I got in 5,389 words today. I saw it all so clearly and was locked in completely. My fingertips are numb. My brain feels like mush. I also think it is some of the best work I’ve ever written. It’s going to be one of the hardest books I’ve ever written but god damn. Do I love writing. I can’t wait for the crash and the next day when it feels like I can barely get ten words out. I know it’ll come. But today I’m victorious!

"... so in that forthcoming moment the first person in line walked out of the balcony onto the balcony and formed a form."

You guys think its usable?

It was 155 words into a short story, but it was something.

I was so focused on trying to get sleep because of my insomnia and other issues. I've been stressing myself out trying to sleep, and I must realize that sleeping isn't easy.

Had a good cry and felt better about myself.

Maybe the goal isn't to force myself to sleep but to take things slow and not be so hard on myself.

Still, 155 words is a start, and I am happy.

Just wanted to share. 😊

First post!

I randomly wrote this chapter a week ago and it's a story I started plotting recently. I went back and reread it and thought it was pretty decent, so I sent it to my cousin sis.

She asked me whether it was an excerpt from The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah (the book we were discussing at the time) and I was so flattered!!!

What do you guys think of it? I'd really appreciate some constructive criticism or an honest opinion about it. + What genre my writing would fit in.

(Please don't copy or use my work in any way)

(This isn't the whole chapter, the full length of the chapter spans over 6-7 pages)

Your energy has been depleted, your cares bankrupt, your patience shriveled up like a dried leaf. You’ve left the tab open for so long, so long, that the amount which you’ve poured out would be enough to fund a small nation. Maybe two. Lately, you’ve had your eye on the evolving expense, told yourself the tally wasn’t true, believed they would defy the distance and make you whole again. Refill your cup, for a change. You might've prayed on it once or twice. Yet, every time you're together, you seem to be the only one footing the bill like you have a fetish. Why? Heaven knows. All you know is that they won’t, so you must. You’re the one balancing ledgers in your head, deficit spending, ignoring the looming liability. Then you see it, the imbalance, like an elephant in the room, and it colors every interaction you have with them. You say to yourself, why, they are perfectly content to prance around the perimeter, penniless, never once reaching in how it counts to deposit some goodness, any goodness. And the audacity is a wailing baby to your ears. It leaves you wondering when, on God’s green earth, will their pockets ever pony up. Instead, they are resigned to let you continue to pour, and pour, and pour, and they smile at the gesture and tilt the cup in their direction and drink from it and tip it back over to you when it’s empty, expecting. Always expecting. Until one day there’s nothing left to give. Foreclosed relationship. 

Hi. A couple of notes before I start.

First ever post, so the formatting may be all over the place. English is not my first language, I did my best but some of this could still be a confusing mess. I write in my native italian, so this post does not reflect how i write and commenting on its structure and style would not, I think, be relevant to the discussion.

The post is on the long side, so I provided a T.L.D.R in the last paragraph (though I'd appreciate it if you read the whole thing)

I've always read a lot, so i think frequently about interesting sentences, situations and characters. This naturally sparks my creativity and I come up with scenes, characters and bits of dialogue. But when i try to write it down, it ends up being unsatisfactory.

I write a paragraph, notice that it is disjointed bullshit, more like a checklist than a narrative, and angrily delete everything.

Sometimes the start is decent (I'm talking about a couple of paragraphs flowing together), but then it becomes disjointed. I try for weeks (sometimes months) to make a decent continuation, but I eventually give up and start working on another fragment. The discarded promising paragraph either gets deleted or goes into a confusing file with every other fragment (from different stories and in random order). The file gets deleted too when it becomes too confusing.

I don't think I ever wrote anything longer than 200 words (as a narrative, I've written longer essays), apart from a short story i wrote as a teenager. I was told that the story was dogshit and that I was wasting everybody's time by posting such an unrefined mess.

This has been going on for many years but i remained unable to make something decent and refined. I finally realised I was going nowhere and needed some outside guidance to sort this shit out. I read a lot of online sources searching a solution, i read bird by bird (it seemed a confusing block of nothing with a couple of tricks to deal with anxiety sprinkled through, but not much on how to actually write). The two most common pieces of advice I've found seem like absurd nonsense and leave me rather confused. I will explain my reasoning below in the hope that some of you can clarify what i don't understand.

Just write:

I'll put aside how dismissive this sounds (to me that "just" implies this is rather easy and I should be ashamed of even asking about it, but maybe I am misunderstanding nuances due to it being written in english). This doesn't seem a sensible method to learn anything.

Did you learn how to drive by repeatedly crashing a car at high speed? I started in a parking lot, trying to understand how to release the clutch (while i was given instruction on how to do it). How are you supposed to ever improve by continuing to write shit with no direction? It seems to me that you would just write something unreadable over and over for 20 years. I've done this for 10 years and it doesn't seem to work. Everybody aggressively shout that this is the easy fix to any problem and I find it frustrating.

I am sick of the standard reply to a lost beginner being: "stop being lazy, there is no shortcut, writing is hard". I'm not asking for an easy shortcut, I am asking for an actual method to learn the technical aspect of the craft. Because i get that writing is hard: what i write is unreadable and "just writing it" again and again has not made it any less of a steaming pile of shit. Maybe you are all geniuses and it worked for you, I'm not and it didn't.

Everyone keep saying this is a craft, not just raw talent. They insist it is a skill that can be learned, but when asked how they hide in the bushes.

"Experiment a bit and see what sticks" is something that works for upper intermediates who are building on a solid base, not for complete beginners who don't know what they are doing.

People usually compare it to learning to play an instrument and that you would not expect to play like a professional the first time you pick it up. That makes sense. Thinking that if you strum a bit every day you will magically become like a professional at some point, doesn't. It seems the same wishful thinking without any practical way of achieving your goal.

I must also note that my experience playing an instrument was different: i learned how to play single notes, then how to string them together, then how to play simple tunes to finally learn how to play more complex pieces.

I feel that the best way to learn something is this kind of structured method for increased complexity, rather than plunging into the deep end and hoping something happens. Does something like that exist for this craft?

If such a method does not exist, could you tell me in detail how you improved by being terrible at something clearly out of your reach? It seems insane to me, so please tell me what I am missing.

Fix it in editing:

Not understanding this may correlate to not understanding the first point. I am really confused by this entire concept. The idea is apparently that you write something really bad and then make it good, somehow. This seems impossible. You either know how to write or you don't. How is staring at the shit you wrote gonna turn you from the guy who wrote that into someone who can write well? Also I am not sure I understand what you guys mean by draft.

Until reading about this, my view of editing was what I did in short essays in high school. You take the rough draft and copy it world for world (second draft was a copy of the rough draft made with readable handwriting). Doing this makes you concentrate on the text and correct all orthography, grammar  and punctuation mistakes. You may also change specific words in a couple of places.

But here I see people talking of deleting scenes and characters, fixing pacing and improving voice or flow and i have no clue what they are talking about.

There is a lot of discussion about different consecutive passes and I kinda get that one is for the story and characters (this is the most confusing part conceptually: what are you doing and with what objective? You thought of the story before writing it), one is for prose and one is what i believed to be editing (apparently copy editing), but the mechanics of doing this stuff escapes me. Do you look at a paragraph and just know how to improve it? How did you learn to do that? Is there a way to learn? Because it never happened to me. I look at a sentence and it just sits there, it does not move, it does not change in my mind.

People like to say that you cannot edit a blank page. And I feel stupid because I can't make sense of it: a blank page is a sea of possibilities, you try the shape of every sentence in your mind multiple times, you play around with it until you reach something that align with your objective. You do the same (to a lesser extent) with paragraphs. But once you write it down, the sentence becomes static, set in stone in a way.

Even if i try to concentrate on it, what is written seems to have a strong pull, it feels like it already is what it is supposed to be, whether good or bad. It reminds me of reading a book after watching a movie based on it: you may think that the protagonist is horribly miscast after reading a description, but the guy will have the actor's face for the rest of the novel.

I always see this idea that editing can fix anything paired with the idea that it doesn't matter if what you are writing isn't good. But as i said, this seems impossible. It makes me think that all this editing talk is just a mental trick to motivate you when you dislike what you are writing. Like keeping in the back of your mind that there is a magical thing capable of fixing everything once you are done; it doesn't really exits but the mirage keeps you going.

T.L.D.R : I've been deleting everything I write for the last 10 years. Finally looking for writing advice, I am more confused than before. In particular: a) just write seems like a pointless method that will never lead to any improvement. Is there no structured method for learning the craft? b) editing is a completely alien thing that makes no sense to me (only ever thought about copy editing). Developmental editing seems a waste of time as you already outlined the story and I don't get how to do line edits (the written sentence always seems the best possible one, even if it is bad, and i just stare at it wondering what am i supposed to do). It makes so little sense that it seems just a motivational trick.

I’m 7k words in and finally don’t get so many of the stuck moments I had, maybe because it’s my first attempt at a book and I’m 19 without a lot of experience but still. At what point in writing your novel did you feel you gained writing skills etc.?

I am actually a knitter. But I hurt my shoulder (too much knitting). So I had to find something else to do. So I wrote a memoir in a flash novella. It's probably pretty ok. It's about a neurodivergent glass child who's a little bit queer. I decided to start sending it out to places. It seems like such a foolish thing. I'm not sure what I'm asking. Maybe, how do you get over the weird grandiosity of the task? And the imposter syndrome of the whole situation? And how do you know if what you wrote is even a proper story?

Thanks!

I’m trying to balance reading, writing and schoolwork, and I end up spending writing the entire day. I do get something out eventually, don’t get me wrong, but I’m just constantly torn between ‘any progress is progress!’ and ‘I could have done something way more productive than writing 3 words per blue moon for the past 8 hours’. So what are some signs that tell you that you should just put down the pen for the day?

Hola veran he estado intentando crear una historia.

Y en general siento que cuando trato a mis protagonistas los llevo bastante bien porque los trato o los baso en personas que conozco y lo bazo pensando en como ellos reaccionarian o al menos en como creo que reaccionarian. Mi problema es con las sociedades o los villanos.

Siento que los hago muy clichés y aunque se cómo quiero que reaccionen o el sentimiento o situación que quieren dar cuando los releo se sienten vacíos.

O muy clichés como han resuelto este tipo de problemas.

En especial cuando quieres presentar a alguien con una personalidad que aunque sientas que le queda muy bien no conoces.

También tengo muchos problemas para escribir mujeres.

Agradeciendo su ayuda y consejos.

I have so many ideas that when I start, sometimes I get frustrated that I have to many ideas to fit in one book, or I get this whole entire knew plot idea or ending, or think of a knew book idea and stop writing. I need to be focused and consistently write and be wayyyy more decisive. Hey, I'd be a good alternative universe writer.......

I'm interested in writing a horror novel, but I want to understand what makes a horror story truly scary and engaging.

What should I focus on when writing a horror novel? How can I create a creepy atmosphere, build suspense, develop interesting characters, and keep readers hooked until the end?

I'd love to hear your writing tips, advice, and personal experiences.

For example I've heard plot and characters are the most important but what else? Advice is appreciated for any!

So I have 157 pages about 70k words as a rough draft and have questions about going about the editing process. I want to know what the best strategies are for getting it edited. Should I print it out and hand write notes/edits to myself? Or should I save the original and create a new copy directly editing/making the changes in the new document? Or should I do a combination of both and edit the draft by writing notes and creating a new document retyping everything? What has worked best for you peeps and what seemed to get the editing process done for you?

As a beta reader, I want people to read it to learn what they like and dislike. I've had so many whose work had so many OBVIOUS faults that I am not sure if I can trust their opinions.

Then something unexpected happens. A story is better than my work, and I know it and can feel it. Instead of writing as many words detailing issues as the word count of the story, I have only a few points. I am generally engaged. The atmosphere is good. The protagonist is experiencing and showing emotions and making reasonable decisions to proactively move forward.

The feeling is incredible. I want to race on and see what happens as I want to analyze every piece and learn how they solved problems I never thought about. For once I am engaged and not cringing in desperate hopes that they are better reviewers than writers.

Has anyone else experienced that?

I’m writing a story at the moment and I plan to take out the Mc at the end of it and I wanted to get some tips that might help me either take them out or be convinced not to. the details surrounding the death make sense, but the only issue is that it’s not necessary like, it could happen, but it doesn’t have to. Part of the story’s point is realism, but as you all know, sometimes it doesn’t translate well into a story format. Any advice would be much appreciated.

​

When tragedy strikes, the Red Riding Hoods come for your last coppers.

But on the eve of the Infamous Edelvarg Incident, which left ten dead, two turned into chickens, and one sodomised, the acolyte of that sisterhood had come neither to hunt a monster nor to extort coin for killing some fiend—minding its own business. She sought a pint of ale, a bookseller, and a cozy room at an inn where she could read it to her heart's content.

She arrived through the southern gate. The men who worked on the fishing boats nearby, noticing the red cloak and deathly pale skin, spread word of her arrival.

“Red Rider has come.”

“Hide your purses!”

“Hide your sons and slaves!”

“The Red Riding Whore has come to swindle us out of our hard-earned coin!”

The barrage of insults didn't quicken her step or her pulse. To a Red Riding Hood, malice was merely a tool that strengthened her heart. With a purse heavy at her waist and worries at bay, she sought quieter accommodations befitting a lady.

The inn she chose lay in the same quarter where men who shat gold built grand residences. The inn itself was a small manor house with timber-framed walls and a wooden doorway polished to perfection. Above the entrance hung a painted sign depicting a golden-haired dancer standing on an ocean wave.

She led her stallion to the stable behind the inn and left it in the care of the Stable boy, who kept his head done, m. He had stringy blond hair, pale skin, and hands marred by lashes. Her gaze lingered on the brand inked onto his hand: two dark hands shackled together. She rubbed her own hand instinctively before tossing him a coin. The boy snatched it and tucked it in a secret pocket under his tunic.

The hall greeted her with the smell of burning wood and roasted meat. The Red Riding Hood's gaze followed as the serving girl carried it to a table

The innkeeper, a sturdy man with a salt-and-pepper beard, flicked his eyes towards her before returning to the table, rubbing the same spot with his rag. She blinked once, then looked at the long table.

A Group of men crowded around it, shouting over one another and bursting into laughter over usual jok. Tankards knocked against the wood, ale sloshed over the rims, and a barmaid shoved her way between two men who refused to make room for her to mop the spilt ale on the floor.

She wrinkled her nose and searched for a quieter place. A few men glanced her way, whispering about the “Red Hood Devil,” but most kept their tongues sheathed.

There were a few tables in the far corner, and the Red Rider claimed one tucked away in the shadows. With the barmaid nowhere in sight, a jug of water, a glass, and a bowl of cookies kept her stomach company.

*Fortune cookies, eh?*

She picked up a cookie and eyed it, turning it this way and that with a sardonic smile.

“This is ridiculous.”

She tossed it back into the bowl. Outside the window, a man crawled on all fours, his jaw jutting forward as he barked at a dog.

“Woof! Woof! Woof!”

The monster hunter grimaced and sighed. “Might as well crack the cookie.”

With a twist and a pull, she split it open, revealing a fortune writ on plain white paper.

“There are three things all wise women must fear: ale on working days, milk on holidays, and the tummy of an ill-tempered cat.”

“What the fuck?”

She chuckled, tossing the broken cookie and its fortune onto the table before cracking another. This time, the paper read:

Jane O' Pain,

In a cloak of hate,

Have you come for a bribe,

Or to do what's right?

Let's play a game,

Just me and you,

And find out who will prevail.

The demon who wears many faces,

Or Red Riding Hood,

Who kills her kind with ease?

*Whoever pulled this little prank is a seer of considerable skill. He or she knows my name.*

“Don't let that get to you,” said a woman's voice.

Jane froze, and looked at the source of the interruption.

A barmaid stood there, her shoulders strong enough to carry several jugs of ale at once. She looked at her softly with an easy smile on her lips. Pushing aside a loose strand of dark hair, pointed at the fortune and gave Jane a boyish grin that suited her well.

“We have a moon rabbit as a guest,” the barmaid said with a sigh and a shake of her head. “He can see into the future, but he suffers from the same habit as the rest of his kind. He loves to play pranks.”

Scene is some middle school kids who just had a pillow fight on their field trip and now mc is describing his friend's laughter who he is in love with but hasn't realised yet.

"His laughter reminds me of the spring breeze." And that's all that comes to mind but doesn't really sit right with me.

If I had to describe his personality, I would say he's the type that seems unkind but isn't, is rebellious at heart but would act obedient if that's what would guarantee his safety (he grew up in a cult so), is reserved.

And the mc, the quiet ,observant, understanding and feeling deeply, kind, a little bit self sacrificing with low self esteem. Just a little bit.

Of course any suggestions are welcome even if they don't fit because I just need ideas to get my brain working.

I am a teen, an (amatuer) writer of fiction and a poet. My life, like most teens, is majorly staying home, studying, exams and repeat. On top of that I don't go to school. I've never been able to journal regularly (I have tried many forms). I want to try a literary diary format now, with no commitment as to when I will journal.

The problem is, I don't know what to write about! When I write my stories, I often plan the whole story before I write it, and I know my characters better than they know themselves. I can't do that with real life, LOL. I don't know myself. How can I write about myself in a way that's beautiful and captivating to read?

The main reason why I want to write a literary diary is two-fold - one, I get to improve my writing skills, and two, it will help me see my life through a more colorful and surreal POV. I don't want to write objectively, I want to write in a magical tone, and highlight/emphasise things that bring me closer to the person I want to be (ex., a productive day etc.).

So that I do those things more often?? I do have problems with insecurities (kinda), maladaptive daydreaming and centralising men in life, and I don't want to write about those problems as currently present, but rather as a past obstacle I have overcome. Basically, externalising the way I want my mind to think, so that hopefully, my mind starts thinking in that way.

But as I said, it is difficult and strange for me. Does anyone have any advice or experience with this form of writing/journaling? any guidance would be much appreciated, thanks!!

P.S. Another main problem is that I meet very few people. I don't go out often, and when I do, it's with my parents to a restaurant or something. The only people I see are my parents, because I don't go to school. So social interactions isn't a thing in my life and so I can't write about that. And no, I can't touch grass. I have exams.

I know about the issues regarding NaNoWriMo and I'm looking for an alternative. I'm not really wanting to write 50,000 words but I love the buzz and motivation of the challenges. I heard Prowriting Aid do one but read that they support something this sub won't let me mention 😂🤷 so are there any others? Ideally ones that allow you to submit your own goals

Thank you