/wg/ Writing General

[Anonymous No.23213914]

"Sole Survivor" edition

Previous: >>23199599

/wg/ AUTHORS & FLASH FICTION: https://pastebin.com/ruwQj7xQ
RESOURCES & RECOMMENDATIONS: https://pastebin.com/nFxdiQvC

Please limit excerpts to one post.
Give advice as much as you receive it to the best of your ability.
Follow prompts made below and discuss written works for practice; contribute and you shall receive.
If you have not performed a cursory proofread, do not expect to be treated kindly. Edit your work for spelling and grammar before posting.
Violent shills, relentless shill-spammers, and grounds keeping prose, should be ignored and reported.

Simple guides on writing:
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHdzv1NfZRM
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPnobbck9s
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAKcbvioxFk

Thread theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUW1hHwoIzM

[Anonymous No.23213924]

God I love throwing shade at every single martial arts cliché in existence.
>Street fighter challenges a boxer to a match
>Gets obliterated
>Copes by saying "IF IT WAS IN THE STREETS I'D TOTALLY WIN"
>Challenges him to a street fight
>Still loses because the only thing that's going to get over that strength and skill difference is a weapon

[Anonymous No.23213929]

Opinions on writing for a specific audience versus just writing what you want?

Feels like my story is all over the place, ranging from "the gang figures out who vandalized a dress before a party" to "immortal cannibal who enjoys eating people alive", and I don't know if anyone is even into that.

[Anonymous No.23213939]

Genre fiction isn't literature. You're not writing a book, you're writing a failed screenplay.

[Anonymous No.23213945]

Thoughts?

[Anonymous No.23213959]

>>23213945
Fanfic tier

[Anonymous No.23213975]

>>23213945
Do you want my honest critique or a Reddit softball?

[Anonymous No.23214013]

Should paragraphs be justified in a novel? Like is it better if all the lines line up on the left and right sides, or is it fine for the right side to be all uneven?

[Anonymous No.23214024]

This is my first time posting my writing, please use lube.
https://pastebin.com/3ditSMsR

[Anonymous No.23214056]

>>23214013
Yes, but it's accomplished through typesetting with the help of hyphenation. Don't do something weird like choosing your words specifically just to line up the right margin like a psychopath.

[Anonymous No.23214063]

What are some good writing communities? The ones on Reddit suck ass, and this thread is a bit slow.

[Anonymous No.23214064]

>>23213939
Uh oh, somebody's getting stinky!

[Anonymous No.23214069]

>>23214063
What are you talking about? This community sucks too.

[Anonymous No.23214090]

>>23213975
Nah, be honest man. I want to improve, otherwise I would have posted on reddit instead

[Anonymous No.23214158]

>>23213914
Unsure if I should open the novel with one of the MC's and how she went about giving herself the major problem that ultimately catches up with her or if I should leave it ambiguous and show it later as a flashback?

I really really hate flashbacks and I always liked just having a single path in a narrative, temporally. It can be convoluted and go a thousand different directions with different characters but I don't usually like going back. However, I find if I show how she got herself to the point that starts the novel off, context will make it more moving and it's already sort of complicated so it might make it easier on the reader.

[Anonymous No.23214189]

>>23214090
Okay. You show more concern for what is happening than how or why it's happening, and this seems like it's in written form not because you have a passion for conveying it through language, but because you lack another means of doing so. You don't seem to pay attention to how your writing reads or sounds--your syllables, meter, rhythm, flow, upward/downward leads, etc. are fucked. I get the impression that you jam adjectives into your writing when you feel a section is too bare, but without any thought devoted to how they change the sentence and the words around them. I suspect this particular habit is why the first anon said it reads like fanfiction--I would argue it reads like erotica. You have a lot of comma splices. Too many superfluous details--a few is fine, but chain too many and it has the opposite effect: they lose all meaning and people zone out. I stopped reading after the first paragraph and had to force myself to read the rest.

I think you have a lot of potential and a lot of room for improvement. Read Moby Dick three times.

[Anonymous No.23214233]

>>23214024
No lube is required; you're not making any novice mistakes and you seem to know, on a practical level, what a figure of speech is even if you're not pulling anything too fancy. Most people that post their writing here aren't at this level but then again you didn't write a whole lot so there's not much more that I can say.

[Anonymous No.23214246]

>>23214024
Really good.

[Anonymous No.23214262]

>>23213945
Might as well go all the way.

Her frosty hand pulled me along the hall, leading me toward the study.

She always said, “This is my favorite room in the house. It’s nice and secluded . . . and intimate.”

She glided silently on the wooden floor. The moon and the ancient books lining the shelves bore witness to her forbidden cravings.

She pushed me onto the velvet sofa and laid her weightless body on top of mine.

“I want you, Anon-kun,” she purred. Her voice echoed like rustling leaves. “I want you to shove your warm cock up my cunt and grind me good.”

Her icy lips met mine. They felt like the brushing of butterfly wings as they explored my body, moving from my lips to my neck and chest. Chill breath caressed my skin, leaving goosebumps. Even the lightest graze of her lips were jolts of electricity, sending shivers down my spine. An intoxicating scent of withered roses mingled with mine, numbing my senses.

Her white dress slid down her body, presenting to me her creamy breasts. Transparent skin glowed in the moonlight. She guided my hands along her body. My fingertips traced the intricate patterns of her sublime figure.

A moan escaped from her lips.

My heart raced, and she could hear it beating in my chest. Her eyes reflected delight, reminiscence—and envy.

My fingers ended their salacious stroll on her left breast, where I felt a wound. A deep gash where her heart should be. With curiosity, my fingertips trailed along the gash. But there was no blood.

After all, ghosts don’t bleed.

[Anonymous No.23214352]

>>23213939
genre chads live in your head rent free, you literally cannot stop talking about how much we win

[Anonymous No.23214355]

>>23213364
So how is this?

[Anonymous No.23214362]

>>23214056
So the first example in the image is incorrect, but the second is how it should be?

[Anonymous No.23214382]

>>23213914
How do I know what I'm writing is actually worth others reading? I've got themes and ideas that I see in my work but I'm not sure they would be picked up on, but I also don't want to slam it over the reader's head
But also because it can be classified as genre fiction I don't want it dismissed immediately as not container a deep message/idea

[Anonymous No.23214387]

>>23213959
>>23214189
Thanks for the feedback. Giving it a read again with a clear mind, yeah, I can see the adjective abuse. Been reading a lot of those old gothic stories where they describe some fucking stairs for 7 pages and wanted to try something similar, but compacted into a really short story (I want to try my hand at flash fiction before trying something long). Guess I didn't study/understand the style of these pages enough. But regardless, the cleaner version >>23214262 posted reads way better without all the bullshit. Also, wasn't exactly aiming for erotica but I see what you mean.

[Anonymous No.23214478]

>>23214362
Yes
Are you typesetting your own novel though? There's a lot of other shit to consider if it's not just a manuscript

[Anonymous No.23214479]

>>23214478
Yes, it's being self-published so I have to do all the formatting/typesetting. What are the other considerations?

[Anonymous No.23214482]

>>23214262
>I want you to shove your warm cock up my cunt and grind me good
Say this out loud and ask yourself if words like it have ever been spoken in the history of the human species outside of a porno.

[Anonymous No.23214510]

>>23214362
For the love of god, google a proper formatting guide instead of relying on anonymous advice

[Anonymous No.23214528]

>>23214479
I’m guessing you’re going to self-pub on Amazon. Then why not use the tools they provided?

[Anonymous No.23214580]

>>23214479
Typography is a much broader and deeper subject than what could possibly be covered in one post, but let's say the easiest thing to fuck up is line length
Text becomes punishingly difficult to read after line length exceeds roughly three alphabets, and ideally should be closer to two and a half
You can verify this with books you already own
You'll also notice body text on the printed page overwhelmingly favors serif fonts, and in fact maybe you already noticed, since you're using one
I hope your word processor (or whatever) supports proper automatic hyphenation, because without it, justified text can get really screwed up and have giant gaps all over some lines
That's all I can say for now
Good luck anon

[Anonymous No.23214674]

>>23214580
Who the hell measures line length in "alphabets"?

[Anonymous No.23214829]

>>23213939
Genre fiction is better than "literature"

[Anonymous No.23214832]

>https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E9qQYnzsFtPB5eTqwsa1o-2DrPjnSLNPj61s1_hwbxY/
Draft of a short story I'm working on. It's been edited for spelling and grammar (even though my intentional use of grammar is, in and of itself, probably deeply offensive to many). Could use another set of eyes or two.

[Anonymous No.23214855]

What’s a good resource for sensitivity readers?

[Anonymous No.23214857]

>>23214855
A closed fist.

[Anonymous No.23214858]

>>23214829
Only because you’re a retard.

[Anonymous No.23214866]

https://pastebin.com/s97q8vQ5

[Anonymous No.23214870]

>>23214832
>sidle somewhat sideways
Before I continue, do you have an actual point to making it all one paragraph?

[Anonymous No.23214874]

>>23214870
Yes.

[Anonymous No.23214876]

>>23214832
Why my nigga Kowalski gotta be a fucking plumber? Racist ass bitch

[Anonymous No.23214877]

>>23214874
Got it. You’re just going to lie.

[Anonymous No.23214885]

>>23214870
>alliteration bad
Go back to your Sanderson toilet paper, lil guy.

[Anonymous No.23214890]

>>23214876
Yeah, well... he's fucking the German girl so I guess he's coming out ahead in the grand scheme of things.

[Anonymous No.23214891]

>>23214877
I'm not lying. I'm just refusing to elaborate. Also for a reason.

[Anonymous No.23214914]

>>23214891
That reason is you want the air of pretension despite lacking the substance to actually have it.

[Anonymous No.23214922]

>>23214914
I don't know how to respond to that, honestly, except to say that my goal was not to create "the air of pretension." I just want feedback without my goals being made immediately explicit... you know, to simulate an actual first-read experience.

[Anonymous No.23215151]

“Three assignments for one needed day? A bit too much on them are you? I succeed his request but I will make it one assignment. If there is nothing else then we should reconvene for refreshments later.” he responded and turned back into the monastery. The monastery did elude me with its patioed garden; I have not eaten since speaking with the under person from before. I mustered back to the under person quarters and passed the faded buildings into a house etched with a spoon. Druids are not unseen or not allowed to go to under person quarters but the same formalities from before are present. I ate my food on a table towards the back and peered at the crowded house. A dull décor and dress. Kitchen staff scraping orders, a group of young men guffawing and stirring, an older set murmuring among themselves; some color shines from the door. A bustling crowd in the afternoon passes by the open windows, the streets of towns are kept worn from under person mileage. Finishing my food I brushed into the street towards the monastery to finish the small details. As I walked through the quarters I heard a small pardon behind me.

[Anonymous No.23215185]

>>23215151
>later.” he
Please edit for grammar and spelling before asking for feedback.
>Druids are not unseen or not allowed to go to under person quarters
I have no clue what this means and I get the feeling I'm supposed to.
>I ate
>Finishing my food
Mixing up your tenses. This is not a cardinal sin in a cosmic sense, but here it suggests a lack of awareness rather than an intentionally broken rule for specific effect.

[Anonymous No.23215188]

>>23215185
>Finishing my food
My mistake, this is valid.
>A bustling crowd in the afternoon passes
This is mixed tenses.

[Anonymous No.23215296]

My main character picking up dead birds is rooted in his psychology after seeing an incident when he was younger but it's not something where I'm trying to display it's a serial killer or sociopathic tendancy. He's just trying to work out if the birds are being affected at all by 5G towers by dissecting their brains. It's more of an unusual quirk if anything.

[Anonymous No.23215307]

>>23215296
This reads like a Boswell story.

[Anonymous No.23215312]

>>23215296
>He's just trying to work out if the birds are being affected at all by 5G towers by dissecting their brains.

Normal people will interpret this as mental illness.

[Anonymous No.23215330]

>>23215296
It's very cut and dried. Leif did this. Leif did that. Leif thought this. Leif thought that. There's very little depth or nuance or mystery to any of it, which doesn't really make for compelling reading. If someone is picking into bird brains, I want to read it in all its depth and nuance and humanity. I don't want it to be depicted just just a haha quirky ain't that funny kind of thing. The way you handle it makes me feel like I'm the one picking into the author's birdbrain.

[Anonymous No.23215389]

>>23215188
>>23215185
Thank you both for your time.

[Anonymous No.23215572]

>>23214355
Are you asking for critique on a 4chan post?

[Anonymous No.23215586]

>>23214674
1. People who do not have actual typographical jargon in their vocabulary
2. Anyone currently talking to those people

[Anonymous No.23215794]

As a compound adjective, should "[adjective]-enough" constructions contain a hyphen?
For example, should it be
>We don't have a big-enough bag.
or
>We don't have a big enough bag.
Rewriting isn't an option, this is a transcription of spoken dialogue.

[Anonymous No.23215889]

>>23214362
Bottom panel is justified, but you missed the point about hyphenation. Hyphenation is where a word that won't fit on a single line is broken across two, with a hyphen appended to the first part; this should be something you can enable in whatever software you're using, so just look up "[program] automatic hyphenation" (if your program doesn't support it, find one that does; you can also import your text into more professional typesetting tools).

Justification on its own adjusts the widths of spaces, character spacing, and characters themselves to make the text fill to the margins. Normally this has bounds on it (how far some things with be stretched or compressed to fit the text), but can still lead to cases where spaces are uncomfortably large in a line. Hyphenation addresses this by allowing the words themselves to be broken, and generally makes the spacing much more consistent.

See pic rel for an example of hyphenation.
(Not my writing, but part of something I'm editing; the software I'm using is Scribus, which is okay for typesetting, but isn't as competent for writing and re-editing the text itself so probably better to import into later.)

[Anonymous No.23216012]

>>23213924
Martial arts is gay as hell. Women's self defense. WHY CANT I HUG HIM. WHY IS HIS PUNCHIng ME SO EFFECiTVELY

[Anonymous No.23216064]

>>23215307

Samuel or Robert? I've read neither

>>23213924

Have one character who's K-O is smashing people in the testicles as a nod to Bobby Hill

>>23215312

There's definitely some underlying mental illness in my character he's been through some shit but at the same time he's picked up quickly the apocalypse is actually happening but nobody listens to him because he's a 50-60 potential schizoid boomer.

Trying to present this in a way that seems genuine is giving me a little trouble but I'm having fun with it.

[Anonymous No.23216082]

I'm done. Now I just need to edit the hell out of it and I'll have my final draft complete. I think I'm just going to upload it online as I don't think publishing is in the cards.

[Anonymous No.23216088]

How do you make sure you’ve adequately covered yourself with trigger warnings for your work? Also, do you ever worry about those trigger warnings serving as spoilers?

[Anonymous No.23216164]

>>23216088
>trigger warnings
Are you writing for babies?

[Anonymous No.23216184]

>>23216088
I have been once asked to add a warning for torture, and I obliged them. Otherwise, if they've gotten far enough into my story then they know exactly what they're getting into, and there is no need for warnings.

[Anonymous No.23216199]

>>23216064
maybe he meant james, i.e. the author of Tour of the Hebrides. your story had a sort of dry, mocking wit about it

[Anonymous No.23216255]

>>23216088
>trigger warnings
Jesus fuck it's a work of fiction. I'm not warning anybody about made-up WORDS. God damn this clown world

[Anonymous No.23216331]

>>23216255
Remember, you're dealing with cultural Marxists, whose only use for fiction is to extol the virtues of the totalitarians who want to be in charge.

[Anonymous No.23216676]

>>23213914
How do you write when you're exhausted from long hours+lack of sleep due to work but ARE NOT a pussy and know you need to bang that shit out like a fucking man. I can force myself to do it, but what are some good tricks/exercises to wake my mind up enough to be creative?

[Anonymous No.23216683]

>>23216082
Good job, anon!

[Anonymous No.23216789]

>>23216082
>being an idiot after all that work done
better put up the work now and see what you can do for self-publishing.

[Anonymous No.23216794]

>>23216676
Just take a half hour nap idiot.

[Anonymous No.23216795]

>>23216088
don't be an autist, only put in the rating for your book and let'er rip. don't be part of the culture that spoils faggots and get rid of all the fun of reading a story.

[Anonymous No.23216802]

>>23216676
>overworked fag
make greentexts on your phone/ect when the ideas comes up, get yourself some fun on your off-time and in the weekend/spare time when you feel at best, punch that shit in.

[Anonymous No.23216821]

>>23216789
It's too scary and the odds are extremely low. I just want to write and enjoy myself, know what I mean?

[Anonymous No.23216831]

>>23216821
and this is how corporates wants you to think. be a good cattle and don't even bother looking up how to properly set your book up and make money on the side. you'll enjoy it later when you'll find out everything is ai online and you missed your chance

[Anonymous No.23216857]

>>23216831
I wouldn't know what to do

[Anonymous No.23216896]

>>23216794
NTA but I can't nap like that. If only. And there's no need to be so rude.
>>23216802
>>23216831
That goes for you too. Probably the samefag.

[Anonymous No.23217095]

What exactly is subtext and can someone give me an example?

[Anonymous No.23217100]

>>23216082

Congrats

>>23215330

I'm hoping this reads a little better from later in the same chapter.

[Anonymous No.23217118]

>>23217095
It is what is implied but not stated.
Let's say king faggot actually hates queen cunt, so when he says
>My, how wonderful to see you again.
He is actually saying
>I hoped to never see you again, you wretched sow.
But, he doesn't say the second thing because it would be a diplomatic failure between the two nations.
Now, if she replied
>I am always glad to be back in your city.
She could mean that she is actually glad, or she could be saying that she hates being here but is because of an obligation between nations.
If we know the character of the king, then we can tell what he meant, or in your narration you could just state that outright.
By that same process, you could either tell the reader that the queen feels the same way about the king that he does her, or you could leave it up to the reader to assume, and that can be set up for intrigue, as they may or may not know her intent.

[Anonymous No.23217177]

How would one describe a situation that is humorous in a somewhat depressing manner? For example, say a character witnesses another doing something that is at first glance bad, wrongheaded, or short-sighted, but the inherent sadness of the witnessing is offset by a recognition that the action is expected, given the actor's personality and past. Put more succinctly, the type of humor that arises from watching someone drop and shatter a plate, when you've seen them break many dishes in the past. It's annoying to lose a plate, but also, what were you expecting? It's so true to form for them.

Describing the event as "grimly" humorous seems an exaggeration, since the stakes need not be so heavy for this type of humor to occur. I don't think one can use "sardonic" or "wry" or something similar, since I believe such words are restricted to describing actions taken in a conscious manner. The use of "cynical" doesn't seem appropriate either. I feel like there is a particular word for this type of perspective, but I am coming up empty.

[Anonymous No.23217228]

>>23217177
tragicomic?

[Anonymous No.23217248]

>>23217177
Resigned comedy/humor? It's not a shock, it's just what you already expected to happen.

[Anonymous No.23217260]

>>23217228
That's certainly better than anything I've come up with. The tragi- prefix still feels sort of heavy to me by connotation, but much less so than "grim". Thank you.
>>23217248
This could work as well, depending on the situation, thank you. In my head I was thinking more of situations where it wasn't consciously expected, but your suggestion is very solid if the character is at least dimly suspecting the end result.

[Anonymous No.23217276]

>>23217177
it doesn't fit your example, but the phrase "gallows humor" might apply. think of the 1970s tv show "M.A.S.H."

[Anonymous No.23217284]

>>23217177
There's a kind of story people like to tell about their friends where you know what's going to happen up front, but it's how it happens and what happens afterwards that is funny and interesting. It's usually pretty dark, but that's where the humor comes from when you know someone like the person in question.

[Anonymous No.23217444]

>>23214832
It has definitely not been proofread enough since there's still words missing and your grammar is atrocious to the point of offending my eyeballs.
Learn how to use semicolons, colons, exclamation marks, em dashes and full stops.

[Anonymous No.23217481]

>>23217276
Yes, along with "black humor". I didn't list it because I felt it was similar to describing something as "grimly humorous". Thank you for the suggestion.

[Anonymous No.23217499]

I do not write.

[Anonymous No.23217506]

Can i talk to Travis?

[Anonymous No.23217574]

So, double-spaces after a period. Who does that? I was taught that was correct syntax but I notice that I usually (never?) see it.

[Anonymous No.23217612]

>>23216064
If you think a ball kick is bad wait until you see what happens with a liver shot

[Anonymous No.23217617]

>>23216012
Are you having a stroke

[Anonymous No.23217621]

This isn't any good but I'm gonna finish it and submit it anyway

[Anonymous No.23217673]

Also, is it possible for autistic (on the spectrum) people to write good fiction? My automatic assumption is "no" but it occurs to me that may be too much of a generalization…is it? Are there known autistic writers who’ve made good fiction?

[Anonymous No.23217717]

>>23217444
>there's still words missing
Unnecessary words are sacrificed to the gods of flow, my fren. I've proofread it over and over again. It's exactly how I intend it to be from first to last sentence.

[Anonymous No.23217770]

>>23213914
I kind of need an idea for a prologue

The goal of it is to set up the plotline. Basically a foreign beastman trader learns of an impending invasion of his neighbouring human country from refugees fleeing to a town he frequently trades at.

He comes trading salt pork and herbs to the fishing town, and normally he takes smoked fish back to his people, but in light of the refugees he takes some baubles, trinkets, and sea salt instead. He meets the leader of the refugees and hears his story to pass to his king because an alliance of all the nations may be needed.

The thing is it doesn't really seem very exciting for a prologue, so I want to sort of alter the basic premise to be a more exciting one.

Thoughts on a change to the premise?

[Anonymous No.23217778]

>>23217717
You're talking to a genrefag. He doesn't know anything about prose or flow, just elves and fight scenes.

[Anonymous No.23217782]

>>23217778
Oh. I thought they all left since now they've got /wbg/. Maybe I'll come back next year.

[Anonymous No.23217789]

>>23217770
Have the trader get attacked by human bandits who turn out to be desperate refugees. That way you can set up the plot line but have some action to hook the reader. Alternatively, have the refugees and the trader come under attack by assassins / spec ops of the invading power to silence word of the invasion getting out, maybe one of them carries an artifact that the trader has to keep safe in order to show the king as evidence and maybe the invaders will keep sending agents after the trader to retrieve it one way or another.

[Anonymous No.23217801]

>>23217782
Nope, they're here too. See:
>>23217789

These people don't discuss the art or technicalities or writing, they discuss their childish plots in bullet points. This is their conception of literature - they will almost certainly never write a novel as they don't actually like writing, they like daydreaming about elves.

[Anonymous No.23217825]

>>23214832
seeing it all as one gigantic block of text burned my eyes and I didn't want to read it

[Anonymous No.23217857]

>turned a 700-word scene into a 3,200-word chapter
Grooming weeds into blooms

[Anonymous No.23217902]

>>23217801
you sound only slightly less autistic than Neil Degrasse Tyson

[Anonymous No.23217970]

>>23217717
>to is an unnecessary word
Take a load of this guy!

[Anonymous No.23218013]

>>23215794
If the noun comes after the two adjectives then it should have no hyphen.

[Anonymous No.23218029]

>>23217970
Yeah, it can be, in my opinion. If you're not careful with your particles, your sentences can become choppy, monosyllabic, and ugly. English is a beautifully versatile language. A lot of conventional rules and bylines can be safely discarded in certain circumstances. I'm not aiming for mass appeal (or the seal of approval from career grammaticists), so if you don't like it... feel free to continue not liking it! However, within the broad scope of English-language literature, you're going to have a very difficult uphill climb if you want to try to claim that your preferred grammatical conventions are somehow objectively correct.

[Anonymous No.23218064]

>>23217778
Since you didn't bother reading what he wrote and keep yapping like a moody nigger why don't you explain to me what part of this excerpt is proper "prose" that "flows" well:
>Klaus stood above his desk, a man transfixed, a sentry to each second past with utter, abject clarity; and in his state, he could not find the most immediate remedy to his current problem: no, not Frau Edel! she might as do well what she likes (there is no point in trying turn the younger generations from their folly); the concern most salient to Herr Klaus Tordwankel was the dire state of his direct environ: the papers' polluting presence. Klaus reasoned: they could be simply thrown away; but if they were discarded, in so doing would he lose entirely their utility ... unless he had in perfect working memory a recall of their contents; but he did not, and could not hope by ring of 0815 to have committed them to memory; as such, necessity would dictate that one—or, perhaps, all three—must be saved for Klaus and for, perhaps, posterity.
>>23217801
And while you're at it I'll also let you know that even if I bothered to discuss art or the technicalities of writing, like I have done so before in this general, I wouldn't do so with a crab bucket faggot and would rather "go jerk off to elves so I can write properly".
>>23213939
1000-2000 words, you get to pick the prompt/challenge/whatever the fuck but I'll have to write in an elf and a fighting scene for shits and giggles; surely you can write better than a genreCHAD, right?
Of course, if you don't accept my duel challenge you are an eternally btfo honorless faggot and my cock is bigger than yours.

[Anonymous No.23218082]

>>23218064
Try to intuitively elide certain syllables. I've tried to set a rhythm from the very start, which then I started playing with as the piece went on. To my inner ear, the flow is very carefully dictated. There are maybe a few individual syllables out of place there, probably the most offensive being "remedy to," which breaks the rhythm in a pretty ugly way. Thanks for pointing that out, I'll fix it.

[Anonymous No.23218108]

>>23218064
What an unpleasant person! Anyway...

[Anonymous No.23218119]

Does anyone here write stories about whimsical little folk dealing with their big problems or is all fantasy just "saving the world from the demon lord" or "attending Hogwards in another world"?
Where are today's Hobbit or Borrowers?

[Anonymous No.23218129]

>>23218119
Fantasy kind of just sucks. I personally blame it on anime. It's entirely plausible that a pretty decently sized demographic has literally seen everything (they think is) worth seeing in anime and have turned to other media to get that shlock fix. If everything seems geared toward the heckin epic hero summoning his battle elves to defeat the Big Bad, it might be because this is most shonen anime in a nutshell. I think anime ruins everything, but there's probably a decent degree of garden variety poor taste and generally-low literacy at play as well.

[Anonymous No.23218153]

>I was hoping someone could give me some advise on this short story, I feel like it doesn't really flow well
I once knew a sniffler who managed to drive his stepsister’s boogie board all the way from Honduras to the Laika convention for space dogs in Missouri. There he met a Smurfette, and sniffling the sniffle of her sniffer, at once, he fell madly in love.
Some claim he sniffled too deep. Some say that he sniffled too aggressively. That when he was finally done sniffling, his sniffer had almost sniffled itself to smithereens. This is a statement only made by man-children, weaklings and cowards.
He brought a burlap sack filled with live-salmon to smash up car windows with in some effort to impress her. With a tiny mischievous grin, he tip-toed like a pretty little dandelion prince on his dilly dallying shoes across the parking lot, causing havoc. She was into it. He later drank a concoction of pure un-distilled psycho melon lemonade dipped in toe green ostrich fat laced with grade-A, black tar heroin and baby teeth. They shared the entire bottle as is tradition.
I mean, what did you expect from a sniffler of such caliber? When he is actually the real and undeniable him. Hide his hurting heart? Of course not. Everybody has a hungry heart, so why eat a bag of beans when you can simply sleep in a bean of bags at a motel 6 where midgets shoot up gasoline down an earth worm container of pork fat scratchings they stripped off of a 76 year old Ford Esquire Cadillac with their bare fingernails? The absolute cretins.
Madly in love, hoping to soon regurgitate that gorgeous gangrene incubus of a Smurf nick-named Dustee: ‘the paint huffer extraordinaire’ — he booked a room at the Mystery Motel, increasing his critical strike chance by 20%. A few cardiac arrests later he even managed to acquire a lakeside view. No one saw them for days. Supposedly they went as far as covering themselves in all kinds of promiscuous bodily fluids in order to preserve their innate ‘pavement flavour’.
Their poignant smell kept the bottom dwellers at a distance. Sniffing out a snatch like that from a mile away they’d inevitably call up their buddies, mister water-head and strawberry stable stank junior. But to no avail. A good sniffler is always prepared. If need arises he’d launch an expedition into no man’s land and recover from the archives three Brunelli bongs made with sulphuric acid and volcanic glass to rip a fat cloud the size of Texas, keeping the wolves at bay by pure force of intimidation. Any other human lung under normal atmospheric conditions would instantly collapses into itself. A true feet of sniffling superiority.
Fair to say, the couple had a great time. Later they married, and Papa smurf even showed up to the wedding. Obviously spaced-out of his mind. The ocean rose, thousands died, unloaded chunks fell from the sky, pubes gently blew in the wind as they boogie boarded over the per-rendered horizon, never to be seen again.

[Anonymous No.23218168]

>>23218153
It flows fine and you know it. You're just being a nigger.

[Anonymous No.23218181]

>>23218029
They're not my conventions, there's a very clear way in which grammar should be used and that is inherent to every single written language including English. In regards to punctuation there's even more overlap in the west regarding the rules that govern it. Arguing that there's no proper way of using a semicolon or a em dash is not the same thing as arguing as to the merits of using a quotation dash over marks which is mostly stylistic (but nonetheless has impacts on what you can and cannot do). I could understand if you were arguing for comma splices but you are not arguing from a position of knowledge but rather willful ignorance; instead of learning how each punctuation mark can be used through cursory searchers you're simply dismissing punctuation as a subjective happenstance. Even if you are not going for mass appeal you should at least be aware that your writing will look completely bonkers even in casual settings.
>>23218082
Your work has no flow issues.
Flow is only being brought up rhetorically. >>23218108 has no intention of putting his pussy where his mouth is but I'm sure that he'll continue to jerk himself off about how everyone else is just bad and he's the good, with the same dishonest gait of a bottom feeder who wants people to agree with his baseless elitism while sighing about how no other writers, as good as him (the good, mind you), want to sniff his farts. Absolutely pathetic.

[Anonymous No.23218200]

>>23218181
I use semicolons primarily to enclose nominally-independent subclauses in which there are commas, and sometimes just independent clauses. I use em dashes sometimes as a stronger (but not full) stop to carefully govern rhythm and flow. I don't really see the problem, personally. If that makes my writing look bonkers to normies, well... que sera, sera. I'm a pretty eccentric person and, at this point in my life, completely uninterested in tempering it for anything but my own subjective aesthetic.
>there's a very clear way in which grammar should be used and that is inherent to every single written language including English
There are periodic conventions institutionalized (often arbitrarily) and codified by people who have no greater right to the development of the English language than I do. If you go back even 150 years, you'll find conventions in grammar very different. I'm not mentioning that to champion returning to 19th century English. I'm mentioning that to drive home the point that these things are all transient — in another 150 years, the rules will very likely have changed again.

[Anonymous No.23218252]

>>23218013
That's not how compound adjectives work
If a plane has blue stripes on it, it's a blue-striped plane
If the plane is blue and has stripes on it, it's a blue striped plane

[Anonymous No.23218262]

Genrefriends gettin' reallllll uppity in this thread. If you put a tenth as much effort into your prose as you put into being insecure about it on the internet, you might actually write something decent. But I suppose it's easier to write pew pew laser elves, the beauty of sentences be damned.

[Anonymous No.23218270]

>>23218262
I'm personally pretty comfortable calling a cease-fire with the genrefags. This general is in a much better place than it was pre-/wbg/. It's entirely usable. No need to derail it anymore.

[Anonymous No.23218273]

Wonder if that anon asking for story ideas in an earlier thread got anything done with the one I gave him. It'd be interesting to see if his approach to the premise was anything like what I had in mind.

[Anonymous No.23218287]

Wrote a maximalist pastiche(with some poetry in there too) in /vg/ and want some serious criticism. If it looks like I gave up halfway through, well that's because I did due to sheer exhaustion, but the early parts are competent enough(by my newfag standards) that I want feedback.
https://rentry.org/utg-pastiche

[Anonymous No.23218290]

>>23218273
Ooh, I want one too. I'll make a short one. Gimme your genius, maestro. Please.

[Anonymous No.23218299]

>>23218200
>nominally-independent
That just means dependent. Semicolons are only meant to be used to join independent clauses. A good example would be the usage of "and" at the beginning of a clause which makes it dependent to what came before. You also chain semicolons, which you can do, but frankly they're being used more as replacements for full stops since a chain of thought that big just gets confusing from the standpoint that you're constantly adding information to it. Thing; contrast; contrast; conclusion. Moreover, you're not really adding new information despite the contrast since "they could be thrown away, but it would be useful to memorize them" just gets reiterated two more times.
The em dash is not meant to be a substitute for a full stop. While it is used for emphasis, it's somewhere between the comma and parenthesis. Some of your usage is more akin to parenthesis like:
>—into which he tapped by first creating in his mind an occult symbol where he stood, then by channeling some Vedic leylines of monadistic Reality onto th' illusion he'd projected via astral magick into being—
I wouldn't even say this is a good example of parenthesis but it is doing what a parenthesis could have done minus how the content is being separated as you would with a full stop (which brings us full circle back to the incorrect usage as full stop replacements).
Personally, my biggest issue is with you ignoring capitalization after exclamation points or ellipsis, and your liberal use of of colons that never end because of how you chain clauses together. The underlying theme with a lot of these is just the reluctance to use full stops.
>I'm a pretty eccentric person and, at this point in my life, completely uninterested in tempering it for anything but my own subjective aesthetic.
This is fair but there's so much room within punctuation that there's no need to go outside of conventions to use a non-standard style. The biggest thing is that however you are writing it should look congruent.
>in another 150 years, the rules will very likely have changed again.
Yes but when shifts are so pronounced as to completely upturn grammar or punctuation we usually refer to them a separate language. Moreover these shifts usually concern spelling; grammar itself has continuously evolved over the years, not devolved and then headed into a completely new direction.
But I think you get the point. I definitely think that it'll be a problem when you post your work anywhere and expect it to be read seriously since the more elemental stuff will be universally regarded as a mistake on your part, thus making people judge your work by its grammar instead of its contents.

[Anonymous No.23218308]

>>23218287
I don't get it. It seems like mostly gibberish, like you prioritized being zany over writing anything cohesive. To me, this kind of writing comes off as insecure, like you're too afraid to write sincerely.

[Anonymous No.23218334]

>>23218299
>The em dash is not meant to be a substitute for a full stop
I don't really use them as full stops. I'm using each grammatical symbol with purpose. I have autistically obsessed over governing the rhythm to be exactly how I want it. To me, punctuation is the way you govern flow. I categorically refuse to limit myself to a STOP-WAIT-GO paradigm of rhythm. If we boil (this subset of) punctuation down to its simplest elements, each symbol represents a graduated continuum of rhythmic pauses. This is, admittedly, now a mostly-unused facet thereof; we live in an age where the dynamics of writing have been mostly boiled down to stop (period), pause (comma), go (naught). I feel like we're coming at this discussion from entirely different angles. To you, each symbol serves a purpose under a broader set of grammatical rules and standards. To me, each symbol serves as a point upon a rhythmic continuum. Could I strip it down and just kind of let readers find the flow or not? Absolutely. Am I willing to do that? Absolutely not.
>parens vs. em dashes
I find parens aesthetically ugly. I prefer em dashes unless ugliness is an intentional choice (as I did when enumerating the contraptions near the midsection).

Isn't it sufficiently well-written to earn a little bit of the benefit of the doubt? Literature just seems such a boring exercise in rule adherence if experimentation is forbidden.

[Anonymous No.23218338]

>>23215794
The correct way is big-enough. My mistake.
>>23218252
I meant before and the second example that you give is just an incorrect usage where an hyphen should have been used. For it to mean what you wanted it to you would have to rephrase it.

[Anonymous No.23218355]

>>23218338
>The correct way is big-enough. My mistake.
Ah, no worries. That's what I thought it was and put down first. Thanks for the confirmation.

Yeah, the example isn't the best one. "striped plane" would have to be an existing term for that to work.

A better one would be orange scented candle vs orange-scented candle.
An orange scented candle is a scented candle that is orange (scented candle is the noun, orange is the adjective)
An orange-scented candle is a candle that has an orange scent (where orange-scented is the compound adjective and the noun is candle).

[Anonymous No.23218356]

>>23218299
>Yes but when shifts are so pronounced as to completely upturn grammar or punctuation
Do you stand by this or are you exaggerating? It doesn't seem at all to "completely upturn" grammar or punctuation to me. It seems different for sure, but I don't think its sins are such that anything is "completely upturned."

[Anonymous No.23218358]

>>23217574
You double space mono spaced fonts in order to break up rivers in the text block. It's an old convention from typewriters.

[Anonymous No.23218407]

>>23218308
My intention was to display the main character as scatter-brained and stupid, though I see that more reflected on the authot than the character. There is some truth to the zany part(Mettaton's world naturally has that reflection of himself) but if it got in the way of the story I'd like to know how to restrain it.

[Anonymous No.23218418]

>>23218334
It's a common misconception that punctuation is meant to dictate rhythm because of how we're taught to read out loud, which remind me that I was going to talk about that but completely forgot.
This is why "rule of flow" is not the correct way to always write something because punctuation itself is not meant to dictate how something ought to be vocalized. If you're using a full stop > semicolon > comma system you will invariably use punctuation in ways that it's not meant to be used. It's one of those things where there's some leeway but not so much that you ought to dictate reading enunciation with how you write.
As far as flow is concerned I wouldn't say punctuation is the main culprit. You could obviously abuse anything to the point, where, reading, comes, to; an; alt. But that's just another argument in favor of why you shouldn't use punctuation to dictate flow since there's plenty of other ways to achieve a winding down effect. Most of the time it comes down to word choice or sentence structure.
>Could I strip it down and just kind of let readers find the flow
You don't need to strip down anything, with minor fixes and some rewrites you could massively increase the readability.
>Isn't it sufficiently well-written to earn a little bit of the benefit of the doubt?
You're already asking people to read a paragraph with thousands of words. This is precisely why I'm saying that you're undermining your work with the punctuation. I really don't think that most people would bother to read it past a certain arbitrary point. I'm not denying that I didn't find any other problems that I thought that I should mention, but I also didn't feel like reading it to the end.
>>23218356
Granted that I'm implying that what you wrote is congruent. Exclamation marks and ellipsis end sentences but you ignore the capitalization when you use those despite something like quotation marks fixing the exclamation marks. This is why I said that it doesn't look like you proofread since something like this is super basic and most people would know about it.
And yes, plenty of people do not read stuff that wasn't proofread because it's one of those "you didn't do it so I have to do it for you?" moments and there's plenty of anons that are guilty of that from time to time.
>>23218355
It's still ambiguous, it would have to be "an orange, scented candle." The hyphen utilization for compound adjectives is only really about whether the noun is before the compound or if you're trying to use an adverb that ends in -ly which should never be made into a compound with an hyphen. Resolving ambiguity is outside the purview of the hyphen.

[Anonymous No.23218433]

>>23218418
>Exclamation marks and ellipsis end sentences
But O! my friend ... neither of these things absolutely end sentences in all cases.

[Anonymous No.23218446]

Wonder if you guys get any remarks on this short story I wrote. I'm not a native English speaker.

(1/2)
There is a little man in my house. Though I dare not speak of him to anyone. I suspect he’s chosen my residence for this very reason. Even if I’d manage to convince a single, undoubtedly naïve soul to be inquisitive — the illusive little bugger remains skittish as a mouse and virtually untraceable if sought after.

If I truly neglect to think of the fellow, as one should on account of remaining sane — he’ll suddenly appear out of nowhere, mocking my lisp, doing bad imitations, and laughing at my general shortcomings. He’ll copy my entire wardrobe, mannerisms, and speech in every detail. Then he’ll put on one of those awkward coworker hallway grins and stare at me intensely before scurrying off behind the fridge or some other den he’s made himself comfortable in at my expense.

Salting the wound — this little man, scampering through my walls, positioning himself to taunt me, using his serpent’s tongue to make vile and vindictive statements about my character — now often proclaims and repeats, ‘You’re a little man.’ And to ‘Shut up.’ He remains unwavering and relentless in this pursuit, often labouring well into the night, his words echoing in my sleep, denying me my last place of refuge in slumber, even defiling my dreams.

Thus this persistent little man remains firmly entrenched in my psyche, like some exhibitionist that wishes to remain unseen. The spectre of his mischief haunts me in perpetuity. I dread what forms of sabotage and mental subterfuge await me once I return home. Every day it’s something new. His commitment in dismantling me is unwavering. I often tremble in horror contemplating what inhumane and malicious plans of humiliation he is concocting in that walnut-sized little brain of his this time.

If the torment and anguish of this malcontent cretin become too unbearable, I often refrain from returning home all together. Upon which I roam taverns aimlessly with the rest of those wretched sops, whom I suspect involuntarily house similar little men.

[Anonymous No.23218449]

>>23218446

(2/2)
Do not think relaying your misgivings with them will garner you any sympathy, however. Oh, no. You’d be thoroughly misguided. Trust me, I’ve tried. One night, being quite inebriated and in a bit of a rebellious spirit, I embarked on lecturing my compatriots on the scruples I had with these little men and what steps should be taken to succour our peace once and for all. I became emboldened and defiant, brave even, and made grand energising speeches. What I was met with however was listlessness and derision. I couldn’t believe the blatant defeatism present. How complete these men had been broken. I became revolted, probably recognising some form of my own shortcomings in their indifference — my vicarious embarrassment quickly turned to an alcohol fuelled fury. This was not taken in kind. I was met with all sorts of accusations regarding my sanity and told to ‘Shut up’.

Even now, I realised, they serve their little men. Such is their denial, these pour sops, out of sheer complacency. A truth they can’t bear, unwilling ears turned to threats, such a shame, a brother they ousted, who vouched for them in vane. Handcuffed and routed, the little man jeering, they rejoice in their sin, I was brought to sleep off my drunkenness a night in the bin.

You might, however, be surprised to hear the relief I felt. Finally, I’d receive a short respite. A night alone. No little men in sight. Now, imagine my dismay when, after only two short hours, this little man, this cockroach, this nothing to be stepped over — apathetically scurried its way into my cell to taunt once more. The laughing. That vile, vindictive laughing. As if all the little men throughout the city were joining in encore. I was utterly dejected, joining the ranks of men whom I scolded but moments earlier, and finally admitted in all earnest that nothing but unremitted derision should be my portion. Fair to say, I never brought up the subject of little men in taverns again.

[Anonymous No.23218455]

>>23218418
EoS describes hyphenation as the halfway point of the formation of a compound word due to common usage. At least in common use, it does have other purposes. Most often to avoid the New Yorker hyphen because "reëxamine" is equally awful as the alternatives.

[Anonymous No.23218478]

>>23218290
Define "short". And what's your preferred genre/theme?

[Anonymous No.23218479]

>>23218418
Maybe (well, definitely) I'm just being obstinate. I hate rules. I am fiercely independent and it feels like bowing to convention is a defeat. I'm not going to be able to see it any other way. I haven't said it outright, but it's not intended to be easy (as you probably gathered from the enormous-block-of-text approach). This is for effect, but maybe it's just too difficult to read on a mechanical level... and overall, I guess that is valuable information I'll have to take under consideration. In the spirit of good faith, I don't know if I'm going to end up significantly changing it. I've found this valuable though, so thank you for taking the time to engage with me.

[Anonymous No.23218483]

>>23218479
>I hate rules. I am fiercely independent and it feels like bowing to convention is a defeat.
>I'm so up my own ass that I don't notice what works in books, if I read critically at all, because then I might learn something from someone else
Don't be that guy, there are enough of those guys. They play guitar and think that their learning disabilities and personality disorders make them special when it all it makes them is special ed.

[Anonymous No.23218487]

>>23218119
Children are no longer a demographic that consumes books (this includes adults reading them stories at bedtime). The kind of fantasy you are describing is children's literature (which is what the first 3 HP books, The Hobbit, the works of Dianne Wynne Forgetherlastname, etc. fall under). Some of my fondest memories are perusing the children's section of my local library when I was a lad and picking out interesting books--A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Bartimeus Trilogy, the Edge Chronicles--but I don't think there's much of a market for this anymore. Video games and youtube and tiktok have simply become too entertaining and most children can no longer sit still long enough for anything else (and the parents are just the same).

[Anonymous No.23218493]

>>23218478
>I meant I'll write something short, like two pages, a short story
>Whatever you like. I like writing weird stuff, like dreams, or world's where things are slightly/subtly different, or strange stuff no one acknowledges, and very strict social situations, politeness, etc.

[Anonymous No.23218503]

>>23218433
Great Scott! ... he's right.
>>23218455
There's the common usage argument, but I don't think it supersedes the rules about hyphens.
"The candle was orange-scented" would be incorrect even if "orange-scented" things would be a common usage where you would think you would use an hyphen.
>"reëxamine"
Ich sprechen kein Deutch.
>>23218483
I had a similar issue with my prose where I'd use semicolons incorrectly and didn't like using quotation marks so I had to work out the styling to make it coherent instead of a mess of me writing however I wanted just to dictate the reader's cadence.
It's completely fixable, you just have to take the time to establish a proper style.

[Anonymous No.23218516]

>>23218483
I'm not allowed to hate rules and discover things on my own?

[Anonymous No.23218518]

>>23218516
No, it's against the rules.

[Anonymous No.23218527]

>>23218487
It's very unfortunate. I recently wrote a short story in the style of an older children's book, but I think the audience, if it gets one at all, will be adults who want to read something simple rather than something to be read to children.

[Anonymous No.23218536]

>>23218493
Sorry, I've got nothing for you. Short stories are my weak point. If an idea isn't worth taking a long time to develop, then it doesn't interest me.

[Anonymous No.23218543]

>>23218518
That—; that's ... quite—wow!—unfortunate ... seeing ... seeing as—how unbearably uncouth!—; I hate niggers.

[Anonymous No.23218560]

>>23216082
Don't upload the draft online. I can edit it for you so you can actually publish

[Anonymous No.23218561]

>>23218516
Going against the grain for the sake of art and exploration? On /lit/? How dare you, Mister.

[Anonymous No.23218565]

>>23218536
I only write shorts, personal pref I guess. You could've said whatever, though. Was just for fun. So serious...

[Anonymous No.23218578]

>>23218565
Some people still have principles. If anyone honestly asks me anything, even if it's only an anonymous retard, then I won't bullshit you.

[Anonymous No.23218610]

>>23218449
Based and Gnomepilled.

[Anonymous No.23218621]

>>23218262
Strongest literary faction fan:
>tries to convey a point about the beauty of other people's sentences by conjuring all his experience as an alleged lit fic writer, ultimately settling on saying that, get this, they are damned
>«You're not writing a book, you're writing a failed screenplay.»
>offers no constructive advice, never elaborates upon anything that he says while moaning about the lack of technical discussion going on in the thread despite never participating in any of it
Weakest genreCHAD:
>verbally ground-pounds faggots for being tautologically evil, challenges them to a writing duel on their terms while undertaking a handicap and insults their penis size
>«would rather "go jerk off to elves so I can write properly"»; and will actually do it
>makes several paragraph long posts offering advice and critics with the intent of being helpful, spits in the face of individuals with smaller penises who have nothing to say and can't even >(You) him back while talking shit behind his back
Yah, I'm thinking pew pew lazers and elven pussy enjoyer genreCHADS won this one. Let me know if you actually intend on contributing anything of worth to this thread or if you'll finally accept my chivalric challenge to settle once and for all whether you're babbling out of your rectum. Alternatively I'll also accept settling this via hatefucking your (boi)pussy (if you pass and have bangs), we can meet halfway and I'll pay for the hotel stay as long as you wear elf ears.

[Anonymous No.23218642]

>>23218527
It's not an easy market to crack your way into. In studying it, it's also hard as shit to write. I don't know the current trends, but there is an adult audience and it would probably be easier to write for them in a certain way than it would be to write a children's book. YA is a slightly different story, tween tastes are very different.

[Anonymous No.23218709]

>>23217801
>Will never write a novel
Wait but it's the lit authors who never finish anything. You're getting your stereotypes mixed up. Say what you want about genre chads, we finish books, post them, and get an audience. That's because writing about elves is fun

[Anonymous No.23218792]

How do you know when a story is "ready" to be written? I've had some false starts and don't know how to get it to feel fully formed on a subconscious level. How do you get it ready?

[Anonymous No.23218818]

>>23218621
Sorry I don't read the posts of "people" who avatarfag as anime girls.

[Anonymous No.23218834]

>>23218818
That's because you don't read at all

[Anonymous No.23219197]

>>23218834
Oh yeah well I bet you can’t even read because you’re an illiterate ghetto nigger.

[Anonymous No.23219256]

Hello, I need help writing my way out of a plot point I want to advance.

>Background
My story revolves around two characters, who are the leaders of what originally seemed like a ragtag group of ruffians and misfits that has turned into the main opposition force of the "Empire", which is the foreign power which controls the City in which the story takes place. (We'll call them "the Group", for now).

Character X's POV is set in the far north of the country, being lured by the enemy after an ominous message turns up, threatening his secret lover whose existence only he had knowledge of. He gets involved with the "Faction", a crew of pirates and smugglers that have caused havoc against the Empire since the invasion.

Meanwhile, Y is X's second-in-command and is now left of overseeing the Group's operation in the City until X returns and he gets embroiled in numerous conspiracies, navigating the underworld and the aristocracy of the City as he tries to set up the stage for when the insurrection is set to begin.

I'm numerous chapters into the story and Y is heading for his second mission; having heard reports of a terrible beast having escaped from an Empire terranium, he heads out into the sewers with three companions of his, hoping to slay it and present themselves as heroes, getting rid of the beast which has killed dozens in two weeks.

However, unbeknownst to both the Empire and the Group, the tales of the beast's terror have been manufactured by the Pirates, whose reach and influence is underestimated by both parties. I'm writing the chapter where Y ventures into the sewers in search of the beast, but I want to write it as a catalyst for the beginning of the end of Act 1.

cont

[Anonymous No.23219268]

Here's a "short" story I wrote for a sci-fi/fantasy magazine contest. 6,800 words. Too long to stick in a pastebin with awful formatting, so forgive a pdf. Thoughts appreciated.

https://litter.catbox.moe/jmrbqx.pdf

[Anonymous No.23219304]

>>23219256
I'm planning for Y and his group to discover a severely injured and maimed man (whose state they think was caused by the beast, while in reality he was a plant of the Pirates, to keep the sewers locked and only for their own uses). In order to discover more about the nature of the attacks, Y decides that they should take him to a doctor, a task eagerly accepted by one of Y's companions, Z, an arrogant and overly zealous youth. While Y stays behind in the sewers to guard the dying man in-case the beast returns until Z returns with the doctor, Z returns with empty hands and claiming he was attacked by a guard of the Empire, breaking a no-transgression pact they had established years ago.

In reality, on his way back from the doctor, Z kills/injures one of their own and blames it on the Empire, hoping to force Y's hand into taking action against their enemies, who had adopted a cautious stance as advised by X. This event causses a stirrup amongst the Group, and laying the ground for the story to advance in the City so when X eventually returns, it's in a state of turmoil, providing me with the foundations of an Act 2 and 3.

Damn, I'm bambling again.

[Anonymous No.23219315]

>>23218818
>>23219197
What an unpleasant person. Anyway...

[Anonymous No.23219352]

Haven't written a book since 2020. Had an idea for a modern day 'american psycho' called 'the main character' about a zillennial hustler yuppie retard who idealizes american psycho in spirit because he wants to be successful more than anything else in his miserable twitter-orientated life. So basically Logan/Jake Paul but a book.

[Anonymous No.23219426]

>>23219304
This just seems needlessly convoluted and it has several plot holes because you're trying to force that development.
>they go into the sewers
>they see two lookouts talking to each other
>the two men spot the group and run of in separate directions
>the group splits up because Z is a faggot so Y has the other guy go after him
>Y loses his guy because he wasted too much time trying to decide on whether to chase him or not
>Z catches the lookout but they stumble into an imperial guard patrol
>the lookout tries to make a run for it but the imperial guards subdue him
>Z starts seething over muh empire or whatever and impulsively kills one of the guards
>lookout runs away in the confusion
>party member arrives and Z says some bullshit about them attacking him
>in a panic party member tries to help him but Z stabs him from behind with one of the guard's weapons as soon as he's done killing his foe
>runs away and tells Y about it who later looks at the scene and starts seething about the empire
Z's crime has a witness so there's potential for further drama and impulsive killings to cover his shit up later down the line while Y still gets tricked into seething about the empire.

[Anonymous No.23219473]

>>23213914
The best and worst part of a short story competition in a lrg university is tat, alongwith with international writers, literally every person you knw from workshops and classes has applied. And I've just brn tipped off in secret by my english professor (who is administrating not judging the contest) that my stry has already ben adjudged the winner of my category and will compete now for the final top prize. The announcement will beon thursday apparently.

Cannot wait to rub my achievement in thw faces of all thpse feminist cunts and male-feminist bitches and Pakistani jews in my workshops who hated on my work for reasons that were clearly beyond what wss on thr page

>inb4 some gay fuck tries to be big brain and say that I won because they knew who i was
it was anonymous, you dumb motherfucker. plus the panel was all international writers

>inb4 some pedantic cuck says that well you must be retarded if you don't think judges can tell the ethnicity and gender and politics of the writer
first finish jacking off to your 4k furry tranny porn abd then reply to me

>inb4 some bitch say those whores in my workshop were right and mt work actually isn't good
fuck off nigger, i won

>inb4 some fat schizo sanctimonious bastard says that im never gonna make it because i wrote to prove people wrong
wrong bitch. I only write to please myself and improve my skills and do write by my characters and story. nothing else, including you, matters. proving haters wrong is merely a teaspoon of sugar stop the birthday cake that writing a story that achieves that ambitions you set out for it which is exactly what I strive dkr

>inb4 some faggot comes and says I'm wasting time witg short story contests
sure nigger, tell that to the agents waiting in my inbox

damn feels so fucking good bros

[Anonymous No.23219485]

What's your preferred length of a chapter when you're reading? I've written 5 chapters so far but each chapter is 5k-6k words whereas most novels I read have chapters that are half or a third of that. I'm thinking of either heavily trimming up the content of each chapter or just splitting each chapter (which covers the POV of one character) into 2-3 separate ones.

[Anonymous No.23219489]

>>23219485
I don't like when I notice that they start running over 7 pages. They can go over that, but it becomes noticeable.

[Anonymous No.23219494]

>>23219485
I think it depends on the goals you set for yourself for this project. The 5k mark is a great place to start from. Now perhaps figure out what you want to achieve from the chapter structure and lengths because those certain have a non-zero impact on both the story you're telling and the overall reading experience

[Anonymous No.23219500]

>>23219268
Do you know where I can look up writing contests, specifically sci-fi/fantasy as you've mentioned? I'm thinking that having a goal of only writing 5-10k words will be easier at the start than targeting the 100k-200k of a full scale novel

[Anonymous No.23219530]

>>23219473
And so in your victory you decided to get drunk before posting?

[Anonymous No.23219535]

>>23219485
Around 3k is what I tend to write, but I've gone as low as 1.5k and as high as 5k.

[Anonymous No.23219606]

>>23219315
Your unpleasant.

[Anonymous No.23219626]

>>23218418
In some cases it could be ambiguous.
Not in the orange scented candle one, though.
A "scented candle" is a functionally a noun unto itself.
there are candles, then there are scented candles. Scented candles are a category and "scented candles" is an accepted, and used term. This goes beyond using "scented" as an adjective to describe candles.
You wouldn't say "blue candles" because blue candles aren't a prominent enough category of candles.
Tapered candles, dinner candles, wickless candles, etc, are all functionally noun phrases.
Old candles, lost candles, expensive candles, are not the same construction. The adjective describes the noun, but is not defining enough of the noun's characterstics that it elevates it into a noun phrase.

As such, an "orange candle" describes a candle that is orange.
A "scented candle" is a candle that is scented, and this is a commonly used, accepted terminology. The word "scented' does describe the candle, but this particular phrase is in use as its own, distinguished term. "scented candle" thus functions more as a noun phrase than an ajdective describing a noun.
An "orange scented candle" describes a scented candle that is orange, and "scented candle" is functionally a noun here, being described by "orange."
An "orange-scented candle" describes a candle (not a scented candle) that is scented orange. While, yes, this is indeed a scented candle, but "scented candle" is not functioning as the noun here, just "candle" is the noun, the adjective is the compound adjective "orange-scented."

[Anonymous No.23219632]

>>23218308
Would you say that this passage is one of the strongest, weakest, or neither? I see what you mean after re-reading the passage right before
>Nevertheless, he has no better option.
The whole passage leading up to that is just off even by maximalist standards, and I could probably re-write it.
As for the poetry read by "Gem Yellow"(if you know the game the actual character is obvious), do you think it was appropriate or better left as part of a separate piece altogether? Perhaps a Francis pastiche would be best left for Gerson himself as his life philosophy best resembles the kind of passive observation Francis would write about.

[Anonymous No.23219640]

>>23219473
>didn't win yet
>already celebrating
uh oh...

[Anonymous No.23219641]

>>23219626
>The adjective describes the noun, but is not defining enough of the noun's characterstics that it elevates it into a noun phrase.
To reword this a bit, it's more that people don't use those constructions as noun phrases.
If there was a category of candles that become somewhat used and accepted and the best way to describe them was "old candles" due to the way they're made or how they're used or whatever, then, by merit of "old candles" being a culturally/socially relevant term that people use to distinguish a specific type of candle from another type, then it gets elevated to being more of a noun phrase than just an adjective+noun.

[Anonymous No.23219647]

>>23219640
anon no... please...

[Anonymous No.23219759]

>>23219606
You're*

[Anonymous No.23219798]

>>23214479
Get Atticus. It's worth the cost, you get it forever (rather than subscription based), it's easy to use, and gives a nice finished product.

[Anonymous No.23219839]

>>23219426
I like the addition of the two lookouts/imperial guardsmen, adds a layer of tension and ups the stakes as it's no longer them vs an invisible enemy

I'm doing this from Y's perspective so I'm thinking of just cutting to where Y finds out the two imperial guardsmen and the other party member lying dead, with Z telling his story. That's where the chapter will end

[Anonymous No.23219863]

>>23219500
>Do you know where I can look up writing contests
Depends where you live. You should google local contests by clubs and communities, since they typically have fewer participants and better chances to get something out of it. The big ones are just a scam and you might as well stick your work straight in the trash bin.

[Anonymous No.23219962]

>>23219863
>The big ones are just a scam and you might as well stick your work straight in the trash bin.
Well it worked out for our drunk guy >>23219473 so you never know y'know

[Anonymous No.23220049]

>>23219641
>>23219626
As far as I can tell "scented candle", in this sentence, cannot be a noun phrase without the noun phrase being "(the) orange scented candle". A noun phrase must be replaceable with a pronoun:
>The orange scented candle burned beautifully
>It burned beautifully
And not:
>The orange it burned beautifully
Regardless, the noun phrase has no effect on ambiguity since "(the) orange scented candle" still fails to clarify whether the candle is orange and scented or scented like the fruit. The fact that "orange-scented candle" clarifies the ambiguity does not retroactively clarify "orange scented candle".
Noun phrases also don't have anything to do with Plato's Theory of Forms. What you're describing seems to be closer to a collocation but those are merely words that are common together and have no effect on the underlying parts of speech.

[Anonymous No.23220058]

What's a good way for a deity to demonstrate humility?

I wanted a story somewhat similar to this but with the act being shorter (i.e. not labouring for hours upon hours): https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:The_Pilgrim%27s_Path

>Here Lord Vivec met a poor farmer whose guar had died. The farmer could not harvest his muck without his guar, and he could not provide for his family or his village. So the Lord Vivec removed his fine clothes and toiled in the fields like a beast of burden until the crop was harvested. It is at the Fields of Kummu we go to pray for the same humility Lord Vivec showed on that day.

I was thinking instead the deity sees a man with his cart stuck in the mud of a river, his horses cannot pull it out. The deity walks into the mud himself, knee deep, and pushes the cart out.

[Anonymous No.23220072]

>>23220049
Or a common noun that's a noun phrase, but I think that's too in the weeds and not relevant to the sentence at hand because of the order in which orange is in the sentence.

[Anonymous No.23220101]

>>23220058
Maybe the man and the diety both walk into the mud and push the cart out together

[Anonymous No.23220128]

>>23220058
I think that it's a good story, and you could also add a rich man who refuses to help because he believes himself too above the common man, and wouldn't want to debase himself.

[Anonymous No.23220141]

>>23220058
>Saint Martin of Tours
>One day as he was approaching the gates of the city of Amiens, he met a scantily clad beggar. He impulsively cut his military cloak in half to share with the man. That night, Martin dreamed of Jesus wearing the half of the cloak he had given away. He heard Jesus say to some of the angels, "Martin, who is still but a catechumen, clothed me with this robe."
>In another version, when Martin woke, he found his cloak restored to wholeness. The dream confirmed Martin in his piety, and he was baptised at the age of 18.

[Anonymous No.23220210]

I don't want to write stories that only I would see. What I want to do is write stories for someone else. Writing something valuable to someone else would make me happy.
Think of session musicians, they get hired by composers to play their music, without really creating music themselves.
That's what I want to do, I want to get told to write something to make somebody's vision come true.
Is this approach any good?

[Anonymous No.23220215]

>>23220049
Maybe noun phrase isn't the correct term to use.
A different example might illustrate what I'm trying to get at better.

>a heavy metal detector
a metal detector that is heavy
"metal detector" is the noun, "heavy" is the adjective
>a heavy-metal detector
"heavy-metal" is the compound adjective, and "detector" is the noun
Both metal detectors and detectors are their own things, and function as nouns in these examples. One is a single word, the other is two words, with "metal" describing what kind of detector the other one is.

I see this as being the same kind of construction as orange-scented candle vs. orange scented candle.

To me, I don't see any ambiguity in "orange scented candle" just as I don't se any ambiguity in "heavy metal detector."

[Anonymous No.23220235]

>>23220210
Advertise your services as a ghostwriter. You'll probably only get offers to write bad slop though.

[Anonymous No.23220248]

>>23220235
what's a good place to start?

[Anonymous No.23220378]

Rate the following passage I wrote when I was 15. I'm thinking of taking it and building something out of it, though it's not much.

The tall, brick building of the Priory at the other side of the port blocked the moonlight and cast a big shadow upon Devon, who had been waiting for half an hour at the docks. The only sounds he’d been hearing by then were the distant squeaks of rats and the night waves sieging the hulls of the anchored ships.

He almost fell on a snooze before he saw an emerging silhouette crawling towards him from the other side of the street. Short man, shoulder length hair, shaved, curious and cautious. That was the description he was given. As the figure got closer, Devon remained still as a statue, his arms crossed at his torso.

When the man got close enough, he removed his hood. He was as though Theo had described him, although his head was shaved and his uncouth beard and black circles around his eyes made him older than he actually was.

“I’m looking for passage to Sentinel. My wife is sick, and I’m in dire need of medicine,” said the man, as if he was trying to recite a poorly-remembered poem. A sensation of relief took over Devon. Good. At least he knows the words.

“You were late,” was the only thing Devon said as he turned his back and headed towards the ship. “I was not,” the man responded. “You picked a bad time for the meeting. I spotted at least ten sailors and merchants working on the decks of the nearby vessels. Gossip flies fast in this city. I only made my move when no prying eyes were awake.”

Cautious indeed. Devon stopped when he reached the side of the Black Moth and gave the man an unflinching stare. “I admire your caution. But your delay put us thirty minutes behind schedule. The men that you spotted were our fleas, like everyone else at this port tonight,” he said as he reached for his pockets and grabbed a coin made out of ivory.

cont

[Anonymous No.23220382]

>>23220378

Devon walked up to the vessel and gave a loud whistle. Quickly, crewmembers stormed out as if wasps from a hive and greeted them with as little enthusiasm as they could muster. None of them have closed an eye yet, Devon noted. The captain was the last man to welcome them. Standing at almost 2 meters tall, his once glorious hair had been shaved off and his beard was now bushy and greying. Captain Wormack had been a friend of the Order for almost twenty years at this point, every year approaching the grave faster than the one before it.

Once the captain showed them to their cabins and their belongings, they were left alone. “You must be Devon,” said the man who was had now gotten rid of the rags he was wearing, putting on a frock coat and wooly gloves to protect his fingers from the damp and cold. Devon’s lean face drew upwards into a bland smile. “That is the name I go by most of the time, yes.” He reached towards a bottle of white wine that was left on his silken mattress. A 591 Vintage. Last year’s bottled piss would have been better, he thought.

“Our common acquaintance didn’t think it would be wise to tell me your name, however,” Devon said to the man, who stretched out his hand in a friendly gesture.
“Call me Santo.”

“Well, Santo,” Devon said and returned the gesture, “Did Grandmaster Harkon brief you on how we’ll manage to haul out an elephant’s weight worth in gold out of the fucking Cianfanelli Bank with being seen?”

[Anonymous No.23220530]

>>23220210
Most people don't know what they want until they have it, and then they want more of it. Why would you dance to someone else's tune when you could write what you yourself have made others desire? If you were a good author who wrote valuable stories, that should be all that is necessary to satisfy you.

[Anonymous No.23220574]

Why is the standard for word count in fantasy so fucking high? Is it solely Martin's fault, or are there others to blame?

[Anonymous No.23220679]

>>23220574
I don't think page counts got out of control and broke 500 before early 80s, but essentially, it became a commodity like the airport thriller and is probably the earliest form of binge consumption of media. People want long series of fat books because they're meant for an especially empty kind of consumption, given that they're all the exact fucking same, because that's what the people buying them demand.

The demographic putting the most money into it has shit taste, news at 11. I'd also argue that the chonk mass market paperback format represents something due to the form, but that's more nebulous.

[Anonymous No.23220711]

>>23220215
This new example doesn't change anything in so far as my response goes. There's still ambiguity and this becomes apparent once you reorder the words:
>heavy-metal detector
>the detector was heavy metal
This can only mean that it's both heavy and made out of metal given that it's an adjective.
>heavy metal detector
>the metal detector was heavy
Or
>the detector for heavy metal
A detector for heavy metal. In this case it would make more sense for it to detect heavy metals but the ambiguity is still generally applicable if you go back to the candle example.
>the candle was orange scented
>the scented candle was orange
Whereas orange-scented can only be an adjective since it's only correct to use an hyphen between two adjectives before a noun, hence there's no ambiguity as to what it could mean.

[Anonymous No.23220737]

>>23220711
Idk wtf you two are arguing about but why not just use other sentences to make it clear what exactly is being described. You're telling a story, it's not like you're using these words in a vacuum.
>A candle that is scented like orange
Say something like
>The room was infused with the delicate citrus notes of an orange scented candle.
For the opposite
>Scented candle that's colored orange
>He lit an orange scented candle, as vibrant as the setting sun.

[Anonymous No.23220740]

>>23219473
Congrats.

[Anonymous No.23220749]

>>23220737
This is a grammar discussion.
A lot of the work I do is in transcribing audio, so I can't rewrite something to remove ambiguities, I can only put down exactly what was said.

[Anonymous No.23220830]

>>23220378
When I read the last paragraphs of this post I felt a deep sense of deja vu and it turns out that you did indeed post this before in December 2023 but passed it off as something you wrote when you were 17.
I'm not going to rate it but I'm fairly curious as to what you're planning on doing with that given that it's been on your mind for almost 5 months.

[Anonymous No.23220859]

>>23220210
Not bad in theory but besides what >>23220530 said, the key of any author is getting readers to connect with feelings and emotions of things they didn't necessarily experience themselves
So why not start with things that you enjoy and the emotions they elicit and transform it in a way that similar people like you can find enjoyment in?
Or at least, that's been my mentality trying to write a SoL

[Anonymous No.23220983]

>>23220235
uh...no one is hiring ghost writers for slop. u serious? most ghost writers are for biographies or other "professional" type works
how come so many 4channers act like authorities in subjects they're clueless about

[Anonymous No.23221021]

What's the difference between a good character and a great character?

[Anonymous No.23221034]

I needed these audiobooks for inspiration
It's over
I'm finished as a writer
Done
Fin.
https://mega.nz/folder/utchyAAK#GTVl1fINpekEch95xj8Fmg

[Anonymous No.23221036]

>>23221021
a good character is good and a great character is great. hope this helps

[Anonymous No.23221047]

>want to write stories
>never read any books to learn proper formatting
>can never work up the motivation to write
>all the ideas in my head are getting overwritten by new ideas in a vicious cycle of cannibalism

Yep, this is my life.

[Anonymous No.23221056]

>>23221047
Wow it sounds like you're just a person with thoughts in their head and not a writer at all! Glad you're in my thread!

[Anonymous No.23221059]

>>23221056
Glad to be here, thanks for having me.

[Anonymous No.23221305]

>>23219268
No comments?

[Anonymous No.23221362]

>>23221047
Now that you mentioned it, what is the correct format for modern genre fiction anyway?

Back when I was a kid, it was kinda like this:
“Dialogue,” dialogue tag.
Narration. Action. Action. Action. Narration. Action. Action.
“Dialogue,” dialogue tag.
“Dialogue,” dialogue tag.
“Dialogue.”
“Dialogue.”
“Dialogue.” Action tag.
Narration. Action. Action. Action. Narration.

But nowadays, I’m seeing a lot of this:
Narration. Narration. Narration. Narration. Narration. Narration. Action.
“Dialogue,” dialogue tag.
“Dialogue.”
Narration. Narration. Narration. Narration. Narration. Narration. Narration. Narration. Narration. Narration. Narration. Action. Inner monologue. Narration. Narration.

[Anonymous No.23221364]

>>23221362
>the correct format
nigga are you for real?

[Anonymous No.23221446]

>>23221364
Why not have a standardized way of approaching your typical genre slop? As an anon in this thread so eloquently put it: “Genre fiction isn’t literature. You’re not writing a book, you’re writing a failed screenplay.”
Since it’s a screenplay, then it needs a clear formatting guide that’s easy to understand and follow, especially for beginners and ESL like myself.
Instead of your typical advice of “Write anything you want! Then edit it down to follow these dozens of arbitrary rules spread across several books, style guides, and random YouTube videos, um-kay?”
It’d be much easier to have something like this:
###
Location/time.
Character A and Character B were at a certain place, doing something.
“Dialogue,” Character A said. (action tag is optional.)
“Dialogue,” Character B said. (action tag is optional.)
“Dialogue.” (dialogue tag or action tag is optional.)
“Dialogue.”
“Dialogue.”
. . .
They ended their discussion and moved on to the next topic, action, or location.
###
So an absolute pleb can look at the example above and apply their ideas to it.
On a sunny afternoon, Jack and Jill climbed up the hill. They were searching for a secluded spot to fuck. Jack was trailing behind with sweat pouring down his face.
“Are we there yet?” Jack said. “My legs are killing me!”
“Act like a man and stop whining. We’re almost there,” Jill said.
“You said that a mile ago!”
“Well, we’re a mile closer at least.” Jill chuckled.
They walked for another twenty minutes until they arrived at a cliff overlooking the town.
“This is your special place?” Jack frowned. His slant eyes scanned the patchy grass littered with beer bottles and cigarette butts.

[Anonymous No.23221452]

>>23221362
These are both fine depending on how it's written.

[Anonymous No.23221478]

>>23221446
It's not a fucking screenplay because some anonymous retard says so. All books share the same basic formatting principles. But what you're talking about has nothing to do with formatting and is purely a matter of style and personal preference.

[Anonymous No.23221619]

>>23218287
I don't know what you're basing this on but in terms of maximalism you seem to have only emulated it at a superficial level, with your long running sentences and exposition, without any of the creative excess that go along with this style of writing. With your focus on imitation you have not actually conferred any deeper meaning to the text so while it does look maximalist you're not grasping at what maximalism is. Capturing the world in its entirety, manifold to weave through blatant excess your thoughts, meaning, critiques whilst exerting as much creative domain over the text as one cans by using techniques, using genres, using subjects and using tangents. A tree has many roots and branches but they all return to a singular trunk, the message.
As far as the writing went some parts are pretty enjoyable, others make you lose track of what was even being said, but for the most part it achieves the effect. On the other hand many of the long running passages could have just been individual sentences separated by full stops so you're not quite there as far as long running text is concerned.
Overall, your focus was on emulating the source material and the style of maximalism but in doing so you lost track of both what maximalism is and the craft of the text.

[Anonymous No.23221632]

>>23221446
It's not set in stone, but already exists. Let's call it "effective" style, even though it's more like serviceable style. It's the mean of what works and is pretty much exactly that. You start to notice it after a while and it becomes draining. It's the hamburger essay writing of fiction.

Ironically enough, genres have their own unique conventions, read a few Ambrose Bierce stories and you'll see the structure of the entire horror genre in miniscule.

[Anonymous No.23221636]

>>23220983
>because it's a biography and """""professional"""""
>that means it isn't slop!
Have fun writing slop for some moronic white collar worker with a shit idea or the next uongo butumbu civil rights icon biography you dumb faggot.

[Anonymous No.23221642]

>>23221446

[Anonymous No.23221961]

one of the pseuds mustve had their submission rejected again :/ its the only explanation for the uptick in annoying posts

[Anonymous No.23222278]

There's pig beastkin in my fantasy smut that can orgasm from 30 to 90 minutes

What would be a good human reaction during a handjob that ends in a 30 minute session of nonstop jizzing? I wrote it as they really enjoy sexual stimulus during the entire orgasm or it gets ruined and they become extremely enraged

[Anonymous No.23222290]

>>23222278
Kill yourself

[Anonymous No.23222302]

>>23222290
....screamed the stableboy

[Anonymous No.23222360]

Now google has implemented AI writing, what happens to this craft?

[Anonymous No.23222399]

>>23222278
>30 minute session of nonstop jizzing
orgasm and ejaculation are two separate if related phenomena. the pleasure and feeling of wellness from the orgasm can last 30 minutes but the ejaculation may be done after 30 seconds
circumcision is designed to destroy the duration/magnitude of good feelings from an orgasm while maintaining the ability to ejaculate, but for your pig beastkin I recommend castration.

[Anonymous No.23222424]

>>23222399
In my setting the ejaculation is 30 minutes too

Also circumcision is not a thing and considered a barbaric and disgusting practice that is outlawed

[Anonymous No.23222430]

Any idea how to beat writers block/autism? I have ideas, multiple ideas that I've fleshed out in my mind and how the story will go etc. but literally can't write 500 words without thinking
>This could easily be 2000 words if I tried harder
>It's too short
>It's going nowhere
>This is cringe
>This is too on the nose
etc. etc. It's really fucking annoying. It's like if I don't reach perfection in the first attempt, I just scrap everything.

[Anonymous No.23222681]

>>23222430
Write what has the truest feel, the thing that makes you cringe or swell with excitement. Or if it's more subtle things, all the details in the matrix that inform what you really want to say before you say it. I usually find that I'm either not writing something I want to read or wrote the part I want to read and nothing to contextualize and build up to it before the fact, or anything after the fact to flow into where it needs to go. I'll spare you a food analogy but think about what isn't the meat of a story and how to fill it out.

[Anonymous No.23222778]

>take creative writing class at uni
>turn in the first assignment
>first thing teacher says about it is how it reminds him of the writer that I consider the most beautiful writer in my native language but who hasn't really been in vogue for a century
I write good after all

[Anonymous No.23222883]

>>23222778
That's a nice feeling, friend

[Anonymous No.23223023]

Can i talk to Travis?

[Anonymous No.23223086]

>>23223023
He died, stingray AIDS.
I'm told it was terribly painful, a terrible way to go.

[Anonymous No.23223142]

>>23213914
>Lay in bed
>Sentences for what I want to write flow beautifully, are nicely to-the-point, robust, funny and enjoyable
>Sit down to write
>Write like a 12 year old
why? I've recently picked it up again since I enjoyed coming up with fantasies and stories in my youth. But when it's time to put thoughts on paper they just seem to scurry away.

[Anonymous No.23223170]

>>23222278
Honestly? Have them run the gamut of being impressed to boredom to idle thoughts or chitchat. Go run your hand under a faucet for half an hour. Sure you can focus on all about the water, but you'll get bored after a minute or two tops. Now imagine that except you have a tv show episode's worth to go, and it's sticky jizz while you work the shaft and cradle the balls.

[Anonymous No.23223236]

Does writing off the dome lead anywhere? I'm going to find out but I figure I may as well ask anyway. I've never done it as a prolonged exercise.

[Anonymous No.23223322]

>>23223086
Can i talk to Travis?

[Anonymous No.23223394]

>>23223322
Sure go ahead

[Anonymous No.23223402]

>Accidently rip off a REALLY specific character trait from a popular work.
Fuck.
I don't want to make an OMORI reference, the MC just finds out he's good with the violin and plays a duet with his piano GF

[Anonymous No.23223410]

>>23223402
>OMORI
never heard of it
>the MC just finds out he's good with the violin
simply unbelievable. I assume your mc has amnesia, or something

[Anonymous No.23223442]

>>23223402
You can't "just be good at" an instrument. Maybe you learn faster or have a natural talent allowing you to become one of the best ever (not anyone can reach such heights) but even those sorts need many thousands of hours to achieve mastery. If your MC picks up a violin for the first time and can even play it properly, much less is good, your readers will say wtf

[Anonymous No.23223466]

>>23223442
He learns the basics fast

[Anonymous No.23223478]

What's the term for someone avoiding something because it makes them feel guilty about it?

I have a character who feels guilty about something he did to someone, but when he sees them again he dances around the subject and avoids it as much as possible because it makes him feel bad.

I'm kind of writing a bunch of charts for positive and negative traits for my characters and I'm not sure how to sort of shorten this one into a word or short phrase.

[Anonymous No.23223500]

>>23221619
So at the end of the day, I need to read more until I understand it. I read two dozen or so pages and wrongly assumed I knew what I was looking at. Is that what you're advising?

[Anonymous No.23223518]

>>23223442
>>23223466
I've been practicing drawing on a graphics tablet for a few months and this is still all I can do. Make no mistake, learning the fine arts is fucking HARD and takes a lot of practice and effort.

You know that story of the Indian guy smashing the mountain apart cause it blocked the path for his wife to see a doctor? Yeah that's learning a fine arts skill is like.

[Anonymous No.23223545]

>>23223478
Pussy-footing

[Anonymous No.23223573]

Is it fine to start a story like picrel? Or do I have to start with the first scene?
The reason why I want to do picrel is to introduce the characters quickly to keep the story under 2000 words.
(don't comment on the writing. it was done quickly to give you an example of what I mean)

[Anonymous No.23223738]

>>23223573
It's fine, narrator's talking about their story works. Animorphs did it IIRC

[Anonymous No.23223745]

>>23223573
Fine for a short story, short enough for a novel, not the trend for novels in the past 50 years. I just got done reading some gothic lit so I'm burnt out on long introductions.

[Anonymous No.23223748]

>Nonhuman antagonist is introduced being tended to be several human women in highly sexual outfits
>All of the women are miserable, most are crying
>It's explicitly stated this villain hates humans and finds them repulsive, he just enjoys humiliating and demeaning them before killing them
Does this feel magical realm at all?

[Anonymous No.23223783]

>>23223236
you've taken the first step into the kino realm
godspeed

[Anonymous No.23223817]

>re-reading some of my old work
>when I didn't give a shit it was good
>when I started to take it le srsly it goes to shit
intredasting

[Anonymous No.23223832]

>>23223783
I have a steelcase desk like this with a typewriter drawer but I've been using it as a liquor cabinet.

[Anonymous No.23223901]

The publisher edit of Cherno Caster Vol. 1 is basically done, so hopefully I'll be shilling it here soon.
In the meanwhile, here's the cover art for Vol. 2.

>>23223748
depends on how you write it and how much you linger on the concubines

[Anonymous No.23224039]

>>23223142
Are you schizo? not being rude but I am and one of the most common (and early) symptoms is there being a massive disconnection between internal thought and articulation

[Anonymous No.23224123]

how. can you tell if a writers enjoys writing

[Anonymous No.23224150]

>>23221961
even in a throwaway post the sloppusher reveals his true drive for peddling dogshit. Fear of rejection. Let no posturing henceforth persuade you. The anime writer does what he does because nobody can ever tell him no.

[Anonymous No.23224204]

Help me.
My editor loves this one character who I have job to a character they don’t care about at all in the first round of the tournament.
They’re really upset by it because they found that character to be far more intriguing and awesome.
The problem is that I GENUINELY could not think of a believable way for the character to win.
Do you mind helping me out? I’ll compare the two
>Female Kung Fu master from Uganda’s Shaolin Temple. Has a sympathetic motivation
>A buff circus clown who weaponizes circus acts as a martial art
The latter wins because no matter how hard I tried I genuinely could not think of a believable way for the lady to win because every maneuver I had in mind for her was met with me thinking of a REALLY easy and believable counter from the clown.
Any ways that she could win?

[Anonymous No.23224217]

>>23224204
I think you need to figure some stuff on your own man, you come here with questions that you need to be answering yourself far too often. If you know your story, you already know the answer to your own question, even if your editor doesn't like it.

[Anonymous No.23224224]

>>23224204
Throws a pie in his face. Your editor is a faggot who wants stronk women when, as you know being your story, it's contrived to have her win. Test them by switching her to a him nothing else changed and see if it remains the same.

[Anonymous No.23224280]

>>23224204
She should use his clown powers against him. Like tying him up with endless string of handkerchiefs, or drowning him with seltzer, or by using mime tricks.

[Anonymous No.23224288]

>>23224224
The editor literally said that it got predictable when nearly all of the women lost round one, especially when all of them were really interesting characters according to them.
I mean
>MMA fighter who’s hugely insecure about how she looks and acts, thinking that her career might ruin her proposal
>Woman who is literally trying to save lives back in her home country via raising money through these fights
Both of these characters are defeated in round one. While the editor was fine with the first one losing due to her landing on the final boss dude, the latter losing kind of irked them

[Anonymous No.23224300]

>>23224204
/wbg/ was great for this place, can someone make a breakaway anime writing general?
The genre/literary wars are misguided. What we really need to do is purge anyone who uses TVTropes phrases without an ounce of shame.

[Anonymous No.23224323]

>>23224300
You’re mom is a tv trope.

[Anonymous No.23224339]

>>23213914
Anyone have advice on writing dreams? I don't really have them anymore now that I take prazosin for nightmares/sleep paralysis.

[Anonymous No.23224344]

>>23224300
Which one?
Also imagine calling literally anything with fights anime

[Anonymous No.23224399]

>>23224344
Name a piece of QUALITY literature which resorts to fighting.

[Anonymous No.23224437]

>>23224399
The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson

[Anonymous No.23224447]

>>23224437
>Brandon Sanderson
>Quality
Pick one.

[Anonymous No.23224450]

>>23224399
Tolstoy wrote pretty good fight scenes

[Anonymous No.23224451]

>>23218536
You don't think short stories take a long time to develop?

[Anonymous No.23224546]

>>23224288
Disregarding whether or not it makes sense for the clown to win, the clown should definitely win, but if you really need to let your bitchass editor have this one you could always just contrive some way for Ugandan kungfu woman to cheat. She might keep a firearm concealed between her bizarrely large breasts, or perhaps she visited her village witchdoctor and he gave her a bump of performance-enhancing cocaine, perchance.
Mayhap.
I feel quite queer.

[Anonymous No.23224578]

>>23224451
No. Keeping it simple is the whole point. It's not like I've never written any.

[Anonymous No.23224580]

>>23224039
I am not schizo, just ADHD.

[Anonymous No.23224582]

>>23224437
>name anything
>BrandoSando
You failed.

[Anonymous No.23224588]

>>23221305
Jesus why is it so hard?

[Anonymous No.23224841]

What do your first drafts look like? Just finished mine and half of it doesn't even look like prose. It's just stating what happens. Entire pages are condensed down to a single paragraph and it's filled with shitty placeholder names. I hate it so fucking much. Just looking at the first draft makes me wanna die of cringe.

[Anonymous No.23224879]

>>23224300
OK. What should go into the OP of a new general?

/twg/ Trashy Writing General

A place for discussion, questions, and critique on the art of lowbrow fiction writing.
If you’re working on genre fiction, web novels, screenplays, erotica (use Pastebin), or any form of writing deemed unworthy of being called “literature,” then you’re in the right place.
Absolute beginners, BrandoSando fans, idea guys, and AI bros are all welcome.
But if you’re a pseud or someone who actually knows how to write, please visit /wg/ instead.

[Anonymous No.23224889]

>>23224123
long and elaborate sentences

[Anonymous No.23224917]

>>23224841
i do have gay placeholder names but it always looks "like prose" if sometimes very awkward. you should look up the book "from where you dream" and the way it teaches to write in sensations instead of abstractions/summaries of "what happens."

[Anonymous No.23224922]

>>23224841
My writing style is such that even my first, rough drafts are pretty polished stylistically. All the turns of phrase and linguistic pirouettes will be present. I generally have to tone it down a bit in editing, but I prefer a subtractive editing process to an additive one. Writing is almost a kind of linguistic performance art for me, and the physical writing is just there to document it.

[Anonymous No.23224929]

>>23224922
>My writing style is such that even my first, rough drafts are pretty polished stylistically. All the turns of phrase and linguistic pirouettes will be present
post a sample i need a laugh

[Anonymous No.23224935]

>>23224929
The decor has seen updates. Dramatic dildonics adorn the hall, so many myriad members throbbing in sculpture out from the walls, sprouting from the floor—a veritable boneyard of penises—they come cut and uncut, trimmed and untrimmed, from every angle by which the eye might pass; penises light and dark, large and small, some curving sideways, others in helices reaching up in pairs of two, in triplicate or more, towards the now-darkened lamplights; some rakish penises angled askance, others laid low along the ground; veiny, smooth, hard, soft, every possible configuration of cock expressing some dick dreamer's unbounded gnosis, interred for all eternity—or what remains of it—in marble here, in granite there, some chrysoprase detailing on lacquered hardwoods—ebony, hickory, olivewood—streams of gold sprouting mock-molten from rosewood glans… there are chairs here whose peniform backings rise from cushions of bristling black boarshair, felted brown upholstery, bare alder, to droop lazily down upon the seated’s ostensible shoulder, the crook of its laconic wooden foreskin inviting rest beneath its shade, the embrace would be warm and caring, like sitting under a banyan at the height of summer… and, in the distant past, were one to sit upon one of these chaises, he or she might have listened at dusk, with the lights glowed down to incandescence, their timbre of campfire, to waters flowing gently perhaps, from the pièce de résistance, whose flaccid Greek proportions bely a sheer magnitude of scope—its descent from the high-vaulted ceiling, some fifty or sixty feet up, drags nearly its terminant foreskin across the lobby floor—emitting waters which once flowed steady, dribbled fits and starts, or gushed voluminous bursts into an ornate and embossed circular basin of immense proportion held low aloft by a dwarf colonnade in keeping with the finest of Ionian tradition, and whose facade entablature might have been carved by Michaelangelo himself… and which bears still a mysterious ammonic smell whose origin I cannot imagine nor postulate.

[Anonymous No.23225110]

>>23224546
The clown wins because three reasons
>Genuinely could not think of a believable way for the lady to win
>The Clown has an incredibly good fight against one of the 2 protagonists in the next round
>I think that fighting style is cool

[Anonymous No.23225114]

>>23224204
>>23224224
>>23225110
This seems more like a conversation for >>>/lit/wbg

[Anonymous No.23225130]

>>23224879
if you need to be "protected" from other people's posts, maybe you should go to plebbit

[Anonymous No.23225158]

>>23222430
>writer's block
Refine your process by guiding yourself into asking more simple questions that are possible to answer. If you steer correctly, your answers will inform you what to write. You know way more than you realize, you only need to a more clear method to not get lost in the daydreams of the story in your head
>autism
Talk to people more and every day, in real life. Surround yourself with people and intetact, pay attention. It wont change you entirely but social interaction has an impact on how well you will understand others.
>if it's not perfect on the first draft
A good novel has too many moving parts to expect this herculean task in one draft. Just write. Use the draft as a reference point on what to change.

[Anonymous No.23225172]

>>23225110
Consider that there could be more fights or important actions other than the tournament.
Maybe there's a way one of these girls can dunk on who she lost to outside of the sanctioned fights.

[Anonymous No.23225202]

>>23224879
show me on the doll where the genre chads touched you

[Anonymous No.23225222]

today is the day. today i write.

[Anonymous No.23225224]

>>23224841
I almost never have my prose down in a first draft, don't worry.

[Anonymous No.23225233]

Anon writing about the guy picking up dead birds. I'm going to rework my opening but actually mention what type of bird my main character picks up off the ground. I thought of a raven at first but I thought that's too obvious even though they are kind of spooky birds but I'm borrowing a lot of Norse imagery, it would fit but I was looking for something more interesting. Maybe a dove or something rarer to signify that shit is actually happening

[Anonymous No.23225235]

I can't read the first draft without cringing and dropping it. How do I deal with it? I have one month to edit it to a good state. I feel miserable.

[Anonymous No.23225252]

>>23225235
Did you write something good that you care about or cringe fantaslop? Because if it's the latter, all you're seeing is what was always there.

[Anonymous No.23225269]

>>23225252
The former. It's about a hippie cult trying to escape the cycle of reincarnation. Even tho it has as many words as The Map and The Territory, which is one of my inspirations, mine seems too fast paced. There should be at least double the size it is right now. Idk what to do desu.

[Anonymous No.23225272]

>>23225172
She does actually but it’s a weird context.
She beats the piss out of a Chinaman because he’s a dick.
You know how Mao neutered Chinese martial arts? This fucking Chinaman has Retsu Kaioh syndrome and genuinely thinks Chinese martial arts are good.
This bitch from Uganda actually learned the real deal

[Anonymous No.23225273]

I changed the name of my orc from Tyrone to Franklin. People kept thinking he represented black people.

[Anonymous No.23225291]

>>23225269
See >>23222681
You now have a framework where you can see where you need to add contexualizing elements that inform what you really want to say. Those also control the pace. It can also be that you want a quicker story, but if you don't, you already have something to work from.

I was worried you wrote outright cringe and only just realized you were copying what you think is good instead of making your own thing. It sounds more like you have something worth working with and instead need to build tension and impact to the moments that everything is about.

[Anonymous No.23225292]

>>23225273
were they wrong to think this?

[Anonymous No.23225306]

>>23225292
yeah. He represents native americans.

[Anonymous No.23225328]

>>23225269
Another thing that can make it seem faster paced is having too much superfluous bullshit going on with no room to breathe. Most novels have a few 'decompression' chapters where very little happens, which resets the pace and builds on the the themes that have been built to that point. They will reiterate a problem, show what the stagnation in being unable to pierce the heart of the mystery does, dissolve tension after critical moments and make time seem to pass. Certain paragraphs and digressions serve a similar purpose within a chapter.

I can think of more shorter novels (~250 pages) that feel longer, larger and slower paced than anything else.

[Anonymous No.23225329]

>>23224204
The clown uses a magic trick, she notice what he's doing with other hand and figures out how the trick is done

[Anonymous No.23225337]

>Try and write purely for myself
>Still feel discouraged when the response to what I write is 'lower' than expected

I think it just feels like I'm not writing anything evocative if I don't even get harsh criticism. When the response suggests that writing is 'good' but not 'great' it still feels like I screwed up somewhere. Is this something you guys experience?

[Anonymous No.23225345]

>>23225273
The fuck kind of setting is that where both of those apply to an orc? Modern Fantasy?

[Anonymous No.23225354]

>>23225345
Just fantasy. What, do you want me to make up a silly name like Lugurgur T’znape or whatever.

[Anonymous No.23225371]

I'm so fucking sick of a certain very popular writing style. I can't get through a page of the stuff, and it's everywhere. Snarky, inoffensive, timid, self-deprecating (somehow by and toward the author him/herself, despite the degrees of remove by character and narrator, reeking of insecurity and lack of convictions) vulgar (common), vulgar (crude), implicitly materialist, no appreciation for language.

[Anonymous No.23225379]

>>23225371
You described talking to anyone 30 and under these days. Are there any authors you’d like to name who embody this style?

[Anonymous No.23225390]

>>23225371
I know exactly the type of writing you mean and at it's core I believe it's rooted in dishonesty, as though they're speaking into a room of people, gauging the most popular opinion, regurgitating it and saying "heh am I right guys?" while not believing a word of it themselves but still wanting recognition

[Anonymous No.23225415]

>>23225390
You just described reddit. And most public social discourse with an audience. They're hunting and pecking around for what they believe the most socially acceptable position to take is, to gain the acceptance of people who are subnormal losers that are doing the same thing in a pantomime of what they believe "normal" is.

They have no experience or real identity and it kills them inside. So they seek to belong in the multicult that accepts everyone and criticizes...well, it would be them if they don't play along. It's a matter of accountability and that requires casting judgement.

[Anonymous No.23225422]

>>23225390
You can't be everything to everyone, so why try? If I can be something to someone, I'll have succeeded as an artist, even if that someone is only myself.

[Anonymous No.23225425]

>>23224935
lame. lots of redundancy and empty superlatives to cover up a lack of concrete imagery. the sheer magnitude of the scope of the immense proportion of the large bigness of who cares. at least the content matches the form, cocks everywhere but no fucking

[Anonymous No.23225427]

>>23225371
An anon wrote this about it
An effort to write such a novel by someone who is isolated to such an extent risks coming across as naive and unrealistic (much of YA and fantasy is like this) and worse ideologically-driven (I'm thinking of the type of books where a white character is the stereotypical prejudiced oppressor, or the male character is the boorish chad who justified the author's pro-women themes). It is in a sense an age of paranoia, whose source is the limited experience we have of actually meeting and forming meaningful relationships with people, particularly those who are different to us, and embracing or at least accepting that they are not 2D cut-outs whose only value is to prop up our victim complex.

One type of interesting literature that arises out of such a state of affairs is the Paranoia story. Popular examples of this are Cat Person by [Armenian name] and The Feminist by Toby [Asian name]. Both were extremely popular at the time they were published within the past decade. The former is a story about a naive woman who becomes paranoid (as a consequence of her naivety, and the general climate of hostility towards perceived 2D archetypal oppressors (in this case white men) about a potential romantic partner, and reinvents what was to previous generations a 'fling' or a 'short-lived romance' into something more befitting the horror genre. It speaks to several Millennial characteristics, namely a victim complex, selfishness, isolation and fear of the other (pretty much anybody other than themselves). The latter story is about an incel whose paranoia is also a consequence of naivety (in this case lack of experience with the opposite sex) and their autistic inability to parse the ideological dogma of the age (men are rapists, women want someone who is both a lover and an 'ally', etc). In both cases, a very basic and normal longing for romantic intimacy turns into something dark, taboo and ultimately threatening. Other people are viewed through the glass lens of ideological fears and ideals, and such a lens has the tendency to distort the perceived (and also the perceiver, in The Feminist's case) into something intimidating, grotesque and worthy of paranoia.

[Anonymous No.23225431]

>>23225425
It almost hurt but then it seemed like you didn't read it because there's tons of concrete imagery.

[Anonymous No.23225435]

>>23225431
Nobody here reads. They just try to discourage others.

[Anonymous No.23225565]

>>23225329
Meh

[Anonymous No.23225650]

>>23224204
make a losers bracket

[Anonymous No.23225782]

>>23225650
Nah.

[Anonymous No.23226228]

>>23203558
Finally figured out what the word was. You were no help. It was mandate.

[Anonymous No.23226254]

>>23224217
Let me point something out.
I actually wanted her to win as well but I couldn’t think of anything that felt believable because I almost made the Clown nearly fucking unbeatable

[Anonymous No.23226313]

>>23226228
What was the word

[Anonymous No.23226450]

>>23226313
>it was mandate

[Anonymous No.23226459]

>>23226450
Mandate? As opposed to womandate?

[Anonymous No.23226471]

literary bros what are we working on?

[Anonymous No.23226508]

>>23226471
A metaphysical mystery novel. Not sure if I want to commit to a murder mystery (the only great mystery) or do something more softball, given that I'm not bound to the genre.

[Anonymous No.23226518]

>>23226508
>metaphysical
how does that factor in at all?

[Anonymous No.23226531]

>>23225337
Those are your expectations, it's not like people on an anonymous forum are here to cater to anyone. Besides that's a problem with how you manage your self-esteem and self-acceptance, not really a thing that's universal to writers.

[Anonymous No.23226628]

>>23226518
There is a very real criminal element, but the story is more about the protagonist's realization that there is some pervasive, malevolent force that allows this kind of crime to perpetuate itself under the surface of the idyll, and even he is subject to it as he willingly assists in a dangerous criminal investigation and watches most of his friends from his youth crumble and rot due to this influence. Or he's a total nut who read too much occult nonsense and is chasing windmills and interfering with an undercover sting operation.Either way, there's an occluded layer beyond the base motivations for what is at work trying to make him revert to old ways, and it may be related to a viking biker cult selling dodgy synthetic drugs.

[Anonymous No.23226967]

>>23226628
perhaps the word youre looking for is supernatural

[Anonymous No.23226972]

>>23226518
One has to determine which branch of metaphysics is actually correct before they can begin to determine if either their senses or the murder scene has been tampered with. This debate will be a central point throughout the novel until someone murders everyone else to make a purely rhetorical point about the reality of the situation.
>>23226628
Somehow you described Umineko minus the forces manifesting themselves and debating whether they committed the murders with the schizo for 800 hours.
>>23226471
I can share that with you in the next thread:
>>23226971
>>23226971
>>23226971

[Anonymous No.23227028]

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