20056932

>>20057030
Sorry, fren, I'm not Magnatron PBUH.

>>20057032
NTA but I'm following your progress, good luck. I'd help too if I wasn't going to sleep.

>>20057035
Damn. Fine I'll bully you for a while instead. Tragic deaths are pretty dumb unless you're an excellent writer. But give me an idea of what you're working on. I'm drunk and listening to bad music and too frightened to sleep.

>>20056978
What's that quote about this? Something along the lines of "when readers tell you something's wrong, they're usually correct, but when they tell you how to fix it, they're nearly always wrong?"

>224k words in today
>I also mad pizza

>>20057083
>224k words
how the fuck do you write THREE entire novels in one day?

>>20057083
>made
thank the lord i get to edit my writing unlike my posted postables

>>20057083
nice dude. very nice. tell me about your pizza. tell me about its toppings. how long it took to make

>>20057092
It was very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very hard

>>20057083
>I also mad pizza

Oh man, I love to come home from work with a freshly mad pizza so I can relax and crack open a bear.

>>20057092
1k words written of a work totaling 224k words. Hence 'ín' rather than 'written'.

>>20057107
tell me about the pizza you fucking poser

>>20057092
by accidentally putting a 'k' after the 4.

>>20057083
>>20057105
where you guys getting your mad pizza? places around here only do sad pizza

>>20057117
At the Mad Pizza restaurant.

There super eats.

>>20057032
Could you please drop this in pastebin or as a comment to make my life easier?

>>20056867
I could probably make a lot more money from drawing furry cub porn for commissions, but I don't want that connected to my bank account.

So I just draw that for free and write for peanuts.

>>20057132
If he had done that I would have offered more than just the comment about pronoun repetition. Really did not feel like retyping shit to go into depth.

>>20057130
That says Mod pizza, clearly they just do ones with semen sauce

>>20057146
That's a typo

>>20057048
Bully me and my greentext then.
>fantasy animeshit story
>MC is the bastard child of the head of a soon to be defunct noble house and the wife of his stepfather
>gets adopted into the house to fulfill his mother's last will after she died giving birth and his dad died (work in progress)
>stepfather has had it with the MC for years since he is a reminder of his wife's infidelity, caused her death, and is also the most talented of his sons
>MC has a childhood friend (male) who is almost on equal footing with him except that he is a much more honorable man than the MC
>MC does believe his friend is, despite his position in life, a better man than him
>this guy is also a knight working for the MC's stepfather
>there will be a point in the story where the MC calls out his stepfather for running their house into the ground
>friend guy challenges the MC to a duel for the honor of his master
>duels to the death are still in fashion in the setting
>the stepfather sees this as a chance to get rid of the MC as he is confident that he will lose the duel
>they have a pretty even duel that ends with the death of the MC's friend
I do want this guy to be a recurring character before his death but I do wonder if making him such a good guy will be too much of a death flag.
I want to make the point with it that the stepfather's hatred has robbed him of a good ally, the MC of a friend, and the world of a good man but I also wonder about that foreshadowing his death unintentionally.

>>20057161
>conversation music: Not Even Jail by Interpol and Black Star by Radiohead

why would a mans (honorable) best friend, fight him to the death, to defend the honor of his friends step father (who is apparently dishonorable)?

also, based on your scenario the friends death is not the stepfathers fault. no one could logically assume that. so is the hero a hothead? an emotional wreck driven to irrational actions? if he was, he should just kill his stepfather. if he's not, he shouldn't kill his friend.

>>20057095
The cheese glistens with its released fat and that of the pepperoni sauteed underneath its cloying embrace. The moisture from the onion, capsicum and mushroom wars with the viscous golden topping and the doughy base as the tomato sauce it sits astride barely contains their molten melange of flavor.
Gliding through the air as it escapes the oven on the incensed tray of justice. Its making is a long forgotten memory owing to its 20 grueling minutes of 250 degree hellish tempering. Its creator eyes it greedily as it unceremoniously removes the indignity of the simmering tray to lay its naked and steaming conglomerate on a piece of hew'n wood before i mercilessly begins to rend it apart with a sharpened implement of steel.

That's all you get cos its getting cold.

>>20057177
nice digits. "incensed tray of justice" doesn't belong. I know you wanted to add it in but it doesn't fit. save it for something else. 250 degrees what? 250 F is too cold and C seems absurdly hot.

Also how do you cut it into pieces? do you have a pizza cutter? or do you use a kitchen knife? or maybe a pocket knife?

how does it taste. does it burn the roof of your mouth as you bite in? does sauce or cheese dribble onto your motley beard? onto your t shirt?

I want more. Pizza is the lords gift to man. And you should do it justice.

How do you write violence in a way that's scary?

So long as the Suzerainty needed ultranationals dead without so-called journalists catching wind of it, he would retain a livelihood. It seemed these days the entire world was pockmarked with new DMZs and no-go zones; the global order had missed only one step and had landed on its ass. The spirit of internationalism was reduced to a pantomime as leaders signed cease fire documents with the NGOs without ever suspending fire missions even for a day. The new Peninsular “Region of Compromise”, the Khananese Zone of (Nominal) International Occupation, the Perifallian Cease Fire Line, the Occident-backed New People’s National Republic of Suzuland. He had been in all of them. He was there when the Philagaen People’s Army had retaken the oilfields of Kur from terrorists on behalf of the Global Banking Organization, and he had been there in the backstreets of New Rattendam helping the Coalition of Nations to coverup the loss of an RADATOM-TOPSECRET dataset. They gave him AEROTEK ceramic armor and FFAMPYRE infrared night vision. They gave him a rifle made in a laboratory with ammunition that cost 200 Krona a round. If he asked for it, they provided. White phosphorus grenades. Cannisters of nerve agents created in underground laboratories unknown to the Suzerain. Before one job in Camilta he had the Coalition Warship JTF-Longsword launch a PRKSET missile at the public housing tower next door to his mark. 546 dead in a smoking crater. They had the balls to claim it was a gas leak. The noise of every emergency responder in the city arriving on the scene masked the sound of his team’s fully automatic room clearing next door. 13 dead Communards who had been organizing the province’s general strike. Their deaths made only the fifth page of the news. The new world.

>>20057195
High stakes

>>20057195
If the subject of violent action is weak, then all violence is scary. Deep within, a dangerous man has forsaken his own safety and cares not for the threats or actions of other men. Only action drives him.

For all others the threat of looming violence is what actually drives their fear. "I need to get the police here or the man standing outside will kill me." Violence itself is confusing, one moment you have control of your own motion, the next a stranger is limiting you, destroying sensation and freedom. Go watch the end of Scream 1

>>20057204
Too many pronouns and "tech" descriptors is the biggest problem with sci fi. No one really cares how the Star Gate works; they just want to watch Jack kill Gou'ld. The same concept applies to writing.

>>20057144
>>20057132
okay

https://pastebin.com/3XxrJfZB

>>20057190
i was gonna extrapolate and improve it, but i realize i've done my words for the day, you seem sufficiently motivated though.

>Show me what your Za is made of.

>>20057174
>why would a mans (honorable) best friend, fight him to the death, to defend the honor of his friends step father (who is apparently dishonorable)?
I wouldn't, as of now, describe the stepfather as dishonorable. He is incompetent and is still hurt but other than the spat he has with the MC he is not some kind of terminally corrupt noble or anything.
As for the friend, it's what he believes is the right thing to do. Part of what makes him honorable is that he believes in the vow (work in progress) he must follow as a knight to a tee. This is obviously a flaw, because even if I want him to be outstanding I don't want him to be perfect.

>also, based on your scenario the friends death is not the stepfathers fault. no one could logically assume that.
Well, yeah. I'd say it is for the most part the friend's fault, but had the stepfather overlooked the MC's origins and been less resentful it wouldn't have had to happen.

>so is the hero a hothead? an emotional wreck driven to irrational actions?
Forgot to mention this, sorry, but part of the set up for that scene is that the MC has just figured out that his stepfather has been giving him assignments that would've gotten him killed on purpose and after some bad-mouthing of the girl he likes, he gets to a boiling point that makes him go off on his stepfather.
He is usually known for being cool headed.

>if he was, he should just kill his stepfather. if he's not, he shouldn't kill his friend.
Well, if his friend were to find out afterwards he would want to avenge him.

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my dumb ass, anon.
It's a pretty new idea but it's nice to get feedback even now.

>>20057204
The saturation of tech-speak definitely makes it an eyeball-full to read, but I guess that's the style.

Your writing has some serious momentum and charisma, though I wouldn't have the endurance to get through an entire story this dense.

>>20057254
There is one more paragraph written in that oversaturated style, and then it reverts to something more natural (fewer proper nouns)

>>20057204
Is this an outline? because I can see this story expanded into a very long series. Post Apocalyptic stories never get old.

>>20057204
This is Disco Elysium fanfiction, right? I don't mind parts of the jargon, particularly the callouts to the original work. I'd drop it four or five paragraphs in if the technobabble stayed at that intensity.

As a somewhat-native English speaker, how do you get rid of awkward sentences? Do you just read them out loud to hear if they sound right or not?

>>20057269
Not quite. I played Disco Elysium when it came out and definitely enjoyed it, but I don't know what references you're talking about besides the terms Suzerainty or Communard (neither were intended as references, but I guess I wouldn't rule out the possibility DE is why they appeared in my head when I wrote it)

>>20057207
I mean the violence in of itself. I have some really fucking graphic shit in this story.
>A character gets his jaw torn off and his neck is snapped
>Another guy gets his jugular vein bitten out before he's torn in half by a water cannon.
>Someone's upper torso ends up getting blown the fuck up
This story is incredibly grisly, and I want to make that scary. What language would one use?

>>20057264
First paragraph of a short story

>>20057177
>unceremoniously
I hate this word. It's an inherently pseud word. I've never seen it used well in a sentence.

>>20057298
""'textured language""" is a meme ignore the pseuds here who push it

>>20056872
Adah stumbled about [the location] in a blind, drunken stupor.

>>20057368
textured language is just when you change to a different font lol

>>20057270
You seem not to be asking how to get rid of but instead how to detect awkward sentences. It takes practice. You don't need to hear them out loud, but you do need to gauge how it fits into the prose and if it contributes to the whole.

>>20057363
I'm gonna unceremoniously fuck your ass.

>>20057373
Isn't braille just textured language?

>>20057392
As if that's any different from ceremoniously fucking a dude in the ass.

>>20057395
braille is more of a texture than a language. a languaged texture.

>>20056932
>>20057242
Ok, I'm gonna go line-by-line. The main problem here is the positioning of the scene is really vague and we never really get inside Adah's head. You just tell us that she's feeling a certain way. The scene can be made stronger by firmly establishing where Adah is and what she looks like.

>Adah poured another cup of wine.
Good
>The steam from the meat bowl dissipated as the minutes ticked by.
The image is strong, your way of getting there is iffy. The way it's worded the steam seems to dissipate all at once. “minutes ticked by” is cliché
>Drinking was more important.
Good
>There she sat, slumped over the chaise,
IMO you slump 'in' or 'on' a chaise. I don't understand what 'slumped over' looks like
>barely dressed with legs spread apart.
'barely dressed' is vague. Be specific so we can see her. Describe what she is/is not still wearing.
>She scratched her groin,
gross, but ok
>detached from the motivation that drove her earlier in the week.
Too abstract. Be more specific. Show us her thoughts of demotivation, don't tell
>Another sip of wine filled her head with the inconceivable nonsense of picturesque dancing flares, jolts, and waves.
I like the image, but wording is awkward. Is this really what being drunk feels like? Strike 'picturesque'.
>The case of disappearing Knights was going nowhere.
Good
>The scene of the crime and Thurstan’s eulogy for her missing colleagues replayed in her head over and over.
She is remembering two separate scenes here. The crimescene and the eulogy. Don't lump them together in one sentence.
>The urgency to solve the case frustrated her.
Kind of weird wording. Play around with this to make it feel more urgent. Even something like “And she had the Commissioner breathing down her neck” might make it feel more real to the reader.
>Even a single lead would satisfy her; anything to move the case forward.
Good

CONT

>>20057363
It's good for short sentences if you're trying to stress a point. But otherwise yeah it can feel like a lazy descriptive copout or just a filler word.

>>20055711
This is a throwaway story that I'd appreciate constructive feedback for.
https://pastebin.com/1Zui1BZT
>>20056872
The first.
>>20056932
>In a cry of exhaustion ... adorned her apartment
This line is overwritten in my opinion. You could convey this rather simple action with fewer words.
>>20057204
I like this world and the events happening in it, but it might be a bit too expository for some people. Have you thought about introducing it slowly through dialogue or someone reading a newspaper/article/document?
>200 Krona a round.
I would prefer "per round" but it's not that important.

>>20057403
>In a cry of exhaustion, the knife slammed onto her dinner.
Confusing. The knife didn't slam itself. Try: “She screamed in frustration and slammed the knife into her dinner”
>Pieces of rice, meat, vegetables, and juice exploded all over,
Reorder this list. It sound like pieces of juice exploded all over.
>landing not only on Adah, but scattered across the floor, including between the crevices that outlined the cushions and furniture that adorned her apartment.
This is ACTION. Keep it fast paced, cut out unnecessary words. Use strong action verbs. Try: “spraying all over Adah's pants, scattering across the floor, and getting into the crevices of her apartment”
>The Knight groaned, realizing what just happened.
I'm just not sold this is how someone reacts to an outburst of rage. Doesn't feel natural.
>She stumbled with her glass in hand, not noticing the extra mess she made trying to find a cloth to clean.
She just teleported from sitting down on the chaise to standing up. We missed a step.

>Her black bob bounced in unison with the pieces of the brown grain falling on the floor.
Weird. I can't imagine it.
>Returning with cloth in hand,
returning where? The chaise?
>Adah’s elbow was sandwiched between her head and cushion as she lazily pushed the bits together.
Ah, so she's laying down on the chaise. I misunderstood the positioning of Adah in the scene.
>Adah stumbled about,
Now she's standing up again?!?
>her eyes closed from the self-induced drunken state.
'Self-induced' is redundant. We already know it's self-induced.
>She never took another bite of the ox bowl.
Good ending.

You basically have a character sitting around drinking and thinking about the case and how stressed she is, until her outburst, but we never really get much of her thoughts. Start the "camera" by establishing the scene, what the room looks like, how's she's sitting, what she's wearing etc. Then bring the camera into her head and let us hear her thoughts about the case. Then bring the camera out and give us the action of her slamming her knife and making a mess.

Focus on definite, unambiguous descriptions. Your writing right now is too vague. It doesn't feel physically real.

Don't get discouraged. Keep up the good work :)

>>20057177
>pepperoni sauteed
Pepperoni isn't sauteed. It's baked.
>underneath its
Unclear antecedent. Consider revision. Also the pepperoni is typically found above the cheese.
>cloying
Cloying refers to sweet flavors, not salty.
>gliding ...
Incomplete sentence. Immediate revision needed. Also the image is of a pizza, gliding ala a paper airplane or delivery drone, when we both know that is probably not the case.
>long forgotten
Hyphen needed.
>250 degree
Hyphen needed. Good image with hellish tempering.
Final sentence confirms the awkward choice of trying to anthropomorphize the nonliving and immobile pizza. No apostrophe in hewn. Minor errors follow. Consider revision.

>>20057363
It's okay for "unceremoniously dumped on the floor" or "unceremoniously fired," where it emphasises lack of dignity. No idea how a pizza is meant to do anything ceremoniously in the first place, let alone unceremoniously remove indignity.

>give story to 2 friends (220k words)
>one barely reads it
>one basically binges the whole thing in a week and most likely wants to read volume 2 once I make it
>generally very positive feedback and good help with typos and weird flow in some sentences
I was worried at first when the first guy didn't even read the thing, but reading that much goes well beyond just being polite because you're friends with someone so I'm gonna assume I didn't fuck up terribly. Feels good to have written something which is entertaining to another person. At least I know now that I haven't Dunning-Kreugered myself into thinking I know how to construct a plot.

>>20057403
>'barely dressed' is vague. Be specific so we can see her. Describe what she is/is not still wearing.

By this, can I just put she was in a shirt and underwear?

Or do I have to describe everything like:

>the shirt as being too large, with the opening falling over her shoulders. Her panties were spun from the finest silks. She scratched her crotch, wrinkling the soft fabric that covered her genitals.

>>20057403
>>20057417
thank you anon.

There's nothing more fun than being actively at work on a story. It fills me with happiness.

>>20057487
The best feeling is when you finish one thing and can finally focus on the others its been taking time away from

>>20057470
Tell us more about the genitals. Is she an innie? An outie? How moist? And how big is the clitoris? Red vs. pink? Is she hairy? What color? If not, is there stubble? Razor burn? Does her vulva release a smell when she opens her legs?

>>20057491
It's covered with a cloth anon

>>20057501
Get in the head of the character. Is it itchy? Is she scratching for any particular reason? Does she have a venereal disease? Is she prepped for sex despite potentially having no suitors immediately available? How fertile is she? How would she respond to being called a slut?

>>20057470
I've found published authors give us one or two key details and let us fill in the rest.

So, something like
>she lounged on the chaise in a stained t-shirt and her panties
is fine. You don't need to specify every attribute of every article of clothing.

>>20057522
Wrong. We need to know if it's laced, cotton, silk, thong, striped, low rise, color, wet or not, are pubes sticking out? Is it a fresh pair? Does she masturbate with her panties on or off, fat % ratio? What is she masturbating to?

>>20057548
you are a boring person

>>20057521
Do we need to know if she likes anal too?

>>20057559
No, I'm not into anal. Intercrural and we have a deal.

>>20057569
>Intercrural
is that a thigh job?

>>20057574
Exactly.

If the 2010s was about 80s nostalgia caving in on itself, then what do the 2020s hold? Can we expect an aesthetic shift away from the 90s or one that cum guzzles it? I can see grunge coming back quickly.

>>20057673
We're already accelerating past the 90s to 00s nostalgia. "Back when the internet was good, before phones and social media."

Anyone write physically? I usually feel a lot more inspired to write with a pen in my hand

As an exercise I wrote something with dialogue but no quoted speech. I don't know if it benefits this particular story but paraphrasing is a tool I don't use enough.
I'd love feedback (on any aspect).

I've been procrastinating my novel since last year and there's still so much to do. No deadline, I'm just worried someone's gonna publish my idea before I do and these 110k words will be in vain.

>>20056839
Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing by Lance Olsen

>>20057878
The uniqueness of your idea doesn’t matter. What makes the book special or interesting is your voice. The only way to manifest it into reality is to write. You could read 100 different versions of Dog discovers Aliens, and they would all be different.

>>20057897
It absolutely does matter when it comes to traditional publishing. Some ideas just have a spark- marketability and a good hook. And they’re the first or one of the first to do it.

>>20057945
Tell me what your idea is and I’ll tell you if it has a spark or not.

>>20057964
Oops I forgot to say I’m not that anon lol I’m sorry. I don’t want to hijack the discussion :/

>>20056798
Thank you for looking at it and for the edit.

>>20057416
I like it, you managed to keep my attention and make me curious.

The florid descriptions feel at odds with the age and naïveté of the viewpoint character.
You could lean more into the fact that the narrator is older now and remembering his past. Narration like "I fell into the comfort of a dream which I hoped was a good one" implies little distance from the events.
Or you could go the other way, dumb down the narration and keep it rooted in the now—that would be a larger change, but it would strengthen the mood of being pulled along and only having half an idea what's going on.

Nitpicks:
>Ned laughed, then conceded. “But they do take a lot to kill.”
"Conceded" doesn't connect to that quotation properly.
>“Well, we’d better get out of your hair,” Dan the leader spoke softly but the others followed his every word.
"spoke softly" is doing double duty as a speech tag and a general description. I don't think that works, grammatically.
>[...] The dark bags that underlined his eyes showed years of restlessness.
If this whole description is nothing new, then why is it salient to the narrator? Isn't he used to it?
>a black pistol
I'd just write "the pistol", this almost sounds like he has a collection. (And here too, I think the color wouldn't be salient because of familiarity.)
>was a mystery to me, until I later found out
I'd write:
>was a mystery to me. I would later find out
It more clearly separates it from the current events.
>yet it came to be one of the most life-changing things I ever experienced
I think it's stronger without this.
>covered in long locks of curly hair, not unlike the one from my dream
I don't think you need to make the connection to the dream explicit, particularly if you also describe the hair as golden.
>Tears rolled down my face.
>“What is it?” I cried.
I'd merge these into a single paragraph.

>>20058104
Hey, thanks for the feedback and glad you picked up on my mistakes. I'll edit them out now.

>>20057363
She broke up with me unceremoniously. It was 11pm on a work night and after a quick exchange of text messages I discovered that I would literally never see her again. I'd thought things were going well between us.

>tons of enemies to lovers
>Barley any lovers to enemies

Which is the better trope?

>>20058476
Enemies to lovers is rarely done well

>>20058697
It just feels like a trope a lot of people getting into fiction like now, kind of like found family. I like found family, for sure, it's fairly universal in its appeal, but it does seem like everybody wants to do those.

I live to use World Anvil to manage my world building, which is a pivotal part of any sci-fi and fantasy story. You don’t want your story to seem to take place in a world that’s not fleshed out, do you? It’s free, but you can also subscribe for some extra functionality.
https://www.worldanvil.com/

>>20057851
A couple of times it feels like you may as well have just had quoted speech ("it had already happened" for example), you're not always taking advantage of the brevity that you get out of that style.

>>20058769
Is this a shill post or.

>>20057262
My understanding is the general rule for the first few paragraphs is avoid overloading with proper nouns. I get that's the intention is this is more important high-level speak, but it's an immediate turn-off to be greeted with so many new terms out the gate because a reader will think they're expected to know all of these.

>>20058786
Or it’s to share a valuable resource which can help bring your writing to life! I like the family tree function so that I can go back at least five generations for my characters, after all how can you figure out where they’re going if you don’t know where they’ve come from?

Honest-Tilki's carpet cleaning was in the lower city. You never go down into the lower city alone, not at night. I had to go back to the office to pick up a couple friends, ones who were always waiting for me.
My office was on the second floor, right above a fortune teller's place. The Madame was out of town seeing family and had given me a spare key to go water her plants. Can't recall if I ever did it. My office had no plants.
I had a little trouble with the lock again. Landlord refused to fix the damn door. I stepped inside and tried to turn on the lights. Nothing. My foot rustles over something on the ground. I picked it up, an envelope. Had to go to the window to read it. A letter from the electric company, they were turning off the juice due to unpaid bills.
I crumpled the letter and dropped it into the garbage can, where it met an impassable hill of previous bills and other waste, which forced it out and on to the floor. I really needed to empty that out some time. A secretary's job, only I couldn't pay for one.
My misfortunes continued as I put my coat over the back of the chair and it fell off. Couldn't be bothered to pick it up. I sat in the chair, which groaned under my bulk. It always did, more and more as that bulk grew. Glue and belts held it together well enough.
I opened a desk drawer to find my friends. Both were metal on the outside but one contained things to put in other people, the other stuff to put in me.

ITT a bunch of triggered faggots

>>20058825
Congratulations, you've described 4chan.

Is anyone actually writing a novel? All these months and nobody posted even a first draft

>>20058832
If you post your book for free on 4chan, nobody will ever pick it up for publishing.

>>20058841
Also what would be the point of posting it here? You’ll either be ignored or a troll like you will shit all over just because you’re an insecure little faggot who can’t write.

>>20058860
>troll like you
I just posted text here>>20058820
No bully pls

You’ll never be as good a writer as him. He invented a whole world with history and languages for his books. Now THAT’S world building.

>>20058772
Thank you, that's a good point. I'm going to play around with it some more.

Are there any good discord servers for writers you know one that aren’t fully of retarded liberal faggots I’m sick of discussing pronouns and sensitivity readers but I also don’t like you assholes you’re worse than niggers

>>20058874
I don't have a good idea of what you SHOULD do instead (personally I'd only use this quoteless dialogue thing for either a small story or a specific segment to convey some notion of what's being said not mattering as much as what's going on), but for the example I pointed out, you'd probably have to rewrite it to something like passively describing his complaints or some such.

>>20058841
F Gardner did well

>>20058905
Did he?

>>20056932
This Adah story is hilarious. I swear I read excerpts of her being badass girl boss, masturbating, fucking her brother, bashing the skull of some orbiter, being dutiful to her boss, and even taking a shit.

This character is a complete fucking mess. It's as if you took all the tropes on the world and mixed it into one character

>>20058867
setting the bar awfully low aren't you anon?

>>20058973
Still above any of you.

>>20058976
that's a fucking awful comparison, that's like saying vomit tastes better than shit.

Anybody got any good writing youtubers? I need some new people to make fun of.

>>20058989
Not that anon but it does, it does!

>>20058996
Depends what you ate.

Here's something we haven't done in a while: Make a backstory for any of these characters in a single post worth of length

>>20056948
No, your male characters never have sex. When it gets there, their dicks just don't get hard.

>You’ll never be as good a writer as him. He invented a whole planet with toilet plunger hands with eyes that send Billy Pilgrim through time and space, all within the traumatic flashbacks to the Bombing of Dresden which he experienced first hand. Now THAT’S historiographic metafiction postmodern apotheosis.

>>20059004
Rani wants to rape Laylana. In order to defend herself she summons all sorts of monsters and the undead, however, each monster gets easily defeated by Rani. Rani fucks the undead back to life and the monsters to death.

>>20059020
Sounds like a porn game /h/ would like

>>20059004
>Drakeblast was a pirate crewman of no repute when alive, until a dragon attacked his ship, during which the rest of his crew died, he only survived by grabbing a barrel of gunpowder and kicking it down the dragon's throat, which lost him his leg and his life, but dragons do strange things when they die, and explosives hardly help, so he came back to being along with much of his old crew, hailed as a hero and ready to become something more without flesh holding him back

>>20058867
Even though his books are objectively derivative and trite or whatever, I have fond memories of reading them as a kid. I'd even say they were critical to shaping my taste.
I liked that the world was magical, but still presented as fundamentally rational. The magic acknowledges conservation of energy, people talk about vacuums and atoms, and even spooky ancient as-required-by-the-plot magic is unknown rather than unknowable. It does this without just jerking off the power of science: there's a funny passage where someone starts speculating based on the belief that coral is a rock.
It was shallow and poorly executed, but I was nine years old. I didn't have anything to compare it to.
I'm glad those books exist and that they became popular enough to be translated into my native language.

>>20059004
Cisya was a mage in Rani's forest kingdom that got kidnapped by Laylana who wanted to make elf zombies. Cisya convinced them to spare her life by telling them the secret tunnels so they let her go. After taking over the elf castle, Laylana humilliates the queen by making her living soldiers bang her in front of the captives.

Can a good writer use passive voice well or is it always a no-no?

>>20059239
It's not really something to use all the time, but it can be used for effect in some ways.

>>20059239
Everyone uses passive voice. Anti-passive voice is a mid-wit meme, it's a useful way if speaking/writing depending on the context.

Look up Pullum on Passive Voice, either the paper or the YouTube series for a nice breakdown.

>>20059239
It can be unnoticeable at times, but passive sentences are almost always worse than more actively worded alternatives.

>>20059279
>Everyone uses passive voice.
Really? I know people like McCarthy have passive voice in about 2% of all their books but it’s quite negligible.

>>20059279
>Look up Pullum on Passive Voice
NTA but thanks for the rec

>>20059324
McCarthy is an outlier. Plenty of other well known writers use and advocate for passive voice

>>20058765
what the hell is found family?

>>20059370
Alright thanks. I find the Pullum videos interesting, but I wonder why passive voice is still relatively low in books. The highest I can find is 10% or so in books.

I find it so easy to visualise scenes and dialogue in my head and then it just fucks off as soon as I sit down to write it. O, to be a retard.

>>20057130
Hey I know this place, it’s in Leeds

>>20059354
For sure, two anons were talking about him a few threads back and he gave me so much clarity. Probably even sticky worthy.

>>20059324
Is Cormac a meme among creative writing teachers or something? I had this exact conversation when this topic came up before so just curious why he is always the first one brought up.

>>20059427
Use your brain. I'd imagine it's when a group of loner characters find each other and create a makeshift family. It's a cozy trope.

>>20059427
A group of friends who become close-knit enough to be more like family than simply friends. Typically members of the group will often be estranged or distant from their actual families.

how do you guys get the lay of the land? I need to see what tropes/genres are in trend right now

>>20059495
Look at new stuff that's popular, I think is one way. See what's being discussed, see why people like new things. Being a trendchaser may be a bit soulless but if some of the tropes that're in vogue inspires you, go.

>>20059461
He might be memed by CRWR teachers because I think he’s just upheld as a good writer that bridges “literary” fiction with popular genres and modes like westerns and cinema. It’s their ultimate fantasy for themselves as writers. He just happens not to use passive voice much so I thought of him.

>>20059429
I can't speak to the accuracy of the algorithm that generates those estimates but note that nobody is saying to ONLY or even primarily speak in passive voice. But passive voice is a tool to focus the audience's perspective by making irrelevant background characters invisible or leaving some mystery. Great for scene transions as well. All I'm saying is to breath the air of freedom and use passive voice without guilt when it's appropriate.

>>20059526
Makes sense, I liked what I read of him.

>>20059495
Oh great, another trend chaser. Just what we needed

>>20059738
Not everyone wants to write the obscure and obtuse anon.

>>20055711
Feeling creatively bakrupt. Someone give me a prompt and I'll write a passage on it.

>>20060113
A sandwich, a blowtorch, and a mismatched set of spoons

Does anyone here write with amphetamines?

>>20059239
It has its uses and a great many writers use it to good effect but should not be used unless you have a clear reason to do so and understand why you are using it.

>>20060206
You're gonna want >>>/sci/ for that

>>20059495
Twitter, goodreads, tiktok, amazon lists

>>20060206
When I was on modafinil for the second or third time I wrote something I liked. It was the only time it ever felt like the words just spilled out of me.
But I think much of it was placebo, and I could replicate it by getting in the right mood and not worrying about quality.

>>20060499
Really? Why? I'm curious about accounts from writers who use it. Obviously it has a history in literature: Auden, Sartre, Kerouac, Rand . . .

>>20060613
Only /sci/ is degenerate enough to use amphetamines to get their work done. The most I've seen /lit/ use is alcohol or weed. It's better to write with a clear mind anyways.

>>20060619
I think some of /g/ also might, but I never click on the relevant threads.

>>20057298
just write what happens. alot of you guys spend too much time on how it should be written, instead of just writing.

>>20060619
>The most I've seen /lit/ use is alcohol or weed
/lit/ has some serious addicts, when we have relevant threads we get quite a few heroin/crack/meth addicts. We have a large number of hardcore alcoholics and pot heads.

t. alcoholic who sometimes goes in those threads.

>>20058290
>she broke up with me.

is a better line.. also pm and night are almost redundant, there's gotta be a better way to phrase this.

remove literally. it's worse than unceremoniously.
>I hate you.
>I literally hate you.
Which line is better?

>>20060619
During a week in july, I inhaled over a gram of cocaine. I would roll a euro into a straw, spill some powder onto a sheet of paper and inhale. I use foreign bills because it makes me feel hip. Then I would write in my car while smoking mentholated and non mentholated cigarettes. My writing was still shit.

>>20060113
a lettuce sandwich, a missing blowtorch and spoons you've thrown out of the window.

>>20060113
A godless murder in which a lettuce sandwich, a horrid blowtorch, and a mismatched set of spoons was involved.

>>20060113
A dog discovers aliens and has to warn the humans, but he has to use a sandwich, a blowtorch, and a mismatched set of spoons.

I want a detective novel where the detective investigates for hundreds of pages only to arrest his chief suspect in some daring airport novel method. Only it's the wrong guy and he has to let him go and he wasted all of his time with his investigation

>>20060113
A blowtorch, lettuce sandwich alongside a toast sandwich, and a Chinese soup spoon alongside a European soup spoon

>>20060736
I want to write an action novel where the guy is this jason bourne rambo arnold schwartzeneggar badass, and does the whole training/gearing up montage, then accidentally shoots himself in the shoulder from an unintentional discharge. Then wakes up in the hospital surrounded by grieving family, as he slowly and painfully dies from sepsis.

>>20060206
No, I use a word processor.

Any recs or books for finding your voice? I do stream of consciousness, but it comes out like my usual writing.

>>20060878
To find your voice, you have to see what's not your voice. As evident by your words, you seem to be more focused on the opposite.

>>20060878
Any good book for descriptive Grammar, Oxford Modern English Grammar, Cambridge Students Introduction to Grammar both are good. You need to understand the language well enough to identify what defines your voice, what is borrowed, what is crap and what is worthwhile. Learning more about the language in which you write is a good thing.

>>20060833
kino

>>20060833
Wasn't there a book like this? It's got this big build up only for the protagonist to fall to some stupid thing. I can't remember the title, but I follow that someone may.

>>20060990
There's a few books that have ended in anticlimaxes, that's pretty broad a topic.

>>20060206
>>20060592
I've written on moda before, and the words did spill out, but the stream wasn't that good. It stops the feeling of tiredness without taking away all the downsides, and I use it to compensate for lack of sleep, so perhaps it's different taken after a full eight hours.

I've also written on coke once. I was drunk and writing from a nightclub toilet using my phone, so the results were similarly awful.

https://www.wattpad.com/763975967-disconnected-ramblings-part-1-an-intro-to-some

>>20060639
I need proper wording

Quick give me some quotes so I can plaster it on my back cover.

>>20061275
"This new author... would be out of his depth in a parking lot puddle"
"Somehow, I got conned into reading this for $13"
"I've seen better prose in church pamphlets, but the sex scenes were funny"

>>20061275
>One of the books ever written.

>>20061275
"Spending money on strippers would be less of a waste of money." - J.D. Lee

>>20061275
No quote, but include a reference to Ezekiel 23:20 in the dedication.

How's my blurb?

>>20060113
>>20060201
Thanks for the prompt!

In case anyone wants to read:
>https://pastebin.com/gK8gZLiH

Comments and criticism from anyone would be greatly appreciated. I'm pleased with how this one turned out.

>>20061381
your font is atrocious

>>20061401
Damn, genuinely good anon. I'm amazed you were able to bust out something so good, so quickly. The characterization of Cheyenne is excellent, as well as the robot and even the restrained detail on Dustin nicely accents his irrelevance as yet another notch in a long string of lovers.

Only critique I have is that the introduction of the robot and the car crash felt a bit too sudden and random (understandable given the length of the piece).

>>20061381
It sucks.
He didn't cling to the past he's a loser. He didn't have plan to disrupt here only existed.
He's 33 get rid of the word old. Unless he's like 60 and he's been doing this same bullshit for 33 years.
Emily, a robot - get rid of the fact that its a robot.
Is Emily giving him a chance or does her existence force him to do something?

>>20061381
I see you took some advice. Thought about paying someone for better font?
I like the FRONT cover though. Iffy on the back.

>>20061381
Put me in the back as a quote Emily fag
>"Reflective of the times we live in." - A. Moose

>>20061489
I'll only probably make 15 cents for this book. Don't think I want to spend hundreds to make a cover. Stephen King style of pushing out as many books as possible to get my name out. Something turns to gold, readers seek out the others

>>20061381
>Nobody likes having their plans disrupted. Caleb's plan was to live alone, collect toys and be on the internet every single waking moment, as he had done for the past thirty-three years. No dates, no friends, no experiences. Perfect. Until Emily entered his life.

>>20061647
I'll read this

>>20061441
Thanks Anon. It means a lot to me.

Yeah, it was pretty rushed but it still took me like 3 hours to write.

Can I ask you some questions?
1) How did you think Cheyenne was? Could you picture her and Dustin clearly?
2) Did you get a strong sense of the setting?
3) How believable and interesting was the dialogue?

I appreciate your time.

>>20061647
Thanks anon. Just some fake quotes and I think I'll be good to go. I'll find a better font

What if I rewrote the same paragraph several different ways until I likes the style, then tried writing that way with drabbles, then flash fictions, then short stories, and then novels?

>>20061684
Sounds like a plan

>>20061250
proper wording is fake and gay.

>>20061381
I can't tell if this is a joke or not

>>20061683
Get rid of "He clung to the past..." too.

>>20061628
Terrible attitude to approach a first book.
Paying $100-300 for a professional cover isn’t asking a lot when it’ll be up for the rest of your career.
It’s to gain a base following and put your name out there, not to throw into the wind.
Even if you expect $0.15 a copy, you should do better.

>>20061784
Professional-looking covers do a LOT to sell a book. If a cover looks amateur-ish, people will think the book overall is.

>>20060735
kek

>>20061666
1. Yes, but more than "picture" them, I feel I got a "sense" of them as people (like you do when you meet someone for the first time and they leave a strong impression).
2. Not so much. I understood it's probably in the American south (dixieland perhaps, given the name) but it felt more surreal than anything else.
3. The dialogue was believable but, I felt, not interesting. Whereas you're careful to let the reader to put the clues together when it comes to character, the dialogue felt a bit too direct, to point that it sometimes felt like exposition. In a longer piece it'd probably be alright, but for something so short, it sticks out.

>>20061736
stop being a negative nancy.
>>20061784
>>20061806
I get that. the problem is that it's not $100-$300. It's in the $2000+ dollar range for a professional book cover.

Believe me I looked. It's about $50-250 for a amateur book cover designer. Its unfortunate, but i can't do it. I can always change it if it ever gets a decent following.

>>20061866
Thanks

>>20061875
>50 bucks min for an AMATEUR cover designer
Oh really now?

>>20061904
don't tell me you think someone on imagr is a professional designer.

>>20060206
I'm prescribed ritalin and use it to write. I don't think it inhibits my creativity at all. I can write for 1-2 hours straight sometimes. It's also great for re-reading and editing.

>>20061909
I was going more for "holy shit I can make 50 bucks minimum from making covers on a shitty website!"

>>20061925
Look at fivver. Even shitty anime covers make something like $30. Pictures with models on them are $200+. And if it gets huge you're going to have to remove it because of likeness or pay off the model

>>20061965
That won't be a problem if you pitch that to the client before you offer them a cover that's instead traced from shutterstock pictures

Kaijuanon here. How does this sound? Context is that the frog Kaiju, out of nowhere, attacks the mermaid Kaiju, while a guy meant to monitor her looks on in awe.
>He couldn't say this job was exactly boring. After all, he and his team got to study at what might be one of the rarest things on the face of the earth, and it was one of these giants. Small tissue samples, vital signs, x-rays, analysis of bodily functions, the whole package. On the other hand, the excitement kind of wore off rapidly once he had scrubbed through enough stuff about this thing's biology. That, and the only thing she ever seemed to do was sleep while she recovered from the wounds she had received in a fight with that dragon, which is something he, along with basically the entire planet, was surprised at the existence of.
>The cushion of his chair felt like a rock at times, but he was able to rest in it nonetheless, to the point where he was half-asleep. However, this didn't last for another moment, as a noise caught his attention, causing him to jolt up and gaze directly at the white, plastic-covered computer panel right in front of him. He frantically looked around for the source of the noise, only to hear it again coming from his right. To his shock, the radar was active, and getting more active by the second, as if something was approaching faster and faster.
>60 knots...
>80 knots...
>100 knots..
>150 knots...
>300 knots...
>500 knots....
>He looked out the window at the sleeping siren, only to feel a distinct rumbling that got stronger and stronger with each moment.
>Suddenly, something rammed into her. He didn't get a good look at it, but all he clearly saw was a green, glowing orb. The shock wore off within seconds, and he dashed to the communications array. The only living giants he knew of that were able to efficiently swim like that were that frog, the siren, and that thing in the Indian Ocean. Only on of them had green eyes, so it rapidly became obvious as to who or what had attacked her. Activating the array, he immediately spoke. Well, more like shouted.
>"HEY! IF ANYONE IS LISTENING, WE MIGHT HAVE A CODE KERMIT. I REPEAT, SUBJECT "FROG DRAGON" HAS APPEARED. HE'S SHOWN UP AND IS CURRENTLY ATTACKING THE SUBJECT. BOTH SHE AND I NEED SUPPORT! NOW!"
In case you're wondering, his name is not "Kermit" or "Frog Dragon" but his name can roughly translate into the latter.

>>20062034
It's been a while since I caught you.

>Frog kaiju
I like it before even reading

>Line one
I might do a ... before "the whole package". I got confused at the sudden change between he and she but got it on a second read.

>Line two
I'd cut the "this didnt last for a moment" and just jump to the noise.

>Line nine
nothin'
>Line ten
Maybe not orb if he didn't get a good look at it. How about Blur, or sphere? Type on the sentence about the eyes
>Line eleven
I hope you don't expect me to read CODE KERMIT with a straight face. Cut the "HE HAS SHOWN UP", also cut "BOTH SHE AND I", just say they need support

>>20062034
>, to the point where he was half-asleep. However, this didn't last for another moment, as a noise caught his attention, causing him to jolt up and gaze directly at the white, plastic-covered computer panel right in front of him.
This reads better when you tighten the consistency. If he's half asleep, saying it didn't last for another moment makes me think he just got to sleep, when the previous sentence implies that he's been half asleep for a little while, or at least there's no time indication so I assume he's been sleeping for a while. Gazing is "slow", try scan or something else.
>Suddenly, something rammed into her. He didn't get a good look at it, but all he clearly saw was a green, glowing orb.
How about "Suddenly, a glowing green orb slammed into her"? It doesn't seem right to say "something", "he didn't get a good look at it", and then tell us it was a green orb. If you're going for a suspense moment here, you can have a cloud of dust kick up, the station camera go offline for a second, and then a green orb shows up when they come back.

>>20061381
You spelled the names differently on the spine and cover, dip.

>>20062088
I know. Already fixed before fucking your mum.

>>20061381
hello again Emmyfag. Glad to see you keeping at it

>>20062095
You’re a retard. I bet your writing is trashy.

>>20062130
It is. Do you need me to praise you for catching my mistake? Want me to suck your dick too?

>>20062033
At that point I'll need a lawyer.
$125 for a unique ibsn
$500 for a copyright and lawyer retainer
$250 for a cover
$600 for a professional editor

The costs add up. It's insane. I have no idea how self publishing authors make it on their first book. They have to do free marketing on #booktok or something. Or be an author YouTuber to get a following

>>20062246
Pitch #2:
Pic related looks tacky.

>>20061381
This has flat design going for it. Clean, albeit simple.

For 25$ I will HAND-DRAW you 5 different cover drafts. Pick your favorite over 1 or 2 revisions and I'll vector it into a digital image. You get a third and final revision when the draft has been made into the final cover.
0% risk of copyright
Piss easy to do

>>20062034
You are magnatron anon?

>>20062267
>pic related, which looks tacky

I give up. Writing horror scenes is impossible.

>>20062064
He’s a giant frog what the fuck else are they gonna give him for a codename

>>20062281
>>20055888

>>20062083
The orb is his eye

>>20062295
Sure. I love that the giant frog goes by code Kermit. Just that CODE KERMIT takes away any tension the scene had until then, and afterwards.

>Top selling books in Amazon are all romance and female-orientated erotica
God why have you forsaken me

>>20062306
He has an actual name, though. I thought about how to make it feel iconic in a sense. I’m not gonna spill it for the sake of it

>>20062326
Women tend to write more than men and read more as well. Zoomer boys don't read fiction. Or non fiction either

>>20062326
Men don't read. They spend all their time jerking off, watching HBO shows, drinking until they pass out, eating hot chips, lying, and committing meaningless crimes. If you read you are a deficient man, and probably homosexual.

>>20062277
Sometimes I wonder why I picked such mediocre cover designs for my last 3 books, and then I see shit like this and I feel better about myself. I'm gonna land a good cover with #4 though. I can feel it.

>>20062326
>Look at booktok
ALL authors of fantasy are women
>All have terrible sex scenes with penises entering into every orifice

>>20062342
Hey! I'm no homosexual!

Thoughts on my cover? I'm not an artist, but I made it myself.

>>20062385
R.L Stine wants his book bak

>>20062385
I like it. Simple, yet effective. I think It's missing your name though, and isn't it a little wide?

>>20062385
The words aren't bloody enough

>>20062385
It just doesn't grab me. I am probably not the intended audience anyways. But it's better than the soulless "All the Fire We Breathe in the Daylight" corporate minimalist artwork bullshit on contemporary novels.

>>20062385
Pretty good. I like it. Is it just the front cover or does it bend around?
>>20055711
My success with submission is over 5%. What about you anons?

Perfect covers don't exi-

>>20062463
>>20062463
>>20062463
>>20062463

>>20062429
0. I don't know where to submit