When to give up writing? When to accept you have no talent?

[Anonymous No.21387116]

I need to know if I have talent in writing and if I should continue, or if I should quite the craft. Please my whole future hinges on this because I am about to drop out of college to become an author. Here is an excerpt from my novel.

[Anonymous No.21387133]

this is juvenile, sophomoric, and full of cliches. it's like a deviantart furry completing a bad painting in the sistine chapel. i have no idea how you managed to finish a book while being such a bad writer.

[Anonymous No.21387169]

>>21387116
It's not particularly exciting, but it's enough that it is worth editing. Think about using less page breaks and consider the pacing of the scene some more (the fire moment doesn't have the impact you hoped)
But I swear to god, anon, if you give up on writing I will dox you, find your house and smack your face into submission. Do you want to be a writer or not?

[Anonymous No.21387178]

>>21387116
>I am about to drop out of college to become an author.
You should seriously sell some valuables and put it all in crypto now at the bottom.
Just as a backup cause I have a feeling McDonald's awaits you.

[Anonymous No.21387180]

>>21387116
>The ballroom was her boyfriends ballsack the entire time.

genius

[Anonymous No.21387223]

>>21387116
Its about the content of your writing you stupid idiot; 50% of great literature is written very timely and formally, the idiosyncratic elements we nowadays read into are just by chance, and the status the books hold are exclusively due to the topics they deal with, or the culture they reflect -- and yes, "crafty eloquence" fits in the category of particular timely fashion as well, so just write whats written on your heart and have mercy on the soul of your hand.

[Anonymous No.21387226]

>>21387116
If you make it on RR you can write complete trash and still earn thousands of dollars per month. It's all down to what you want to do anon.

[Anonymous No.21387228]

>>21387226
BTW I should note that I am not calling your writing trash - I didn't read the post because I am in a rush. I am just saying that any level of skill is fine if you are persistent and know your goals. Good luck retard and stop relying on the opinions of strangers for your life!

[Anonymous No.21387234]

>>21387178
>crypto now at the bottom.
lel

[Anonymous No.21387235]

>>21387178
What do you mean by McDonalds? Do you mean I will only be able to afford fast food?

[Anonymous No.21387238]

>>21387133
>sophomoric
that wasnt forced at all

[Anonymous No.21387244]

>>21387234
bear faggot
>>21387235
yes, during lunch breaks, while working there
ahahahahahahaha

[Anonymous No.21387254]

>>21387235
>>21387116
Don't drop out of college... just write in your spare time.

[Anonymous No.21387256]

Talent is something you can only uncover with a sustained effort. Until you’ve spent a year or more with focused consistency, nobody can say if you have talent or not.

[Anonymous No.21387255]

Write a metafictional novel about a guy who drops out of college to write shitty prose like yours

[Anonymous No.21387257]

>>21387116
Before you give up, did you even actually try?
There is no description of the ornate dresses or the ballroom. How many people are there? What kinds of people? None of the characters are described, they don't do anything interesting, and they aren't given any personality. When the dancers get closer to the girl, there is no build up of emotion. The language doesn't convey any excitement other than just plainly stating "she was excited." You just mindlessly list what happens like you're making an outline.
This isn't how you tell a story, retard. This isn't how you'd tell it in a bar to your friends, and it certainly isn't how you tell it in a novel.
Write it again and put in some detail, personality, and emotion. If that's too hard for you, then you can fucking quit.

[Anonymous No.21387258]

Honestly just write if you want to write but don't expect to make any money off it even IF you were literally a great writer. It's just not a good way to make money, in fact, art in general is a really bad way to make money. BUT by god if you want to write then write, and disregard what anyone else tells you. I

[Anonymous No.21387261]

>>21387116
>I am about to drop out of college to become an author.
DON'T DO THIS
Write in your own time, there is no guarantee that anything you write will be published or a success, no matter how good it is.

[Anonymous No.21387262]

>>21387254
College is a scam it's practically useless

[Anonymous No.21387272]

This is your life, fuck stability, ignore normies who talk about financial freedom or some bullshit. Even if you pursue a career that aligns with your college course, chances are you are still going to be a wagie who will work at a desk and stares at a computer screen all day long fiddling numbers for the rich.

You will also stare at a screen all day in writing but in that act, you can pour your soul into your works and to the improvement of your craft.

WAGMI writer bros

[Anonymous No.21387286]

>>21387262
Either way, the stupidest thing you could do as an amateur writer is not have a day job

[Anonymous No.21387323]

>>21387116
It is very surface level to me. I don't think you need to specify that a servant girl is below the princesses that dance, for example.
This is something of a personal bias but I think explaining the nature of her attraction to the man would be more interesting. The female-male dynamic is always fun to read about, especially in verboten circumstances like their belonging to such different social strata. The ending is pretty kino though.

[Anonymous No.21387331]

>>21387116
How old are you? Yea what you posted is bad, but if your in you're late teens keep pushing. If your in your 40s, you might not be a writer

[Anonymous No.21387370]

>>21387116
You could get there, but definitely aren't right now. You tell us what happens and then describe things in a rather generic manner. Focus on giving us a good feeling for her actions. (Instead of "Still, she watched." write something like "As expected of her station, she kept her head down, yet everytime the noble ladies where all too distracted by their chatter her eyes shot up.")

[Anonymous No.21387554]

Guys, I have been keeping something from you. I already dropped out of college last week. I am panicking now because I thought I was a way better writer than I was. I'm starting to freak out.

[Anonymous No.21387620]

>>21387554
Oh
Oh dear

[Anonymous No.21387743]

>>21387554
You can do it. Start a pseudonymous account on Substack, WattPad, whatever, make some social media accounts to promote your pieces, write stuff to submit to local newspapers, just get after it really hard. If you put in the time and effort consistently you can make it.

[Anonymous No.21387757]

>>21387743
Is that how you do it these days? Would a publisher even accept it if you already put it online on Substack?

[Anonymous No.21387758]

>>21387116
>>21387235
>>21387554
There's no way. This post is bait. I REPEAT: OP IS BAITING

[Anonymous No.21387782]

>>21387554
If it's not bait I'm in the screenshot.

[Anonymous No.21387788]

>>21387554
I'm sorry anon, you've only got one way out: take your ass to that chair and write the best goddamn book you can conjure from that hollow head.

[Anonymous No.21387813]

>>21387116
Here's the thing anon, it's bad. However, bad literature sells. Young women are the biggest demographic for book sales and they gravitate towards shitty 'young adult,' rebranded now as 'new adult' fiction. I recently read one of these books because a girl I was seeing raved about it. It wasn't too far off from the type of prose you're writing. I noticed two major things while reading this book:
1. Write as if writing for children. You're already 95% of the way there. Your style is probably at a 4th grade reading level. However, writing for children also includes inserting a 'reach' word for them every once in awhile. That is to say, include an SAT word once every two pages or so. It's cheap but it works. Somewhat related, in the Young Adult novel I mentioned, the author included the words "well, fuck" in the first chapter of the book and then proceeded to never write another curse word in the book for the next 400 pages. I assume this was to get young people 'hooked' by a blunt, humorous, and edgy tone that never really reappears. The author also wrote in the present tense which was strange but it gave the feeling of immediacy.
2. Insert hollow John Greenisms based on pop-science or otherwise pseud knowledge. "If the theory of parallel universes was true, there was a -insert character name here-, in some other world, who proudly and defiantly took to the dance floor. Of course, there was even a -insert character name here- that did not watch the dance floor at all, but watched another servant watching the dance floor. Even in her unlimited universes, she was forever the middle ground." It's terrible, I know. It took me 15 seconds to write, you can think of a better one. The more pseud the better. Shit like that; retarded women in their 20s with the minds of 13 year olds, the kind of people who unironically declare "I don't think I want kids until my 30s" when they are 22, consider 'deep.'

If you are trying to be a solid author then no, you're nowhere near that. How could you be? There are some people who can write at a young age but they are few and far between and generally a brimming with strange life or experiences most would not have had. What can you teach someone about life? What do you have to say about it? As others mentioned, your story is very cliche. It doesn't even include extrapolations. By that I mean, read someone like Dostoyevsky or Steinbeck who, when they write, allow the narration to take an experience of a character and make it fit for us all. If you're on instagram, you may often see people commenting on certain posts "no unique experiences" as they discover the post describes something they thought was completely unique to them-- something they did in childhood or when no one was around. Through that post they discover that it is a shared behavior. That's what a 'good' version of this might be able to accomplish.

[Anonymous No.21387913]

>>21387554
See >>21387813

[Anonymous No.21388471]

>>21387116
it's terrible but keep on trying, you might become a decent or great writer

[Anonymous No.21388527]

>>21387554
man just take a gap year or even just a semester off at the very least. focus on your writing for that time and then at least if it doesn't work you can still fall back on college. i reckon get back in contact with them and try and explain you've changed your mind and don't want to drop out completely. give them some focusing on mental health bullshit reason for wanting to take a break and i'm sure they'll eat it up.

[Anonymous No.21388558]

The quality of your prose is better than 95% of YA authors'. That doesn't mean it is great by any means, but it IS passable. That's a start - something to work with. Just keep improoving and writing short stories in your free time to better get a handle on the writing process. I believe in you.


I think dropping out of college would be a bad idea, thoughever. Even if your prose was second-to-none, I would not recommend doing that to attempt to make it as an author.

[Anonymous No.21388582]

>>21387116

Okay here's the thing about writing and any creative thing really. If you can make something that is basic and cliched from start to finish you actually have a good foundation to make something good eventually. It might not seem that way but it is. People who try to make something great right from the beginning often end up failing and giving up faster.
And as far as cliches go many people don't really understand their usefulness and importance. To some extent they are inescapable but the truth is all great writers use them even if it's only subconsciously at times. You just have to learn to pull what is interesting out of cliches and use it to your advantage. You can even use straight stock cliches as long as you use them sparingly and surround them with something that goes beyond that and you can find great success that way as many creators have.

[Anonymous No.21388593]

>>21387813
I was led to believe that New Adult implies that a YA novel includes a sex scene. If OP wants to fleece women, he needs to practice writing those (unless OP is a woman, then she can just wing it with her own subjective experience firmly in mind).

[Anonymous No.21388612]

>>21387116
Sorry, bro. Don't quit your day job. This is about as generic as it gets.

[Anonymous No.21388623]

>>21387554
this is true; i'm the dean of his college.

[Anonymous No.21388640]

>>21387116
i mean it's not great but i wasn't laughing out loud like i sometimes do when i look at what people from the writing general shit out. but good luck trying to get paid for it

[Anonymous No.21388716]

>>21387554
Once you've crawled through the grinder that is the utter purposelessness you feel having internalized the thought that you're laughably average,
you might actually have some good material to draw from.
Any writer that I notice doesn't have some level of disdain for reality always betrays this later on as their stories drag and have no real substance to them.

Just write your thoughts down after getting flamed by faceless critics on an image board and I guarantee you, there will be an inkling of existentialism to it
that will be worth far more than the pulp you try to write at the moment.

Make it special, give it a twist, turn it into a video essay by hiring a narrator and slap the audio over a series of still video captures of some inconsolable landscapes and you might have something.

[Anonymous No.21388814]

>I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.
>I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed—and the great learned one!—among men.—For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul—which was rich to begin with—more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!

[Anonymous No.21388970]

>>21387554
Based

[Anonymous No.21389009]

>>21387226
>RR
?

[Anonymous No.21389014]

>>21389009
Royalroad

[Anonymous No.21389019]

>>21388716
So what you're saying is I should install grindr and invest in kneepads?

[Anonymous No.21389023]

>>21389014
what's the point? writing fanfic genuinely sounds more painful than being a mcwagie and probably makes you a worse writer long term

[Anonymous No.21389029]

Where should you host your work for easy feedback and interaction with other amateurs? I set up on Wattpad but it's 90% women and people just posting memes unironically. I guess it's time to go back to AO3.

[Anonymous No.21389040]

>>21387116
Talent is the excuse of those not willing to put in the time.

[Anonymous No.21389136]

>>21387116
Invest heavily in 'show don't tell'. Don't just say the guests faces were radiant and happy. Give your reader something to figure out. Show, don't tell.

[Anonymous No.21389159]

>>21387116
Trite, contrived, mediocre, milquetoast, amateurish, infantile, cliche-and-gonorrhea-ridden paean to conformism, eye-fucked me, affront to humanity, war crime, should *literally* be tried for war crimes, resolutely shit, lacking in imagination, uninformed reimagining of, limp-wristed, premature, ill-informed attempt at, talentless fuckfest, recidivistic shitpeddler, pedantic, listless, savagely boring, just one repulsive laugh after another.

[Anonymous No.21389202]

>>21387116
This is all just “telling,” anon.

“Each dress more ornate than the last” even if it feels gay to do so, at least look up different clothing styles so that you can give your characters specific things to wear. Then do that with everything because you don’t show a fucking thing. You’re only a “bad” writer because your writing is lazy, where’s the effort?

[Anonymous No.21389207]

>>21389040
Correct. There’s no such thing as “talent.” No one is just born a phenomenal writer. It takes work, and OP clearly doesn’t want to work, hence why he thinks he can just drop out of college and pump out this shit full-time without building an audience and sales first.

[Anonymous No.21390397]

>>21388593
I honestly do not know. The one YA book I read had a pseudo-sex scene. Almost like a 40s or 50s Hayes code Hollywood movie. It had the start of some descriptions of their bodies against one another and then it was like "...until the candle burned out." Type shit. I see a lot of shit being promoted on social media though, YA/NA novels and their plots are always super focused on sex. It'll be something like, "Max is a bipoc high powered defense attorney, Lydia is a neuodivergent prosecutor with a flawless record. They're in an open relationship and looking for a third. What will happen when Max has to defend Declan, Lydia's ex who has just been arrested of murder???"

[Anonymous No.21390411]

>>21387370
>As expected of her station, she kept her head down, yet everytime the noble ladies where all too distracted by their chatter her eyes shot up
This is somehow worse than what OP posted, I sincerely hope you are baiting.

[Anonymous No.21390413]

>>21389207
There's definitely such a thing as talent. You can overcome a lack of it though, as Balzac and many countless others did.

[Anonymous No.21390426]

>>21388814
I call this the cult of the self. It's your last stop before the train derails and you're free from the ride and this is where most get off.

[Anonymous No.21391052]

>>21387116
Honestly just write if you want to write but don't expect to make any money off it even IF you were literally a great writer. It's just not a good way to make money, in fact, art in general is a really bad way to make money. BUT by god if you want to write then write, and disregard what anyone else tells you. I

[Anonymous No.21391057]

>>21387116
I hate to tell you this...but it's pretty bad, anon. It's almost impressive how many cliched stock phrases you managed to fit into one excerpt, and how little actual substance there was. That doesn't mean you can't improve, but you're nowhere near the level where you can even think about making a living as a fiction writer. You need to realize that even some of the bestselling and most famous authors today got rejected for a long time before they got their first novel published, and during that time they had normal jobs and went to school. Even if your writing was many times better than this and easily publishable, it would still be a horrendous idea to drop out.

Stay in school and learn to write well in your spare time.

[Anonymous No.21391059]

>>21387116
Uh, well, I've seen worse on FF.net and Ao3.
Atm it just seems bland.

[Anonymous No.21391143]

>>21387116
Readable, but >>21387133
You must not be just be the stenographer of the image. We're not inside this scene, much less observing it at the margins of it.

>Her heart ached as she watched the guests
This is the story. You can be more oblique, let things unfurl themselves, rather than pointing to events.

>The ballroom filled with anticipation ...
An example of what I'm looking for from this. Reduce the word count by 1/3rd for this passage, and the appearance of the word "She" to not more than twice and see what you get.


>my whole future hinges on this
5k in sales self publishing, or an actual book deal first.


>if I have talent in writing and if I should continue
Not enough to judge definitely no. It's a question of putting in the time to read models, form and articulate your particular voice and style. But if the question is "I'm I deadass fr no cap on god >>21388814 then the answer is no. Then again he had conquered his literary world by 18 and fucked off to God knows where.

>>21389207
>There’s no such thing as “talent."
Still doxa. It's reasonable to expect the apple to not fall far from the tree, and here intellect/imagination is an advantage. The secret sauce of aptitude for writing worthwhile literary (or even commercial) material is rarely cut and dried, but some will 'have it', and others will have to assimilate much more through training themselves to acquire comparable automatisms toward mastery.

[Anonymous No.21391199]

What was behind that door? How did they all went missing? I hope someone would this mystery anytime soon...... And who is the strange figure?

[Anonymous No.21391203]

>>21389023
You wouldn't be allowed to monetise fanfics afaik. It's generally a website for serial fiction and you can make a lot of money producing lowbrow or highbrow slop.

[Anonymous No.21392676]

>>21387116

Yes, you have talent. Ignore these other faggots here who are just jealous.

This is of course a small sample but there's nothing fundamentally bad about it. You will improve as you keep going but already you are better than the vast majority of people who have posted their own samples.

[Anonymous No.21393330]

Sickeningly trite. I teach in a secondary school and if a fourteen year old wrote this I’d give them a 6 or a 7 (B grade)

[Anonymous No.21393382]

If this is really supposed to be a novel, why would you cram a chapter's worth of events into a couple paragraphs?

[Anonymous No.21393582]

>>21387116
This reads like a little kid's storybook.

[Anonymous No.21393767]

>>21392676
>Ignore these other faggots here who are just jealous.

[Anonymous No.21393826]

>>21387116 (OP)

Yo anon, we let shitty authors try to claim paid commissions at Outfox Stories. You reserve a commission, write it, then the people who put the money up can vote on whether to accept it. Could make some money that way, but it's not a big enough site yet make enough to live on. Also it's mainly tranny erotica.

[Anonymous No.21393829]

You are being way to kind, OP is horrible. You are using expressions and structures that you probably read somewhere but there is zero flow. It's probably bait anyway.

[Anonymous No.21393843]

>>21387116
If you need proof that you have talent in order to continue writing then you don't and you shouldn't.

[Anonymous No.21393846]

Talent is not a real thing. You consume and practice until you produce something that someone cares about. Most stuff is mediocre on the technical sense but carries something for people to connect. Great authors with beautiful prose are still missinterpreted because few people actually read the words in front of them, they just interpret whatever the fuck they wanted to see there before starting.

[Anonymous No.21393876]

>>21393846
Talent is real, but it really just means that your neural pathways are structured in such a way that you can excel at doing something to a degree and with a level of ease that the vast majority can't.