/lit/ - Literature

>>23418446
>Wrote this poem, would appreciate any feedback:

Touch the death and pierce it like night
Swim in its cool molasses, sweet
And sticky
Bless my heart when the child falls in
And tips his tongue to the black, teasing
Teasing me slowly out of a cold
Through leaf piles and swirling buds that
rise from wet grass, dew
Loving all within, yet forgetting my
position, where are my manners
Sandwiches that sink in the cool water
I’m going back, going back
Going home, I want to
I don’t want to leave you, tired and sickly
and angry, lift up your skirt and throw out
the stones and brush away the silt
With a toothbrush
In blindness there is all seeing, in knowing
all doing, in being all wanting, lilac cherry
trees built in groves of perfuming sun,
dripping kisses and plopping sweetness
Run from me and I’ll chase you
I’ll chase my wonder and wander forever

>Set out to make a dumb, low-IQ fantasy story following a silly band of adventurers on a generic quest to save the world
>Somehow every one of my story arcs has turned into an allegory for the horrors of war
Am I doing something wrong? Or something right?

How do the japanese manage to make stupid shit like this sound like the coolest thing ever.
Is it just great character designs/art?

how do you write with a migraine

>Poem I wrote yesterday, any feedback is much appreciated:

Touch the death and pierce it like night
Swim in its cool molasses, sweet
And sticky
Bless my heart when the child falls in
And tips his tongue to the black, teasing
Teasing me slowly out of a cold
Through leaf piles and swirling buds that
rise from wet grass, dew
Loving all within, yet forgetting my
position, where are my manners
Sandwiches that sink in the cool water
I’m going back, going back
Going home, I want to
I don’t want to leave you, tired and sickly
and angry, lift up your skirt and throw out
the stones and brush away the silt
With a toothbrush
In blindness there is all seeing, in knowing
all doing, in being all wanting, lilac cherry
trees built in groves of perfuming sun,
dripping kisses and plopping sweetness
Run from me and I’ll chase you
I’ll chase my wonder and wander forever

>>23418519
I'm not much a poet, what kind of feedback would help you?

>>23418406
Tbf Conrad has a love it or hate it style. Not being able to differentiate him from AI isn't surprising since these threads are mostly populated by ESLs (not even hating, just a fact).

Rate this brief and very much so loose story idea.
>Aliens make contact with mankind
>They warn that their raiding parties are already en route
>Humans can keep a degree of independence if they comply and woefully begin prepping the planet for occupation
>Governments of the world agree
>Aliens will be there within 2 generations
>Until then the man-made peacekeeping force has to stop dissent
>That's the setting
>The story would be about two buddy-cop esque peacekeepers trying to quell the insurgents while dealing with their own drama of having de facto betrayed their own race
>One of them is a nihilist edgelord conspiracy crackpot opportunist loser who is just glad to support whoever's on top
>The second is a Paladin-type genuinely good guy who tries to use his position of power to help out regular people whenever he can. Very conflicted about working for the aayys
>Also cool gimmicky biomutations for cool fight scenes but that's secondary

>>23418529
What do u think the poem is about?

I'm in the last stages of my book. Just crossing the t's and dotting the i's before I send it away. I'm thinking about starting a new book in tandem though, completely different. Fantasy. Is this a good idea? Doing 2 at once? Even if one is pretty much finished?

>>23418544
>Fantasy. Is this a good idea?
All I know is that the stuff I hate reading in here is shit like Gorgoreth the Blind who smite Egoliath in the Twelvetree Palace and all this crap

>>23418535
Your story idea has several strong elements that can create a compelling narrative. Here are some points to consider:

### Strengths:
1. **Unique Premise**: The concept of aliens pre-warning their arrival and humans preparing for occupation is intriguing and sets up a tense atmosphere.
2. **Moral Conflict**: The internal struggle of the peacekeepers, particularly the "Paladin-type" character, adds depth and complexity to the story.
3. **Buddy-Cop Dynamic**: The contrast between the nihilist and the idealist provides a solid foundation for character-driven drama and humor.
4. **Dystopian Setting**: The idea of a peacekeeping force controlling dissent offers plenty of opportunities for action and political intrigue.
5. **Biomutations**: These can add exciting and visually engaging elements to fight scenes, enhancing the story's appeal.

### Areas for Development:
1. **World-Building**: Flesh out the political, social, and environmental changes on Earth as it prepares for alien occupation. How does this impending occupation affect daily life, culture, and technology?
2. **Alien Motives and Culture**: Develop the aliens’ motives and culture to make them more than just an impending threat. This can add layers to the story, especially if there are differing opinions among the aliens themselves.
3. **Insurgents’ Perspective**: Give more insight into the insurgents' motivations and their perspective. Are they purely antagonistic, or do they have valid reasons for resisting?
4. **Character Arcs**: Ensure both main characters have clear development arcs. How do their experiences and interactions with each other and the world around them change their outlooks and decisions?
5. **Secondary Characters**: Introduce secondary characters who can add depth to the story and support the main characters' development. Allies, informants, and even alien collaborators can provide interesting subplots.
6. **Ethical Dilemmas**: Highlight the ethical dilemmas faced by both peacekeepers and insurgents. This can add emotional weight and make the story more thought-provoking.

Overall, your story idea is strong and has a lot of potential. By further developing the world, characters, and underlying themes, you can create a rich and engaging narrative that resonates with readers.

>>23418508
I'd say it's because Araki plays it completely straight despite it being over the top crazy shit that is almost comically absurd.

>>23418501
are you watching a lot of news?

>>23418508
The language is sincere, like fantasy or older lit. They let themselves take the dialogue seriously and don't give a fuck about realism. Sometimes it comes across as cringe, but sometimes it lands just right.

>>23418513
you don't. rest first.

>>23418535
Definitely enough there to get started. The buddy cop idea might be too on-the-nose if they are juxtaposed that much, but you could probably pull it off. How serious will the tone be?

>>23418539
for some reason I'm feeling it's about the death of a loved one.

>>23418560
pathetic

>>23418535
Feels more like the description of an anime than a novel.

>>23418577
>How serious will the tone be
Fairly serious as far as the plot goes. Ofc the "bonding" moments would be lighter because i think that's better than heavy emotional work.
>>23418560
Thx. I covered more of the areas of development in my head already, i just didn't want to spill out too much in a brief post.

>>23418578
Ideally i'd like to make it in a visual medium, but that adds like 10 times the workload.

>>23418533
The issue isn't whether it's forgivable that people with limited English skills can't differentiate Conrad and AI, it's that they waffle on about principles of prose while being unable to do it.

>>23418603
>Fairly serious as far as the plot goes. Ofc the "bonding" moments would be lighter because i think that's better than heavy emotional work.
yeah I think tone will be important for this one. Like I said, there's enough there to get started but from your brief description it could either be ultra serious or goofy so if you want to keep it serious then I'd say the character might be a bit one-dimensional at this point. You probably just left out some details though.

how to write jealousy? feels very difficult to describe

>>23418670
No one has ever satisfactorily explained the difference between jealousy and envy - can you?

>>23418535

I had an idea for a story told from the alien invaders' perspective.
>a fleet of intergalactic conquerors have spent 300 years observing Earth, incarnated in human bodies, studying the planet and people, preparing for the conquest
>capturing planets is just a sport for them
>the D-day comes
>the galactic emperor's policy is join or die, but many in the invasion army have grown to enjoy life on Earth
>they want to capture the planet as intact as possible with minimum casualties and bloodshed
>but how to "peacefully conquer" those who refuse to join willingly?
>the story deals with the space knights' attempts to win over the hearts of the ordinary people around the world
>as the conquest progresses, they start to uncover an evil elite cabal, which rolls out various dirty tricks from clones to brainwashed troops, mutants, malicious AIs, biological weapons, and nukes to either retain their hold of Earth, or ruin it beyond recovery

I'll never be allowed to actually make this, will I? Too many redpills

>>23418698
it's only the last line with the "redpills"

>>23418698
I dig the idea of Aliens trying their hardest to make people love them, really wholesome.
Is the cabal human or alien?

>>23418685
that's because their synonyms retard

>>23418742
The cabal are mostly human, but some of them have prolonged their lives, or modified themselves genetically and technologically to the point that they hardly qualify anymore. They're also working with reptilians and other evil aliens.

I forgot to mention, there's also a federation of benevolent aliens, who want to let mankind develop on their own without interference, but they're so naive and bureaucratic every side hoodwinks them all the time.

>>23418761
I think you should write it.

dash is superior than quotation marks, english language is retard

>>23418885
Thanks for your contribution

how do i circumvent the menwritingwomen effect?

>>23418929
Ignore it because it's a non-issue

What is a good book to study if I want to look at group dialogue. There is quite a bit of.
>A said "blah", B reacted. C was doing x with D.
I know I can take characters out of scenes but my plot has these characters together a lot. Think a travelling party.

>>23418933
is it really?
it's just femcels complaining on the internet not really a massive problem to reader enjoyment?
i thought they hated that shit

>>23418957
>femcels
This doesnt exist, they are all trolling (unironically)

>>23418957
Just give her decent characterization and don't spend a whole page describing her body, other than that do whatever you want.

>>23418978
>and don't spend a whole page describing her body,
why not?

>>23418980
Weren't you the one who asked how to avoid the "menwritingwomen" effect? That's the kind of stuff that gets posted there

>>23418990
that's some other anon

>>23418935
Visual Novels

>>23418929
Read some books by women?
Talk to some women?
Just invite a woman you know to lunch and let her know ahead of time that you'd like to get her take on some of your writing. Go in with an open mind and focus on listening. Don't interrupt her feedback or try to argue with her. Take copious notes.

After getting feedback, repeat the gist of it back to her and get her confirmation that you understood her correctly. If she misunderstood something you wrote, let her know what you meant and ask how you could have been more clear. (Look up Active Listening for more on the right way to communicate on this topic.)

Repeat as many times as you like. You'll notice after a half dozen or so interviews that women are wildly different. Probably moreso than men. But you'll also notice a few themes that run through all of the feedback you're getting, and those are what you want to focus on getting right.

If you make your intentions clear and don't come across as if you're hitting on them, this approach works amazingly well. I'm at the point where I sometimes go to a coffee shop and look for someone killing time, not dressed up like they're on their way to work or waiting on a date, etc, introduce myself as someone looking for "diverse perspectives" on my writing, and ask if they would be interested in critiquing me. These days I emphasize that I'm looking for their PoV as a woman, because otherwise sometimes a woman will make an effort to be unbiased and gender neutral and that's the opposite of what you want.

You learn to read them before you approach them over time. For example, if you want feedback from a 20-year old with blue hair you'll find that you're better off asking her while she's in line and offering to compensate her for her efforts by paying for her order, because if you wait until she's at a table on her laptop she may presume that you're demanding unpaid editorial labor from her and snap at you. If you're looking for an older woman's perspective, a 50+ year old woman alone in a cafe may be tickled that anyone cares what she thinks and be grateful for the conversation, so you might feel safe approaching them even if they seem to be in the middle of something else.

In any case, be gracious and humble and listen to what they say. Even if they chew you out and tell you to fuck off, that itself is valuable knowledge. Consider exchanging contact information with the most receptive or helpful people you interview. Be careful not to accidentally curate a list of contacts composed entirely of people that tend to give you minimal criticism, because then you're just building an echo chamber for yourself.

If all of that seems to be too much, consider posting online, even if it has to be reddit, asking for feedback from women in particular. I've heard of people reserving meeting rooms on college campuses (as students) or public libraries and posting events to local social media inviting critique.

>>23418685
>>23418747
wrong. jealousy is when you want good things for yourself, envy is when you want others to be deprived. defined by aristotle 2300 years ago

>>23418501
If you’re not writing a story about murder hobos, incorporated what are you doing with your life?
>”aye so after I had about three mugs in me gullet I took ‘er round back to the ol’ shitter and gave ‘er a what fer.”

>>23418513
I’ve been having a terrible migraine all week, it completely killed the momentum I had built up with a story I had been working on.

>>23419005
ignore this anon

>>23419005
Peak reddit post

>>23418957
>>23418971
Femcels exist.
How you write women matters.
There's a reason "booktok" exists.
There's a reason romance novels, as a genre, exist.
Women have different priorities and different preferences and how characters are described matters a great deal there. You have to keep in mind that the things that make a male character attractive to men are not necessarily the same things that make a male character attractive to women, and vice versa.

This carries on into how you depict their behavior.

>>23418978
>I gazed upon her bare form, her pale skin reflecting the neon lights of the whorehouse to which she owes her name.

>>23419030
are you a woman

>>23419030
>the things that make a male character attractive to men are not necessarily the same things that make a male character attractive to women, and vice versa.
This point bears reiterating, you should consider your intended audience first and foremost. The reason women complain about men writing women characters isn't because they're bad characters, it's because the men are writing women that appeal to men.

>>23419030
>put Fabio Lanzoni on the cover
>???
>profit

>>23419005
>Read some books by women?
i dont know any other than jane austen and brontes
>Talk to some women?
i don't know any, not even any family members
>Just invite a woman you know to lunch
do trans women on discord count?

>>23419005
insanely stupid idea. women are the most virtue-signaling, image-obsessed people on earth and they will 100% sell you complete horseshit the media told them they're supposed to say. look at what a woman says on twitter about "toxic masculinity" and then at the romance books she reads at home. if you asked her for her fantasy man, would she have said "serial killer with face tattoos who rapes me until i orgasm?" no. and yet that is what she masturbates to in private. talking to women is a complete waste of time, you have to watch how they act.

>>23419042
This.

>>23419025
>>23419027
I will qualify my advice by adding that if you look like the average neckbeard at a Magic the Gathering tournament and your book is in a genre/subgenre typically dominated by men writing male power fantasies where the MC bangs every woman he meets.

>>23419040
No, but I am the anon that recommended interviewing people to get their takes. I've interviewed easily over 100 women over the years.

>>23419042
Yes, this is precisely right.
The crucial differences often lay in details like how you describe a woman getting dressed. When writing for men you may mention the way her corset lifts her bust, but when writing for women you may emphasize the effort of lacing it and how it matches the rest of her outfit. You can attempt to compromise by mentioning both, and your ability to balance them without boring or offending either audience is a mark of skill as a writer.

The big stuff that will blow up in your face can be something like blatantly projecting male desires, though. For example, don't write about a man doing a small kindness for a woman and her deciding that she now owes him sex. That'll come across as incel shit and if that's how the MC and their love interest meet it will taint the entire story from that point onward. No amount of detail will fix that.

>>23419066
Can’t get any FTM women at least?

>>23419064
This is the most nuanced and difficult point on the entire topic. Many things men enjoy reading, like a strong, confident man doing daring things and taking women however he likes, ALSO resonate with women. I've seen studies claiming that over 3/4ths of popular romance novels include scenes in which the male lead forces himself on the female MC without explicit verbal consent, which is technically rape, but women reading it often love it.

This emphasizes my point because the key difference is in the details. These male characters are described in ways that appeal to women, with emphasis on things like their intimidating nature combined with a protectiveness for the female MC, and their high status or abundance of resources. The male MC is often a CEO, pirate captain, vampire, werewolf, fey lord, prince, or some other man with a lot of resources and clout. If he's a homeless bum, and he's not secretly a prince looking to recapture the throne that is rightfully his, he's usually some kind of antihero that's powerful enough, smart enough, and skilled enough to scare those in power.

The female characters aren't generally hypersexualized. Emphasis is placed on their mundaneness. They're just an average gal. But there's something special about them that others usually don't see, but the male MC does. She's simultaneously the girl nextdoor and fit to be queen, and her journey may be going from being repressed and lacking confidence in herself to being assertive and powerful, even if she does so through her partner.

There's so much overlap between what men and women often what to read. The main difference is what details you use to describe them.

>>23419072
This is why you need to talk to a lot of them and not argue with them. Appreciate their time. Take notes. And the more women you interview the more the truth shines through.

>if you asked her for her fantasy man, would she have said "serial killer with face tattoos who rapes me until i orgasm?" no. and yet that is what she masturbates to in private.
Because it's not as simple as what you wrote. There are layers of symbolism to it that you will only learn to decade by piecing a rosetta stone together from talking to multiple women about the topic.

>>23419005
>>23419075
>>23419110
in case anybody can't tell, this guy is 100% making up everything he's saying, he has never interviewed any women in any cafes. every sentence just reeks of a larping autist daydreaming fake scenarios. incidentally a good example of a man writing women poorly

>PC can run Elden Ring at a playable level
>Can't fucking open a Word document in less than 10 minutes and god forbid if you try to actually write anything in it before it finished stretching
Explain this

>>23419110
>There are layers of symbolism to it that you will only learn to decade by piecing a rosetta stone together from talking to multiple women about the topic.
complete horseshit by a sheltered virgin. there's nothing to "decade," women simply say things they picked up from mass media and none of it reflects their underlying psychology or desires. step one for dealing with women is to ignore everything that comes out of the mouth

>>23419075
>I will qualify my advice by adding that if you look like the average neckbeard at a Magic the Gathering tournament and your book is in a genre/subgenre typically dominated by men writing male power fantasies where the MC bangs every woman he meets.
Derp, didn't read that before posting.

If you look like a neckbeard and your book is of the style or genre typically aimed at that kind of audience, you may get shot down more, and may face harsher criticism, and may gain less useful information. So this approach doesn't work for everyone.

>>23419066
>i dont know any other than jane austen and brontes
This is easily google-able and every day someone posts on the "recommend me a book" subreddit asking for books by women. Several recent best sellers and award winners have been written by women.

>i don't know any, not even any family members
Then you're left with asking strangers online, using a meetup app, or approaching strangers like I said.

>do trans women on discord count?
Not usually. Studies show trans women do have morphologically different brains compared to cis men, and that their brains more closely resemble the brains of women in key areas, but their socialization and lived experiences are often utterly unique and in their own entire category. It is EXTREMELY useful to make time to get feedback from trans women and trans men and nonbinary people because they sometimes have wildly unique takes on things that cis people will never be able to tell you about, or don't know to tell you about.

For example, many men go their entire lives having people step out of their way and avoid eye contact even on busy public streets. And many women are used to people checking them out in public, striking up random conversations, or hurrying to open doors for them. Because men and women tend to go their entire lives experiencing these things, they don't realize that the opposite gender might have a completely different experience.

It took interviewing a trans man for me to hear about how jarring it was for them to go from the women's PoV with everyone checking them out, strangers smiling at them, people helping them at a moment's notice, etc, to the man's PoV in which everyone did their best to ignore them and they felt utterly alone, even though they were on a busy NYC sidewalk, because all of the dozens of people around them made an active effort to avoid acknowledging them in any way.

That is incredibly useful for understanding what shifts you need to make when writing from a PoV other than your own real-life gender. Or the changes you need to make if your fictional world is one where gender roles are different from the real world. If your MC is a man and he's a famous hero in a new city he arrives at, you can't write him as if everyone just ignores him because that's your experience as a normal man. You can utilize some of what you know about how an attractive woman experiences a city.

>>23419123
Microshaft being microshaft. Word is a bloated cow of a program that is far more complex and far less useful than it needs to be.
I prefer the MS Word on MacOS because it’s faster for no apparent reason.

>>23419120
Should be easy to prove. What'd I get wrong, then?

>>23419141
Wrong. You have to consider how the tattoos reflect things like defiance of conventional norms, how the serial killings demonstrate competency and formidableness, and how the rape may suggest that he has a way of always getting what he wants.

In that context, he's not the scum of earth abusing a victim. He's a maverick that's strong enough, smart enough, and skilled enough to defy the rest of society and do what he wants. And if he wants HER, she must be worth wanting, and if he falls for her, she must truly be special. And if they become a couple, all of his power becomes hers. Anyone that wrongs her has to deal with him, a veritable force of nature, making them pay for it.

And all of that has to be reflected in your writing when you add these elements to a story, otherwise you risk coming across like low-tier smut written for horny manchildren 100 years ago.

I recommend you read some studies on topics like proxy violence and social cognition among men and women. There's a reason why the rich and powerful get away with so many scandals and still often have supporters even after going to prison for them.

post your tits

>Writing chapter 3
>Check my outline
>"And then he figures something out and goes to the next location in a hurry"
Well fuck you too past me, I already need to do the legwork of actually writing the thing, now I need to figure out plot twists too?
Nvm got it

>>23419005
>set up a series of interviews with every woman you know
>force them to read your writing
>explain clearly that you are not hitting on them
>mansplain the writing back at them
>emphasise that you are looking for a female POV
>take copious notes during

tips:
>strategise around your target's age
>strategise around your target's attire
>don't worry if they tell you to fuck off
>be gracious and humble

>>23419176
i don't have to "prove" anything. people can just read shit like
>For example, if you want feedback from a 20-year old with blue hair you'll find that you're better off asking her while she's in line and offering to compensate her for her efforts by paying for her order, because if you wait until she's at a table on her laptop she may presume that you're demanding unpaid editorial labor from her and snap at you.
it simply RADIATES from this post that it's a daydream not written from experience but cobbled together from internet consumption by a sheltered person. this is you imagining what would happen if you ever left the house. it's blindingly obvious and you will never convince me otherwise

>>23419199
>40,000 words into a story
>decide to flowchart character locations to better map out when they interact and where they meet
>realize that I never gave a main character a reason to leave their old life
How the fuck did past me not even think to add a note about needing an inciting incident? I know with certainty that I've spent this entire time just taking it for granted that they had one. I never once registered before today that such a crucial piece of the story was missing.

>>23419207
Or you can just not worry about it. Women aren’t these mystical creatures, they’re just men with vajeeners. Write a story about men with vajeeners.
>>23419186

All I have in my book is one female side character and the MC's mom who dies before the story starts.

>huge gap in outline near the ending
>can be solved by something you wrote in the 2nd chapter
it's a good feeling when you chekhov's gun yourself

>>23419176
>Wrong. You have to consider how the tattoos reflect things like defiance of conventional norms, how the serial killings demonstrate competency and formidableness, and how the rape may suggest that he has a way of always getting what he wants.
you didn't get any of this from women, you made it up. it's all stereotypical male theorizing about the causes of female desire, whereas women do not theorize about the causes of their desire unless a man teaches them to, they just go "it sort of happened." the only honest answer to "why did you fuck him" a woman can give is a shrug. funny how your 10000 hours of supposedly interviewing women led to you saying exactly what a sheltered male virgin would say when asked the same question. hmmm

>>23418929
>>23419241
You should definitely not force it with a series of interviews, especially with what some people consider harassment.
There is no good advice beyond just getting to know women as friends.
If you've never had a platonic relationship with a woman then that's the issue. This has never been a problem for me because I've always had female friends in school and work. The menwritingwomen shit that guy wants to avoid comes from not sexualising women, but sometimes people want to write sexualised women, and some people like reading about sexualised women.
so >>23418933 is the best answer, because he shouldn't think about it at all and cater to whatever his story or audience is.

>>23419207
You might've been a decent writer if you'd ever learned to utilize your ability to twist words in a creative way instead of squandering it on shitposting, anon.

>>23419214
Go ahead and try it. Most women like the one I described WON'T snap at you, but all it takes is one accusing you of expecting free labor for you to change your approach. That's exactly what happened in my case. What she actually said in response to my request was something like, "I have my own work to do. I'm not going to review yours for free." Women doing unpaid interpersonal labor is a common theme in some spaces these days so I took it as a sign to be more conscientious of that and haven't had any repeats of that kind.

>it's blindingly obvious and you will never convince me otherwise
I'm not trying to. Nobody worth convincing lashes out like you have, so you're not my target audience. The sensible writers that took a little note or copied and pasted what I said and set it aside to think about are my target audience. They resisted the urge to make an immediate value judgement on new information and will mull it over for a little while and then consider adapting the bits and pieces that they find useful and discard the rest.

I'm responding to you only for their sake. In case your criticisms may bias them.

>>23419265
A visit to any forum about genres like romance easily shuts you down. You're saying that all of those thousands and thousands of women discussing what they like about such novels are all just parroting fake analysis they learned from men back and forth without actually understanding what they like about such stories.

That's ludicrously stupid. I'm beginning to suspect that you're projecting your own ignorance onto women. You can't comprehend what drives such preferences so you assume that nobody can. Pathetic.

>>23419277
>You should definitely not force it with a series of interviews, especially with what some people consider harassment.
It stops feeling like you're forcing anything pretty quickly. But I concede that may not be true if you're not the type of person that strikes up conversations in line at the coffee shop to begin with. It's probably a stressful approach if you're not comfortable striking up smalltalk already.

>>23419278
>You might've been a decent writer if you'd ever learned to utilize your ability to twist words in a creative way instead of squandering it on shitposting, anon.
That might have been a scathing backhand if I didn't I find myself having time for both.

>>23419278
>you're not my target audience. The sensible writers that took a little note or copied and pasted what I said and set it aside to think about are my target audience.
there's nothing to copy and paste because you don't offer any insight and the purpose of your posting is to make strangers engage with your daydreams. that's why you take the time to write out these intricate scenarios of made-up interactions but after all the fanfare and posturing about "rosetta stones" and "layers upon layers of symbolic meaning" your actual insight boils down to
>tattoos reflect things like defiance of conventional norms
which is 100% the same thing a guy who never spoke to a girl in his life would also say. you supposedly spent 1000s of hours talking to 100s of women just to arrive at "uhh chicks dig bad boys." that would be extremely sad but fortunately it's just a lie, you're just a narcissistic windbag making shit up

>>23419305
>You're saying that all of those thousands and thousands of women discussing what they like about such novels are all just parroting fake analysis they learned from men back and forth without actually understanding what they like about such stories.
yes, this is one hundred percent true. that's what being a woman is actually like.

>>23419305
oh, also, thanks for tacitly admitting you actually just read forums instead of talking to women lol

I'm a bit worried about repetitions
>Fourth scene is a character going to a place related to a crime he's been sent to investigate (the crime scene, in fact), meet a woman he doesn't really get along with, but eventually they have a look around together, and find a Clue that implies murder
>Fifth scene is a different character going to a place related to the same crime he's also been sent to investigate (the morgue where the body is, actually), meet a woman he doesn't really get along with, but eventually they have a look around together, and find a Clue that implies suicide

Should I not overthinking it?

>>23418929
But you are a man writing women

>>23419324
>you supposedly spent 1000s of hours talking to 100s of women just to arrive at "uhh chicks dig bad boys."
So how should I address this? I gave you a synopsis and an easy example that should be accessible to all audiences because everyone is familiar with the meme you cited. The only way to go beyond that is to transcribe my notes or otherwise write up a larger and more comprehensive document.

Maybe you think you're being clever by implying that I need to write an entire essay or book to prove you wrong, but it comes across as dishonest instead. If I challenged you to list some clear criteria for me to meet you would refuse and run away because it is crucial for you that you always be able to move the goalposts and make up excuses....

>yes, this is one hundred percent true. that's what being a woman is actually like.
.. to hide the fact that you're actually just a lazy misogynist trying to convince themself that they don't have to change their mind or update their beliefs. The cognitive dissonance hurts your little brain so you lash out at whoever you perceive to be triggering it. By shitposting and trolling you distract yourself from the mental pain and reinforce your previous beliefs at the same time.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7101003/
(See also: Confirmation Bias, Reinforcement Theory)

You'll sit here and throw a tantrum until the other party gets tired of you shitting on yourself and smearing it on the walls and leaves, at which point you'll declare yourself the "winner" despite never articulating a coherent argument because you were never actually discussing the topic at hand. The "argument" for you was always the battle to quell your cognitive dissonance instead. So, in your mind, you "win" if you can successfully block the information causing you mental pain.

And because nobody cares enough to waste all day on the likes of you, you always "win" eventually, so you never have to change your mind, which in turn provides more reinforcement for your incorrect beliefs. And the more entrenched they become the more painful it is for you when they are challenged and the harder you will fight to reject new information when it appears.

>>23419356
Is it impossible to do both?
What part of either behavior precludes the other?

At least this is a fresh new way for a /wg/ thread to go to shit

>>23418508
You don't notice the shittiness of the words because you're distracted by the art.

>>23418519
It's shit.
Stop using metaphors, especially shitty ones.

>>23419377
>Should I not overthinking it?
I should probably just go to bed...

>>23419377
You're probably thinking of it in needlessly reductive terms (I know I do with my writing) but if it is too similar you can tweak a scene in various ways to make it read differently, like flipping the perspective so the reader is seeing the other side of the dynamic that had caused friction in the last character pairing. Like, for example, the first guy being irritated by the woman's pedantry and narrow focus, and the second being a detail autist annoyed by his woman's speculations and leaps of logic. Assuming you actually have written distinct characters their interactions should be very different.

>>23419401
>implying that I need to write an entire essay or book to prove you wrong
i implied no such thing. your posts are already essay-sized, they're just full of nothing. if you had insight it would be succinct. instead you write walls of text at me about how it's totally not worth it to write walls of text at me. it's a big nothing, you're a fraud.

>you're actually just a lazy misogynist
see, you're totally confused. the idea that women are defined by male conceptions of themselves is not misogynistic, if anything it's feminist

>Is it impossible to do both?
of course it isn't, but i already know you made up all the stuff about cafe interviews

>>23419401
>list some clear criteria for me to meet
Go and post one thing from these absurd interviews you never did on the subject of women and their relationship with a family member, could be anyone, father, mother, older sister, creepy uncle, that isn't a regressed to the mean cliche I could generate in four seconds with a large language model.

>>23419478
>if you had insight it would be succinct. instead you write walls of text at me about how it's totally not worth it to write walls of text at me. it's a big nothing, you're a fraud.
See? When I write succinctly, you criticize me for having a naive, simplistic, or phony understanding. And when I ask if you want me to write it up in more detail you tell me I should be able to be succinct.
It's a lose-lose for me. You've set up the goalposts so that it's impossible for me to prove to you that you're wrong. Exactly as I explained in that reply.

>the idea that women are defined by male conceptions of themselves is not misogynistic
Good thing I emphasized that you need to talk to women to gain an understanding of their pov and escape male conceptions of themselves, then.
And if you're claiming that all of these spaces made by and for women in which they analyze media in their own voices are just them parroting male conceptions, that's extremely misogynistic.

>of course it isn't, but i already know you made up all the stuff about cafe interviews
Thank you for tacitly admitting that you're full of shit.

Read the study I linked. Do some searching on the topic. Seek professional help.
When you are this viscerally opposed to new information you are bordering on mental illness. If you meltdown this badly over some simple advice on an anonymous image board you must certainly be struggling in your personal life as well. A professional can coach you on how to cope with cognitive dissonance in constructive ways and you can gradually become a more functional, less abrasive member of society.

>>23419404
lmao i was legitimately thinking the same thing. at least it's not another genre vs literary shit-flinging fest
honestly /wg/ is pointless at a fundamental level. who the hell wants advice from random social reject retards? even if people did give critique (1% of posts) it's worthless because you have no idea who's giving it. it's not even like you're getting an "average reader's" opinion. rather some weird autist's.
just a trash thread by its very concept

>>23419438
I have a clear-ish picture of three out of four characters, the fourth one I need to iron out a bit more, so yeah I think I'll focus on the differences a bit more.

slop bros, what are some cool alternative weapons you like the aesthetic of? and how cringe are scythes?

Hit a new personal best today bros. We are all going to make it

>>23419500
>When I write succinctly, you criticize me for having a naive, simplistic, or phony understanding. And when I ask if you want me to write it up in more detail you tell me I should be able to be succinct. It's a lose-lose for me.
of course. you're wrong when you're succinct and you're wrong when you're verbose, because wrong is wrong no matter how much you elaborate on it. how else would it work? the solution is to stop being wrong, not to tinker with the wording.

>And if you're claiming that all of these spaces made by and for women in which they analyze media in their own voices are just them parroting male conceptions
yes, i already confirmed that this what i claim, you don't need to ask over and over again
>that's extremely misogynistic
no, it's extremely feminist.

>If you meltdown this badly over some simple advice on an anonymous image board you must certainly be struggling in your personal life as well.
lol

>>23418698
So, the plot of "Steven Universe", then?

>>23419512
well, duh. it's a containment thread, meant to keep the rest of /lit/ from being polluted by this garbage. you didn't know that?

>>23419575
my guy

>>23419512
Like most generals on 4chan, it is largely a relic of better times. I come for two reasons: a genuine hope that a few dedicated anons can at least partly resurrect it, and improving my understanding by comparing my criticism of work posted here with other people's, provided it has some basic merit.

>>23419533
Scythes as improvised weapons of peasants turned soldiers = pretty cool
Scythes as spooky scary villain weapons = pretty cringe

Personally I think slings don't get enough attention in fantasy compared to bows. Slings are cool.

>>23419495
>on the subject of women and their relationship with a family member
I'll pull some straight from memory.
The first to come to mind was one of the first criticisms I ever got: That I didn't humanize parents enough. Specifically, that I didn't humanize a character's mother in a sample I had shared for critique. I had written the mother more as a facilitator for the character's life. You could replace her with Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons and, other than her chrome body, nothing would change.

The woman I was interviewing told me about a time her she was visiting her mother and her mother had been looking through old photo albums, so they sat and reminisced while they flipped through them. The woman noticed the photos in the albums were not all from the same period. Her mother hadn't just gotten the photos printed and then placed them all in an album in a group together.

She saw what looked like a yearbook photo of her mother in the school choir. Next to it was a photo of the woman as a girl singing in a school play, and the photo after that one was the woman playing guitar in her short-lived garage band during high school.

On the next page was a photo of her mother holding her as a baby, and next to it was two photos of the woman in a cap and gown holding a diploma, one for high school and one for college. Her mom had dropped out of high school to have her and only got her GED years later.

She described her realization like "the world being flipped inside out" as she suddenly imagined herself in her mother's shoes in those photos and truly grasped for the first time that her mother was not the all-knowing, eternal guardian she had always perceived her as. For the first time she realized both that her mother was once a hopeful little girl with dreams of her own and that she was now growing fragile again as age took its toll on her.

She thought of all the times she had judged her mother over the years. She thought about how disappointed she felt when college ended up being easy for her, and she imagined how good her life could have been if her mom had not been "too lazy" to get a degree and she had grown up in a better school district or hadn't had to work through college.

She realized that she had only the tiniest understanding of what her own mother's childhood was like and had never really appreciated how much her mother had done to make sure that her daughter had a better life.

The actual notes go into a bit more depth. I recall her mentioning that when she thought back on all of the arguments and fights the two had been in over the years and considered why her mother believed certain things, like what was appropriate to wear or what jobs were appropriate for women, she realized that was a reflection of the life her mother had while growing up. The woman had spent years holding those beliefs against her mother, but now realized that they were probably forced on her by her own parents, and forced on them as well.

So if I plan on self-publishing a small collection of horror short stories, maybe three or four, what kind of word count would you think is adequate for each story?

>>23419579
>of course. you're wrong when you're succinct and you're wrong when you're verbose, because wrong is wrong no matter how much you elaborate on it. how else would it work? the solution is to stop being wrong, not to tinker with the wording.
You're ignoring the fact that you're using the succinctness and the verboseness as criteria for proving me wrong.
You can't say I'm wrong if I'm too brief and wrong if I'm too verbose and then act like you're not using briefness and verboseness as metrics.

>yes, i already confirmed that this what i claim, you don't need to ask over and over again
Prove it.

>no, it's extremely feminist.
If you can prove it, sure.
It should actually be easy. Just make some bullshit up about how women don't owe anyone an explanation for why they like what they like and how it's misogynistic to expect women to go through the trouble of justifying their preferences and doing critical analysis when it comes to something like reading fiction.

>>23419401
Man, you are a sperg, shut the fuck up.
Women are literally retarded children. There's nothing unique or mysterious about them - that is fictional invention.

Here's how you write a REALISTIC female character:
>write a child, I don't care how old your character is
>because your character is a child, she will not understand the world, complex concepts, or even simple ones like consequences of actions
>do not ever give this character male traits like honor, loyalty and self sacrifice
>if your character has a long term goal, always place it beneath the short term goal of having more sex with as many people possible, consequences be damned
There you go, a realistic female character.

Seething roasties will bitch at this post but at the same time they will EAT UP degenerate "romance" slop like 50 shades.

This is why I don't write realistic women. I write genderswapped men because real women are disgusting fucking creatures.
Women will hate my female characters but I also hate women so I don't give a fuck
Greetings from Kazakhstan.

>>23419512
I've posted my work here several times and gotten constructive feedback and all without the usual shitflinging. But then I actually put some effort into the stuff I posted and it wasn't just anime in book form trying to score a buck from horny manchildren. You get exactly what you put in. A sincere effort will garner a sincere effort in turn.

What's really sad are all the people who, in a forum where it is the easiest to be authentic because of anonymity, still choose hide behind twenty layers of irony and sarcasm so they can get a brief dopamine hit in the form of (you)s.

>>23419681
Based fightingthegoodfightanon

Imagine writing books when you don't even read

>>23419666
Satanic triples of truth

>>23419617
>>23419495
Another that stands out in my mind: I had a sample passage about a woman that was caring for her disabled sister. They were supposed to get along well, with the able one tackling the physical challenges and the disabled one handling the cognitive challenges, with the climax requiring the able-bodied one to think their way through a solution while the disabled one carried it out physically. (I cringe, in hindsight.)

I had lunch with a friend to go over it. She was a woman whose sister was born with dwarfism.
She eviscerated me.
>I didn't consider the fact that the able sister was missing out on a lot of childhood freedom because she was expected to be her sister's caretaker.
>I didn't consider how the able sister might feel about always getting less attention from her parents.
>I didn't consider how both sister had to deal with feelings of being a burden, because the able sister knew the disabled sister had more needs so she never wanted to bring up her own, and the disabled sister knew she got more attention because of her condition.
>I didn't consider the fact that both sisters would struggle with the fact that because they spend all of their time together, neither of them have a unique identity. Everything they, or anyone else, knows about them as people is who they are in relation to one another.
>I didn't consider how being disabled would affect the social life of one sister, or how all the time required to care for her meant her able-bodied sister was also missing out on parts of her own social life.
>I didn't consider how both of them had to give up certain dreams about their futures because the disabled sister was never going to live a normal life, and the able-bodied sister couldn't do whatever she wanted because she was always going to have to take care of her sister. For the rest of their lives.
>I didn't account for any of the realistic messiness of caring for the disabled, like the able-bodied sister having to help her disabled sister use the bathroom or bathe.

I basically wrote them like two able-bodied sisters going on and adventure but chucked one in a wheelchair and made the other a bit of a meathead. It was laughably bad and I was so humiliated by my oversights that I avoided that friend for a month because I wanted to jump into oncoming traffic just thinking about how stupid I must've looked handing her garbage that was so bad that it bordered on offensive.

>>23419617
And right on cue, you spent 500 words spitting out something I could have generated from a chatbot in 4 seconds. There is absolutely nothing in your post which is in any way insightful, novel, or even interesting. Wow a daughter misjudged her mom and didn't appreciate her enough after looking through an old album of photos? Riveting stuff. Truly worth the 1000 hours you spent cross-examining random women waiting on line in a Starbucks.

What's funny is that your method probably would get you some interesting stories, but because you're a fraud and have never actually done it, and because you have the imagination of a goldfish, this is the best you could come up with.

>>23419666
>Greetings from Kazakhstan.
Are you still salty over how badly some armies with female soldiers have wrecked you in recent decades?

>>23419707
And right on cue, you resort to bullshitting because you can't actually critique what was presented to you.
Your mental anguish is such that you will do anything to avoid accepting that you're wrong.
Cope and seethe.

>>23419706
All of that seems like obvious shit that anyone who isn't completely braindead would have figured out after just thinking about it for ten minutes. Which, come to think of it, is probably how you came up with it in the first place. Well done, I guess.

why you guys are arguing with a fucking woman

>>23419633
>You're ignoring the fact that you're using the succinctness and the verboseness as criteria for proving me wrong.
false. i said you were full of shit because when pressed for specifics you simply reverted to stereotypical male rationalizations of female desire. you're fixating on brevity/verbosity to dodge that point.

>Prove it.
it's an empirical observation, not a math theorem. if you actually did what you pretend to have done and investigated female behavior, you'd discover that women simply do not posses the need to rationalize their desire, whereas men have an intense need to rationalize female desire, therefore all rationalizations of female desire are male in origin, and women learn and deploy them to please men*. when a girlfriend tells you she likes tall guys for evopsych reasons that doesn't tell you why she likes tall guys, it only tells you she had a boyfriend once that was into evopsych. i cannot "prove" this to you beyond telling you to go out there and check.

*it's important to note that women are conditioned to act as if to please an imaginary man even in purely female company, so "but i read it on a forum for women" is no argument here

I'm rewriting my fantasy story. It's shit, it's still shit, and always will be shit, but I still want to rewrite it.

>>23419707
>What's funny is that your method probably would get you some interesting stories
Ripping off and making fictional the life stories a lot of people have is how you make a good book with good characters.
All of them will be male though.
>>23419710
The only women in militaries were meat toilets.

>>23419713
What exactly am I supposed to critique? Did you post actual writing anywhere? Go ahead and write a scene from that trite little anecdote and if you can make it into something even halfway interesting, I'll take a knee. Or post the before and after of the disabled story--you did rewrite it after getting that critique right? You didn't just shelve it, thereby wasting your friend's time with her critique, or god forbid, make the whole thing up?

>walking at the park today
>a great idea for a story suddenly comes to me
>spend the entire hour planning it out in my mind as I walk around
>get home and outline it on my computer
>suddenly it seems so stupid when I see it laid out as text

Many such cases

>>23419728
Someone will eat that shit anon.
If you
put your heart into it, it might even be good.

>>23419005
>If you make your intentions clear and don't come across as if you're hitting on them, this approach works amazingly well. I'm at the point where I sometimes go to a coffee shop and look for someone killing time, not dressed up like they're on their way to work or waiting on a date, etc, introduce myself as someone looking for "diverse perspectives" on my writing, and ask if they would be interested in critiquing me.
There is no way you can just walk up to a random woman in 2024 and not have it look like you're hitting on her.

>>23419726
>false. i said you were full of shit because when pressed for specifics you simply reverted to stereotypical male rationalizations of female desire
No, you criticized the brevity and then criticized the verboseness. You refuse to justify your assertion. You cannot explain how anything I said is a "stereotypical male rationalization of female desire".

>you'd discover that women simply do not posses the need to rationalize their desire
And if you did it you would discover that women love to talk about what they like and love to nitpick how men misunderstand them.

>therefore all rationalizations of female desire are male in origin
This logic is actually psychotic because it requires that virtually all women can't or won't consider any rationalize or symbolism in their reading preferences but they WILL happily repeat any work men do on the topic. That's the dumbest take I've seen on any board on 4chan in months. Bravo.

>i cannot "prove" this to you beyond telling you to go out there and check.
>proof: TRUST ME BRO!
And you have the nerve to criticize me? I think you're projecting now. You're pulling all of this out of your ass so you assume I'm doing the same.

>*it's important to note that women are conditioned to act as if to please an imaginary man even in purely female company
This is a take from someone that has never had a woman as a friend in his entire life. Sad.

>>23419666
>>write a child, I don't care how old your character is
>>because your character is a child, she will not understand the world, complex concepts, or even simple ones like consequences of actions
>>do not ever give this character male traits like honor, loyalty and self sacrifice
>>if your character has a long term goal, always place it beneath the short term goal of having more sex with as many people possible, consequences be damned
What's hilarious is that this perfectly describes two of the most well-written female characters in literature: Anna Karenina and Madam Bovary. And, of course, the authors were masters of the genre known as "literary realism".

>>23419750
if that bozo ever actually tried his made-up tactics irl he would be the subject of one thousand tiktoks

>>23419750
It's either a morbidly obese sperg who has 0 idea what women are like, or a woman.

The most realistic but still flattering depiction of a woman one can write is that of an innocent retarded child - very easily and readily harmed and exploited by bad people.

>>23419741
Some anon argued with me that you can forget shower thoughts and things from half dreams that were important but I just retained the only important things from one this morning, long after the fact. I don't remember what it was now but it was banging and had to do with abjection and the repetition of witchcraft narratives driving what one character is as far as the story goes. I have the book that solidified it so I can refer back any time, I swear.

>>23419740
>What exactly am I supposed to critique?
You could critique literally anything. Your basic claim is that I'm making shit up. So go ahead and prove it. You laid out some explicit challenges and I met them and then you proceeded to make excuses and launch a bunch of petty personal attacks. Why can't you just address what was actually said if it's so laughably wrong?

>Did you post actual writing anywhere? Go ahead and write a scene from that trite little anecdote and if you can make it into something even halfway interesting, I'll take a knee.
You'd love for the topic to change to something subjective so you can pretend you haven't been wrong this entire time. Too bad.

>Or post the before and after of the disabled story--you did rewrite it after getting that critique right? You didn't just shelve it, thereby wasting your friend's time with her critique, or god forbid, make the whole thing up?
I actually burned the written sample I had using an oven burner when I got home.
Then I typed all of my handwritten notes up as an addendum to the digital copy of the story and chucked the whole thing in an external hard drive I was suing as an archive.
I taped the hand-written notes to my wall above my desk as a daily reminder of my failure, though.

>>23419761
>The most realistic but still flattering depiction of a woman one can write is that of an innocent retarded child
I feel like that describes 99% of anime female characters.

>>23419750
>There is no way you can just walk up to a random woman in 2024 and not have it look like you're hitting on her.
Seems easy enough to me.
> Act polite, not friendly.
>Don't put on a fake smile.
>Tell them bluntly that you're working on a book and ask them politely if they'd be interested in giving you feedback or answering some questions.
>Don't sit next to them. Sit across from them.
>Be reserved in your body language.
>Look them in eyes. Don't check them out.
>Be respectful of their time.
>etc etc etc
If all else fails, imagine you're interviewing an old man or something.

>>23419782
It would never happen because no stranger wants to drop whatever they're doing and devote all their time to you for no reason. If they're at a coffee shop they want to either drink their coffee in peace, or work on what they want to work on. They don't go there to do unsolicited volunteer work.

>>23419753
Sounds like Juliet, too, now that you mention it.
Maybe anon's problem is they think all women should be written as naive girls and never as adult women.

My next story I wanted to have a female MC. This entire thread is making me rethink my life.

>>23419782
>Tell them bluntly that you're working on a book and ask them politely if they'd be interested in giving you feedback or answering some questions.
"I don't have the time sorry" is the polite answer you'll hear, "fuck off" is the thing they'll mean you LARPing tard.

>>23419785
I'm not reading all of the garbage being posted and don't know the context of this conversation beyond extremely brief skimming, but if you walk up to a person and ask to interview them, there is definitely a portion of the population who will accept because it makes them feel special and important and they think their voice is something that has to be heard

>>23419775
Anime kind of exaggerates it. Tone it down a little, especially the "retarded child" part and you'll have a realistic female character.

>>23419377
Generally you want to have as many fresh things happening as possible. Repeated scenes or scenarios tend to make the reader feel like the story is dragging and spinning its wheels. Unless it's done for purpose (like to highlight the difference in perspectives or how characters do things in similar situations) you might be better off changing the setting to something different. Of course I don't know your whole story, so do you what you feel is best. If you feel it is getting boring then the reader will feel that x10.

>>23419790
My VN literally has a burning core of misguided hatred wrapped around in the sweetest, innocent thing ever. That's the female deuteragonist.

My other VN has a magic cat murderer. No, I will not elaborate.

>>23419794
If it's a 3 minute survey, sure. Anon is talking about taking an hour or more of their time for them to be a beta reader on the spot. No one wants to commit to that on a whim.

>>23419805
oh yeah agreed that's hilarious wtf is he on about

>>23419803
Is it a cat who murders using magic, or someone who murders magic cats?

>>23419785
Tell this to the other anon that said it was "unrealistic" that any woman would scold you for asking her to critique your work for free.

But you are also mistaken. Many people go to places like coffee shops to hang out. Some are happy to spend 10, 20, 30 minutes chitchatting about a topic close to them. Sometimes a person is waiting on a friend and will kill a few minutes with you until their friend shows up. And sometimes they'll even rope their friend into giving feedback, too.

Lastly, this works in other places as well. I was in a Half Priced Books a little over a month ago looking for picrel on the suggestion I got from one of these interviews. I needed some help finding it and the employee that helped me asked if I needed anything else and the store seemed empty so I told her why I was buying it and asked if she had any recommendations along similar lines. I ended up walking out with a few more titles and plans to meet the woman for lunch the next day to talk more about it, which went great.

Being sincere goes a long way sometimes. Especially if you're trying to learn more about people.

>>23419790
yeah take what 4chan has to say about women as the truth. these are the people you want to emulate for a healthy and happy life

One time a random ass guy came up to me saying he was writing a book on smiles and was asking people what made them smile. Even that 2 minute encounter annoyed me.

>>23419752
>You cannot explain how anything I said is a "stereotypical male rationalization of female desire".
"women like bad boys" is in fact a stereotypical male rationalization of female desire. there's nothing to explain.

>it requires that virtually all women can't or won't consider any rationalize or symbolism in their reading preferences but they WILL happily repeat any work men do on the topic.
yes. weren't you the one talking about "refusing to deal with new information?" you keep asking me the same thing over and over and over again and i confirm it every time and you just go "but you can't really mean X" once again. yes, i do mean X. why is this so impossible for you to deal with? you have to try and move on from this basic point. women are conditioned to be objects of male desire, and they are not interested in investigating the causes of their own desire, they are interested in investigating what men want the causes of their desire to be and performing that. when they explain themselves to you they are not actually explaining, they are signaling. if you buy the signal as a real explanation you will be extremely confused, as you are.

>>proof: TRUST ME BRO!
yes. what do you imagine a proof would look like, lol? you will either start noticing these things, or you will stay retarded.

>This is a take from someone that has never had a woman as a friend in his entire life.
you have never observed a female friend group if you think that's in any way a controversial statement. women compete for male attention, irrationally, even when there is no male present.

>>23418446
I'm writing this chapter showing my mc going to her room in this big violet underfunded complex for homeless and fucked up women. I want her to have to go up the stairwell instead of the elevator for like 15 floors and then carry a girl she finds there bleeding to death on the stairs to her room in this Christlike fashion. I want to both show the level of danger and quasi-cyberpunk degeneracy of the place while also trying to show this characters fear and humility. Any tips? Fear is a very difficult emotion to write about because I don't want to have to rely on paragraphs and paragraphs of the senses describing the place, but if I go from her pov, I feel I'll miss the fear aspect because she's also a very empathetic character.

Took up the pen for the first time in a few months. Some things I've noticed
1. Without making a conscious effort, I've gotten the dreaded "that" down to around 3-4 times per page (in an unformatted document file) and "which" to less than once. A lot less than I used to but still feels like too much
2. I do this thing where I often like to disrupt dialogue often to insert character reactions or ironic clarifications from the narrator. I'm not necessarily sure if this is a bad thing. I feel it gives a bit of a cheeky tone but may also just be distracting
3. The human face I am completely lost on describing. I feel like we have a handful of stock words to describe faces and then have rely on comparisons and metaphors for the rest. I have failed clinical tests for distinguishing faces and facial expressions before so that likely has to do something with it
4. Nature I also struggle with somewhat. I feel English has excess words to describe each minute detail of nature, but most are only really comprehended by people who grew up in that environment
5. I feel I begin too many sentences with temporal words. I struggle to write such that the flow of time is naturally implied
6. My average sentence length is shorter than it used to be, but it feels like a stylistic choice. The occasional abrupt "He left." can carry a lot of weight I feel.
7. Most of my dialogue is transactional, which is realistic, appropriate for a screenplay. I'm not sure if it's my natural style or a product of the type of story I am writing, but I don't quite like it. I am currently reading Wuthering Heights and appreciate its somewhat unrealistic highly effusive dialogue where a character will just go on for half a page stressing and iterating upon the same point. I used to write in first person present tense a lot, and that had a similar appeal I think.
8. The rule of English where each paragraph may only contain dialogue from one speaker trips me up. I dislike having to interrupt the flow of a paragraph for a short response or bit of ambient dialogue
9.I like to do a lot of short term callbacks. For a toy example. "She was torn on what movie to buy tickets for. [Description of her choosing, buying popcorn, walking to theater room, and sitting down]. All that deliberation was for nothing as she was asleep by the end of the previews." That's a very clunky example but gives the general idea. I will sometimes reuse exact word choice intentionally to make it stick. Not sure if there is a name for this and if it's a bad thing
10. When I employ a metaphor, it feels proper (e.g. not cliche, appropriate weight), but I do so too infrequently.
thank you for reading my blog

>>23419805
>>23419808
They're full of shit. I'm talking about 5/10/15/30 minutes at a time. 30 minutes max, unless they're super-engaged and explicitly interested in more. If it's an hour-long interview, that will always be a pre-arranged lunch or dinner or something with a friend or someone that has expressly said they'd be interested in giving feedback.

And I'm not asking for beta readers. I often have a list of key themes and plot points or elements of characterization I want feedback on. I might also bring a few paragraphs with me. Very rarely, I'll bring a whole chapter if it's a longer lunch engagement or something.

You don't approach strangers in a coffee shop and sit and drill them with questions for an hour. You open with a brief explanation of what you're trying to write and ask for initial thoughts and go from there. You balance letting them lead the conversation and working down your list of topics or questions.

If their interest seems to be fading or it's dragging on beyond 15/20 minutes, thank them and excuse yourself.

If they're super into it, try to make arrangements for a more in-depth critique over lunch or something, thank them, and excuse yourself.

Anon just made up a strawman because he pisses and shits himself at the very thought of approaching a woman and striking up a conversation.

>>23419768
>You laid out some explicit challenges and I met them
No, you didn't. I asked you to post something from these alleged interviews that wasn't a mishmash of tired cliches and that's exactly what you posted. Twice. So either you're a fraud or this method isn't even remotely useful for writing women characters that aren't tired cliches.

The only thing you've managed to prove is that you're not a very good writer since you seem to lack the basic imagination necessary to noodle out shit like this on your own:

>I didn't consider the fact that the able sister was missing out on a lot of childhood freedom because she was expected to be her sister's caretaker.

>>23419845
holy shit an anon used the term strawman correctly

>>23419845
the effort you're putting into this gay larp is really incredible

>>23419839
>"women like bad boys" is in fact a stereotypical male rationalization of female desire. there's nothing to explain.
And? Why are you repeating it like that's what I said? That's your strawman. Not what I said.

>yes. weren't you the one talking about "refusing to deal with new information?" you keep asking me the same thing over and over and over again and i confirm it every time
It's just blatantly wrong. I'm asking you to prove it. We both know you can't.

>yes. what do you imagine a proof would look like, lol? you will either start noticing these things, or you will stay retarded.
That's your problem. The one making the claim bears the burden of proof. If what you say is true, the entirety of modern academia is a sham because women are a sizable chunk of researchers in every field now. If we believe that every woman is as stupid as you claim them to be, we need to retract a bunch of physics and engineering papers ASAP, and thousands of medical studies.

You have a very high bar to meet. Chop chop.

>you have never observed a female friend group if you think that's in any way a controversial statement. women compete for male attention, irrationally, even when there is no male present.
Even if we grant that as true, it's irrelevant. It doesn't change anything else. Maybe it changes your respect for them, but it doesn't change much else.

>>23419852
nta but you're getting kinda dunked on logically speaking, so at least he's good at it

>>23419846
>No, you didn't. I asked you to post something from these alleged interviews that wasn't a mishmash of tired cliches and that's exactly what you posted. Twice. So either you're a fraud or this method isn't even remotely useful for writing women characters that aren't tired cliches.
Again: Set the criteria. What is not a tired cliche?
You don't get to just label everything a cliche after the fact. Go ahead and prove that anything I posted was a tired cliche in the first place.
How do you not get this? I linked a study explaining how your mental illness functions. I have repeatedly called you out for blatantly trying to set up vague goalposts on wheels so you can move them no matter what I say.

Go on: Lay out some concrete criteria.

You won't. You're throwing a tantrum because your brain is defective and cannot cope with new information.

>>23419840
>I feel I'll miss the fear aspect because she's also a very empathetic character.
My first thought is deliberately juxtaposing her conscious mind, focused on helping the woman, with her physiology and subconsciousness actions (avoiding an imaginary figure in the shadows, faster movement, altered time perception, etc.)

>>23419882
Interesting. It's always difficult for me to write these very active in the moment scenes because I think any verbosity at all immediately loses the tension I'm trying to achieve. So it's as if I have to kill two birds with one stone, in this case, the juxtaposition of psychology in real time.

>>23419873
>Again: Set the criteria. What is not a tired cliche?
You're a writer right? Or at least LARPing as one? You should know what is and isn't a tired cliche, especially after interviewing all these women. I'm not going to list every cliche for you.
>Go on: Lay out some concrete criteria.
I already did. Post something from your interviews that I couldn't generate in four seconds with AI:

Absolutely, here are a few scenes that might help you explore the dynamics of their relationship:
The Kitchen Conversation: Mother and daughter are preparing a big family dinner together. The process of preparing a beloved traditional recipe prompts a discussion about family heritage and shared memories. The daughter directly asks the mother about a family mystery or a secret they've never discussed.
Unexpected Visit: The daughter unexpectedly shows up at her mother's doorstep. She’s just had a significant life event (a breakup, losing a job, a big fight with a friend) and needs comfort. This could show how their relationship serves as a safe haven during crises.
Role-Reversal: The mother falls ill and the daughter has to take care of her. This role reversal can invoke revelations about their shared past and individual personalities.
A Walk Down Memory Lane: They sit together looking through old photo albums reminiscing about key moments in both their lives. This could bring nostalgic shared memories, intimate revelations and can give scope to discuss how their relationship has evolved over the years.
A Heated Argument: Both women have a passionate argument about a contentious issue, showing how their relationship can handle stresses and challenges. The resolution of the argument would indicate a lot about their dynamic.
Advice Session: The daughter seeks advice from her mother on a serious issue, displaying the bond of trust and respect between them.
Surprise Adventure: The mother surprises the daughter, taking her on an unplanned trip to somewhere special for both of them. This introduces an element of joy and spontaneity in their relationship.

>Amid the relentless turmoil of her days, where news of distant conflicts and close-to-home crises blended into a ceaseless din, Sam often felt adrift in a sea of chaos. Every headline seemed like a new weight added to her already heavy heart. But one evening, as she sat quietly by the window, watching the sun dip below the horizon, an epiphany struck her with quiet force: though she could not control the world's madness, she held the reins of her own inner world. In that tranquil moment, she understood that her power lay in her response to the chaos, not in changing the chaos itself. She could choose calm over anxiety, action over helplessness, and compassion over anger. This realization was like a breath of fresh air, filling her with a renewed sense of agency. She began to see that her strength lay in small, deliberate acts of kindness, in maintaining her inner peace, and in nurturing hope within herself and those around her. The world’s chaos might be unending, but within herself, she discovered a wellspring of resilience and power that no external storm could ever extinguish.

Too cheesy?
Too cliche?

Can you recommend me any music to write to?
I'm trying to write a really sweet and tender moment where two characters really hug it out, but the only remotely "Awww" track I have is this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLzcPChG-64

>>23419899
Give me something concrete.
Go on. Don't just sit there and claim you can't possibly define clear requirements. Either they exist or they don't. Otherwise you're just demanding someone else magically manipulate your infantile emotions to soothe you.

And here, I'll do you one better than AI for finding cliches:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MovingTheGoalposts

If you're asking me to write something that's completely novel, you're either an idiot that doesn't realize how stories work or acting in bad faith because you know it's virtually impossible to be truly original. Everything is a trope. Nobody ever has a truly novel experience.

Do readers like stupid jokes in their stories?

“Who knows, Sulfur. It’s not as if we don’t have reports of the other monsters appearing across Silica. There was that time when I was attending St. Phillia, a dragon flew over the school.”

>“That was a bird. The dragon rumor is worse than the rumor about rat-meat being used in the meatloaf.”

>“You can deny it all you want, but we know that isn’t a rumor! The meatloaf is still disgusting! And no way! It had to be a dragon! I bet there's plenty of evidence of monsters if we go to another country! I bet we can find a dragon there!”

>>23419857
>Why are you repeating it like that's what I said?
you said women like "defiance of conventional norms" such as with face tattoos which is just a gay way of saying they like bad boys. this is 100% your statement that you're now trying to dodge because of petty issues of wording

>That's your problem. The one making the claim bears the burden of proof.
i'm providing exactly as much "proof" as you are. people can read and see for themselves which description fits reality better.

>If we believe that every woman is as stupid as you claim them to be, we need to retract a bunch of physics and engineering papers ASAP, and thousands of medical studies.
what are you even talking about lol? i never said women were "stupid," i never said they can't do math. who's making shit up now, who's misogynistic? i said they were fundamentally uninterested in investigating their own desire, and that they were interested in signaling desirability to men. how did you get from that to their math being wrong in engineering papers? you've completely lost the plot.

>Even if we grant that as true, it's irrelevant. It doesn't change anything else.
you're in denial. if women try to signal to mates, irrationally, even when they are no mates present, then your entire point about "reading forums for women" is complete nonsense. you cannot treat anything you read there at face value because they are just juggling male expectations, competing with each other. doubly so you cannot trust anything they say to you about how they relate to men because everything they say about how they relate to men is in itself a tactic for relating to men. it's all unusable, tainted. you just don't like these consequences so you go on coping.

>>23419892
If you want the reader to experience the fear of the character (which is what "showing" ultimately comes down to anyway), just do the following:

1. Make the character really want something
2. Make the reader identify with the character
3. Put the thing she really wants at hazard

The thing you're missing in your description is why this character is in this terrible place to begin with and why the reader should care. Suppose, as an example, she came to rescue her younger sister who is possibly in mortal danger (maybe she overdosed, maybe she's about to get prostituted, etc.) so that every second counts. And this sister is her whole life. She changed her diapers, quit school to work and take care of her, etc. And they had a terrible argument in which she said some unforgivable shit that cause her sister to walk out. So she gets to this shithole, and the elevator's out. She runs up 15 flights of stairs and there's a girl bleeding on the 12th floor--panic, her sister? No, thank god. But now there's a dilemma, does she help her and risk her sister or just leave her to die. Etc.

Once the stakes and the identification are properly set up, it's pretty much just kicking a skateboard from a very tall hill.

>>23419912
What are you yapping about now? No, I'm not asking you write something completely novel. I'm not actually asking you "write" anything. Isn't this supposed to be dictation from your notes? Just give me something that isn't entirely a cliche. How about you just give me something about the mother-daughter relationship that isn't in the AI generated list I posted? (Did you see the fourth item on list btw--you can't make this shit up, or I guess in your case, you can) Is that specific enough for you?

>>23419933
Essentially the reason she has to go up the flight of stairs is because she lives there. This chapter is the chapter after her initial introduction, which shows her living situation. She has a row with the receptionist/monitor person who lets people in and out of the building and sort of gatekeeps access to the elevators to her because she doesn't like her. The character usually brings her food from her job as a peace offering but was unable to today because she was distracted (a big part of her arc is she tends to fall in love with anyone who gives her attention and this girl at work distracted her etc)

So she has to go up the stairwell because the receptionist is being an asshole. Her sole goal is to just go to sleep. This is supposed to be an intro to her character so the stakes are more there to show the life she lives and her humility despite it.

Why should the reader care? Because they (hopefully ) have empathy for a human being. I don't like this idea of me having to create contrived scenarios and perform a mental gymnastics to convince the reader to have empathy. It should come as default.

>>23419902
It's very telling. Almost the entire thing is saying what Sam feels, or what the reader should feel about her. Cut some of that and illustrate her emotions more vividly. All I get out of it is she ends up feeling hopeful, but it sure takes a roundabout approach to get there.

>breath of fresh air
Cliched line, cut it
>blended into a ceaseless din
I have no idea what this means. I mean I do, but it's weird.

Here's a quick trimming
>Sam drifted relentlessly in a sea of chaos stirred by news of distant conflicts and close-to-home crises. Every headline added more weight to her heavy heart. She watched the sun dip below the horizon when an epiphany struck: her power lay not in changing the chaos, but her response toward it. Tranquility over anxiety. Action over weakness. Compassion over anger. These were the reigns she held in her hands, steering her to a new destiny. With renewed agency, she discovered a wellspring of power within her no external storm could extinguish.

>>23419947
>This is supposed to be an intro to her character so the stakes are more there to show the life she lives and her humility despite it.
I don't really see how humility would be a surprising quality in person who lives in such conditions. Are they supposed to be smug and arrogant about instead?

>Why should the reader care? Because they (hopefully ) have empathy for a human being. I don't like this idea of me having to create contrived scenarios and perform a mental gymnastics to convince the reader to have empathy. It should come as default.
Then you're probably not cut out to be an author since that's pretty much a requirement. You have to work to overcome the reader's natural apathy for everyone not part of their tribe or family.

>>23419955
People are not naturally apathetic if they choose to read a book. That's retarded. Maybe I'm not as pessimistic as you are when it comes to the reasons why people do certain things, but if the exploration of theme and character in certain circumstances isn't enough for people then the people are retarded and not my audience. If that limits me, than so be it.

Simple, basic, universal truths are what ought to draw peoples sympathy not some imaginary contrived plot that activates some dopamine receptors.

>somehow ended up with a 9/12 female cast without trying
bros

>>23419963
Almost there. You can do it!

>>23419974
yeah all he has to do is delete one guy and we will have a 9/11 on our hands

>>23419962
Really don't get all this pearl-clutching high road nonsense. You really think the classic authors didn't use the same techniques of plot, suspense, stakes, and identification?

>Simple, basic, universal truths are what ought to draw peoples sympathy not some imaginary contrived plot that activates some dopamine receptors.
Ah, yes, you must living in that alternate universe where this is the case, and not the one the rest of us live in.

Here's the first page of Chekov's An Anonymous Story:

THROUGH causes which it is not the time to go into in detail, I had to enter the service of a Petersburg official called Orlov, in the capacity of a footman. He was about five and thirty, and was called Georgy* Ivanitch.

I entered this Orlov's service on account of his father, a prominent political man, whom I looked upon as a serious enemy of my cause. I reckoned that, living with the son, I should—from the conversations I should hear, and from the letters and papers I should find on the table—learn every detail of the father's plans and intentions.

As a rule at eleven o'clock in the morning the electric bell rang in my footman's quarters to let me know that my master was awake. When I went into the bedroom with his polished shoes and brushed clothes, Georgy Ivanitch would be sitting in his bed with a face that looked, not drowsy, but rather exhausted by sleep, and he would gaze off in one direction without any sign of satisfaction at having waked. I helped him to dress, and he let me do it with an air of reluctance without speaking or noticing my presence; then with his head wet with washing, smelling of fresh scent, he used to go into the dining-room to drink his coffee. He used to sit at the table, sipping his coffee and glancing through the newspapers, while the maid Polya and I stood respectfully at the door gazing at him. Two grown-up persons had to stand watching with the gravest attention a third drinking coffee and munching rusks. It was probably ludicrous and grotesque, but I saw nothing humiliating in having to stand near the door, though I was quite as well born and well educated as Orlov himself.

But go ahead and write your "exploration of theme and character". Hint: you can have both an engrossing story and universal truths. Unsurprisingly though, if you want people to actually read and enjoy your work, the first is a requirement, while the other is merely a confection.

What POV do you guys like reading in the most?

>>23419902
>Too cheesy?
I can literally read the first paragraph and I can tell you outright that it is.

>>23419902
>Amid the relentless turmoil of her days
Come on man.

>>23420080

why do these threads move so fast? most be some real spergs in here

>>23419922
>you said women like "defiance of conventional norms" such as with face tattoos which is just a gay way of saying they like bad boys
That's your interpretation, a fraction of my overall interpretation, and my own statement was itself abbreviated and simplified.

What you're doing is singling out one part of one remark which is a simplified version of a bigger point and OBSESSIVELY focusing on your own interpretation of that point at the exclusion of all others because you get bitch slapped every time you open your mouth.
You can't even stand your ground when trying to stack the deck this hard, so you know you can't address EVERYTHING I said or even a fraction of what I implied because you'd get obliterated.

>you're now trying to dodge because of petty issues of wording
You're projecting. You're the one trying to use semantics to avoid the point.

>i'm providing exactly as much "proof" as you are
What don't you understand about "the person making the affirmative claim has the greater burden of proof"? You have to provide more proof if you're going to make an affirmative claim.

>i never said women were "stupid,"
Now who's trying to dodge with wording?

>you're in denial.
I'm not the retard that looks at thousands of articles, books, posts, etc, by women all about what motivates women, what they like to read, how they view the world, etc, and claim without proof that it's all lies and that they're all secretly constantly putting on a show for men.

>>23419989
3rd person, (limited, not necessarily non-omniscient)

>>23420087
>I'm not the retard that looks at thousands of articles, books, posts, etc, by women all about what motivates women, what they like to read, how they view the world, etc, and claim without proof that it's all lies and that they're all secretly constantly putting on a show for men.
right, so we're back in the endless loop of "you can't possibly be saying X - yes i'm saying X - but you can't possibly be saying X." this will be the final one: yes, i am saying that. women are constantly putting on a show for men, even with other women, even when alone in a room. it's a fundamental and inescapable part of what growing up as a woman and object of male desire does to a human psyche. you will deal with this or you will keep going "source? proof? source?" like a retard but i'm really not interested in watching your brain go in circles anymore. feel free to do some "i accept your concession" faggotry if you want

>>23418519
sounds like a stream of conscious, but your also dying of a stroke. Im not really into post modernism, but I guess the point of post modernism is you can write whatever the fuck and we just have to sit and try to glean some meaning from it like a rorschach picture

>come back to thread after asking initial question about avoiding menwritingwomen effect
>literal dissertations in the thread
What the fuck guys, calm the fuck down lmao
Also thanks to those two anons for the advice. Ignore the shitposter.

>>23419940
>How about you just give me something about the mother-daughter relationship that isn't in the AI generated list I posted?
You can twist damn near anything to fit those categories but I'll type up an entry for you, almost word for word, unformatted:

When: 1-15-2022
Where: Mezzanine Cafe ([Redacted] Museum of Art)
Who: [Friend from College]
Why: Feedback on [character] reuniting with [character's mother]. [Friend] reunited with mom after being given up for adoption. [Character] was abandoned by mom so mom could save herself.

- [Friend]'s circumstances less traumatic, no direct fit?
- met birth mom at her home
- [friend] was nervous
- she was conflicted between resenting her birth mother vs wanting approval
- treated it like meeting a stranger to control nerves
- disappointed that birth mom opened up telling her how good her life was going instead of starting with their separation
- got madder as the convo went as it became clear birth mom was trying to justify her actions
- [friend] didn't initially blame birth mom, just wanted answer
- birth mom's defensiveness made her suspicious, stoked resentment
- talked herself up to make birth mom regret leaving her but birth mom seemed to take it as proof that she made the right decision
- friend left early
- wanted to know more about her roots
- struggles with lack of identity
- felt like she never belonged
- desperately wants to know things that "run in the family" that resonate with her
- needs medical info, ie family histories
- wants to talk more, doesn't have the "spoons" for it (with me or her mom?)

- re: my passage
- "don't focus entirely on her feeling betrayed"
- maybe [character] deep down wants to be family again
- "how does she know why her mom left her behind?"
- (flesh this out?)
- what's the point of confronting mom?
- what's the point of reuniting them?
- is mom even relevant to their life now?

- I want her to be resilient because of her past
- I want her to have a clear sense of identity, but maybe that doesn't have to come from genetics?
- Desire for answers is a strong motivation early in story, can I dismiss it without getting them?
-

>>23419963
Been there. I noticed all the links in my relationship charts tended to occur through women, then I did a word count on how much outline I'd written for each character and the women's count outnumbered the men's 4-to-1. I've been slowly working on balancing it out for a while now.

>>23419728
You shit that story out, then, with all of the ferocity of a taco bell combo meal.
Because 99% of fantasy is shit, and still people consume shit.

I am tempted to write a fantasy story. How do I copy Final Fantasy without making it obvious I'm copying Final Fantasy? I want mages, airships, and ridable chickens.

Can lower quality of writing be excused if it's accompanied by an outstanding visual?

Like picrel is objectively bad. It's a character exclaiming his motivations for no reason, but it works because it looks cool as fuck, and the vibe is there

It also treats itself 100% seriously. There isn't a "wowzers, that just happened" moment or anything.

>>23420197
God damn, I see all these characters while I can't bring myself insert more than 5 relevant ones in an entire arc, because it feels like trying to steer a D&D campaign with too many players and can't give all of them proper development.

>>23420220
>Final Fantasy
That's like the most generic JRPG setting possible if you rule out rideable chickens, so I don't think anyone will notice.

>>23420243
I can compromise with ridable turkeys.

What are your thoughts on this idea for a story, it may be cliche but we'll see.
>A beautiful auburn haired woman wearing very odd and extraterrestrial clothing washs up on shore
>two best friends, they attempt to help
>due to the face of mc1 she immediately trusts him but is unsure why, total amnesia except for the face of her lover
>she does have abilities as well, but those core memories will unlock throughout the story
>an gargantuan space fleet of unknown origin is decimating solar systems for unknown reasons
>the mysterious woman is completely frightened by this fleet upon hearing its name, but is unsure why
>mc 1's quest is to assist her in getting her memories back and maybe a romantic bond will form, he actively thinks this in the story, not will they won't they bullshit, hes plotting on that pussy
>mc 2 finds the fleet to be intriguing and would like to steal some of their weapons and data chips so that he can use their power
>they travel across planets, galaxies, solar systems to escape the fleet yet get closer to them, they need a "Star Guide" or something, path of the constellation?
>at some point it is revealed that mc 1 has an 30 minute older twin brother that he never knew of, explains her sudden trust of mc1, mc1 begins to seethe badly
>this brother is the fleets leader
>he is the woman's husband, ripping and tearing through space to find his love
>there is a confrontation
>she does not have her memories back in full, but she does not believe the twin brother
>the distance he came to get her, is inconceivable, why was she cast away from their home galaxy?

That's all I can think of for now, obviously all will be fleshed out, lole politics, galactic kingdoms, how they are able to travel such distances in such short time, FTL is an unproven concept in this world, but there are some people who make personal gadgets that appear to make use of it. It would be like driving to another state, I was considering a galactic rail line or something. But idk, I feel as if I'm just meshing a bunch of random things in my mind whilst writing this.

I had written a light novel-length short story intending for it to be the basis for my fantasy world set 1,000 years into the future of the events that happened in the original story, but now I'm stuck conceptualizing a world so different yet so similar because I loved the original story and its simplicity.

>>23420239
the fat. cut it all

>>23420232
youre conflating visual arts with literary arts. like everyone else

>>23420220
My dragons have feathers.

>>23420239
There are actually probably 8 actual arcs in that chart. The character roster has grown beyond these old charts but over time I'm consolidating into fewer and fewer MCs.

Big arcs are those that span the entire story.
Medium arcs are those that span at least half but not the whole thing.
Small arcs span at least a quarter but not more than half.
Minor arcs are those that span less than a quarter. In one or two cases, the characters have larger arcs that concluded before the story kicks off, and in one or two cases the characters set up their own future arcs during the story but don't actually undertake them.

>dont' use name brands
>don't have the MC interject while he's thinking or doing something
>don't use accents
>don't do this, don't do that blah blah blah
>confederacy of dunces breaks all those rules

The fuck? is /wg/ and reddit wrong?

>>23420350
Brand names are important if your story is set in the real world and about a real hobby. Imagine writing a NASCAR story with all made up brands like GTA.

>>23420342
>>23420197
what software are you making these charts in btw?

If you are having any sex fantasies, describe them in detail in your next post. I may be able to interpret their meaning for you and help you through this psychosexual crisis you are having. Subconsciously you feel that you must attempt to explain away your failure, as an intellectual and soldier of ideas, to actively participate in critical social movements. Also, a satisfying sexual encounter would purify your mind and body. you need the therapy of sex desperately. I'm afraid---from what I know about clinical cases, you will end up with a psychological crisis.

>read a new top-trending fiction
>prose is subpar
>readers often point out grammar mistakes in the comments
>only thing it has going for it are the fast releases
Fuck it, no more prose overengineering. I'm gutting my pages to all drafts and only a single edit from now on.

>>23420386
Meanwhile...
>be me
>spend 90 minutes trying to think of how to describe skiers walking across a parking lot, carrying their skis that doesn't sound boring

>>23420398
People wearing colorful waterproof coats queued for the lift and carried their skis as they walked through the frozen asphalt.

Don't bother.

>>23420385
You are talking to who?

>>23420385
>aye so there I was getting drunk under the table by a bearded dwarvish lass. Her knockers were great, but then again so was her ass. She had the figure of a bowling pin and she and her equally bearded friend had been edging me on for the night. It was a seven-ten split, and I needed to figure a way to knock em both down.
Both had fiery red hair and I found meself wondering if perhaps the carpet matched the drapes. Verily, I had to piss and if I didn’t make a move soon I’d come back to an empty table and be stuck with the bill.
“Oi, ye gonna take me and Brunhild back to yer room fer a shag or what ya tall pansy?”
>say no more.jpg

>>23420385

>>23420382
Obsidian Notes.

It's free. You make a "vault" for a certain set of notes. You put notes and folders in the vault. You can put notes in the folders to create hierarchies. You can make canvases and use them to make flowcharts.

The big thing with Obsidian is cross-linking. You can have a single note for each chapter of your story, and then you can have a note for each character, location, etc, with important details about it, then every time you mention a character you can type the name like [[this]] and it will turn that text into a link to the individual note for that character, place, etc.

You can also generate a graph view that will show you a visual graph of every note you've written, connected by a line for each link, so if a character appears in 3 chapters, you can see on the graph that the note for that character has a line going to the 3 chapters they appear in.

Obsidian has lots of free plugins, too, and you can pay for cross-device encrypted synchronization, so you can write on multiple devices and have it all synchronized. I think you may be able to get this for free with plugins but I wanted to support the company. I do know there are even more graph and timeline generation plugins, but I've been sticking the built-in functionality of the app.

>>23420417

>>23420382
picrel is a big graph view
On the left is the vault hierarchy.
On the right is a pretty big graph.
In between the two are all the tools you can use to filter and color what shows up on the graph, as well as options for how spread out the graph is, how long the connections can be, how big the circles or text are, etc.

>>23420403
I did mention the fluorescent pink and yellow ski boots. To me that is the most striking part of the outfit, but raincoats is good too.

>>23420382
Oh, and there's a window for crosslinks, both tagged and untagged.
So if you have a note about a character open, on the right you'll see a list of places you've linked that note, and below that you'll see a list of places the name of the note (probably the character name) has been mentioned but not linked, in case you want to link it.

There's also a tagging system, but I haven't messed with that as much. It's supposed to introduce another layer of organization to everything.

>>23420428
Give your people some interaction. Make them likable and personable.

>>23420441
One of my characters is like Lou Grant, grizzled and no nonsense. But in this chapter he is starting to warm up for the first time. It is a dramatic shift in his personality, so a lot is riding on this.

>>23420085
two incels arguing over what women are really like, when it's clear they've never talked to one, or left their room in years. freaking hilarious

>>23420427
>>23420440
Awesome, I've actually been using obsidian for my story for around half a year now but I didn't know any of these advanced features existed

>>23420510
We are all Ignatius J. Reilly.

>>23419575
went with KU this time i see
Shows a willingness to learn from mistakes. Is this not pubbed by Aethon?

I rode into Amarillo as the sun sank in the west,
my thoughts in Kansas City and the girl that I loved best.
As I smiled and kissed her gently and then turned away to go,
said I'd send for her to meet me when I'd reached ol' Mexico.

I had barely left the saddle and my foot just touched the ground
when a cold voice from the shadows told me not to turn around.
Said he knew about my fast gun, knew the price paid by the law.
Challenged by a bounty hunter, so I turned around to draw.

I knew someday I'd meet him 'fore his hand like lightning flashed.
My own gun stood in leather as his bullet tore its path.
As my strength was slowly fading I could see him walk away,
and I knew that where I lie tonight he too must lie someday.

>>23420385
I'm into sadism but not as much into physical violence as causing fear and forcing submission. I wouldn't do that to anyone IRL though, it's just smut fantasy.
I also like rape + forced breeding, but see the caveat above. Bonus points if combined.

Ironically, though, lovey-dovey shit with lots of kissing, handholding and closeness gets me the hardest. And that's what I would do IRL.

Go on and analyze me, I'm curious how you wrap this around into me wanting to fuck my mother.

>>23419785
Depends mostly on the country you're in, if you're a burger you'd definitely get told to fuck off, maybe that guy lives in a more friendly country

>>23420686
I'm in America and I can't even get my neighbor of two years to say hi to me. People here are just naturally standoffish.

>>23420474
Make one of the other characters lively. Introduce a "friend"

>>23420612
>>23420404
>>23420416
>>23420417
I wanted you to rate my prose and paragraph. Goddamnit.

>>23420821
you need to quote your post bro

>>23420727
it wasnt always like that. Ever since 9/11 ameritards have become more and more antisocial basket cases

>>23420592
you forgot to add "By Marty Robbins,"

>>23420197
>AI slop
>not drawing the character pics yourself

NGMI

>>23420821
I wanted you to rate the shitty paragraph i came up with on the fly

>>23420420
That sounds autistic as fuck

>>23420910
you mean this? >>23420385

>>23420975
no way >>23420416

>>23420993
you need to learn how quoting works m8 I dont know wtf your doing

>>23420874
>AI slop
>not drawing the character pics yourself
>NGMI
I did TRAIN the embeddings myself. You can't consistently get the same features on a person with prompting alone, so trained embeddings for each character and tweaked them until they looked like what I imagined. Now I can refer to characters by name and Stable Diffusion will know exactly who to depict.

I use the AI stuff for organization. My plan is to commission some art once my story's farther along. I'd never publish anything with AI art when I can pay a real artist and give them credit in the text.

>>23420916
yes.webp

You get what you fucking deserve

>Know the fantasy story I'm writing is the most generic slop on earth

>Having a lot of fun writing it anyway

>See the dopamine numbers (views, favorites, etc.) go up bit by bit when I post a chapter

Writing makes me happy.

>>23421074
Won't you share it with your /wg/ friends and allies?

>>23420592
This fits perfectly into the melody of Big Iron

What do women find appealing about men?
Im writing a female main character who is crossdressing as a man and she is starting to get AGP romantic feelings to her male persona and is lusting after the way she looks in the mirror.
Im trying to figure out how to write this scene.
No this isn't erotica or porn, i was just exaggerating.

>>23421087

Sure, if you really need more slop in your life. One or two people might recognize me here, I posted in the past, but I'm just now coming back after getting over some severe writer's block:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/67087/avatar-of-reincarnation

>>23421091
That's uncanny, but you're right. I can mentally hear it.

>>23421097
>What do women find appealing about men?
Big beefy hands with thick veins. At least that's what I've heard.

>>23421097
They all want someone who reminds them of daddy.

>>23421105
>Big beefy hands with thick veins.
She doesn't have those.
She has an above average sized penis however.

>>23421109
>daddy.
she was a street orphan, she never had one

>>23421110
>>23421111
Sounds like you have some rewrites to do then.

>>23421111

Don't worry, she can call me that after she meets me.

>>23420080
>>23420084
What exactly happens in this scene?

>>23421117
no this is historical, she is probably long dead. maybe you can find one of her descendents today

How's Texas? :)

>>23420591
I stand by my reason for going wide with Trash instead of KU. On the other hand, not publishing with Aethon again definitely is me learning from my mistakes.

>>23421121

>maybe you can find one of her descendents today

Bet.

>>23421100
I read a bit of the first chapter. It's not bad, but it can benefit from some polish. You definitely have the ideas down and that's the hard part, lack of variety in word play and sentences that don't flow well together is something a skilled editor can fix.
I rewrote my entire story twice before I published it because no matter how many times i read my own work I find issues with it.

>>23421097
perceived social power
the perceived part is important

>>23421122
There are fucking T*xans in the thread? Ewwwwwwwwww
>>23421126
Hit me up if you find one, we can DP her pretty good. I have a 90 inch cock

How would you go about trying to capture Lovecraft’s “NOO A SQUID I’M GOING INSANE” in a memetic way without having a majority of the same fears he did?

>>23421131

I figured it was most important to... just read and write, and get in the practice and everything.

No one expects my first semi-serious attempt at novel-writing to be 10/5 stars.

The negative feedback hurts my soul, but, I think even if a lot of the stuff in my novel so far is mediocre at best (or even downright bad), at the end of the day, I'm writing what I want to write, and there's been one or two moments I wrote that I enjoyed a lot or thought were decent and meaningful.

And most importantly, I'm having fun.

>>23421153
It wasn't negative feedback.

>>23421154

I'm not saying you gave me negative feedback, I'm saying some of my readers have.

>>23421156
I saw a lot of promise, keep it up. You're your own worst critic, and everyone else is just along for the ride.

>>23421157

Thanks!

The most frustrating thing was, since it's a medieval fantasy story, it features slavery, so I had people posting that I was defending slavery when I had one of my characters argue it was the best choice (In place of things like a medieval prison, or execution, or the gibbet or something), and acted like I was personally advocating for slavery.

I about wanted to claw my eyes out.

>>23421091
thats because its literally written by Marty Robbins dickhead

>>23421153
>And most importantly, I'm having fun.
That's the main reason to keep going. It could stand some trimming and better word choice in parts, but if it's a hobby then that's a minor issue. Do what you enjoy.

>>23421169
At least I did better than the anons in the last thread who thought Heart of Darkness was AI

>>23421162
It's a common theme in WN style stories, people usually pitch a fit about something or another. I read a lot of WN/LN fantasies so it doesn't bother me.

>>23420821
Oh. So you're not going to tell me I want to fuck my mother?

>>23421201
>>23421162
In my case people bitched the MC was unlikable.
That's literally the point of the story. He's a prick. It's supposed to make you go "man, what a prick" and wonder just how the fuck is everyone going to handle him.

>>23421207

Oh I got the same complaint. I pointed out that if you don't actually write any flaws into a character to work on over the story, then they're an incredibly boring character, and a Gary Stu/Mary Sue.

But readers don't really get that.

>>23421207
People these days can't handle negativity. They need a therapy kitten in each hand at all times or they can't make it through the day.

>>23421207
Man I can't wait until I write my next story. The MC is going to go around shooting dogs. That'll stir some shit up in the comments I bet.

>>23421220

What the hell story is that, "Diary of an ATF agent"?

>>23421221
The plan is it's a priest turned vigilante.

>>23421220
>shock value for the sake of shock value

>>23421270
It's not shock value. It's a commentary of modern society.

>>23421272
>That'll stir some shit up in the comments I bet.
If you have a reason to write it then cool, but if it's just to see reactions then I'd rethink the idea if I were you.

>>23419575
How many have you sold so far?

>>23421291
They're not real dogs, they're fantasy dogs. It's set in a medieval magic world. The dogs are a euphemism. But they do get shot. Not all will die though. It's for the betterment of society.

>>23421327
my bad I didn't read the previous posts
I'm used to people coming here and posting their shock stories just for (You)s

>>23421135
How's Texas? :)

>>23421153
personally I strived to get better to stop being disappointed with my work. its slowly working

>>23421207
the key to an unlikable protag is having a compelling motivation. the payoff in the end usually being a redemption

>>23421384
Oh yeah the motivation is compelling and the payoff is good, but what are you going to do if some mong drops your story 3 chapters in because he didn't like MC's attitude?

>>23421404
the protag also cant be annoying. the more overbearing you write a character, the more work you have to do making him sympathetic

>>23421384
>>23421404

Jesus Christ, you are describing my story to a T right now.

I only make a character unlikeable in the way a reader could be. He might be an asshole, steal something, put his blame on other people because the reader could have done that once in his life, so it's relatable. Now, it's inadvisable to make his bad traits completely unrelatable

>>23418446
So last thread I asked for advice about a spurned childhood friend refusing romance from his spurned when they are now adults

I wrote a little bit on them before the wedding. It's a political marriage that benefits both, and she's trying to more or less bribe him

The first few days were a rush of preparations- letters being written, decorations being sewn. But after that, Jane had to deal with the calmness of her home, and the constant presence of Sarin.

"I'm glad you agreed to the marriage" she said, breaking the silence of their dinner.

Her old friend looked up from his meal for a moment. "We both gain a great deal from it," he replied after a pause.

"I have a gift for you, my love. A hairpiece," she stated with a smile. Jane produced a small box from her dress and opened it, revealing a piece of intricate gold. A sapphire was set in the front, and the silver hairpin accompanying it was a masterwork as well.

Sarin stared at it blankly before his eyes darted back to her. "Thank you." He took it from her, but did not wear it.

"Do you want to try it on?" Jane inquired. She was leaning forward now, her fingers fiddling with one another.

Sarin frowned a bit before putting the box in his pocket. "The braids in my hair took some time to make, and I wouldn't want my dinner to get cold as I redo it. Another time."

Jane's lips pressed tightly, and her brows furrowed together and down. There were no more words exchanged as they finished their plates off.

How many fucking agents am I going to have to write to? 8 weeks minimum for a response is a joke, frankly.

>>23421455
The Call of Reddit

>>23421517

Ball is all in their court unless you're self-publishing - and they probably get a dozen emails a day of someone just like you who wants them to read their 2.6million word vore slop fantasy to consider publishing it.

is there a word for being angry at someone but also enjoying it? like someone has done something to wrong you so you're pissed off at them, but your excited to shout at them and put them in their place

>>23421567
*you're

i hate phoneposting. please don't make fun of me

>>23421416
>the protag also cant be annoying
So he has to be a stuttering herbivore bitch to please the weak-willed?

>>23421585
>The relatable guy who ends up being a harem protagonist
>The herbivore who spends the next sixteen novels dodging pussy like a ninja
Everyone just wants to make self-insert characters for low budget fiction

>>23421567
sadistic?

>>23421567
You're thriving in the anger?

>>23421567
Righteous indignation?

There is nothing wrong with male epic fantasy isekai MC getting a harem, and I am tired of people pretending otherwise.

>>23421627
Harems themselves aren't bad, it's women just throwing themselves at the biggest pussy they can find that screams poor writing.
Mushoku Tensei did harems right, that stupid farming life isekai in another world where that guy has like 500 wives and fucks them all nonstop was pure self-insert fantasy trash.

Are there resources on how to write smut?

>>23421660
>Discord.com

Now that I'm waiting to hear back from agents... What do I do now?

>>23421541
No idea what that means but ok

>>23421676
Now you have to build hype. Start by telling us a few things about your book.

I'm thinking about writing my fantasy fiction with litRPG systems solely for RR, whereas in Scribblehub and Kindle, I would make an alt version without the Litslop and write something to describe the [special ability] instead.

I can't stand litrpg since it dates one's fiction to rudimentary early 20 century games. If wanted to chase trends I'd future-proof my story with a damn holodeck, but eh, stat tables are a better fit for short-term audiences.

I'm thinking about writing my fantasy fiction with litRPG systems solely for RR, whereas in Scribblehub and Kindle, I would make an alt version without the Litslop and write something to describe the [special ability] instead.

I can't stand litrpg since it dates one's fiction to rudimentary early 21st-century games. If wanted to chase trends I'd future-proof my story with a damn holodeck, but eh, stat tables are a better fit for short-term audiences.

>>23421627
Your text-based masturbation is not literature. Just a feeble expression of one sad man's unsated libido. Many such cases.

>>23421734
>I'm thinking about chasing trends
>If wanted to chase trends
What a completely empty, dishonest waste of time this post was

>>23421735
This.

Broke: harem

Woke: reverse harem

Bespoke: inverse harem

pitch your story to me and I'll tell you if it is shit
you are allowed one question

>>23421742
Did your hare brain glitch when it failed to grasp the simple concept of "what is preferable to write for a short term audience" vs "what is preferable to write for a long-term audience"?

>>23421627
There isn't. The problem starts when he's a pussy tailored to be self-insertable to the type of faggot that would never hold the attention of a single woman, let alone multiple. Slavery is a good catch-all answer to why they don't just leave him, but hey, it's not rape - they love him!

>>23421660
Read a few nasty visual novels. Skip all the onomatopoeia shit.

>>23421747
Consumer molecular printing causes the world governments to completely lose all control of regulations on things like firearms and explosives which causes a gigantic wave of terrorism which causes a gigantic wave of government repression in an attempt to wrestle the problem into submission.

All this on a background of rapidly advancing technology from the recent breakthroughs, including gene engineering.

Terror orphans are put into a gene-engineering program to be supercops (read: supersoldiers) and help keep crime and especially terrorism under control. This displaces more conventional forces like spec ops and military.

Male MC is one of those spec ops and part of an international counter-terror organization. He and others like him are jokingly or disdainfully called "gen 0s" to contrast with ones like the female MC, generation 1 gene-engineered orphan also a part of the organization. Male MC goes on counter-terror sorties alone after his squad was whittled down, which earned him more disdainful handles like "grim reaper", "black cat" and "bad luck charm".

The two don't really interact until a case of gene-engineering treatment injectors gets intercepted by terrorists and stolen, MC recovers all but one and it just so happens the girl gets in his way at base when he's returning bruised to shit by gunfire and exhausted. She lets him through the narrow pathway, thinking she pissed him off and that he's generally and easily angered person, since he was huffing and puffing from exhaustion. The male MC later visits her quarters and apologizes for coming off as a little rude, and explains that he wasn't angry she got in his way. They begin talking frequently, despite even the most innocent of interactions between gen 0s and 1s being strongly frowned upon.

And yes there is a jewish plot in the midst of it. As you may have guessed, the government wants unstoppable ZOGbots to put down terrorists and "terrorists". There is a bright-eyed idealist at the head of the questionably moral gene-engineering project, however.

Given that it's a very watered-down synopsis, how is this?

>>23421743
Enlightenment: Twincest is wincest.

>>23421763
In the end, you're still pandering to losers, and pretending you're somehow not like the other desperate dollar-chasers.

>>23418766
I decided to give it a try and got 5k words down with little effort. My brain tells me the whole idea is stupid and isn't going to work, but it just practically writes itself and feels pretty fun too.

The babies cries pierced her ears. For the second time in half an hour, Carla forced herself up. Her lover was jostling the child up and down, but her crying did not abate. An eight foot tall barbarian, capable of rending armies with his bare hands, and entirely a slave to his daughter's wails. "Our little girl's hungry, my love," he said. Weary and tired, Carla took the babe from him, before giving him a hard slap across the face.

"You forget yourself, Kurn. She is my daughter and mine only. I graciously allow you to help rear her, but never forget that. And a slave such as yourself should recall to always call me 'mistress'. Now fetch me a drink," Kurn bowed, before taking his leave.

Carla sighed as she pushed the front of her dress down and let the screaming infant latch on. Quickly she began to suckle, draining the breast. "You're a greedy little milk leech, aren't you? All babies are. Gluttonous little screamers that can only take and take," Carla derided softly as she sat down.

As her daughter nursed, Carla noticed she was beginning to look less like a reddish potato and more like a proper person. Her hair, dark like her brute of a father's, was also beginning to thicken. And her cheeks! Carla did not notice, but they were so plump and soft. "They're like little hams, aren't they?" she remarked, corners of her lips curling into a smile.

Kurn had returned by then, mug of barley tea in hand. "For you, mistress," he said obsequiously. Carla frowned, noticing the bit of redness now on the barbarian's cheek.

"Do you love me, Kurn?" Carla asked. Their daughter kicked a little as she fed, before Carla soothed her.

Kurn, perhaps more wounded by the slave comment than the slap, replied, "It is improper for a mere slave such as myself to love his mistress."

Carla pouted now, looking off to the side. "I....I didn't mean it."

>any feedback?

>>23421815
I never pretended to be or not to be like anyone. My post was speculating about increasing visibility while voicing a distaste for obsolescence. Did you feel good posting this "owned" though? G-d, /wg/ as of late has been populated by the most exquisite species of dopamine-addled crabs.

>>23421890
> For the second time in half an hour
is this supposed to be a lot? why not for the fifth time this afternoon? or is this the first half hour after waking up?

> before giving him a hard slap across the face
sounds cringe. would the slave not know how to address her? also i feel like the infant might react to this negatively. women probably only rarely use violence while literally taking an infant into their arms. and this is the moment everyone in the room would have a lot of feelings and reactions. you start talking about the reactions later, but i feel we should have a bit of it here, where normal people would expect it.

> Kurn bowed, before taking his leave.
and you do not show us how Kurn feels about this. is he upset at all? I guess he is not the MC so whatever, we only have one camera in this room and it is on the awesome woman showing us female rage. these people do not have a relationship between one another worth describing. did he just take is stoicly? she is probably looking at his face to see what he thinks of this. what does she see?

>Kurn bowed
is this a dialogue tag?

> derided softly
cringe dialogue tag, and even more cringe because of the adverb. we know it is deriding from the dialogue. do i have to say "let the dialoge speak"?

> Carla did not notice, but they were so plump and soft.
what do you mean with she "did not notice"? did not understand that.

> she remarked
are you too cool to just say "she said"?

> obsequiously
stop using the thesaurus
also don't use adverbs this often for dialogue tags

> Carla pouted now, looking off to the side. "I....I didn't mean it."
is this an anime?

some general stuff:
maybe describe our environment a bit better. it is nice to have a bit of spacial context as a reader. are we in a home? a palace? is there a fire place? is the mother aristocracy or just wealthy? where is the rest of the family?

this is of course just a small exerpt without any context, but i feel we could get a lot more out of this. maybe imply something about the greater context of the situation. what do the characters want? does the barbarian actually go to war often? why is he so buff? why did she get a child from him? is this not a problem for her status?

here they just seem to be a bit dumb and awkward. their dialogue and their actions do not make much sense for thinking human beings. the slave knows his place. the mother knows how to deal with slaves and men. or are both teenagers?

maybe just google some general writing advice. should cover most of you problems right now and after you fixed that people might look closer at other problems.

hope that helped. good luck with your future writing :)

>>23422146
>stop using the thesaurus
Worst off-hand advice you can ever give to someone. Use a thesaurus and use it a lot, but use it to find synonyms to words you'd actually realistically use.

As a reader, I don't want to have to pull out a fucking thesaurus.

>>23422146
She's supposed to be an evil queen character ruling over a land and he's her barbarian lover

Idk I just wrote it cause I was kind of horny but after fapping I am slightly disgusted by the idea

I have my story outlined via bullet points and half sentences, but I just feel no motivation to actually write it out in prose. It's just been sitting there since January and now that I feel like I've solved the story beats, I don't feel any push to turn it into a full story.

>>23422210
Then don't write it out in prose. Write out the story in a simple language a human can understand and see if you can make it "pretty" while at it.

Do you care about telling a story, or blasting the reader with tons of shitty purple prose?

>>23422209
>She's supposed to be an evil queen character ruling over a land and he's her barbarian lover
i got that, but not much more and i did not see how this would happen at all. which would have been the interesting part.

so was my critique useful for you at all?

>>23422224
>Write out the story in a simple language a human can understand and see if you can make it "pretty" while at it.

isn't that what prose means?

>>23422224
When I do write, I find myself getting stuck self editing while I write instead of just pressing on to the next line. So it's lack of motivation paired with getting stuck in the mud.
I'm not planning on going purple with it, I still want it to be more than, "see Spot run." or whatever.

Re the motivation, to me and my editor friends, I've told the story via the outline. Just kind of stuck in the place where I am retreading the same ground but simultaneously more and less because I don't trust my writing ability to make it the way I see it in my head.

>>23422243
Technically yes but every now and then you have retards who think creating convoluted word spaghetti is the way to go.

Simple and to point > entire paragraph telling me in most beautiful words how a character is performing a single action over the span of an entire page.

>>23422210
maybe try to write just some scenes that you think would turn out especially interesting.

or write the parts that show off the characters the most.

have you written anything before? i think you just need to get into a habit of writing.

>>23422245
Write first, edit later unless you immediately see something that you can improve right away. If not, next point.

Your first draft is meant to be sloppiest, shittiest trash not fit for publishing. If you are not being pushed by a tight schedule, your edited/proofread draft should be "good enough" state for publishing. At that point you can start refining as many times as you want.

>>23422234
Yeah the critique helped

But what should I use instead of "said" during dialogue heavy sections? I feel strange when I write a conversation and have to use "said" too much on a page.

>>23422252
My past is mostly in very short story/flash fiction, that is either unfinished or open ended to perpetually continue. I always preferred to edit and help others build their stories, so I'm definitely lacking a lot of "words on page" history.
>>23422254
Yes, I'm aware of the theory, I just find it hard to stop myself from going down that path. I'll hit one small roadblock, go back to fix something a sentence or two ago, and then 30 minutes later I'm back to where I left off.

So just kind of working through it all.

>>23422286
just use said. it is fine.

besides that look at how other writers work around that. not everything that is said needs a dialogue tag.

>>23422325
well i guess it is just a mindset and practice thing. might take a while getting used to it.

try to write with a timer. like 15 minutes where the explicit task is to get the word count up as much as possible. the written words do not need to be perfect, just usable for the next stage of editing.

find ways to just keep writing when you get stuck. if a sentence is cringe, but still says what should happen here in the story then let it be cringe and keep writing.

maybe even just summarize in a sentence what part you are stuck with and then keep writing.

imagine you had a first, but shitty draft. would that not be much better for getting to a second draft than having nothing at all?

>>23422325
>Yes, I'm aware of the theory,
Skill issue.

>>23421119
Nothing lol I pantsed this one

It’s time for a new one!

>>23422524
>>23422524
>>23422524

wow, look at this pile of crap: https://files.catbox.moe/d9sukc.zip