/lit/ - Literature

What's an average working persons car? Someone that works at an office for example? I know nothing about cars and don't drive so I have no idea.

Do you follow any sort of convention when naming your characters or is it all random pickings? Night and day play a huge as a theme in my book so I named a lot of my characters connected with the sun and moon and it's made things a whole lot easier

>>22195028
I just name them the first thing that I think of, it's completely random.

>>22195022
Cheap and reliable, like a Toyota.

>>22195040
Like a camry?

>>22195010
I do truly reckon, that only with persistance I'll get my critique

Anyone care to read?

Story I'm working on:
https://pastebin.com/KBkFecAm

Currently finished Lorestuffs:
https://pastebin.com/DNuYsdrK

>>22195068
I hate to sound like a zoomer but I ain't reading all that, can you give me a detailed blurb or something? I just genuinely don't have the time right now.

>>22195095
Uhh the story goes like.
>knight is introduced
>he is mid-running away from a plebian crowd
>did some shitups
>heavy rain falls and the pursuers stop the chase
>he travels through a fuckass huge birch forest
>hears screams and smells burned fat in the air
>charges in to save what he assumes is a group of people, from bandits
>oh shit there is a dragon on the sky
>hides behind a rock stack
>dragon didn't even notice him, flies away
>the dude finds out that screams came from a burned caravan that lay now before him
>after exiting from hiding he finds a survivor
>she's a pleb but he promised to himself to save those people
>so honorable he even graciously helps the pleb out, drags her to safety on his steed
>they camp
>rich description of armaments and weapons ensues.
that's the gist of it.
I hope to write a battle scene next.

>>22195028
I use latin, greek, german, english and polish word-making rules to create names. Very rarely I'll make the names have deeper meaning. Here are some examples.
Zenon Zapizdrz
Headlop
Krwogon
Zatrian
Siegefrad
Rarrke
Oldest Desert, Silvery tear
When I don't want a special name for a character I'll just pick what sounds right or drives the message I like.
Renata has hard N and R, is a bold name so I named a bold fighter Renata.
Cletus is a sly soft name so I named a shopkeeper that.
Don't overcomplicate it.

>>22195068
>his horse's hooves echoed in the quietude of his mind
The only reason I read even one word past this complete blunder of an attempt at writing was in eagerness to find more ammunition with which I could make fun of you. Despite this initial enthusiasm, I became incredibly bored shortly thereafter. I decided that it was enough to say "yikes, cringe!" and move on. Yikes, cringe!

On another note, have you ever read a fucking book before in your life, nigger? Or do you just watch anime and read webnovels?

It took four drafts but I finally fixed chapter 13 to something I wanted it to be. Now it might be one of my favorites.

>>22195112
I don't watch anime, I read books mostly in my language, english is my second language,I asked for critique, so just bear with me and tell me what more to fix.
I did not by any means say Im competent and you by all means still seem offended somehow.

Just give the critique to me

>>22195028
I use the most banal and commonplace names I can imagine. In literally everything I've ever written, there is a character named Jim. Most of the time I don't give my characters names. I see the "writerly" obsession with names as being downstream of (or at least synonymous with) the obsession with finding synonyms for "said."

>>22195120
Look, man, I'm sorry if I was rude, especially since you're ESL. The brunt of my critique of your writing style was predicated upon you being a native speaker. I am aware that linguistic "mores" do not tend to translate well between languages... just look at English versus Polish idioms, for example, and try directly translating them for a case in point.

It is my opinion that writers should write in their native languages. You are up against entirely too many assholes like me who are going to tear your guts out through your ass hole for the slightest misstep if you choose to write in English. Leave translation to the translators, in my opinion. Only absolute freaks like Nabokov can write convincingly in a second language.

>>22195106
>Cletus is a sly soft name
It just makes me think of rednecks

>>22195133
It's a hill I'm willing to stand on, since I know meaning of most words i ready anywhere, anytime in english. Grammar, idioms, nouns etc will develop themselves along my writing and it's not like I'm planning to live off of it. I just want to pursue the written word because it's a virtue IMO.

>>22195141
Well, best of luck to you either way, anon. I forget sometimes that we have ESLs here, and it is categorically unfair for a native speaker to mock you for your second (or, often, third) language. I'm monolingual, so while I can't completely understand the struggle of trying to write fiction in a second language, I think I can at least appreciate it and wish you luck from the sidelines. Keep at it. Maybe you are one of those linguistic freaks and I caught you in the middle of your journey.

>>22195153
that's even more of a reason to critique what I wrote. It's kind of like the natural selection in a way. I fling shit at the wall and you decide what sticks, reinforcing one way of flinging or another.
Just try to read more and tell me what is bad and what is good.

>>22195158
Okay, well, I'm going to take one single sentence I think is good and use it as an example.
>The heavy rain, drenching all that was good and graceful, dissuaded even the darkest of moods from pursuing the knight.
I get a sense of lightness and play from this sentence. It derives, for me, from the somewhat stodgy and otherwise almost sanctimonious invocation of "all that was good and graceful." It's a little ridiculous, and it evidences the idea that perhaps the knight sees it as ridiculous as well, and furthermore ties into his mood. It's well-placed. I would even consider trying to pepper that in earlier. It COULD deflect a hypercritical reader by drawing his attention to a more delightful tone than the same dim and dreary tone used by most fantasy writers. This sentence is a brush with authorial uniqueness that could be fostered.

I also chose this sentence because of its wordplay. In the purest sense, a mood cannot be dissuaded from anything, nor can it chase anything. It is a mood and holds no physical form or independent agency. Regardless, it's a bit of figurative language which just works, maybe because of the little alliterative burst or just because it fits with the rhythm of the language. It works, and I like it.

That is, after all, what it comes down to. I could pick more things out, but I have no way of knowing why I actually like this. Anything I write here will be an ex post facto attempt at reverse engineering the reasons why, in the moment of reading, I intuitively appreciated this sentence. That's not to say I think this is all that inaccurate, or anything I wouldn't analytically stand by, but still... it is important to recognize the nature of feedback and criticism. I believe that we write intuitively and we read intuitively, and that critique, as a form of analysis, if somehow extraneous to everything about the writing process that's actually important. I've decided to press "Post" in the (probably vain) hope that I'm wrong and this may be of some use.

>>22195198
Alright, got it.
I thought that sentence sounded condescending and light-hearted but couldn't stop myself from putting it in there.
I think that it would be good for me to write less and think more about what I'm writing, as in
think what I want to capture with words -> write it down in english -> translate to polish to make sure it doesn't sound too absurd -> re-insert it into the text.
Alright, that's good so far, I've already got a new creative process.
have a cat as a thanks.

>>22195010
Lol the authors pastebin is considered potentially harmful and deleted.

>>22195214
Keep in mind that I am a merciless prosefag. I don't write to tell stories or weave narratives. I write because I find certain arrangements of words and sentences to have a beauty which exists independently of anything else. To be clear, this is the standard to which I hold myself and one I've held you to as well. This may not jive with your philosophy towards writing, in which case my advice may be completely irrelevant to you. If you find that to hold truth, it is entirely valid and defensible to discard anything I've said which isn't useful to you. Best of luck with your writing, anon.

>>22195230
hahaha, You truly think that there is nothing to learn from you? Humility is a great trait but it should follow ambition like a hound, not the other way around else you'll subject the human material to strain, wear and tear.

I've yet to meet someone or somewhere that didn't teach me a single thing.
I'll be back, with better articulated and richer story and we'll see (frfr) if I become better or not.

>>22195044
Sure. Or a Ford Taurus, Hyundai Excel, or any of the other entry-level cheap "commuter" cars.

>>22195249
Cool, thank you.

Why is that anti LitRPG spammer so angry and miserable all the time? I think someone needs to check up on him

>>22195273
>I think someone needs to check up on him
Nah, he'll sort himself out, one day he'll stop posting and we'll all collectively sigh a sigh of relief. We'll all know what happened and none of us will be upset.

>>22195068
Is this the first draft and are you just starting with stories with Gaza as an established character before making an intro? I think it's interesting that he thinks of a wolf as a creature of darkness but not only helps it but prays for it too. There was not much resistance in him in regards to acting out with empathy. I also see that when he encountered the ruined saarling convoy he had similar feelings to the first scene. Except in that case he had way more reason not to help. Until he saw Lea's big fat cat tats. So I totally understand why as a man he would be nice to her while also being awkward about her being "lowly." I think it's more amusing to see how ashamed he is in that scene, but I think you would do well to explore his inner conflict regarding the wolf or Lea a bit more to demonstrate this isn't normal behavior for him and he may be crossing ethical standards in both cases, and may possibly be looked down upon by his peers. It's certainly not rare in fantasy to have the hot catgirl character, there will be readers that like that kind of character interaction.
I don't have much to say on the prose other than a couple cases of using too many adjectives or an adverb that did nothing. You had a good amount of description for a fantasy. I think with more editing and some tuning to the tensions central to your scenes this could be a story people would want to read.

Fuck, bros, I just remembered the story I wrote for an English assignment in high school, wish I still had that shit, it wasn't any good but I'd love to have it to look back upon.

>>22195277
I don't even care about the genre vs litfic debate, but the vitriol is tiresome. It's a writing general. If he foams at the mouth whenever pulp genres are mentioned, or marketing and such, then why doesn't he go make a litfic or prose general? Why does he take personal offense that people write genre fiction and talk about it in the writing general? It's just weird energy and I worry for his mental state.

>>22195307
>and I worry for his mental state.
You shouldn't, you don't know who they are and you never will, worrying yourself with such things will only do bad things for your mental health, focus on yourself, not the schizo, he only does this for the attention.

I'm writing a short story about a guy that wears a suicide vest under his clothes to work every day for a multitude of reasons and I'm trying to decide whether I should make him use it on the first day that I write about, if I should write about a few days or if I should never set it off at all. What would you do, bros?

When you get in your car would you describe the action as closing the door behind you or closing the door next to you?

>>22195328
Both. Then mix it together into parallel universes

>>22195328
You should have him slowly heal, renounce his violent ways and find happiness, then it accidentally goes off right as he comes to the decision to stop wearing it to work.

>>22195278
I'm definitely going to refine language. Too many uses of "the" and pronouns became apparent as soon as I read a little critique.
I can think in an insanely big scale (probably aspergers or even autism) but I'm lacking experience of life. I barely hit the legal posting age.

How would you showcase a conflicted man act ~who does surprising things when he's not judged by people he belives are superior?

>>22195337
behind me, for clarity, but really, it depends on what you want to convey. Door next to you might suggest that it's the first thing to be between (you) and whatever external force there is.

>>22195345
Fuck, that's such a good idea but I'll feel like a hack if I use it cause I didn't come up with it, shit.

>>22195337
Just say "He closed the door." and possibly not even that. Unnecessary positional descriptions are something amateurs do way too much. But I guess "He closed the door to his left/right" if you absolutely must for whatever reason.

>>22195337
I close the door as I sit down. To me it's like one fluid motion.

>>22195273
Hey man, I get it. We're all just trying to make our way through life and learn and improve or whatever, right? Oh, well... except those guys who just want to make enough money from a Patreon scam to write their engineering jobs. Fuck those guys! It could be argued that writing is just a means to an end for them.

>>22195379
Do you need someone to talk to, anon?

>>22195347
Show more cycles of hesitation enough to get the point across. Some examples come to mind: he passes by and then turns around. He may not pray immediately but notices he did it out of habit, maybe opens his eyes and lifts his head temporarily before deciding he really ought to pray. As far as the saarling goes, I think there should be more examination of how dangerous she might be before he helps her. There could be an ambush, a weapon (does she have natural claws or teeth that are very dangerous?) and just other things that demonstrate that Gaza has to consider a lot of things before making his decision. It's possible it was more impulsive, but from my reading I expected you wanted him to look like this wasn't exactly a clear decision at first.

>>22195383
Not that anon but I feel like most people need someone to talk to. Too bad /adv/ is slowly getting filled with redpillers and schizos.

Would it be dumb to say "emotion and anger"? should I just say "emotion" or "anger"?

>>22195383
Are you hitting on me? I'm in a committed relationship...

>>22195386
I like how /adv/ literally has the suicide prevention hotline under the banner. I think /lit/ should have it too, anons here are wild.

>>22195403
Everyone on this website is wild, it's why we're on this website.

>>22195399
With deez nuts, lol.

Why do people think writing is some special, esoteric and hard to understand thing? Write or don’t. What’s with all the lecturing??

>>22195408
Bricklaying might be more up your alley!

>>22195398
is it important for anger to be separate from emotions?
In my opinion, no. Do with that what you will.
>>22195408
it's not writing as a skill, but compelling people to feel or do things by writing. Same goes for making art. It's not that art is hard, it's that making something touching is highly regarded, which art and writing want to accomplish.

>>22195411
>highly regarded
If you want to be highly regarded, just make a bunch of money instead.

>>22195411
Yeah but most of the long threads and arguments aren’t about that. They’re about writing rules, whether people should write for money or not, if writing 100 words a day makes you a writer, self pub vs trad, etc.

>>22195416
ah, fuck, the seether really is back. bet he's that "prosefag" from above who says story is pointless and he just likes words

How many words have you guys written today? I'm gonna try and stick to 1000 words a day but if I don't manage it then I'm not gonna stress.

>>22195423
>r-right RRbros??? we're all gonna make it from Patreon and Twitter advertisement!!!

Am I plagiarizing by stealing sentence structure from my favorite novels and poems??

>>22195432
No.

>>22195422
And that's all relevant to a 'writing general', isn't it? I would figure anything related to writing goes here, including the peripheral aspects like publishing, marketing, formatting, processes, literally anything that constitutes writing as a skill and profession.

It's not like we have limited posts per hour. Or are even a fast thread to begin with. So what's it matter?

The inciting incident in craft books is usually at 10-12%. What is supposed to go on between the hook and the inciting incident? Won’t people get bored in like ~10000 with no plot introduction

>>22195439
What kind of question is ‘does writing 100 words a day make me a writer’? Sorry I
come from Reddit so I am not referring to this thread in particular

>>22195430
You really are the prosefag aren't you? "I don't care about story or themes or literally anything besides the way words are arranged." I wish you could understand just how stupid that sounds. Even poets would call you retarded.

Post your work so we can see how embarrassing your mindset is when lined up with how god awful your purple and overwrought writing is. I honestly bet you write worse than some of the litrpg anons in this thread.

>>22195440
I started mine in media res. Still don't know if it was a good decision.

>>22195446
Something can topically belong in a writing general thread and still be a retarded question. Please use your brain.

>>22195407
>Everyone on this website is wild, it's why we're on this website.
Yet 99% of /wg/ has literally nothing "wild" to it except the intensity of expression. The vast majority of anything discussed here is normie-tier drivel. Fantasy, litRPG, literally just the bargain-bin of writers congregate here and call themselves "wild" as if that wilderness is somehow instilled by simple virtue of being on 4chan. Yeah, it's real fuckin neato that you're trying to write litRPG isekai fantasy #264959203624. I can hardly contain myself. I'm just getting blown away.

Trying to get my head stuck out of trying to subvert/reinforce tropes
My historical fiction has mc start at an orphanage he'll break out from - beyond that I can't figure out how oppressive (or not) it should be
On one hand he has an asshole he constantly butts head with and a non-existent asshole father figure
On the other hand it's a well off orphanage, relatively small for the time, and he has a soft spot for the proverbial mother
My gut is saying just show both sides uniformly to provide the context of
>why didn't he escape sooner?
But I'm also annoyed at just how good having a shit upbringing is at creating character motivation

>>22195453
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

>>22195464
Uh, anon, he meant 'wild' as in unhinged, like you're being right now. Prosefag lacking basic comprehension skills--who's shocked? Anyone?

>>22195460
No. They should use theirs
They should read FAQs and lurk

Or at least just be confident in their own decisions and actions. Writing is not astrophysics

>>22195471
Oh! Wild, as in the abbreviated version of WILDIN'. Frfr 4chan be wildin out bruh

>>22195459
Yeah that’s what you’re supposed to do! But if you’re saying that your inciting incident is near the beginning, 25% of the novel is the debate on whether they should go on the ‘journey’ or not?

>>22195469
He can has a proverbial mother that he likes and looks up to while also being pressed by other staff members, not everyone at the orphanage has to be nice to him. Also, just because it is a well-off orphanage doesn't mean it can't be oppressive, rich institutions can and have been very oppressive and cruel.

>>22195469
>But I'm also annoyed at just how good having a shit upbringing is at creating character motivation
There's nothing wrong with this, a lot of superheroes from DC and Marvel are fueled by their shitty upbringings and those companies/IPs are worth billions.

>>22195470
Christ. I didn't expect you to show your ass like that. Thank you for confirming all my biases about your writing and providing me the ammunition to disregard any further posts of yours. I already considered you a sort of zoo animal but having proof is nice.

How should I estabilish worldbuilding? Do I just make the characters say exposition? State the exposition myself? Make the reader figure it out from piecing parts together? All three? I'm wondering how to put in meat of the story, lay down the pipe so to speak.

>>22195485
Sorry, can you rephrase your statement? I'm having a stroke and my brain isn't processing that sentence at all.

>>22195495
I could have posted a less-known Joyce or Nabo excerpt and you probably wouldn't have realized it and still tried to call me shit. Come on, now.

>>22195501
Look at how your favorite author does it and then copy them

That’s what I’m doing

Is it possible to "hear something on the horizon" or is that just retarded?

>>22195508
No.
You could be sending these questions to an AI for quicker and better results.

>>22195514
Guess I could, good point, anon.

Stop engaging with the troll, newfags. You're shitting up the thread.

>>22195504

Hook - 0-1%

Inciting Incident - 10-12%

Plot Point 1 - 25%

If you move the inciting incident to where the hook is, what are you writing about that whole first act/25%?

>>22195477
I'm not disagreeing? I'm saying the question fits the thread topic on a literal sense, but it's retarded and shouldn't be asked, because it's retarded.

WordPad has no page breaks, what the fuck this is so retarded, how am I meant to keep track of how many pages I've written?

>>22195550
Everyone uses word count, not pages.
Why use WordPad? Use LibreOffice. It has most Word features.

>>22195428
Gonna do 6k.

>>22195471
>>22195478
I meant we are mentally ill and potentially suicidal.

>>22195520
the inciting incident happened prior to the beginning of the story, if you begin in media res

>>22195559
>LibreOffice
Didn't know that was a thing, just downloaded it, thank you, anon.

>>22195573
Stop feeding them, please.

litrpg

>>22195573
I used to see myself as being mentally ill. Maybe I was. What I came to realize is that the "illness" component comes primarily from the way you look at yourself. I realize that this is different for more severe illnesses, like schizophrenia or a bad case of the tism. But your real power emerges when you take a hard look at yourself and accept yourself while acknowledging that the way your brain works is different from most people's. You are the way you are. Moderating it on account of others is pointless when the impact is comparatively small.

>>22195559
Thank you for suggesting LibreOffice, anon, this is genuinely such an awesome program.

>>22195729
Personally I use Scrivener for writing, and Word for normal documents, but LibreOffice is the best open source alternative

>>22195010
Why do people put their novels out for free?

>>22195798
to gain fans. to get reviews. because it wasn't selling anyway.

>>22195489
>>22195494
Good points
I'll hone on that contradictory tension
>I hate it here, but it still beats life outside, right?
Especially since an underlying theme is obligatory relationships (ie family)
and his insistence of finding a proper home means abandoning the only real home he will ever have

Hey guys, got some good feedback in a previous thread and I've actually been making some decent progress with figuring out some plot points that I was previously hung up on. Still a few things to iron out but we're getting there. This may help some of you guys too, but I've been using chat-gpt to describe my characters in depth and get an assessment of what the character is like to sort of validate that the core themes I'm trying to work with are coming through in my writing.

>>22195559
>>22195585
>>22195729
If you anons like the features of a Word-esque word processor, then disregard the following. However, if you enjoy the simplicity of working with Notepad for writing that doesn't require intensive formatting and the universality of .txt files, I would strongly encourage checking out Notepad++. Unless I'm banging out a quick note or want nothing more than a white text field to write on, Notepad++ is the best piece of writing software I have ever used, aside from work that demands formatting. It's also great for writing/editing code. Just thought I'd shill it to anyone who likes Notepad as I do.

>>22195798
there's more to life than money, or you're using those people as beta readers to help you edit so that later on you can monetize it, or you're using the book as a loss leader to attract eyeballs to the rest of your work
but really you shouldn't be writing trying to get rich. you'd be better off spending your time doing nearly anything else if that's your goal

>>22195897
>It's also great for writing/editing code
that why I use notepad++. libreoffice for writing

>>22195022
Does it matter?

>>22196050
Wdym? He was probably asking because he wanted to include the model as a detail in a story.

Do people like short stories?

>>22196059
If you don't know anything about cars and don't drive them, the more detail you include about them in your writing, the more you will produce uncanny breaks from the verisimilitude of the story. You could use generic language like "the car" or have the character "drive", or even just referring to a journey with the actual driving being implied. If you're going to include detail, don't half arse by asking spergs like us, especially if you don't include any further context as to why you need to know or what purpose the detail would serve. Do actual research.
So, what I mean is why does he need to know. Why does it matter? What are you hoping to achieve by including this information. Maybe I will be able to give a better answer to his question if he tells me.

>>22196098
yeah some people do

>>22196104
I want to bring back the bathroom read. Short silly stories taking about 10 minutes to read while you're waiting for your shit to come out. Then another 5 minutes more after it leaves to finish.

The problem is how to put it in a format where someone can just jump to a story, and call it a day.

I genuinely despise the writing process and the physical act of writing, but every time I give up and nuke all my manuscripts I feel like shit until I start again. Can you diagnose my mental illness /wg/?

>>22196143
Youre bored and aren't doing this out of fun, you're doing this to belong to a community. Basically the reddit writing forum.

>>22196156
I don't think it is that, because I very seldom post here

>>22196143
Diagnosis: severe autism complicated by a lack of genuine life experience leading to a tendency towards elaborate fantasy

Prescription: Gender reassignment therapy

>>22195225
What the fuck. Give me a few, I'll see what I can do to fix it

>>22195022
>>22196059
I want to add to the important point >>22196103 made about details in writing, because it is extremely useful advice. You're asking about what an average office worker's car is like because
>I know nothing about cars
>and don't drive

This is akin to something like
>What kind of guns do police officers use?
>I know nothing about guns
>and have never even touched one

In that case, you had better just write things like "the officer drew his service pistol" or "the officer fired his handgun." Maybe you could describe how it looks for various effect, like that it was "militaristic, black polymer and metal," but then leave it alone. If you write about things of which you know nothing about, you will read like a lazy moron to those who know even the rudiments of whatever it is you are describing. Conversely, recognize that your audience as a demographic is also going to know (or not know) general information by genre. The demographic that reads military fiction would probably be familiar with a "gas-operated battle rifle," while a general audience would probably be highly confused and wonder what gasoline has to do with a firearm.

So back to your question about the car--what would it mean, to you, if I wrote, "The man drove home from his office job in a white 1994 Toyota Corolla." Does that mean anything to you? Would you even bother to think about it for a second before reading the next sentence? Maybe "Toyota" stands out as being a Japanese manufacturer, maybe the fact that he drives a "white" car says something about his personality, or, most probably, "1994" stands out as being quite old. So what's important about describing the car at all? Is he poor? Is he boring? Uncreative? Dull? Low-status? Economical? Because writing something like, "The man drove home from his generic office job in his generic economy vehicle--white paint, foreign-made, manufactured five years before he was" says something about the man, but "The man drove home" is more appropriate if the car says nothing about him, and even that is pointless if you could just start with "The man allowed himself to collapse on the couch after arriving home" or something. Don't waste the reader's time with pointless details unless they say something important. Office drones, boring people, and/or people that don't give two shits about cars drive economy vehicles. Don't bother with makes, models, etc. unless the car itself is something important to the story and you're willing to do your research.

Just a thought. The more focused you are able to make your writing as you write it, the better it will be when you edit it, and the clearer themes and connections will become. Don't waste time on irrelevant details--they piss off audiences and ruin your prose.

>/sffg/ breaking down over Kill List anon posting his story
>only because the lead character is f*male

You get what you deserve, cuck

>>22195501
Im trying to do this myself Anon.
My friend gave me a pretty good tip however, just start making short stories like HP lovecraft and if you think you are ready, combine them all in a narrative.

I'm not the guy who wrote this, but it's about writing and it entertained me on the train today:
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-numb-at-the-lodge-guide-to-writing

>>22196383
What’s the point of this post

>>22196531
For the annoying troll to receive (You)s, and since you just fed him, we have another dozen posts in our immediate future. Good job, newfag

>>22196383
What’s wrong with female protagonists?

>>22196602
properly done? nothing. in fantasy, however, they're usually just men with tits who despite weighing 100lbs are capable of physically tossing men twice their size around

>>22196602
The idea is that when men write them, they're just male characters with tits or a fanservice character where authors can inject their fetishes on them. And when women write them, it's a self-insert power fantasy.

No real reason, just people bitching that a book isn't geared toward their specific taste

>>22196616
Hey it’s the incel from /sffg/!

>>22196643
meds

>>22196617
Both of these are true though.

>>22196808
Then you must exclusively read badly written books.

>>22196823
I tend to avoid reading bad books by not reading books made by women.

I'm so glad you guys got baited by the troll and now this thread is going to be 50 messages of the same shit that /sffg/ just went through.

>>22196493
It's kinda funny, from a very Jewish, very neo-Marxist, very angry-hypocrite-2smart4you-intelligensia POV. I actually hate that read through more of the sea of his trash before I realized what I was doing and decided to go pound some heavy beer and grab a disgusting fast-food burger before typing this comment just so you could know that you quite literally ruined my afternoon by reminding me that people like this exist.

>>22196840
I think he has a good intuition for what things are interesting and valuable and what things are wretched and hollow. But he is also often insufferable. If it makes you feel better, he got cancelled for being vaguely creepy towards a woman on a date.

>>22196493
This is probably one of the most bitter things I've ever read

Do you guys have any examples of times when a writer told a story set in a certain time period, then had one of the characters reference people and events that happened much later? does it always come off as a mistake from the writher or can it be executed cleverly?

Hey, posted a few threads ago for some critique and got good feedback. This is what I ended up with. Any critique is welcome/appreciated. Strengths, weaknesses, I'd love to hear it.

>>22196967
I suppose you could have what looks like a prototype of something, showing that someone was trying to make something and could not. You could also use metafiction to deliberately reference things but I think that might be too easy to do. I think unless you story involves time travel, most anachronisms like that will come off as mistakes.
There are also times when people who read old books, say the History of Mr Polly by HG Wells, and notice that characters are predicting WWI over 15 years before it started. It's important to not that back the, the political sentiment around Europe after the the treaty of Berlin was that it was inevitable. I think it's interesting to point out that readers in the future may not understand some of the details in your story and might even see them as prophetic and not even noticed that they were common sentiment or potentially anachronisms.
It's also possible if you are writing about the future, people will criticize less advanced tech. Say for example your character uses a phone in the 22nd century. It may have some new features, but readers might get upset the characters don't have cooler tech, and I have seen readers get really angry about this. Even though a lot of technology we use is not the most up to date thing available, people that read scifi are more likely to get annoyed by technology not being at the standards they expect. I think my point was in that case is that technology is always going to disappoint us somehow. But retrofit style tech is also really cool and I think there's a place for it in scifi.

>>22196879
Most Marxists or Marxist-adjacents do have that skill, probably explaining why they think the way that they do, but it also exists in healthy, normal people, too. I just can't read that kind of nauseating material, written in such an excessively obnoxious, self-righteous, vainglorious manner that I did briefly question if it was actually the worst kind of literary excrement I have read (it's close). And all that is rendered irrelevant by my extreme disdain--basically hatred--of people that live to piss, whine, moan, and bitch but are too weak, cowardly, uncreative, or simply lazy to actually make or do something about--none of that ugly, insipid fucks work is going to change anyone's mind about anything--it's complete hate-bait--even as he criticizes others for doing exactly the same thing. The only thing worse than the planet of selfish, lazy, entitled, retarded morons we already have to deal with would be a planet with one or more additional people like that waste of skin.

You still ruined my afternoon, and I'm still mad.

>>22197029
Try writing poetry and not prose, then come back--that's not an insult.

If you want some honest feedback about your writing: I read the first three sentences and then stopped. I read little bits of more and stopped, too. It's like you have deliberately and neurotically worked at every turn to write the most overwrought thing your mind could conceive. Taken apart, on an individual, sentence-by-sentence basis, some of it quite good. As a whole? It's like eating a bag of sugar with lumps of rat piss and shit it. I do like the gore, I like the horror, I am a fan of such kinds of things. But write meat, anon. Audiences want meat with some zest, not sugar that's been molded into the shape of a New York Strip.

>>22197029
In general you should work on saying things in fewer words.

The whole section where he opens the door is way too long, and the way it plods along is very typical of an inexperienced writer. Try rewriting it to be one sentence only.

>>22197029
As a continuation of what I wrote in >>22197113, your last line, tweaked just a little, would be a bit of solid gold--sincerely, it's very nice. However, in my opinion, you should set up that line properly by aggressively toning down the way you're making the English language contort itself throughout the rest of it. Seriously, "He fell onto his knees... on the side of the road," is the best descriptive sentence here because it doesn't sound forced, dressed up, wordy, phony, or tacky, and it describes nicely the action of the male character. I like the pink cheetah-print acrylics. Human blood doesn't taste of copper. Static is not used properly in any capacity whatsoever. Human feet don't scream. The positionings of the vehicles, as written, doesn't make any physical sense whatsoever. That should be enough to get you going with a second draft of this passage.

>>22197029
The first sentence is kind of hard to read, it might be just me though.
>until silence on the crooked angle gazing down a swampy ditch
Specifically, what did he mean by this? Is it meant to be very poetic and I am too much of a brainlet to get it?
>A hot, waxy red jetted down his left eye
This is also kind of hard, but I can extrapolate this means blood.

Again, I might be a retard, but I think you ought to leave words like "stream" or synonymous in. I think the rest is fine, I get that the guy is fucked up and his perception is very subjective, but the first two sentences are hard to decipher.

Also a small detail, but blood tastes like iron, not copper.

>>22196143
Insecurity?

>>22197163
>"Human feet don't scream"
Personification from context?
I took good consideration in your reply, and I do thank you for your feedback. While you have valid critiques and gripes with the prose and other descriptors, I'm confused with a few things you've said. >>22197146 was an exceptionally valid critique that offered me great insight, and I have already worked it in. Part of me appreciates your blatant, unabashed evaluation of my work, and part of me has to question what you're saying in its entirety because

>" I read the first three sentences and then stopped."

Did you? Or did you read through the meatless dribble and generate something more meaningful to share?

I do appreciate the opinion on that last line, and I'm definitely going to take that into account. As for the rest of it, I believe that it is a matter of taste. Thank you for your time, anon.

>>22197163
>Human blood doesn't taste of copper.
I know saying that something "smells of" or "tastes of" is more precise when you are confirming the identity rather than drawing a comparison. But with all respect to you, anon, I wanted to ask where this kind of phrasing is from. At least where I'm at in the rural US, literally no one says it like that and instead use the more colloquial style "tastes like" or "smells like." I am just really curious because I never really understood why people differ on how they say it.

>>22197190
Basically what I said in >>22197189 can be summed up as - you're laying it on way too fucking thick anon. Tone it down a little bit. For me, it's almost getting to the point of being unreadable; which is fine, as long as it doesn't cross that threshold.

Basically, bits like this are like mountain climbing or sprints. They take effort to read through, and that's perfectly fine. But do you want to make your reader sprint a marathon? Making it hard to read in a short segment (where the character is badly fucked up) is fine, but avoid it for the rest of the thing.

>>22196143
>but every time I give up and nuke all my manuscripts I feel like shit until I start again.
Have you tired not nuking your manuscripts and instead making them less shit?

t. guy who nuked his work twice before realizing it's kind of annoying to write it again

I wrote the ending of that WW2 tank movie, but it's sci-fi and with cute girls fighting a war on Venus.
I apologize for any misspellings or bad formatting.

https://pastebin.com/MwqPh8em

>>22197267
>with cute girls
I can't give it a read because I'm writing and if I keep reading other anons' shit I'll never get started, but I can already tell you that you tick a marketability checkbox.

shooting in the dark but: could anyone recommend something to read if i want to write cartoon scripts? (i.e. 10-20 minute episodic stories with recurring characters but little by way of long-term character development.)
most writing guides seem like they've got a more serious, literary focus and would take too much shoehorning and independent thought on my part to fit to this use-case.

should i just keep writing my fantasy book on first person? i started changing it to third person but i realised i have started doing a little bit of info dumping too. it's so weird, the feeling of freedom on third person is kind of bizarre. when i am writing on first person something always seemed lacking to me

>>22197317
there's no easy rule of thumb for this. and info dump isn't necessarily bad, it just often is

>>22197317
go for it. Everyone else does. 3rd person fantasy is hard.

>>22197348
>>22197412
so a third person with internal focalization should be better than with a first persons writing right? Or should i just go full omnipotent and just do headhopping across the key characters?
How in the fuck can i explain a character succeded a throne meanwhile writing other character who is on run away? Do you just write one chapter for one character and turn to other character on third person zero focalization? This always bugs me.

>>22195022
Honda CR-V

>>22197029
Kudos for actually rewriting this and making it better. I would say it's still feels off to me, but I think you've made definite progress from last thread.

If you post this version in a pastebin again, I can take a crack at my version of it. You can then take or leave whatever you like of it.

Two more chapters left in this draft. It's fixing to be a big editing weekend to trim out the things I don't want.

>>22197236
>when you are confirming the identity rather than drawing a comparison
I would say it's more about an attempt at making an identification, or only possessing an element without the whole; otherwise, this is exactly the difference. Something that "smells of roses" is not quite the same as something that "smells *like* roses;" to smell "of" something only requires an element of familiarity, to smell "like" something is to be similar. Colloquial language varies, as you know--so what's colloquial for you is probably not for me--and the casual, spoken/written English we use on an everyday basis is often imprecise and without any deep nuance. The difference here might really be as simple as the fact that certain regions have different standards of phrasing and pronunciation. I doubt most English-speaking humans, regardless of education or literacy, would be able to delineate between "of" and "like" in this instance because it's rarely important.

>>22197190
I don't want you to think I'm picking on you. In truth, you're the first I've given more than really ultra-basic feedback since posting in these threads because one of more of the following usually applies: I don't really know what to say (beyond "you tried"), the poster is just looking for headpats and an ego stroking, someone else has already dropped sufficient feedback, I'm unsure if the passage was written by an actual human, or anything I could say amounts to "stop this disaster before it gets worse and try again with something else." Also, you remind me very much of how I used to write when I was younger.

If you continue writing, and I hope you do, you will eventually realize that the worst thing you could ever hear from someone who takes the time to read something you wrote (with the sole exception being a major publisher) is, "Wow! Amazing! I love it!" Your job is to consider if the criticism is valid, and if so, what to do about it. I could be just another bitter, puckered asshole on this site venting my own failures that you can safely ignore--but that's your decision to make.

>>22197554
>>22197190
>" I read the first three sentences and then stopped."
Clearly, I read all of the passage. When I wrote, "I stopped," I meant exactly that--I was done reading the passage. I no longer had interest in reading any more. You're going to think this is incredibly harsh, but I actually demand this level of insight from the people I give my own stuff to read--the reason is because I am treating your work as if perusing it before buying at a bookstore. Maybe that's not what you asked for, but that's what I meant by that. The first two lines are grammatically incomplete and physically absurd--I understand why, and really, if you're going to do something crazy like that, you can even ignore the punctuation. That's okay, but then the next single-line paragraph, which should be some kind of snap to our actual senses--you are communicating to an audience with expectation of understanding what's happening--and blood is now simply "a... red" (a noun?) that is "waxy" and it "jetted down" "his eye." Then I stopped. I stopped because I was confused--is his eye pierced with a shard of glass/metal and squirting out blood? No, because the "hot" seems to suggest it is being perceived by someone (him) and it's not jetting *from* his eye, so then the wound is above his eye? No, it's not under the brow ridge, because that would be jetting *on* his eye, so then maybe the forehead? No, because "jetting" implies a concentrated stream of something spraying in a narrow or narrowish cone or stream. Then I was done.

I hope this will explain something about what I meant by saying this felt like eating a bag of sugar with really unpleasant bits ("mice gossip behind titanium walls" is just not good, at all, I really can't be more polite than that--unless this is story about mice and high-tech metal environments and that's an idiom). I hope you will be less afraid of just using plain language (meat) with zest (like your last sentence--you know why it's good so I don't have to tell you). Your goal is to tell a story and communicate that story. You have to do that hard work of making that clear. You *do not* want to confuse or make your audience expend too much effort unless you really, really know what you're doing, why, and still do so sparingly. Consider how arrogant it is to otherwise, and how frustrated it makes your audience when they're constantly asking themselves, "What does this mean?"

Just thoughts and suggestions. Thanks for being polite and receptive despite my colorful language--I sense now that perhaps that's not your preferred method of communication.

>>22197458
if it matters to your character they will find out. if this doesn't affect your character, he doesn't ever need to know-- the reader will be invested in your character and their pov, they won't inherently care about the succession; even reading about it in your comment made me bored

Holy crap I actually wrote a little over 2K words today in just over an hour.

https://agdg-steam.netlify.app/
Something like /agdg/ game review rankings but for /wg/ releases. Idea guy for hire btw.

Would you like to read my short story?
https://litter.catbox.moe/0okml6.pdf

>>22198113
Are you >>22196131?

In all honesty, you got me to chuckle at some of your descriptions. I enjoy such kinds of humor, so my standards are high; I'm not really your target audience here, though--this was too predictable for me. I'd really like to see another one that's a less of a trope combined with a meme (actually a South Park joke that might even predate memes as we know them, and that's assuming they wrote that line themselves, which I doubt).

You do have good comedic descriptions and a nice sense of writing them out in a way that is amusing. Have you read "The Necklace?" In a figurative and literal sense, this short does a good job at building up to a reveal/punchline--I was reminded of that famous story to a degree because of this.

Seriously, though--write another one, without borrowing from internet colloquialisms too much. Low-brow humor with not-low-brow structure is rare and well-received when it's done successfully.

>>22198190
Yes I am him.
I loved the necklace. The irony was simply masterful. The 15 stories I'm planning is based off 21st century humor and references that only those living in the 2000-2020's would understand. Similar to how Twain wrote short stories in the 1800's and the humor can only really be appreciated for those living at the time

>>22198215
My advice, should you choose to find it valuable, still stands--familiarity is great, but finding a way to balance it with novelty or something unexpected in a pleasing manner works really well when you can pull it off successfully. If you have 14 other stories planned, I hope you will post your next one here, too.

Not everything can or should have some twist or unexpected punchline like "The Necklace," in fact the only reason that works at all is because the whole thing is played straight until that famous literary sucker punch of an ending. I know you want to keep these short, but I would have also enjoyed a variety of alternative remedies tried with successive failures and increased urgencies beforehand, or some irony involving the cause of the problem also being the solution to the problem (a joke about how the food is just the same five ingredients arranged in different ways, finding the "magical" arrangement of said ingredients being part of it).

Purely personal taste, though. Hopefully you'll get a second opinion.

Is it possible to "patent" an idea for a book?
Let's pretend that I have a story idea SO good and interesting that people authors instantly want to write a book with it if it leaked.

>>22198385
No.
>and
Why not write this idea yourself?
>unless
You're having delusions of grandeur and think you can get someone else to do the work of writing your idea so you can "split" the """profits?"""
>which is stupid because
Good ideas get ruined all of the time, or turn to be not-so-good ideas.

>>22195133
NTA but writing in a native language is usually pointless.

You can either write for 1 million at most who read in your language (and even then how many will be interested in what you're writing) or you can write for however many people read in English.

Also here in Poland trying to get published in nearly impossible since our internet has been completely taken over by Facebook, which I refuse to use.

>tfw had an idea
:)

>>22198385
Ideas are worthless. All that matters is how they're presented.

>>22198497
Sad but true. It's extremely difficult to get published in my country and even if you do, you're lucky to sell 100 copies. My amazon books have already sold more than that and no one's called me esl yet.

>>22198497
Sure. I have no problem believing that. The problem is that you're frankly just never going to be as good a writer in English as you are in your native tongue. This means that you are essentially shoehorned into primarily becoming a storyteller rather than a writer. For some, this is probably not a big deal since most people will see writing as subservient to storytelling. But if you write each and every sentence with craft and care, I don't see how you're not going to shoot yourself in the foot by writing primarily in English. I still think that writing in your native language is the best. Translators are essentially writers themselves, but they specialize in capturing an author's nuance and voice and translating it as faithfully as possible into English. It may seem counterintuitive that a translator could translate your work into English better than you could, considering you're the one who wrote the damn thing, but it's (probably) the truth. Don't spread your ass hole wide for English-speaking markets. Write in your own language as best you can and then just allow what happens to happen.

>>22198724
>The problem is that you're frankly just never going to be as good a writer in English as you are in your native tongue

I've seen completely unintelligible attempts become popular bestsellers. Not close to all who read in English are native speakers or able to see the issues.

>>22198331
I don't plan for all of the stories to be comedy. I don't think I have that many jokes to tell. There's going to be a few dramatic ones and other genres.

>>22197029
Keep in mind that most people here are isekai or litRPG "writers" just engaged in a bit of misguided rentseeking. There are glimmers of talent here and while this piece might not be worth much even with a bunch of polishing, it doesn't mean you'll never write anything worth a shit. Disregard the "But Where's The Heckin' Story It's Just Words" crowd and keep refining your style and aesthetic sense. Feedback is mostly worthless when it delves into analysis. What's important is whether or not it works for people who are predisposed to appreciate your style. I'm one of those people, and I don't think it works. Keep reading and writing. That's all you need in the end.

>>22198731
If you want to just hoodwink your way into a minor market success, what does any of it matter anyway? Consider the possibility that sales and currency are not the alpha and omega of writing.

>>22198741
No, but at the end of the day you'll want readers.

>>22198761
Why? Sure, I like the idea that my work will be read and appreciated, but I find it extremely liberating to write under the assumption that if I'm ever read and recognized, it'll be long after my death. I fully anticipate writing for the rest of my life without gaining an iota of contemporary recognition therefrom.

A few of these descriptive comparisons could be improved, so I'm taking suggestions

Every once in a while though, novelty finds me.

Skipping over my evening-morning, I find myself in a ramen bar. It has cascading mezzanines rolling out from the steeping vats of broth. There are little, plant-topped half-walls that wrap around the tables like a honeycomb hive. It lets the scents of kitchen flow everywhere, while the electronic music can mask people’s conversations. It’s not exactly a place to rub elbows and get to know other people. In fact, after one’s bowl has been drained, the deep booths are shaped to prop a sleeper up. I was rather enjoying the place–the curry ramen fit my appetite–and deciding if I should note it down as a VR hideaway, when a woman approached me.

Some time in the last century, the human body truly became an artist’s canvas. Not the merely crude injections of a tattoo, but skin tone, subcutaneous fat, and of course natural hair color. The approach of several feet of silky hair like the growing blush of a sunset only registers with me when I see the smile pointed at me as well. She’s barely dressed, as flashy as an idol.

What cloth does cover her extends no further than the necessities to cup her breasts and flutter around her hips. Lace obscures more of her skin, shading it darker to show she has on an outfit–an art piece–not merely nature’s gifts. Well, nature or whatever plastic surgeon she paid off.

She says to me, “I need a partner for the sake tasting platter. Can I join you? I’ll pay.”

And that’s when I know she’s a honey pot.

>>22198385
No. Ideas are just ideas, it's just about how you spin it. Every ideas are used but they are infinite ways to spin them.

In years, I have developed several ideas too, but I leant that it's only secondary to a story like a packaging for a product

It's mainly for this reason that most recents novels/books are bad to be honest, they foocus just on "cool" concept without anything behind

in most cases the thing with the name of the story being a sentence is mainly a evidence that it won't be anything other than a concept with basics tropes

The story is the main element you should foocus on

Don't be a idiot, just write and understand what is a story

>>22198779
I hope you all understand the passage starts after that first sentence. I forgot to greentext any of it.

>>22197317
i've started changing to third person internal focalization view. Let's hope everything goes good. While changing stuff, should i just change everything to third person(not english writer so i don't just go change "I"s to "He"s) or meanwhile at it fix loopholes from the ongoing chapters on the previous chapters? I've realised i am adding to make things look more natural to third person view. Has anyone felt like this ever?

>>22198779
It's really hard to mix in "highbrow" literary language while also maintaining a more informal tone. There are instances where it works here, and instances where it doesn't. Either way, it doesn't feel entirely natural to me, and I feel like it really needs to with this writing style. Most offensive is the constant use of the word "merely," which is an ugly word in and of itself, but also stuffy and pompous. I don't think you're going for stuffy and pompous here. The flow could also use some doctoring. There are lots of little filler words which bust up the rhythm and make the prose more laborious.
>there are little
>it lets
>it's not exactly
>etc
Try playing a little more with your sentence structure. Try to find ways to remove the filler words and you'll find your sentences much more elegant. It actually allows for even longer and more complex sentence structures when you're actively cutting down the chaff.

I know that some degree of these filler words are important in establishing the tone you're going for, but they're slightly overbearing as it is in this draft.

>>22198779
>It has cascading mezzanines rolling out from the steeping vats
Also, I have no idea how to visualize this. Mezzanines rolling out from vats? It's a pleasing sequence of words but it's also more or less nonsensical.

>>22198808
To crudely explain, in a way I might actually use, every booth away from the central cooking area is a few steps down from the last, like terraced rice paddies. I totally forgot to explain that the point of creating an inverted stadium structure is to give everyone seated a view of the two-story windows.

>>22198808
This is a good point. I enjoy listening to songs and poetry in languages I can't understand just because I like the sound. If I didn't understand English I'm sure these word salad thesaurus bombs would sound great to me as background noise but the real beauty of prose is in the meaning of the words, not just the pretty sound they can make.

I think there are too many stories about humans out there so I'm gonna write a story about a crocodile that owns a motel instead :)

>>22198827
I don't need you to explain it to me. It doesn't matter whether or not an author can explain something to a reader outside the text. The problem is that the author has to explain it when it's obviously intended to depict a concrete image.

>>22198774
Well, you do you. But most people want to share their writing, entertain people, and talk about it while they're still alive.

>>22198829
>the real beauty of prose is in the meaning of the words
A blandly boring, universalist idea. I didn't make that post as a cosmic statement on the philosophy of language. It was a specific bit of feedback which fits into that author's approach to that piece in that sentence.

>>22198839
>4chan, the website catering to the majority
Normies and rentseekers begone.

Have any of you branded this book? On a website called the elements of writing, they shared the story beats of each genre that are covered in this book but I found it to be too vague for me to understand. What did you think of this book? Could you tell me how it works?

>>22198853
>branded
Read. I don't know why dictation put branded.

>>22198853
if it's vague, chances are you could come to similar conclusions if you were writing and learning alone, without reading the book.
It's ok, if you don't like improving on your own.

>>22198853
>story beats
I'm personally really sick of this garbage. Story beats are straight from television screenplays. They're an overly cut-and-dried approach which lends itself to a neat, safe little exercise in darting from one "beat" to the next to the next. It's a formulaic and boring shortcut used by literally everyone who hopes eventually for a Netshits adaptation windfall.

>>22198867
What is wrong with learning from books?
>>22198894
But don't you think that stories, especially myths, have a sort of typical trajectory?

>>22198894
I think they could be helpful to someone just getting into writing, it could help them understand how a story is meant to work and how the flow of a story should work and in turn it hopefully gives them the ability to take what they know and spin it in different ways while not looking like an utter retard. I hope this made sense.

>>22198802
It's called editing.

>>22198900
absolutely nothing, but I feel bad If I don't figure something out on my own, that's just my personal retardation.

You should attain and use what knowledge you can get from any source.

>>22198900
>What is wrong with learning from books?
It homogenizes the trajectory of your development as an author. This is a hot take, but I think that these analytical approaches to writing are a runaway cancer on the body of literature. When you activate that crystallized, analytical part of your brain (especially when absorbing the doctrines originated by others) you are essentially precluding the necessity of coming to your own, personalized intuition of these structures of writing. You're outsourcing some really important parts of your development as a writer to a prepackaged collection of doctrines and dogmas. I don't think this is good for authors or for the field of literature as a whole. By "learning" from others in this way, you're subsuming a large part of your individuality.

Story beats "work". I think this is undeniable. What's more ambiguous, as an aside, is whether or not this is because people have been conditioned across multiple different media to anticipate them, as opposed to there being some cosmic superiority to a storyline with discrete beats.

>>22198913
>knowledge
The problem is that it's not "knowledge" in the classical sense. It doesn't represent material truths of the phenomenal world. "Knowledge" of writing in this way is not knowing writing itself as much as it is knowing the tenets of whichever dogma is pretending to have that knowledge. I think we should all embrace wholeheartedly a more unknowable, flawed paradigm of writing in which nobody actually knows what they're doing.

>>22198907
So is this normal to add more to the chapter while editing, i mean i didn't finish my draft i am just 6 chapters in but had to change my story teller pov on a friends recommendation. He made solid arguments and i saw all of the loopholes in my story too. So after writing in third person, i realised "oh this happened on the other chapter so i should just add a pretext for this so it wouldn't feel stupid later on" or "oh i should just strengthen the things that happened on the previous chapters with one or two more sentences and when i realised i finished editing the second chapter, i added a lot but it felt more satisfying this way. I never released a novel before but, how should i react to this? I'll do a final draft to trim unnecesarry parts too when the whole book ends but is this a good procedure to go?

>>22198915
Writing is like a trade. Part of it must be derived from active practice. However, there are parts of it that need training and instruction. A good student knows not to get caught up in dogma or formula since they should also read and see how much of the art of writing is personalized despite having fundamentals that cast a wide net over most storytellers.

>>22198922
Do you need me to wipe your ass too? I'm just going to say yes to all your dumbass questions.

>>22198932
>However, there are parts of it that need training and instruction
I'm not sure I agree that reading extraneous analytical approaches to story structure is a valid component of this training and instruction. I think all the instruction and training is found in the canon and the leadership-by-example of the old masters. But what do I know? I'm nobody and nothing.

>>22198932
>>22198941
In my opinion, the importance of instruction is not in finding patterns to follow, but in learning to avoid the basicass pitfalls that most uneducated amateurs fall into. Because you WILL fall into them if you don't study them beforehand.

>>22199001
>avoid the basicass pitfalls that most uneducated amateurs fall into
Like what?

>>22198853
I feel like reading something like this will ruin my reading experiences, it's like watching a video about what makes a jumpscare, you'll never be jump scared by a horror movie again and all the scariness will be taken out of them because you'll know exactly when it's gonna happen.

>>22199001
I agree with that. I started with the Writing Excuses podcast but eventually began to discover my own style and rules for things, as well a new mentors. As long as you can use some critical thinking, there's some decent advice for writing in general. A lot of people would emphasize there's no one right way either, a lot of texts and instruction out there are just one way to start thinking about writing well.

>>22199021
>Writing Excuses podcast
Is it any good or is it just a bunch of writing snobs sitting around a table jerking each other off?

>>22195010
H-hot

>>22199015
Why are you here then?

>>22199039
There are some episodes that are useless. But their site is searchable so you can find lots of topics, and there are fan sites with full transcripts to read.
The show got more woke as time went on, but I think if you ignore the Chicago crew and the occasional Mary-Robinette-ism, the show gives a pretty decent impression about the kind of effort that goes into writing. And the eps are supposed to 15 minutes but they are more like 20. It's also kind of humbling to see the trajectory of the original cast because when it started they had not made it yet. Especially Dan Wells. By all means it appeared he'd be writing fan fiction at a dead end hotel job for the rest of his life.

Alright, I've never actually written a story before (besides mandatory assignments years ago in school) and want to start.
I've already planned the structure and I'm aiming at a short story atleast 2500 words long.

Is the word count to small to be concidered a short story or too big for someone with no expirience?

>>22199123
Just write it, faggot.

>>22199123
If you actually write something, you're already ahead of 90% of "writers", so at that point things like word count or what can be classified as a short story don't really matter.

>>22199043
What kind of dumbass question is that?

Daniel sat on the bus. It was night. He hated the bus because of the way it smelled. Because of the way the people on the bus cursed and stank and were to him like animals. Because of the way the darkened windows doubled on themselves, revealing for the passengers alone a brief fragmentary view of that other repeated world. Daniel sat with his noise-cancelling headphones in as always so he wouldn't have to listen to the incessant chatter of teenagers or anything in spanish or god-forbid the faggoty gangster rap droning from tin can speakers or yet another abuellita scolding her whelping jew baby. Daniel knew all babies were jewish, even most white babies were in some way maybe not genetically, but spiritually jewish. The babies were all jewish babies because goyim were but chattel of their jew cabal, hence the babies were born jewish because it was the jew needed the babies. For his ends. Jewish ends. Which to enforce suicide for the entire human race, and the jew wants you miserable and sleep deprived, changing a diaper and drunk on burger king when he finally pulls the big one over and the curtains drop. Daniel was listening to a lecture on the later works of Matisse, when his hands were bad and he could only work in cut paper with scissors. Daniel hated Matisse, too, because his pictures were jewish. Art was even more jewish than children these days, probably.
Across from Daniel sat a small child. A girl. She was not cute. "Great." Daniel looked at her shoes. "A nigger baby. A baby nigger." He sneered. "My children will go broke on your welfare. Already like your mother. Nothing in your eyes, hungry for the world's teat." Daniel hated the child, in all her niggerish ways, in all her jewry. He did not see even a child. But a demon. Drawn tight and inward, a porthole of hellish portents, explosive in implicant, a synechdoche of all the pain and sorrow and sin and malice of man, a watermelon lipped scrying mirror for all the world's whorish kiking ways. Babylon, blowing bubbles. Bumped backseat on the bus. Bumpstock in his back pocket. Gangster rap. He spits on them, all of them. The faggots on horseback quoting horseback. The niggers buying the faggot shirts. The pedestrians with their workweek, their sitters and pensions, their lips tight behind the ass of zog. Their mortgages and babies. The loathsome Zionists.

>>22199123
Jerichowriters.com (whoever the fuck that is) says that a short story is between 1,500 to 7,500 words, so yeah, I guess so.

https://mega.nz/file/YaU2UQCL#eA1Qy8GECkIQrOT_wpjU-uidRLtLfFp4HUFkCAnIx8g

If the Anon who posted this is in this thread, I want to say that a bit of editing could make it a really good read. There a various "amateur writer" moments and scenes that aren't constructed well, but there is so much imagining, interesting content that deserves to be framed by better writing.

>>22199144
tell me im a piece of shit...noob writer here

>>22199156
checking the bomb bros, pray that my pc doesn't fucking explode
>>22199160
havent read your stuff yet, wait a few minutes and you'll get your critique.

>>22199161
Bomb defused, the text is very compelling and oozes personality

>>22199144
use less pronouns and names. I want all those "he" and "daniel" to be gone. Your sentence structure should be better
>faggots on horseback quoting horseback
try to be more creative than "x does y". Use less periods, more sentence continuations for better flow. Your language should depict what you want the reader to feel.
solid 3/10 but I wouldn't bet on you in a competition of homeschooled writers.

>>22199135
I am

I'm a wrooter.

>>22199168
thanks bud. i may post more samples later on. i have a retards syntax

>faggots on horseback quoting horseback
was at first a typo which for some reason i liked, and kept.

how do you write stutters? "Y-you sh-shouldn't write them like this!" everytime i see this, i fucking shut my brain and just leave the page on hold for a while. Is there a turnaround for this bullshit instead of sounding like an anime girl

>>22199240
That is actually exactly how you write them.

>https://pastes.io/qrehgff7nc
First draft of a short story I've been working on. Could use a set of eyes and whatever feedback you feel like giving.

>>22199242
it sounds really weird when you read it out loud for some reason. no one speaks like that. i found out that by making words repeat or cutting the sentence half and continuing with an emotion and afterwards finishing it would work better. for example: "you... you shouldn't-" the pressure was too high and he looked at the empty gazes of crowd.he felt bad at being on spot and stuttered his words. "you shouldn't write like this!"
now trimming it to "y-you... you shouldn't write like that!" works too but feels empty for some reason but the word count goes up if i try to spice it up too. this is a weird dilemma baka

>>22199255
I guess you could write it both ways, it just depends on how you want your character to say it, stuttering can sound like either of those ways in real life.

>>22199240
It's because of this
>>22199255
>no one speaks like that
If you type it like generic tsundere dialogue, it will read like generic tsundere dialogue. Just voice it out loud and try to phonetically copy it so it sounds natural, or describe/imply the stuttering before/after the dialogue.

>>22199240
>>22199255
You're making a big deal out of nothing. Just don't overdo it like
>"I-I'm terribly afraid a-and s-s-s-stuttering like mad all the t-t-t-time...!"
Once per line is enough. Still readable but the point comes across.
>"A-are you sure that's a good idea?" he stammered.

I have the right to. Spitting the man swayed bound by eighth-inch nylon to a metal chair. If it's you well. I can live with that.
Again he was hit.
I have the right.
The older man turned away and the man could no longer make his figure in the dark squinting through eyes crusted over with blood and sweat.
He did not know why he was here. How long he had. If you are going to kill me why dont you do it now.
Why dont I. Insects crept in hieroglyphic procession all along the dark and gas soaked concrete floor. It was almost certainly night.
This was the first thing the man had heard the older man say and this frightened the man. Why dont I. Why.
I think the fact is you know something. You might not know you know it. But you do. You know it. And I need to know it too. So youre going to tell me.
If there is somebody. Somebody that I have done wrong I will make it right I swear to god just I dont you you Ill see them please talk to them. We can make it right. Please.
You are going to tell me. What you know. He stepped back under the light.
I swear to god I dont know a single fucking thing. Im the biggest retard youve ever met.
Even a retard is right twice a day. The older man then left again only this time his meander was followed by the slamming of a door. The man was alone.
His clothes were wet. For a time he called out. Soon after his head began to nod and when he awoke the pale thin light shot haunting spears of light
across the heavily dusted and cobwebbed space illuminating starkly the slanted upper third of empty rusted metal shelves which must have at some point at least
been painted cyan and olive if not white also. There was a framed advertisement poster of a Porsche 911 with its glass mottled in occluding yellowed splotches.
A Clock. It might have read two. Its hands twitching in place.

>>22199142
You don't want to demystify the art of fiction yet you're in a writing general. What kind of dumbass are you?

>i-its not l-like I lie you or anything! It's just... Just you're a big dummy!"

5 it of 5 stars on scribblehub and Wattpad. Amazing dialogue

>>22199281
>A-are
Even this reads very "internet." It makes you immediately think of bad fanfic you read on Geocities when you were twelve. It's got no place in anything that's not extremely informal fiction for people without standards. Stylizing a stutter in the wake of the internet is almost completely impossible. I would prefer even
>"The the the ..."
As opposed to
>"Th-the ..."
It's just flat out less gay, faggy, and cummed-on.

>>22199298
so much this.>>22199281
even once in a while sticks out like a sore thumb. i would rather go with repeating words than to cut it the first or second letter. feels really wrong to read it out loud all the time

>>22199281
>"Are you sure that's a good idea?" he stammered.
I think you can get away with just this, s-s-stuttering sounds too cringe, and I say this as an anime writer.

>>22199306
It's like the literary equivalent of a Linkin Park AMV in 240p. Just don't do it.

>>22199289
I see your point.

How often do you guys set aside time to just think about where you’re going with your work? I’ll sometimes spend an entire hour just sitting and thinking, and maybe that’s wasteful, I’m not sure. I’m seventy pages in, and I’ve hit a block recently. Trying to think my way out of it.

>>22199313
In theory, you can, but many readers just skip dialogue tags.

>>22199370
when i hit a block i just try to edit previous chapters to make the light sparkle again. it might just be me but if i don't write when i hit a block it feels like i am doing something sinful and feel guilty. so editing the previous chapters might help if you feel same

>>22199370
you can only write your way out of it. your best thinking will happen when you dream, when you walk, when you eat and after you fuck

>>22199168
this sample is also me, from a different story. is this also a 3, or more like a 2? >>22199288

>>22199306
>>22199298
Repeating whole words is just annoying. It's not even stuttering anymore, only brain infarct patients do it and it wrecks readability.

>>22199400
try to speak out loud these two sentences.
"y-you... can't just say that!"
"you...you can't just say that!"

>>22199400
If you're writing something in which you have occasion to write out a character's stutter, you're probably not painting the Mona Lisa, so to speak, so readability probably isn't a huge issue.

>>22199253
Anyone?

>>22199156
Prose is largely YA trash tier to the point of almost making believe it's intentional, but the characters are strong. Read some better books to soak up the style of and you're good.

>>22199467
Choose a better picture next time and maybe I'll consider it, or record yourself on vocaroo reading it so I can listen to it while playing a game, I don't care to read it.

>>22199509
What, you want a picture of my butt hole too while I'm at it? Want me to hold your dick while you piss?

>>22199521
>Want me to hold your dick while you piss?
I won't say no.

>>22199521
I read some of it. I think that the dialogue comes off a little unnatural, and it might be worth revisiting. I’m in the process of doing this with my dialogue now.

For example, she says Jim’s name like three times during their dialogue. Think about how often you say someone’s name when conversing with them. Not often. The phrase “before nightfall” is repeated twice, and most readers already associate this phrase with on-the-nose fantasy. Spend more time on how the characters speak because it’s a major element in establishing atmosphere.

I’m on the fence regarding the more abstract images that you’ve sprinkled throughout the piece, if only because I’m not sure they meld with what the story is. I almost prefer the entire piece were situated more poetically because that feels like your strong suit. You’ll have to elevate the plot/characters/dialogue to make these fragmented images work.

>>22195022
Depends on The persons salary. I work at an office and most of my coworkers drive sedans or Suv's that are 5-10 years old. The bosses drive newer luxury models Mercedes, Lexus, etc.

As far as the "style" of car, it depends on the character of the person and their location. You have to ask yourself why a person would buy a van/suv over a full sized sedan or a compact car. Does the person travel long distances on highways frequently, or do they just need a car to get around the city?

>>22199253
>>22199467
The first 2 paragraphs felt like an unending slog. Torture. It then seems to pick up the pace with what initially looks like snappy dialogue exchanges when you look at the punctuation of it, but actually reading it is dull and stilted and feels just as much of a slog as the paragraphs before it. The tone comes across as clumsy and try-hard. Put your thesaurus down and just write without over-thinking it, as I disagree with >>22199568 and think the 'poetic' bits are not your strong suit. I feel like a more down-to-earth plainess could suit the setting more.

I'm currently writing about a secretary woman at the front desk of the office building my character works at, how in-depth should I go with her? So far I've said that she's a woman in her mid forties that has self esteem issues due to the way her body looks as she ages, that she doesn't deserve what's coming to everyone else in the office building and that she's just a woman trying to get through life without stepping on anyone's toes, should I mention that this is something she probably picked up in her childhood and that she's probably always been this way or is that too much for a random secretary lady that'll probably get brought up one more time at the end of the story?

How [powerful should the MC of my fantasy novel be at the beginning of the story? I am thinking of making him a genius, but also inexperienced and a total coward.

And also not very physically fit, because he barely ever does any exercise.

>>22199624
basically locke lamora. go for it. dude always makes sure he doesn't dirty his hand by letting others do his job.

>>22199612
You probably already went overboard. If the character isn't that important I wouldn't delve that deep.

>>22199612
>or is that too much for a random secretary lady that'll probably get brought up one more time at the end of the story?
Is it neccesary to the story? Do we even need to know about her self-esteem issues? What impact is it having on the characters/story/reader to know these extra details? if none, then yes, you are wasting yours and the readers time by including it.

>>22199639
>Do we even need to know about her self-esteem issues? What impact is it having on the characters/story/reader to know these extra details?
I bring them up because she's the only person that my main character likes and the only person that he wishes didn't have to die at the end, my main character interacts with her in a certain way because of these self-esteem issues, if she didn't have them then my main character wouldn't have any other reason to interact with her and that would make her completely moot and not worth adding.

>completely deleting half a chapter I should’ve deleted a long time ago
Bittersweet. It was way off, and I’m happy to finally relinquish my attachment, but it’s always hard to part with something you worked on.

>>22199156
One of the best things I've ever read on here, but utterly, utterly repulsive. It reminds me of the worst of Palahniuk's shock literature combined with much better prose. Only an absolute degenerate could have written this. Someone with profound mental illness. I can't even tell you to kill yourself because you might actually do it. Don't kill yourself, but please stop consuming hentai.

>>22199669
I wasn't planning on reading it but if it's as repulsive as you say then I might reconsider.

>>22199666
will do this on my next chapter. feels really weird i know the feeling. also witnessed the 666

>>22199666
The beastly numbers have spoken: all anons must delete half a chapter from a story they are currently working on.

>>22199606
Eugh
>>22199568
Thanks for the input. The dialogue is supposed to be unnatural, and it's supposed to be light on plot/characterization, but I guess it doesn't work. No sense in polishing a turd so I'll just move on.

Need some advice. For the past month or so, I've been writing 1000 words a day and I'm almost of a third of the way through my novel. I've got another month and some change left before I have to return to work. If I double the amount I write a day, I'll be able to complete my first draft by then, but I'm wary about getting burned out by doing 2000 words every day. But on the other hand, I'm also afraid that if I continue at my current rate, I'll risk getting lazy after work starts up again and who knows when/if I'll finish it. What should I do?

>>22199762
stop being a lazy fuck and finish by doubling your writing. if you take no risk, it looks like you wont finish shit

>>22195028
I have characters that are from various nations based on the countries on Earth, but I obviously only know English names off the top of my head. So, I google common names of people in other places, stare at those names, and give my brain time to slap something together, and then I just run with that. This is difficult for nations where I have no background knowledge whatsoever (Pacific islands, native Americans (North and south), certain countries in asia).

>>22199783
I am a lazy fuck, but it's not that simple. 1000 words takes a lot out of me. By the time I'm done for the day, writing is the last thing I want to think about.

>>22199762
>>22199861
If writing 1k words a day is comfortable pace for you then don't mess with success. You're going to have to learn to work on it on the side for editing once you're working fulltime regardless so don't rush yourself.

How do I even get life experiences if I'm stuck working 52 hrs/week for minimum wage?

>>22199920
Reflect on your life or find opportunities to talk to others. Reading more also helps. What you may lack in experience you can make up for with observation.
posting from my wage cage

I really hate snarky, MCU type quipping heroes. So my protagonist is designed to be incredibly boring, has no sense of humor, is generally stoic, and just responds to quippy villains by blasting them with grenades.

He barely ever says anything, actually.

>>22195501
Im making my descriptions alive :
«The Rose and the Sword was, like most of the gouvernement-approved establishments, dirty. Gotta save money to make money. Clive did not care that much, he just cared for his fix. A quick check in his pocket : he only found two nickels. Barely enough for a shot. Without tip. Too bad for the poor negro that was going to serve him.»

I just wrote it like that, but note all the elements you inferred from what I gave you. That’s how I would do it anyway. But someone is going to come and tell me how it sucks so I don’t know, you do you dawg.

I'm writing a single article a day, not intended to be anything too serious or heavily edited, just a diary of what's on my mind. Ignore the non diary entries they are all unfinished essays. I write in a polemical style.

https://seanfranks.substack.com/p/the-hypocrisy-of-the-dissident-right

Every time I start writing regularly on my novel I pick smoking back up. To all of you who can somehow write without smoking, hats off to you. I am fully addicted to taking brief breaks, smoking, having a breakthrough, and returning to write. I guess this is the sacrifice I have to make for good (by my standard) writing.

>>22200083
Drink beer while your at it.

>>22199968
Silent Hero Journey Boy

>>22200083
So lame.
I personally drink kombucha.
Much cooler.


Writing high though, that’s another story, the most fun I can have for free practicality.

I can't seem to write today

i write best when i outline methodically and very detailed. Can anyone share their very detailed outline method?

>>22200298
Introduce hero
Goes on revenge
Finds sexy priestess/nun
Joins him in revenge
Random hijinks
Meet next party member (mushroom man named Funguy, robot (XD-1337), tentacle monster (???).
More hijinks
Battle with Paladin, Fairy, Rogue, Barbarian, and Sorceress.
Reclaim throne

The end

>>22198724
As I said many ESL's have no way of even getting out of the door, the market is simply too small for that. I'm going to try to get trad pubed in Poland some day but chances are very slim.

>>22198774
Your work will never be recognized in any way if you can't get published because the only thing the publishers are interested in is Wattpad romance shlock.

>>22200298
sure i use chatgpt

>>22200298
I write what I want to read about, then lead to that point.
If I want a sex scene between a boxer and a nun, I need to introduce the boxer, introduce the nun, find a way to make them fall in love or something.

>three pages down
That’s enough, I’m beat. Can’t kill yourself everyday. Good luck lads, see you tomorrow.

>>22198802
well i edited one chapter and it fucking made me exhausted to write any new stuff. I am spent too>>22200495
same here see ya

>>22200495
>>22200507
pussies i am just getting started. not even posting anything in this thread because it will die, and i will still be writing. the night is young

>>22200554
fuck you just do this you i will start editing next chapter. just to spit on your face. indeed night is young

>>22200557
im skipping my next smoke break just to bite my thumb at you

Sometimes it just all makes sense.

>>22200714
very rarely, in my experience. sometimes drunk. care to share?

>>22200723
I've been editing what I think is my final draft this week and was on the last four chapters. Each draft I've done changed the content of each significantly, but the key was in chapter 13. At first, the style was too out of line. Second time, it was realistic but thematically nonsensical. Third time, it made sense thematically but was too weak. But I finally circled back and expressed exactly what I wanted to in a style that made sense and felt tense enough. Now I feel like I understand the ending enough to finish the last three chapters.

>>22200751
exhausted anon here. while i was editing the second chapter in my book for pov change, this happened to me too, literally i had a revelation and i now know what to do on the current chapter and even dropped a hint on this chapter and will strengthen that idea thorough chapter 2-6 so sometimes, it just all makes sense keep on grind brother

>>22200773
ha! now you are the ass, i took my smoke break anyway

>>22200773
Good to hear. I really just had to be stubborn about what I wanted to do and what was possible. When I laid out the possibilities I finally found the best one that brought the epiphany for my main characters. I've found trying to make an exhaustive list of what can happen is more effective for me than just trying to imagine it. Then I took the idea and tested it to see how well it worked in the draft and ended up loving it.

>>22200472
>sex scene between a boxer and a nun
I'd read that.
>I need to introduce the boxer, introduce the nun, find a way to make them fall in love or something.
Ain't that just common sense?

>>22200835
>Ain't that just common sense?
Not if it's the opening paragraph of the book.

How hard is it to make money out of writing retarded slop with the full intention of catching as wide an audience as possible?
I'm talking about literally sitting down 1 hour everyday to write pornography or cultivation novels, hoping this will get me some money from amazon kindle or patreon or something.
Anyone has experience with this? This is what I want to do:

>Write a couple of stories on scribblehub and royal road until I get enough attention
>Announce to my audience that I'm selling a story
>???
>Profit
Is this how it works?

>>22200986
i would suggest going youtube/writer route. remember if you go that royalroad route you will be remembered as litrpg guy and will be forever looked down. I mean you'd get paid to please your average shitty chinese novel reader but you will probably hate it on long term. if you still want to pursue this shitty route write one or two really bad manhua like novels on average and afterwards put one chinese manhua that doesn't even look like one and is so off the genre you'd get attraction.
Just remember, does it really worth in the end to lose your passion to go this route? You'll probably hate yourself and your hobby of writing at the end.

>>22201022
>going youtube/writer
How do you mean?

>litrpg guy that writes shitty novels for chinamen
Could you tell me of any of these guys? You mean I can write in english and have the chinese read it?

I'm skimming through several top sellers on royalroad and I'm just fucking amazed at how awful these books are. I really don't feel like I will enjoy the process in its entirety, but I want to try my hand at it.

>>22201036
>Could you tell me of any of these guys?
no i can't i don't read litrpg
>How do you mean?
just be a youtuber that talks about books or how to write one. there are multiple like them and while sharing videos on between shill your book.
for example: terrible writing advice, daniel greene or jed herne. or anyone i dont even remember. these guys always shill their books and most of the time their books fame came exactly from their channel. now one can argue their books are good or bad( i didn't read theirs so can't give opinion) it's more stable than royalroad or other websites that's labeled as bad writer space and you won't be labeled as a "litrpg" author i would say.

>have enjoyed sci-fi and fantasy novels since I was a kid
>always wanted to write my own novel
>find it extremely difficult to even start writing one
>the only writing that comes easily to me is a dry, analytical overview of events like in a history book, or else short erotic fiction
>writing anything else is like pulling teeth, I struggle to hit even 500 words with hours of thinking and writing
>so I just decide to stick with what comes natural and try writing a larger narrative as basically nothing but blocks of exposition interspersed with sex scenes
>figure out that if I build up the scene to sex, then simply cut the sex out, I can actually have a pretty decent bit of dialogue with nice tension in it
>start putting in other types of action in the lead up to sex, then removing the sex afterward
>now have fight scenes, secret meetings, interrogations, all of which were originally preambles for raunchy sex scenes, but are now just stand alone scenes
>Gradually trim down exposition by putting it into its own files as a kind of setting bible, and finding ways to work the info into dialogue or descriptions of my character-focused scenes
>decide which characters are really important to the overall story I'm trying to tell
>suddenly have 100k+ word manuscript of stand-alone fantasy novel
This is probably the dumbest, most round-about way to reverse engineer a fantasy novel, but I did it. Now to send it to every agent under the sun and get rejected a million times.

I was actually reading some Chinese novels this year, now /wg/ is tempting me to write a wuxia litrpg. I will try to stay the course and write what I already planned to.

>>22200035
I like the post about Carmack. No idea what the thesis of the linked article was. It was a series of unfocused paragraphs. What did I take away from them? Only that some degenerate named "Delicious Tacos" wrote a book.

>>22199400
>>22199298
>>22199255
You anons are all correct, but why in the fuck is it just so hard to state that dialogue (if you really want to make it *good*, which isn't necessary in most fiction) needs to simply be an accurate depiction of what is being phonetically sounded? You can go as crazy as you want and grind down to the syllabic level (like Twain), or simply account for colloquial pronunciations, or literally do none of that and simply write readable statements. If you do that, stutter becomes incredibly annoying to read (it's annoying in real life), like Bill in IT. It's horribly obnoxious to read, but WHY should it not be? If you follow this way of thinking, the frustrated/surprised anime "s-s-stutter" is a bad meme, real humans rarely express themselves that way, and it's only appropriate for non-realistic idealized and fantastical settings--like fucking animation or smut--and in those mediums, it works really, really well and serves a function--I don't want Bill's stutter ruining my mind-numbing TV consumption--or my fap.

>>22200986
It sounds like you don't understand the genre or even how to make money in the web serial format, so I say as things stand you have extremely low odds of being successful despite low standards. It's not that hard but if you go in clueless then you won't succeed. Which is pretty obvious, but I went ahead and said it anyways.

Two more chapters left!

>>22198737
>What's important is whether or not it works for people who are predisposed to appreciate your style.
If the size and composition of your audience is unimportant to you, then you are absolutely correct. Most aspiring writer, however, usually have some desire to publish or be read by more than whomever is currently reading their work, and I would safely assume that simply by virtue of posting in a thread like this suggests a desire for improved skills to improve the size or quality of their audience--usually both.

It is true that the quality and value of feedback should be appropriately interpreted on the basis of the qualities of the individual expressing such criticisms. Some random asshole's opinion all by itself is probably not as important as the opinion of even a competent high school English teacher, but the opinions of a random sampling of a thousand random assholes is probably something you should consider taking seriously.

>Feedback is mostly worthless when it delves into analysis.
lol, no. This is the thinking of someone who is exceptionally arrogant, quite retarded, or both. I don't care if this was pointed at me or not, but I refuse to let this kind of thinking go unchallenged.

If someone you're not paying with money is going to take the time to break down why your writing works or doesn't work in any amount of detail (analysis) in a workshop setting, you should honestly be thankful for it, regardless of intention. You, the author, get to decide if it means anything to you at all; if you're serious about writing at all, even the analysis of a professional sweatlord asshole trying as hard as he can to manufacture a tear-down of your work is going to say something to you.

Regarding Anon's car accident excerpt, consider the passage: "A gray sweater and blue yoga pants charged toward him." I had to stop for a moment to get the chuckles out when I read that--instead of reading as an unsteady, delirious mind parsing the action of his surroundings, it's a stand-alone sentence that made me think of an invisible human wearing visible clothes running towards the narrator. That's probably not the effect the author wants to have on the audience. So you do you explain how avoid making people laugh when you're trying to craft a horror scene? Do you explain that, yeah, you can make work, but you gotta set it up properly? Do you give some "mostly worthless analysis" about how using an online thesaurus to replace words creates hilarious cringe most of the time because you clearly don't really understand the vocabulary you're using--and then say, 'Hey, don't do that?'"

>>22201637
>>22198737
Or consider taking the time to explain how to more appropriately write a situation in which a delirious narrator is experiencing a reality of worn clothing taking on the role of the wearer? Something like:

>Without explaining how field of view, tunnel vision, or fucking photons work, consider a scene in which our narrator is a young woman, in an altered state of mind, sitting in a gutter in a disreputable part of a town at night. A man approaches her, positions himself directly in front of her, and begins speaking. She, being in an altered state, given the physical positioning of these physical objects (her seated on the ground and the man above her), can only focus on the man's large, engraved, metal belt buckle. From her perspective, she is talking to a belt buckle; she is following the movements of this belt buckle; she is fixated on this belt buckle, how it looks in the light of the streetlight, the deepness of its voice, etc. We, the audience, because we're humans who know something about the functions of how reality operates, know that this is a man speaking to her. Consider how this particular scenario is saying something about delirium, perception of reality, and sexual themes in way that is deliberate and not incompatible with the physical phenomenon of tunnel vision, as opposed to something like the impossible mechanics of how "A gray sweater and blue yoga pants charged toward him" doesn't work on a fundamental level given the assumed relative distance implied by "charged" or the field of view required to see a "full shot" of a human torso and legs.

Depending on your audience, which might not give even a quarter of a shit about anything I just wrote, there are most certainly many who do care, even if it's only on an intuitive level, and "analysis" by someone who *does* care has the potential to be important if you, the author, decide you fucking care about such things, too.

I seriously hope this is enough for you to consider making such generalizations as
>Feedback is mostly worthless when it delves into analysis.
Even if that is actually the case here, in these threads, at least fucking append that to the end.

>>22201192
I'm incredibly curious to read how this approach worked out--care to post an excerpt?

>>22201462
Well that's why I am here asking for help.
I'll be straight with you, I just want to make some money, and as far as I can tell, you write easy to digest escapist slop stories, add an eye-catching cover (and drawings if possible) and you wait for people to come at you and start giving you money. Sounds like something that could work for me, but I need to know from the people who have done it before, and I know there's gotta be a whole lot of people in this thread doing that shit.

New thread
>>22201849
>>22201849
>>22201849
New thread

>>22200751
>>22200773
So are you ever going to post an excerpt or do you just want people to smell your farts?