/lit/ - Literature

>>22311376

Does it read better now? The part about the myserious director was influenced by Archimboldi in 2666 and the film itself was influenced from scenes in Infinite Jest where Hal is watching Himself's old tapes towards the end of the book. Trying to go for a mashup of those style books with a little Lovecraftian vibe and atmosphere thrown in

>wrote another ~9k word chapter after I said I wasn't going to
I just can't help myself.

>copy a dull paragraph/sentence
>paste it to chatGPT
>add "rewrite this in 5 different ways using similes and/or metaphors"
Been doing this for a while now. Is it cheating? Doesn't feel like it because I'm merely looking for ideas.

>>22311478
You're not gonna make it.

>>22311386
For my taste the first sentence rambles on for too long before the hook. If I trim the fat I end up with this:
>Ask any random film aficionado their favourite movie by A. Furcht and they'll answer "The Dread".
"A. Furcht" gives me something to hang onto, and "The Dread" gets my attention. So you want to get there quickly.

>In fact, it is the only film to have been produced by him;
This sentence doesn't solidify the first, it almost contradicts it, it points out that the question isn't worth asking. So instead of "in fact" I'd use "after all".

>the atmosphere starts to gradually change intensely after he stops dead in his tracks for a while
"gradually" contradicts "intensely" and is maybe made redundant by "starts to". (Note that the way it's written now, "intensely" applies to the verb "change", not to the noun "atmosphere". Maybe you didn't intend that?)
Stopping dead in your tracks is a short moment. It's not the act of standing still, it's the transition from moving to standing still. So it sounds wrong to do it "for a while".
I think it'd be better to move the standing still further to the start of the sentence, so the reader receives the information in the chronological order. Perhaps more importantly, it'd end the paragraph at the place where you're intentionally leaving a hole. If you end by saying that the atmosphere changes then the reader will expect the the next paragraph to describe the change, and will become more curious when you change the subject. By ending with the stopping you distract the reader from their curiosity.

>>22311478
I don't believe in "cheating" but I also don't have a lot of faith in ChatGPT's writing abilities.
>similes and/or metaphors
You need a broader repertoire. There exist extremely nice literal descriptions. Maybe you can get away with asking it something more vague?
Or maybe read good writing to develop a feeling for it.

>>22311464
Better write too much than nothing.

>>22311464
I've been editing a 46k word manuscript for a year now

I managed to shit out a few hundreds of words. It surprised me, because I expected complete zero today. I think this is a progress, usually I would fold.

>>22311478
Isn’t what editors do in some way ?
Make sentences better ?

>>22311478
Rewriting to see different sentence structures or phrases is one thing. Especially if you're trying to simplify or clarify them. But asking for metaphors is weak.The AI going to go for the most bland shit possible every time. Metaphors are your chance to show a spark of genius.

What are some authors I should read if I'm interested in writing the literary equivalent of this?

>>22311774
>your chance to show a spark of genius.
i write fantasy

>>22311809
>But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

>>22311774
Genius was never going to happen anyway.
>>22311376
That's pretty nice.
I haven't written in months.

I have a few things on my mind about writing.

I wish to pursue other career goals and I kinda don't wanna publish oiffcaly (self or trad) maybe online on AO3 is it bad that I don't wish to publish my work?

But is it weird that i'd more so measure my success with getting fan art and people writing fan fiction? I don't want money really is it bad to want this?

>>22312061
>But is it weird that i'd more so measure my success with getting fan art and people writing fan fiction? I don't want money really is it bad to want this?
What an odd question. Why would it be bad to want that? Why would it even matter if it was bad? And why do you need validation from anons here? If that's what you want then make it your goal.

>>22311784
Stream of consciousness is a good way to feel before you understand. Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner are good examples. If you haven't read it, read The Sound and the Fury. Incomprehension is an aspect of the story. You should see how the story tries to make you feel the emotions before you understand why the characters are even having them. Keep in mind that Faulkner does not always write that way.

>>22312240
Thank you anon, those seem like great suggestions.

Anyone need a cheap editor? Just did The Nuclear Snafu on Amazon. If so, reply to this webzone

>Story getting positive attention
>Feel nervous about starting the next chapter because it feels like I'm going to fuck up something and lose my readers
I'm gonna lose them anyway if I don't write.

>>22311809
Good fantasy is like a kiss: sure if you boil it down, a shitty fantasy story will have the same beats as a good one. Yet the kisser, the journey there, makes up all the difference: a sloppy kiss from a lover is better than a well done kiss from a hooker

>>22311376
Is it normal for a land to be so culturally diverse like Europe?
I'm always fascinated at how such a (relatively) small continent has so many different people, languages and ancient history, but that makes me think that my worldbuilding is severely lacking.

>>22312753
Another question: what do you think about trains in high fantasy? (magical or otherwise)
I've been thinking about using one in my story, but I'm worried about it's effects on the development of the world (like economy, industrialization, urbanisation and migration).
One of the aspects I love most about medieval fantasy worlds is the difficulty (or lack) of communication and transportation between places. Even distances considered "short" today might divide two lands for hundreds of years, causing each one to grow and develop uniquely.
Another factor is the perception you have of those places: distant lands with unknown people (that by itself enriches them immensely), and to reach them you must embark on a journey through a specific path, etc.
With trains, the magic of the unknown is lost (and trains by themselves are modern). You have easy information about what a land is like, and if you wish to visit it it won't take an epic quest to do so.

>>22312787
a river or system of rivers does the same thing as a train. does your world have a big river running through it?

>>22312475
im sure your mom will love your new chapter! : )

>>22312475
You fool. Don't post unless you have like ten chapters in reserve. You need a buffer.

>>22311376
Can anyone help me write a murder ballad or tragedy song? Similar to what a few country and blues performers did in the 60s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_tragedy_song

If you're interested in helping me write it, I can include you on the rights when I perform it. Leave an email address

>>22312753
Make few "big" cultures and then branch them off into their smaller, seperate, distinct ones.

Just like slavs, latin cultures, nordic cultures et cetera. You don't need to fill the world to brim with different cultures. Especially if it has no bearing on the story.

Do not make the mistake of confusing worldbuilding with filler and padding. You don't want filler and padding. You want worldbuilding.

>>22312787
Train networks aren't easy to build and old trains weren't exactly fast. Not to mention, they can be prohibitively expensive to the shitpeasants.

Culture permeation is slow. Very, very slow. The global amalgamation of cultures and globohomoifcation is simply the result of over 50 years of world-wide travel and internet. And to this day, we still have plenty of distinct and clashing cultures.

Basically, you can have it either way, but you need to make sure the timespans make sense. Are the trains relatively new invention, 10-20 years old or so? Then it would indeed be revolutionary, but the effects wouldn't be felt for a long time.

>>22310005
Any other writers wanna weigh in on this?

>>22312883
Interesting idea. I'll consider it.
>>22313062
>>22313070
Thanks for the input.

>>22312787
Don't do it. Introducing an anachronism such as a train raises all sorts of questions about material, science, and technology. Unless you can answer those questions and keep everything consistent within your already established universe, it's a bad idea.

>>22312969
- Young man slowly drugging himself to death while mourning his dead girlfriend.
- Upwardly mobile college girl leaves her down home country boyfriend and he drowns himself.
- War veteran boyfriend succumbs to cancer and faithful girlfriend stands vigil.
- Young man plans surprise party for his girlfriend but she dies in a car crash on the way over.

I only have two characters in my story, but they feel like they are missing something. Right now they feel like soulless NPCs and I'm not sure how to fix it. I'm only a few chapters into the story and I figured I'd flesh them out more throughout the course of the story, but I don't think my audience will hang around if my characters are so boring.

>>22313264
Simply write more about them. Introduce them properly and flesh out their emotions and desires. It will actually help you to write in moments where they show their personalities. I struggle with the same thing, the characters don't really read like literary characters, more like movie characters that act and live without their thoughts being vidible. I don't know if writing internal monologue in third person omniscient is good, but someone probably tried.

>>22313264
Give them stronger personalities, it's easier to overwrite them and then cut it back a bit later as opposed to trying to add something to bland characters. That will also help you get a feel for their character.

Also like other anon said, flesh out their emotions and desires, try sitting down and making an outline. With enough desires, fears, personality, and theme/plot connection, they kinda just write themselves at some point.

Something I heard some authors do is "interview" their characters, as in just open a blank document and start writing as if you are talking to your character back and forth. Maybe that will help you.

>>22312787
Depends on the time period, I'd be rather confused if I saw trains in a otherwise generic medieval fantasy world, but it could work in other settings. You could retain the magic of the unknown by having train tracks being mostly local. Maybe building train tracks through certain areas is impossible for one reason or another

>>22313301
Not him, but it makesme think that there's a good setting story potential. Two train networks can benefit from being connected, but there's a big dangerous place where building tracks is almost impossible untill a reforming government popularises a new technology to build and secure the railroard and there is a growing population of hired hunters for the savages/monsters, railroad laborers and potential benefitors of the new road. Adventure, struggle and change already implied by the setting. Kind of western steampunk, I guess.

What are some good resources for someone to better understand writing structures like sentences and paragraphs? I have been writing, not very seriously, for a couple of months and everything I write comes out reading very awkwardly. It's not so much that it's bad, relatively speaking, but it feels like I'm writing in the style of my inner monolog and trying to conform sentence structure and punctuation to it so the resulting sentences tend to be long and rambling with a lot of arbitrary commas because I throw them in where it "feels right," or I'm trying to remember some grammar rule I don't wholly remember, or to subdivide one smaller thought from another larger thought. I've tried writing in a more basic style but it comes out very monotonous because everything is extremely basic and there's no variety but if I try to write more complex sentences it goes back to rambling.

>>22313371
Why not start with the OP?

>>22313264
I have a similar setup for the first part of my book, but my problem is different, because I'm not certain if I should anchor the POV to one entirely, at least for each chapter. As it stands the POV jumps between them constantly, they are twins so I believe it sort of works, it's almost like a playful game of tag and it's really a lot of fun to write that way. Not sure if it's "proper" or not.

>>22313397
That's a good point.

How much genre blending is too much? Should I write the neo-noir revenge romance supernatural mystery-horror medieval fantasy political thriller of my dreams? I do not want to be conservative and cut elements out of my story and characters... but it seems like a difficult undertaking to juggle so many plates and keep them all satisfying. That said, I do think my plot and characters have the potential to tie it all together quite well, but perhaps that is just my hubris speaking because I am not that far into writing it yet, and also am still a novice writer.

>>22313523
You need to understand what you're using for what purpose. Noir with medieval politics works well as a story. Fantasy and magic can distract from it because of how far it is from this, but if you make the world with hidden insidious magic and monsters it can work.

>>22313525
>hidden insidious magic and monsters it can work
Yeah, that is exactly what I am trying to do with those.

I mostly just worry that the scope will get out of control as I write more of it, though the last week or two that I was writing I did not really have the themes and motifs clearly worked out which is part of why I was worried about it becoming a muddled mess. Now that I've sat down and thought through a lot of it and figured out what I want to focus on, it seems doable.

>>22312753
Pretty normal, yeah. And don't fall for the simplicity of that map. The Netherlands is colored Dutch with a carve-out for Frysian, but most Frysian speakers can speak Dutch and some of the Dutch speakers toward the east also speak Low Saxon (kind of mutually intelligible but a different language) and then there's the Brabantish dialect, and Limburgish, and a Dutch-Limburgish friend tells me that it's basically the same as Flemish-Limburgish across the border, while a more western Flemish (so from Belgium, below the Netherlands) acquaintance says he has trouble with the North-Brabantish Dutch dialect in the south of the Netherlands but not with more northern Dutch. And then there was pillarisation, big cultural subdivisions that only disappeared around the time my parents were born and didn't cut along language or geographic lines. My grandfather went to a Protestant barber and got into arguments because of it.
Then you jump to the other side of the globe to see what's going on there and you can for example learn about the alphabet the Japanese used to write Taiwanese Hokkien, which is related to Chinese, not to any of the (Austronesian) indigenous languages of Taiwan, which first really started being messed with during Dutch rule/resource extraction (hello again!).
You scoot over a few thousand kilometers to Papua New Guinea and it turns out they have over 800 languages despite a total population of only 11 million. A massive outlier, but man.

OK, so what does this mean for writing? You clearly can't work all of this out ahead of time. What you can probably do is design in broad lines and acknowledge internal variety. If area X speaks language Y then people in North-X will probably think people in South-X talk funny, and there'll be small pockets that speak languages Z and W. But you can pull these out of your hat the moment you get there. Most of your characters won't have a good understanding of the situation outside their backyard and so you can get away with not knowing it either. "Barbarian" is Greek for "people who say bar-bar-bar". Sometimes all you know is that the people over there talk funny.

There's light worldbuilding in my current project and most of what I do is sprinkle in details. Not many grand generalizations, just loose characters with weird ways of talking, offhand mentions of foreign-sounding places, small examples of how groups view and treat each other. You surely want more worldbuilding than me but it leaves me room to add in more complexity later without contradicting myself.

>tfw you have writers block for days and then have a jimmy neutron brain blast that solves everything and elevates the story to boot

>>22312753
Yeah.
The current Americas is an anomaly. Not the rule.
Look at Africa, or asia

>>22311376
I was about to say, damn, that's a pretty good Calvino imitation.

>>22311464
How the fuck do you write so much to the point you need to stop? 9k words would take me so fucking long. I struggle like fuck to fill things up and just feel it's all filler or fluff.

I wonder how people even make it in the writing industry. Shit looks insanely competitive and it's not like everyone makes a good amount of money even if they do find a job

Suppose I wanted to churn out a bunch of smut and charge a buck for each story. What's the best site for that sort of thing?

>>22314240
Professors or married to successful spouses.

>>22314293
If you can't even do a google search, you won't be churn out anything.

>>22314316
*able to

>>22314316
>>22314319
I don't like Googling sex stuff. I find all this very icky and I'm not even sure yet if I'm comfortable linking my bank info to this work. But I know that I could write this shit very well and tap into a significant niche (read: fetish) audience.

>>22314054
I didn't do it all in one day. This was like a week's worth of work. You take it one day at a time and before you know you've got a shit ton written down.

>had had
Why does this drive me to suicide every time it shows up in my writing?

>>22314337
Then go to the erotica authors subreddit and start reading.
>>22314337
>I find all this very icky
>But I know that I could write this shit very well
Okay

>ask for advice on a piece of writing
>some loser reads until the first grammatical error
>condescendingly corrects it in a response
>mentions nothing of structure or content or rhythm or anything constructive at all
this place sucks

>>22314617
same

>>22314617
it's a start. but expect limited generosity from the reader. try as best you can to correct trivial errors before posting, and you stand a better chance of more constructive criticism. at least in my experience.
that said, the overall ratio of anons sharing work to anons actually reviewing that work is pretty poor in /wg/, with a couple of anons picking up most of the slack. were that improved, i would imagine the general quality of criticism would improve as well.

>>22312969
Teenage narrator kills family in drunk driving incident. Song is framed as a letter written while awaiting trial to the one surviving family member.

>>22314337
As you've likely heard before, don't write things you don't want to if you're just looking to make money, find an actual job instead

>>22314240
Most "creatives" have a day job, even the ones that sell their writing.

>>22314617
>>22314647
The OP used to contain
>If you have not performed a cursory proofread, do not expect to be treated kindly. Edit your work for spelling and grammar before posting.

>>22315093
if "cursory proofread" implies there should be exactly 0 grammatical or spelling errors, then it should say that instead

>>22315093
It didnt when I shared work back in the day. But by the time I edit it now I just submit it for publication.

>>22311376
What's a good metaphor or expression for bringing everyone else down with you? Or I guess the whole "if I can't have it, no one can" mentality

I like the idea of a suicide bomber or a jilted lover getting revenge by homicide. What are some other ideas?

How do I write a stoic, cold, detached character that isn't just boring?

>>22315138
if there's any part of you that thinks a character like that is implicitly cool, it's not possible

>>22315114
scorched earth

>>22315103
"cursory proofread" is being polite
too many "writers" here are functionally illiterate

>>22315156
That isn't my goal, I'm trying to write something more like a Meursault-esque character and highlight his sense of alienation, detachment, and self-questioning of his apathy. Not a cool action hero.

>>22315114
dye packs in a bank heist

>>22315138
>>22315156 is right if this character is your protagonist. But I think this character archetype is cool when he's a supporting player and the reader can't see inside his mind. Let his actions inform his character rather than words. Incorporate humor to counterbalance his stoicism. Above all, restrain this character's page-time.

>>22315138
Put them in situations and with people who illuminate these qualities by their contrast. Same with any other type of character.

I just read this and I was wondering, do any of you get anything out of books like this? I'm not trashing the book because I think it does a good job of hitting the key mistakes people make. I learned most of the things in this book from reading other people's writing and just implement them intuitively, I've never had words for parts of a sentence and the roles of words in a sentence (aside from the basic food groups like nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc). It's just like how I know how to walk but I don't know the names of the muscles in my legs. I don't see how it really helps a person learn to write, but maybe other people learn in different ways. Has reading books on writing helped any of you improve your writing?

>>22315317
I got much more out of this book.

>>22315317
You can try to avoid all the mistakes that you want but you'll still make them. And trying to avoid all the tips makes for a very boring read. What you're really trying to do is cover mistakes well enough people think you're doing it on purpose.

>>22315317
that's because that book is for middle schoolers

I have officially written and published a shitty fantasy book

>>22315332
The foreword said it was originally written for use at a university.

>>22315317
Intuition only gets you so far. Eventually you'll develop your intuition far enough that things will feel wrong, but you won't know how to begin fixing them. That's when these structural elements come into play. You'll be able to articulate what the issues are and try to experiment with forms and structures in order to achieve new effects.

People always get stuck on the "there are no rules in art" bullshit, but nobody is actually out there making art based on rules without regard to their own intuition. You need both and you need to reconcile where your intuition conflicts with the broader consensus on what works and what doesn't. Without this kind of study, you will quickly hit a plateau and be unable to improve.

>>22315334
Nice, self-published or regular?

>>22315344
of course self-published. It's shitty.

>Story has gotten positive attention (110 readers)
>4 chapters, writing the 5th
>Want to scrap it and start over
Should I?
I want to do it because I am just making shit up as I go, and I keep coming up with better ideas.
Do I just rewrite the story I have or do I publish something new? Or do I just soldier on?

>Have new idea
>Just free ball it at first
>Just a loose idea of where I'm going
>At some point realize that I have written several thousands words of what amounts to nothing but a trauma dump diary entry with non-canon fantasy elements that I wish would have happened

it just keeps happening

>>22315417
Soldier on.

>>22315717
If that's what is coming out, let it out.
Eventually you'll get it out of your system, and make room for other ideas.
It's one of the reasons keeping a journal is such an effective tool for creatives.

>>22315717
Not everything you write has to be in the story.
Not every story is worth a novel.
You are doing fine if you are thinking at all.

>>22315369
Link it here. You're among frens

>>22315317
> I've never had words for parts of a sentence and the roles of words in a sentence
It's a good thing you're not trying to learn them from that book.

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.html

>>22315417
Unreliable narrator redcon it. Or kill the protagonist and introduce a better one. They will hate it but still read.

>>22315369
It's only really shitty if it's derivative and you didn't bother with prose.

>>22316147
What do you think?

>>22315417
>4 chapters
Way too early to kill it, especially if you have a reader base. If you don't like what you're writing, wrap up the current plotline and segue into what you want to write instead.

AI (not the current gen) is the future.

>>22316307
agreed. AI has made writing obsolete

>>22311376
Has anyone finished writing a book, published it, then realized the story should have been written completely differently?

>>22316418
>Has anyone finished writing a book
nope

>>22311376
>start writing a loser self insert story about a version of me that's just as pathetic but who actually does things, starting with a suicide attempt
>it turns into milf erotica
I have no idea how this happened but I'm enjoying it.

>getting stuck because I know I need to rewrite some things, but I grew too attached to what I wrote and am unwilling to discard it
ugh

>decide to write a short story
>have a concept but no characters
>uh, I guess I'll just write about the people i know
>realize I don't know anyone at all because i really don't care about others
>???
ok wat nou

>>22316711
Write fictional characters, idiot.

>Writing and editing 1736 took me nearly 3 hours
Does it get better with practice?

>>22316829
That's fucking fast. I doubt anyone can do better.

>Haven't written anything in a while
>Always wanted to write something that is presentable to people
>All of my stuff always gets too dark and violent
>Have a random idea pop in my head a few days ago
>"That could be a decent idea to do as a short story"
>Less than 36 hours later
>15,000 words in first draft
>Most likely will end up at 20,000
>In the final act we have went off the rails again into "nobody can read this or they'll think I'm insane" territory
>I'm too autistic to change it because I like it and think it's fitting

>>22316833
how insane are we talking?

>>22316835
Description of the almost rape of a 13 year old followed extremely detailed and violent death scene for attempted rapist.

>>22316833
toast it

>>22316833
That word count is incredible, I just lost track of time and realized I'd spent almost 4 hours producing 3 paragraphs.

>>22311386
Yes it reads much better now can I try this

>>22316843
Meh, worse has been published

I WISH I could write stories of my own.

>>22316307
painful

>>22311386
You seem to have a tendency towards run-on sentences. I'd replace a lot of those semicolons with full stops and try to vary the pace of your prose a bit. Long sentences are fine every once in a while but, like any seasoning, too much ruins the dish.

You all are bragging too much. I wrote 6.5k words for the past 2 weeks.

>Write a lot in the early hours of the morning before sleeping because creativity is most surreal during that time
>Had to write a torture sequence that doubles as a flashback sequence
>Feel good about it, hit the hay
>Wake up and read it
>It's pure femdom (possibly lesbian) smut with VERY graphic imagery
>Like if there was so much as a dead roach in the corner of the room, you'd know
>Pop a shameful boner
It wasn't supposed to be this way... Nobody can know about this...

>>22316972
post it

>can't write the character I want to write without it turning into excessive trauma dumping

>>22316989
God no.

>>22316992
Come at my main character who totally is not me, bro.
>Depression and all its purports is merely the self grown dependent on the self. No amount of edification can square said circle. Yet this is the foremost compulsion as answer to this 'problem', but I tell you this, this edification is prevarication. Misery becomes recreational when you feed the anxious pride that plans on endless "thens" while it cannot even look "now" in the eye. There is more truth in abject folly by virtue of action alone than in years of sulking rationalization. You will not learn what you do not know doing as you've done, and so you must learn and do otherwise. Dig not this hole deeper, fellow friends, you labor at your very graves. Instead go, relinquish control freely for you do not have it, take risks, be ruined, and so redeemed.

>>22317009
Bro... You realize that today everyone has depression and it's the most boring and watered down subject to write about?

Writing is one million times easier with a pen than on a keyboard.

>>22317049
There's no pressure either. No red underline on incorrect spelling, no autocorrect, just make up your own new words to fit situations like Libberlubber and leave the reader to interpret its meaning. Fun stuff. Boundless.

>>22316997
Virgin pants shitplanner vs Chad Shitpantser.

>>22316992
When else are you gonna dump your trauma if not in your writing? I've taken all my hate and contempt for the world and poured it into my main character.

>>22317168
Same but my 2 main characters are just my split personality. One loves the world, one fucking hates it.

>>22317172
>he only has two personalities
Every single character is a different segment of me. I'm not even sure who is the real one, or if there is such a thing.

I posted my work here last thread and only one person replied and all they said was it was good at a sentence level but my pacing was too fast but I don't how to fix it.

What text format is generally seen as being the most universal for writing books?
I'm thinking of which format is most software independent?
I'm looking for a format that I can easily use in a notepad type application.
Right now I'm formatting my files in markdown ( .dm files)
Are there formats that are more powerful than markdown and as easy to use? (not requiring special software)

>>22311784
I think Kierkegaard has that.
But I've only really read him in Danish so I don't know how well it translates.

>>22317283
* .md files

I would like to write using my own blood. Does anybody have experience with this? My plan is to buy a fountain pen, and mix it with some red ink to make it stick to the paper properly.

>>22317304
I haven't tried that. I use Sublime Text or Google Docs normally. They work pretty well. I don't see what advantage blood would have.

>>22317304
You'd probably be better off asking in the divination general on /x/

>>22317243
The chess one? If so I was that anon and can give thoughts

~~test~~

>>22317283
Never mind.
I found a format called AsciiDoc. It seems it's just what I'm after.

I've been trying to write about a fictional warrior culture, but I've been kind of running into a bit of a roadblock. I've used things like the Iliad or Beowulf as inspiration for genuine celebrations of war, and I have made these kinds of Homeric ideals of heroism, that is the celebration of skill and achievement, the pursuit of glory, and the glorification of death in battle, the highest virtues of this culture. But at the same time, I feel like I'm being a little disingenuous. The culture itself is going through change from wider shift as there are less wars after this culture conquered all it reasonably could, and so I think that makes these characters who want to genuinely express their culture from a bygone age appear childish and reactionary. Is it possible to portray a pro war culture without irony when someone (me) is raised in both a time and place which is essentially anti war? Or am I just talking out my ass?

>>22317724
Until it's written you're talking out of your ass

>>22317172
Works for me. Write what you know!
>>22317304
Didn't the rock band KISS print a comic book with blood?
>>22317724
Reminds me a little of the Green Bone saga.

>>22317724
>and so I think that makes these characters who want to genuinely express their culture from a bygone age appear childish and reactionary.
How is this a roadblock, and not an interesting subtlety?

>minor character goes on a page and a half long rant about how much he hates niggers
How much would this fuck up a book's chance at being published?

>>22317988
Your book won't be published because your writing is shit, not because of racism

>>22317988
Any way to make them fantasy niggers?
This is where the power of allusion comes in handy.

>>22318090
No. The setting is a modern high school in a low income area. I can't just have a bunch of orcs or elves or whatever the fuck fantasy stand-in for blacks is.

I'm editing an old story and the parts I rewrote from scratch are so much more engaging and better written than the rest of the book, I worry readers will find this jarring. It's not like I'm consciously trying to do anything different, my skill level is just that much higher, I can't help it.

Any book recommendations about university life? I'm writing a story about university students, but since I never went to uni myself, the whole institution is basically just like glorified high school in my mind. It's a fantasy story, but I should at least try to make the main vibes convincing.

>>22318117
What about hicks, practicing 19th century Southern white culture?

is it
>“Wait!” John shouted after him, “I wouldn’t even know how to ask!”
or
>“Wait!” John shouted after him. “I wouldn’t even know how to ask!”

>>22318217
first one. Never a full stop

>>22318217
The first one suggests to read the quotations as a single sentence, the second one as two sentences. So the second one suggests a longer pause, maybe as long as two seconds.

>>22318217
Period is generally just needed after an action tag (e.g. yelled while waving his hands) while basic speech tags are fine with comma (he said).

I think there is wiggle room for debate on this specific example, but I'd lean towards considering "after him" as an action since it is instantiating the speech into the scene rather than the dialogue tag being purely attributing the speaker. So period.

>>22318248
this sounds the most right

>>22317168
The problem isn't that I'm representing my trauma, but that I tend to go overboard because I get caught up in it and it makes it unpleasant to read.

>>22318217
they mean different things

>>22318329
I read the first one as a single rectangle

>>22317624
Never mind.
I'm going to use LaTeX instead.

>>22318400
I wouldn't recommend it.
What do you need that's not in markdown?

>>22318315
Have you read Houelleubecq? Or Bret Easton Ellis? Or Osamu Dazai?
What you're talking about is not only a genre, but has lots of fans.

>>22318426
>I wouldn't recommend it.
Why not?
>What do you need that's not in markdown?
All kinds of stuff, like indexing contents list and basic layout, columns, page numbers, paper size, importing other documents, etc.
I think I'm going to start out using TeXstudio first in order to learn the basics. It seems like it has everything I need in an intuitive GUI.

>>22318482
>Why not?
It's janky all around, both when it comes to writing the code to make it do what you want and compiling it. Things don't do what you expect them to. Lots of fiddling.
I used it a lot in university and it was just barely okay. It did give me internal references and citations and the aesthetic that's expected of STEM papers but I wouldn't dream of writing my fiction in it.
>All kinds of stuff, like indexing contents list and basic layout, columns, page numbers, paper size, importing other documents, etc.
Do you truly need this? Writing and typesetting are different activities.
Have you given LibreOffice Writer or MS Word a good look? They should be capable of all this and I'm sure they have a better more intuitive GUI.

>>22318506
>Do you truly need this?
Hmm. I'm not entirely sure yet to be honest.
I think I'll just stick to markdown for now until I have written something to completion. Then I'll try out LaTeX and see if it's too much of a hassle to use.
The thing I like about it is that the files are still going to be usable in 50 years and be just as convertible to other formats as it is now.
If I use libre office then I'm not so sure it'll be the same in 10 years. And if for example I create a layout in libre office, then I don't think it'll look the same in Word, and vice versa. That way I'd be stuck with a certain software application.
I like the idea of it being formatted within a simple-to-understand plain text human readable document.

>>22318683
Also just to add:
The reason I would like it to be fixed and be usable in the future is because I have a lot of Ideas about illustrations and unusual page layout styles that I want to be changing several times throughout the book.
I've had a lot of bad experiences with making layouts in Word or Libre Office where things jump around or disappear and are generally unreliable, sometimes corrupting the document. Images in particular.

>>22318683
>>22318730
A deep quality of LaTeX is that it's not built for micromanagement. You describe the rules for your layout, and you provide the content, and LaTeX decides where your images and such actually end up. You can tell it that you want your image right-aligned with a certain width but you don't decide which page it's on. (In practice you can finagle it, but it's not the workflow it's designed for.) I don't know if this is bad or good for your purposes.
Seems like LaTeX stability over time is pretty good: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/177450
MS Office goes to legendary lengths for backward compatibility, and LibreOffice probably takes it seriously too since that's expected of an office suite. But that's counterbalanced by backward compatibility being really hard. I've barely used them since high school so it sounds like you know far more about the practical side than I do.

>start writing fiction
>slow progress but nothing published outside of uni magazine
>start writing poetry after falling in love with professor's poetry book
>published in over 20 different magazines in less than a year
>not bad following
>true love is still fiction
what's this called

>>22318830
>I don't know if this is bad or good for your purposes.
That's very bad for what I want to do.
I might end up formatting it with html and css and then screencap each page and compile it into a pdf. I already know how to use that.
I don't know if that's an Ideal solution, but it's the only one I know of.

>>22318886
Screencaps are pretty destructive. There are ways to go directly from HTML to PDF and still end up with selectable text and non-pixelated print quality and a reasonable filesize and all that.
(Pandoc can surely do it because pandoc converts from anything to anything, your browser's print function can save to a PDF, at work I've used wkhtmltopdf.)
HTML and CSS do have this exact same quality though, maybe even worse than LaTeX. A LaTeX document will have a single output in the end but a webpage can be displayed by lots of devices with different screen sizes and platform details and browser implementations, and it should do something sensible on all of them. So that's the case they're designed for.

>>22318350
I don't think so, because (as far as I understand it) you can't have two complete sentences of dialogue attached to the same dialogue tag.

E.g. this would be wrong:
>"I've heard so much about you," he said, "It's a pleasure to finally meet you in person."

>>22318932
I read it as a single complete sentence. That doesn't entirely make sense because there'd be an exclamation mark in the middle but my brain doesn't mind.

>>22318911
>A LaTeX document will have a single output in the end but a webpage can be displayed by lots of devices with different screen sizes and platform details and browser implementations
Yes, that sucks. It would be nice with a static standard. Html and css are basically just guidelines for browsers to implement as they see fit.
I don't know what I'll end up doing. There are downsides to each of them.
But thanks for the recommendations. I'll look into the different options and test it out.
Right now I think I'll end up using html and css and then convert to pdf via wkhtmltopdf.
It says that it uses the Qt WebKit rendering engine, which is independent of any browser. So I should be able to write the html and then display what I'm making live in a pdf viewer.

>>22318350
I'm pretty sure that's how it's supposed to be read grammatically, I thought question marks and exclamations points inherited the properties of a comma when used at the end of tagged dialogue like that. Which is why the second comma looks so awkward to me as opposed to a full stop.

>>22319012
WebKit is just the rendering engine used by Safari, so it's not really independent.
I've had to solve breakages, but IIRC they were all caused by HTML that wasn't valid to begin and was patched up in different ways by different versions. It might be that the new way of patching it up was officially prescribed by HTML5, in which case it was more or less a one-time thing.

>>22318932
>"I've heard so much about you," he said, "It's a pleasure to finally meet you in person."

Yes. But you can chop a single sentence that way.
>"I've heard so much about you," he said, "and your giant tumor of a wife."

I want to write this story based on one of those lurid 'real life cop bodycam' youtube videos that I saw. Though I know that by writing this post I'll kill all enthusiasm for the idea. Whatever dude.

A man works as a school bus driver. He handles the ride back at the end of the schoolday. When he gets on the bus, still parked in the depot, he notices a sports bottle in the container by the driver seat, evidently left there by the morning driver.

He picks the bottle up, to go drop it off at the office, and tell them to give it to the morning guy, that the guy forgot it. But when he picks it up, he's hit by the smell instantly, the sweet ethanol smell. He opens it and, yeah, there's no doubting it.

And from that sports bottle full of white rum immediately follows the crux/nub of the story.

Does he tell police, with all the certain consequence of the morning guy losing his job and facing his possibly going to prison?

Or does he go round to the guy's flat -- he's not far -- and talk to him, summon up all his powers of firm, earnest compassion, such as they are, to try to give this guy the help he needs, rather than abandoning him to his -- perhaps deserved -- fate?

>>22319087
Thanks for the punch-up. I knew my original was lacking a certain narrative spark.

>>22319088
Why would anyone care if a school bus driver gets drunk?
How else is he supposed to deal with those uneducated, untrained, undisciplined demons?
Your story seems several decades out of date.

>>22319146
What if he's driving for elementary school kids? What if he has a history of drunk driving? What if the main character knows him, and not only that, but actually vouched for him to get him this job. What if he's actually a war hero that saved the main character's life?

Yeah, on its own it's a bit unconvincing, but there's lots of room to tighten the screws.

>>22319146
It's based on this video, posted one month ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcYjYlYSb8I
What really matters is that the character who discovers the bottle cares about it.

>>22319162
Exactly my point...it can't just be "oooh, driving a school bus drunk is bad, I should turn him into the cops, or have a heart-to-heart talk with him so he sees the error of his ways and repents".
It'd be much more modern to bring up the apathetic, corrupt, self-serving authorities who would go overboard & ruin his life for no good reason, unless of course the bus driver is on good terms with the "right people", in which case the system should bend over backwards to make excuses for him and gaslight/censor anyone that crosses them.

>>22319146
>Why would anyone care if a school bus driver gets drunk?
Uh... because he could get into an accident and kill a busload of kids? Are you genuinely retarded or just pretending?

>>22319207
Not my problem.

>>22319207
/lit/ has edgelords that simultaneously philosophyfag then make posts like
>>22319234

>>22319207
So? Kids are demonic imbeciles.
I didn't even like kids when I was a kid.

>>22319247
I made that post as a joke, but you do have to recognize that you are writing for a post-moral audience and setting the story in a post-moral society, unless you place it in the past. Look at it this way, your character is a bus driver. He works a dead end job, is probably middle-aged, overweight, maybe single or with a wife that hates him. He's bitter about life and he has to deal with screaming kids all day every day. He has zero reason to care about his coworker killing a bus full of kids because it wouldn't affect him. In fact, he might even gain some grim satisfaction from it. You can no longer expect people to "do the right thing" unless they can benefit from it, we're not living in that sort of world anymore.

If I own the .com domain of my pen name, would it be viable to set up a Wordpress-type site on it, and then start putting my fiction up on it? I've got a decent presence on social media, so it's not like I'm incapable of advertising to an extent.

The more I write and pay attention to what I'm reading, the more I feel like all the time people impress the importance of "show, don't tell" is a fucking lie.

I've been reading a bunch of Lovecraft lately since I want to incorporate a similar mysterious, supernatural and horrific atmosphere in my novels. And a lot of his atmosphere building boils down "it makes you feel weird when you look at it," and "the hills are shaped oddly in a manner that makes you feel uneasy." Lots of shit like that.

I feel like I have been handicapping myself severely trying to hint at things through descriptive prose and dialogue when I really should have just explicitly laid it out, or done both in tandem. Especially when it comes to those nebulous sorts of things that can be felt but not easily described.

It should really be "show AND tell." Not just "show don't tell." Context matters of course, but still.

>>22319312
I'm feeling the exact the same thing the more I read. I liked this line a Saul Bellow letter: 'I noted at once in your writing the power to cut through superfluities, the hardness of attack that I favor.'

>>22319300
100% could be done. Having your own site obviously costs money and has limited discoverability though so you'd need to promote yourself elsewhere. I use substack and get a steady trickle of people from within the network.

>>22319312
Same and I conceptualize it now as "experience vs explain" rather than "show vs tell". Explaining is just really efficient at relaying information and often only the focus areas of the story deserve that slow experiential writing.

>see Lightlark in a store
>remember what anon said about it
Interesting to see what else was on the shelf at the grocery store. I should get out more.

>>22319333
and depending on the narrator, majority-telling is more often than not how people well, actually tell stories

>>22319333
>I use substack and get a steady trickle of people from within the network.

I actually have a Substack, too. The trouble is that faggot Elon nuked the link previews to Substack on Twitter in an act of supreme pettiness, so it's hindered sharing Substack posts via tweets. I'm wondering if my own site would be superior for that reason alone.

>>22319312
I don't know if an author that wrote 100 years ago and would almost certainly not be publishable now is the really the baseline to found your assumptions on. If you want to get published today, you should be reading best-selling published horror from the last 5 years. Not shit that was published in 1917.

Wrote 1500 words today. Going to reward myself with reading and try to hit 2k.

>>22319354
No one said anything about publishing.

>>22319340
Yea and especially the boring scene setting stuff so they can get to the good part. There's a spectrum which contributes to voice in my view, like Maugham is on one end at very "explain in sharp details" side and then you have Palahniuk at the other end with tons of visceral details. Everybody does both but it's interesting to see who favors what.

>>22319344
I know two people that bought their own domain and then applied it to substack (you can apparently talk to their customer support about this) pain in the dick but it works regarding the Twitter block. Apparently the Twitter throttled is across your ENTIRE ACCOUNT if you have a substack link but it goes away after you get your own domain. Might be worth it for you (personally I'm too new to it and lazy to bother yet)

I'm not a writer and never will be but someone should steal my idea for a story/ novel or whatever. The story takes place in current year America except the presidents went like this: Bush -> McCain -> Romney. It would be a fascinating setting to explore because America's culture would unironically be healthier. Everyone would be unified behind their hatred of the unbeatable neo-con establishment and none of the cancerous culture war shirt that wrecked the country happened in that timeline.

>>22319537
This will still lead to the rise of Donald Trump. Only as a Democrat.
>McCain gets us into another 10000x wars
>Trump comes in
>THIS HAS TO STOP BIGLY!
>Republicans don't have any idea what they're doing! They send your jobs away, and I know it because I have to intermingle with these assholes!
>TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP
>Democrats rally around the brash billionaire with the support of the media
>Attacked by right winged media
>Everything devolves into TRUMP GOOD/TRUMP BAD!

>>22319411
>I know two people that bought their own domain and then applied it to substack (you can apparently talk to their customer support about this) pain in the dick but it works regarding the Twitter block. Apparently the Twitter throttled is across your ENTIRE ACCOUNT if you have a substack link but it goes away after you get your own domain. Might be worth it for you (personally I'm too new to it and lazy to bother yet)

This is really interesting, Anon! I may make use of this. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. It could be quite useful, for a number of reasons.

Why does it seem like everyone here writes the following:
>edgelord literally me
>medieval fantasy with magic and shit
>harem isekai never ending novels
>randum horror shit

Where's the historical fictions? The romance? slice of life? Coming of age?

>write my characters/plot into a corner, because it's an interesting corner to think my way out of
>except i'm not imaginative enough to do it
fuck

>>22319600
Are you fucking kidding me? I literally wrote a historical romance slice of life coming of age short story and posted it last thread and it got only a single reply. FUCK YOU.

>>22319600
why do you think? is this a serious question? think about where you are and what sort of people inhabit this board

>>22319600
What do you wanna know? I got a number of short stories and a novel getting edited right now. Mostly literary realism.
>frame story about a guy that hijacks a dump truck in the late 90s, doesn't get prosecuted for what he does with it and he's furious about it
>two guys auditing an out of use office that is access by elevator and the elevator stops working
>two kids go fishing with their dad and one catches a fish without bait

What do you want to talk about? My writing brain has completely shut down for the day.

>>22319656
>>two guys auditing an out of use office that is access by elevator and the elevator stops working
Youtube talk about elevators, if you're a turbonerd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHf1vD5_b5I

>>22319767
Thank you. The story is less about the elevator and where they decide to go when it stops working. One of the things that video points out is that the controller won't move the car if it knows the doors are stuck. In the case of the story, the door tries to close and it starts slamming back and forth. It is a problem with some old elevators. And it leads the characters to consider going to the emergency exit, but one of them insists to fix the elevator instead. The safety feature info is useful, but in general the characters don't get to take advantage of the info. If anything, one of them becomes highly anxious standing in the car as it malfunctions and jumps out.

i have totally lost the plot bros, idk what i'm doing with my story anymore or why...

>>22319600
i haven't posted anything in awhile, but i write what you might call slice-of-life, i guess

>>22319805
You are no longer a person. You are a series of words.

>>22319993
Nah, just got severe writers block. On further contemplation I think it is because I give my characters leeway to be themselves and act how they naturally would, while simultaneously trying to impose my will on their actions as an omnipotent author for the sake of steering the plot in the right way. And those two simply don't align. They put me in awkward positions where I don't know what to write anymore. I think I will have to go back and scrap a lot of the stuff I have written and let the characters take the show. But I am attached to what I wrote and I don't want to get rid of it.

what software do you guys use to write in? I find microsoft word to be annoying and bloated. anyone enjoy scrivener?

>>22320042
i use google docs so i can write at work

>>22320021
How do you niggers even manage to write yourselves into a corner like this? My characters act exactly as I want them to, and none of it is ever out of character - unless it's out of character, in character.

Do you just take an amorphous blob, call it a "character" and roll with it?

>>22320042
vim with goyo plugin

do you guys think that getting a job will kill my creativity? i am in nyc. anyone have any good ideas for job that I can crush part of the year and then spend the rest just trying to be an author?

there is health insruance, rent, the fact that I want to feel financially secure... i am so poor... i just want to write, i feel like I really have something to say I;m just too poor right now.

i really need to finish my manuscript.

anyone a partof any writers groups in nyc?

>>22320279
If anything, getting a job will make you MORE creative. You just want to escape the potential shittiness of it in the future, so you write like mad now anywhere you can. Crypto be damned.

I’m actually fearful some bitches are going to use AI to figure out where I’ve been posting and expose me once I become an established author. Fuck self-published, I want my shit to be good

>>22320396
>>22320279
The fact that you’re asking that right now means you should probably pour in your efforts into writing at any available chance you can, especially when no one’s looking.

>t. Phonefag

>>22319993
only people can make words whats more human than that? even an ai is just an amalgamation of humanity

>>22319600
its gonna be boring but my thing is a technical manual for my hobbies as more of a diary and way to access the info from the point of view of a slice of life between two gaybos. So for what its worth theres someone doing it its just gonna suck but atleast theres only gonna be one copy I just like working with leather wanted to make a physical book by hand

>>22320411
Allot of historical maid stuff hopefully cause im a failed tranny lolol

>>22320407
I get that AI is an efficient and revolutionary new tool that could help change the world. It’s just that I feel like I’m cucking myself when I use it to do my thinking for me.

>>22320414
I dont know much about the publishing process and honestly its not an interest of mine BUT. Its worth noting its trained on alot of silicon valley types assumptions of what is right which clearly doesnt connect to the majority of people especially creatives so theres a good chance that a real author would have that in the bag much more than some regurgitated mess made by people disconnected from the human spirit. Its worth a shot isnt it? Atleast to spite the would be controllers of fate out there

>>22320420
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Fuck this anti-human bullshit, I’ll write what I want with what little talent my stupid human brain can muster.

In terms of human faces, it’s not like putting on makeup or facial hair. It’s asking some fucking programming to rearrange your face based on what a consensus thinks is attractive when even people don’t actually know what they want.

>>22320429
Hell yeah man just look at the faces their ai can barely make much less the rest of the body has the majority ever been right anyways? Were constantly changing just because of that. Make what you want its exciting youve made my day worth it man have a good one and good luck.

>>22320042
I use scrivener, I find the cork board and character sheets useful. It has it's quirks but then so do all editors.

>>22311386
"atmosphere to gradually change intensely" seems wrong to me.

>>22313075
It reminded me of this blog post, which I found somewhat instructive:
https://www.justinkownacki.com/the-real-hidden-genius-of-pulp-fiction/

Even a weird ending can be a good ending. Like Ulysses or one of those things that ends in mid-sente

>>22320439
Thanks.

Four more chapters to go. It's been a long road...

>>22320536
Reading or writing?

>>22320567
Writing. I'll never run out of chapters to read

>>22320571
Got it. How long have you been at it? Do you have a day job?

>>22320577
Since last september, no I work nights lol

>>22320602
Cool, and how long is this book you’re making? Are you planning to have ig edited and published somewhere or self published?

Every 30 minutes I vacillate between feeling like I'm god's greatest gift to the literary world and then feeling like I'm a hopeless amateur that can't do anything right and am doomed to be a failure.

>>22320608
>how long
It's a bloated 148k right now, it'll finish at around 155k. It will be shorter after I clean it up.
>planning to have ig edited
I'm going to edit it obviously, there's a bunch of things I already have listed for myself that need changing and that's without the normal editing passes of looking for pointless repetitions, brainfarts and the kinds of mistakes Word doesn't catch, making sentences flow better, breaking up long paragraphs etc.
>and published somewhere
I'll try but if nobody wants it I won't bother with self-pub

>>22320622
Ok then, good luck

>>22320611
Either case you’re right?

>>22319600
>Where's the historical fictions? The romance?
It's literally on my to-write list.

>>22319656
How did he catch the fish? Does the other brother kill him for finding favor with their father undeservedly?

bit late in the thread life so I might repost on the new one.

What story sounds more interesting Anons, A story about an escaped slave trying to learn what it means to be free

Or

A leader of a rebellion of those about those same slaves taking their land and culture back.

what sounds better? I wanna write both.

>>22320714
The story of a man hired to bring back the escaped property of the slave-owner and his melancholy observations of a changing world where the old traditional ways are being destroyed by a violent uprising and a revival of a supposed golden age of half-remembered superstitions

>>22320714
Write both, duh. That's called a 'novel'.

>>22311376
Do I have any talent? Be honest.

Thank you in advance.

https://pastebin.com/YZEJRTNd

>>22320888
No. Still better than most of the shit posted here

>>22320643
The kid doesnt really know but the other kid makes guesses. He really just tried it because it was different.
The brother isn't jealous. But the father gets mad for a lot of different reasons. Not only because no one else caught anything.

>>22320888
I suppose being able to be so energetic about something so uninteresting counts as talent.

>>22320984
Thank you!

>>22311376
“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”
Was Bradbury right here? Is this good advice for young writers?

>>22321108
I'm sure they won't be bad if you give the love and care they need over the week

if you don't edit it and line read it ect then its just not gonna be good,

>>22321108
I have a folder with over 30 short stories in them and I liked 10 of them enough to edit and submit to magazines. I do think Bradbury has a point. If anything you are getting experience going through the creative process.

>>22321108
Sorry, I can't. I better try to write as best as I can instead. Stupid advice and his books are very boring.

>>22320042
Libreoffice

>>22321108
I struggle with short stories. I've written 3, all connected to my novel, and haven't been compelled to write any more. I think it's because I'm not a fan of reading them, either. Usually they're too brief to have much of an impact on me, though when they're good, I think, "This could've been a novel/novella."

I'm trying to write a story about someone (me) that stares at women in the grocery store. How does this sort of preamble read before it goes into actually stalking women shopping. I understand it's sort of dumb to post this without much else.

>>22320042
google docs. notepad for ideas, and nimble writer when I want to write something I'm trying to hide (my diary some other gay ass shit)

How much edginess is too much edginess? I'm trying to make a point and my characters are very morally grey by the standards of the genre. Is killing people all the time without repercussions alright? What if it is super easy and never causes a single doubt in the protagonist? Should I write these deaths like tragedies to contrast with the characters because that's how it is done in some literature?

>>22321262
>Should I write these deaths like tragedies to contrast with the characters because that's how it is done in some literature?
No, that would probably seem sentimental.

I think, as a general rule, you should follow where your story seems to be naturally heading and not compromise it by trying to second-guess 'what you should be doing'. So, if your characters are naturally veering towards extreme cold-bloodedness, then stick to that and make it part of the core of the story.

>>22321262
I like to use the narrator to contrast the edge.

>>22321262
I mean, there are a lot of factors to consider...
>Is it killing in battle or straight up murder/assassination?
>How many of your characters are remorseless killers?
>Do they have a good reason for being that way?
>Who are they killing?
>Are the characters entertaining enough that even someone who doesn't like killers could see past it?

>>22321214
I'd suggest that you not reveal every single one of your cards during the preamble. Leave something to be discovered. Tell the reader just enough so that they read your book but not enough that they think they get it already.

>get PM asking if I receive feedback/fanmail via email on RR
I didn't expect to start getting attention after I switched the medium.

>>22319580
This has genuine alt-history potential.

writing an isekai story where some shaman from chalcolithic Europe gets sent into a fantasy world. he promptly gets spooked when he sees his spells having a visible effect on the world around him. most of the story’s conflict comes from culture shock with the natives, who are bronze/early iron age peoples. it is an extreme pain trying to find resources on prehistoric chalcolithic cultures, and an exercise in making shit up in terms of religion and culture that seem to fit right with what we can guess about them from their graves, items left behind, etc.

>>22321502
Well, good to hear that you're still at it. What percentage of the book is complete already?

>>22321502
>it is an extreme pain trying to find resources on prehistoric chalcolithic cultures
Who gives a fuck as long as it's a fun read?

>>22321559
I have autistically been working at it, first it an iron age finn, then I moved it back to neolithic shaman after watching the best neolithic brit larper there is, then moved it up to the chalcolithic. About less than 5% has been done, because I have been traveling with family, and dealing with my own laziness. My ancestral home out in the countryside has been wonderful help for focusing on writing.

>>22321254
why nimble writer for that?

>>22321211
You can always flesh out your short stories and turn them into longer works after the fact.
Many authors do that.
I've noticed that several of Philip K. Dick's novel's are fleshed-out reimaginings of his short stories.

I find myself often writing disconnected scenes in isolation instead of following the narrative linearly. Anyone else do this? I wonder if it's a bad habit.

how do you find time to write when you have to shit

>>22322083
sometimes it feels like I'm shitting on the page, maybe that's the trick

I am curious, have any writers experimented with having a Patreon? I feel it could be a good way to earn some income and also support fans by giving them an avenue to get updates about works in progress and glimpses of what you're working on. Would you even be allowed to do this if you have a contract with a traditional publisher?

I wrote an illustrated encyclopedia of fantasy weapons
intended audience are DnD players, game developers, people who do worldbuilding
theres a lot of lore in it too

anyone know any publishers that specialize in worldbuilding and similar things?

>>22322056
I do this
I think its great but its a lot slower too. Sometimes you just get good ideas and you gotta add it in.
my current novel has the ending complete, the beginning, and a few scenes in between.

do you have the same issue where the last scenes are qualitatively the worst?

>>22322056
Writing nonlinearly is perfectly valid.
>>22322083
Maybe you need more fiber in your diet.

>>22320888
Ignore the crabs.
I rather enjoyed the chicken's naivete.
Keep at it!

>>22322100
This is the standard model for Royal Road but that leans heavily on serial publishing. Pay to read chapters a day earlier.
I know there are non-serial writers who do it. I don't know how it works out for them.

>>22320611
Same.

>On chapter 4 of my Isekai slop story (only thing I've written so far)
>121 readers
>3k total views
>Only 5 people following me
So, how and when do I start making money?

>>22321108
How do people write that fucking fast?

So help me out here. I read three crime novels recently, and they were all really bad. But the most annoying thing across all three of them, was the description of characters. And I don't mean like what they look like and such. No, every time a new character comes in, like a page or two is dedicated to explaining who they are, their life story, how they got to here, and so on. Am I right to be mad at this? It even happens for characters who are not even relevant to the plot. Some bimbo shows up in an unmotivated flashback, and we spend 2/3 of a page learning about her backstory. And she never shows up again.

So, I decided to cut out all the exposition scenes from my novel. A character shows up, they get a brief description, and unless it's plot relevant, I won't dive into paragraphs of character lore. What they do, what they say in the moment, and all that, is what defines them.

Is that the right train of thought?

>>22322858
>Am I right to be mad at this?
Well, not necessari--
>Some bimbo shows up in an unmotivated flashback, and we spend 2/3 of a page learning about her backstory. And she never shows up again.
Yeah, that's garbage. And yeah, that's actually quite reminiscent of Mamet's memo to his writers for The Unit. That sort of background exposition is only interesting if it somehow contrasts with what they are doing presently, especially if its ironic. Like in Fight Club, the sobbing guy with tits used to be a prize-winning body-builder.

>>22322858
>every time a new character comes in, like a page or two is dedicated to explaining who they are, their life story, how they got to here, and so on. Am I right to be mad at this?
I felt the exact same thing when I was reading a bunch of Richard Stark and Jim Thompson novels. They'll like, go to a garage to fix their heist car, and the guy who works at the garage has a whole flashback and a "Heck, he never thought he'd still be changing oil after all those years. But here he was, old Frank 'Pistachio' Zamoni. He thought back to his first wife, to brighter, more hopeful days" etc. and is never mentioned in the story again.

>>22322790
when you stop posting this same comment over and over and actually write on a schedule. ur 4 fuckin chapters in brother. christ

>>22322932
i wish my friend called me pistachio

Finally writing again after a year
https://pastebin.com/B52aFQhs
Am I all rusted up?

Which method of killing is most preferable for a serious vigilante story? The brutal method or the comedic one (Which can/usually is brutal and performed seriously but the way the method used for killing the villain will make you laugh rather than disgusted).

I feel like the comedic approach is the most satisfying way to kill unforgivable villains.

>>22322985
>Restrained laughter chittered out of a few phlegm stuck throats.
>He gazed at it with a look that belonged on someone remembering a bittersweet past, or perhaps someone who had once held dreams dear but now just wished to hold anything dear.
>With a wistfulness filled sigh
You should have your eyelids forcibly removed with razor blades. Otherwise not bad for flash fiction, though the story doesn't really go anywhere.

>>22323004
Fucking hell man, calm down. Even
>With a wistfulness filled sigh
doesn't call for that.

>>22323010
NTA but
>-fulness filled
is either clearly incorrect or, charitably, experimental-- in which in which case i'd like to see rather a lot more experimenting

>>22323015
It's experimental in the sense that as a kid you experiment with putting ketchup on ice cream.

>>22323021
"process art"

>>22323004
Understandable
I like fucking around with description and having fun with it, but a lot of the time it comes out stilted
I like the way the -ess of wistfulness led to the sigh. Connecting like sounds is satisfying

>>22323027
>Connecting like sounds is satisfying
Check out The Sentence is a Lonely Place by Garielle Lutz, an essay on that exact topic:
https://sites.evergreen.edu/eyeofthestory/wp-content/uploads/sites/137/2016/02/The-Believer-The-Sentence-Is-a-Lonely-Place.pdf

>>22322932
>>22322901
Also, how about pointless side characters? Like let me make an example from one of those crime novels.
>Old lady has gone missing, and one old man who had a bit of a crush on her, goes looking for her, with her neighbor
>Then a whole chapter is devoted to another woman, who has a crush on the main character, but the main character is too dense to notice
>We get some backstory to her, and she spends a chapter making tea for the main character show comes by after searching whole day
>Next chapter, she gets ready, puts on makup (despite going to the woods to look for missing woman)
>They go looking, the main character again ignores her, and then they find the body of a young man
And that's it. She leaves the story at that point, never to return. Aren't side characters supposed to at least offer something? Look at Crime and Punishment, and how characters like Razumihin, Raskolnikov's family, Sonya's family, the detective, Svedrigailov, Luzhin and etc, all had actual things to do in the story. But in the novels I read, characters just pop in, get a whole backstory, barely do anything, and then leave.

Not next thread, but I decided to create a thread to try and figure out what would be the best word processing software for writers.

>>22323405

>>22322200
Thank you anon!

That means a lot! :)

https://pastebin.com/W4gq08iJ
New material at 55, but I revised most everything before that.

>get a brilliant idea to include ANOTHER sub narrative to make my characters even more DEEP
>need to write in a few paragraphs in previous chapters
>need to write a whole another chapter to justify a lewd scene

When am I going to stop inserting stuff in the middle?

>>22323516
REAL writers have everything figured out from the start. You should KYS.

Thinking of adding some flashback scenes to my narrative, perhaps at the beginning of each chapter, including the very start of the novel. Would you be turned off reading a book, getting invested into the scene and then having a 2+ year timeskip to different circumstances?

>>22323528
Nah, this writing is boring as fuck and makes your story flat. Writing with a complete outline is easy, but everyone knows that literature must be completely incomrehensibly complex.

>>22323536
I think it's fully dependant on how good your flashbacks are. If it has entertainment value and explains a lot about the characters and setting while providing a fun story it should not become a drag. I'm thinking of increasing my story 50% just to loredump something that happened a thousand years ago. Probably a bad idea, but I think it can fit in the final version.

Sordid little creature.

Parody of man. Not eliciting laughter of any kind, but horrifying silence.
Wake up, grab your phone, inject a fresh vial of shit directly into your eyes; the preferred method of combating the malaise of independent thought.

Reject self-reflection, or else risk remenbering the depraved, wretched being you have allowed yourself to become.
Mute the remnants of your conscience, the uncomfortable truth that if you had the balls to hear, might lead you towards a better tomorrow.

There it is, bright colors, outrageous stories told by an automaton who's got about the same autonomy as you do.
A little man that keeps on running across train tracks, grabbing coins.
Family guy funny moments a hundred-thirty-five.

Within this bombardment of all your senses, you find peace.

Monks temper their wills through silence.
This human shaped embarassment will consume all sorts of exciting things until it feels nothing anymore.

The neutering of the human soul.

Welcome to the modern man.

Well, no more. I refuse to watch one more video of a clip of south park right above a set of gums collecting, washing and polishing teeth.

I set out to paint a picture of my discontent, the reason of my insomnia.

I read the words, reread them, once, thrice.
I hate them.
I hate my lack of talent, I hate how I've got nothing interesting to say.

When I least expected it, I am no longer faced by my own words on my screen, but by a video of technicolor sand being stacked up and sliced.
Just when did that happen?
My lizard brain could not deal with the pain of my own self-deprecation, and was beaconed by the siren song of this goddammned garbage that I'm embarassed to admit I'm addicted to.

And it is at this moment, that a single thought pops up in my mind:
Maybe that funny looking fella in the shades wasn't so crazy after all.

Experience (any sort of recognized or non recognized mental reception whatsoever, including thought, feeling, or emotion, consciousness, or will ) logically proves existence because the experience itself is recognizeable and for something to be recognized it must either be legitimate or an illusion, and even if it were an illusion it would be legitimate in itself as an illusion and must stem from either some source either tangible or ethereal (that is to say not of a typical reality, though this does not disprove the illusion as it stould would still be stem from some source, thus making it logically viable) or constitute itself entirely, which though apparently pardoxical is a plausible explanation for the source of a recognizeable thing.

>>22324015
Nobody cares

>>22324015
If you can't explain what you wrote to a 8 year old you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about

Earlier today I had an experience followed by an epiphany and I'm now planning on writing the spiritual successor to an old classic. Not in that I plan to keep the narrative going or steal the style of it, more so that I will explore the theme of it in more detail.
My biggest hurdle is that the book was controversial at the time of its release and would be even worse now. Is there any way to try to get it published without ever showing my real identity?

>>22324062
If you're afraid to be exposed, your idea wasn't worth writing about in the first place

>>22324062
Write it first then decide.

>>22324075
Dilate
>>22324062
You should write it regardless. You can publish through different means, through web or through a publisher that will accept it. You do have to be sure that noone will rat you out, of course.

I can do this. I am a good writer. I will finish my book.

>>22324179
You probably aren't a good writer; thinking like this will just lead to disappointment later on. The best way to think is "I am a writer, and I dedicate myself to my craft. I am only the best I can be, and I will put in the effort to be that best, as well as to finish my book. No matter how the book turns out, I know I will have improved, and I know one day I will be 'good.'"

>>22323536
Books like Slaughterhouse Five are almost nonlinear and constantly switch between times. It's a matter of how you pull it off and if that nonlinear order makes sense.

>>22313523
>mystery-horror medieval fantasy
Don't do this unless you plan to write something short and solely horror focused. Tried it, doesn't work. Not for a long multifaceted story

All of you are jealous of me and my massive writing and philosiphizing abilities

>>22321852
I can hide the file and no one knows what file type it is

>>22323536
My story is basically PTSD flashbacks and vaguely relevant dreams on top of a regular plot.

New thread
>>22324926
>>22324926
>>22324926