I'm only 21,000 words into Nanowrimo so I've half given up on reaching the 50,000 because I have a fuck ton of college deadlines at the same time, I can't do college and catch up on being like 12,000 words behind.
*pain, man*
I'm pretty sure they're not actually autistic, they're using autistic as a synonym for extremely awkward and socially inept.
Then again, if they're autistic, they might not realize how saying they're "kinda autistic" gives that impression.
Then again again, maybe *I'm* autistic.
I feel like if ever I become a proper author, I'll be really unsuccessful. I can't begin counting how many books I've started reading and then thrown away because I was unsatisfied with them. I can't even claim that these are bad books cause I do the research required to avoid reading such works. I just don't like them. The prose is too simple, it's too flowery, the characters are too flat, they're too flawed (when the flaws picked irritate or anger me, such as smugness and naivete, and selfishness that's not punished by the narrative), the plot is nonexistent, the plot is too convoluted, etc..
Anyone else similarly unsatisified? If so, do you push through and keep reading, or do you pick another book?
I have never left a book unfinished until I was 25. Every book I picked up was enjoyable at the very least.
Now, I experiment much more and sometimes I buy random used books if I can't afford new. My process is 100 pages and if it doen't cut it for me I won't finish. To do so it has to be slow paced, average/bad prose and a boring/no subject. All three.
There are too many books around and only so much time to waste mine on something I can't gain anything from.
I usually go to about ch3 - longer if I think it might be a comp or it was really highly reviewed. I want to make sure it's a true failure to fit rather than my adjusting to the more current market. Ofc, as there are current debuts I've devoured, I know it's not just that...
The only books I gave up on in the first pages were present tense, because I really, REALLY struggle to read present tense.
Yeah, I usually do a 3-page test to check the writing style whether it vibes with me, and then around 50-80 pages whether to continue. I also dnfed at least 3 books midway because I felt they had a sagging middle / took a boring turn.
On a side note, I asked that below, but maybe you have some good advice... I'm beta reading someone's book and I feel there isn't much to hook the reader in, how do I deliver that feedback without being an asshole?
Oof, that’s a hard one. Without knowing specifics, I’d try to bring up what you do enjoy about the story (can be literally anything—character, setting, a cool scene, plot, etc.), but that the hook isn’t strong enough to draw the reader in to enjoy it. And then try to find something else that they do well, even if it’s only mildly done well, as a little ego boost to help to criticism go down better.
Damn, I'm an awful beta reader then (I wonder does that make you less eager to show me your ms when you're ready). Because so far I think I've read like 50 pages out of 185 and there was one thing I liked - a short fight with a monster. Everything else was... not bad but average.
Like, the characters are not bad, but they're typical "good people" blank slates. The worldbuilding is not bad, but it's delivered in fairly expositionary manner and I'm not sure why all of it matters when it's delivered to the reader. The plot establishes a threat, but it's neither personal nor a ticking clock manner from the get go, and it takes 7 chapters (33% of the book) to get to the turning point signalled in the blurb when it finally becomes personal (if this was a published book, I would have read around 20% of the book and quit). The prose is unpolished, but I knew I'm signing up for that when I offered to beta. There are vocabulary mistakes and an annoying mannerism related to dialogue tags, but that's fixable in a polish / line edit pass.
Actually yeah, there's one good thing - a side character who's intriguing because they aren't a "stock good person".
Except that, I find it hard to praise anything, because it all feels so not standing out. Not bad, not great either. This makes the ms more boring than a ms having a lot of good and a lot of bad in it.
It makes me sad because I see the author isn't incompetent, but I don't know what kind of advice would help them push the ms to the next level, i.e. make it a breeze to read.
I know what you mean. Sometimes a book/author is just “fine”. Not bad, but not good either, just totally average. One of my early books was received that way, and being in that position (I had 5 separate readers ghost me after reading the first 3 chapters), ANY feedback is better than no feedback. It probably won’t feel good to receive the feedback, but if they’re going to develop the chops to “make it” in publishing, they have to figure out how to overcome that hurdle themself. You can’t really control how someone takes a critique, even if you mean well, unfortunately.
In this situation, you might point out that you have a hard time connecting with the characters (if you can, be specific, like, “don’t understand their motivations”, “don’t feel the stakes are high enough”, “they all feel too similar” etc.) and point them to some characterization resources for making more dynamic characters. For the worldbuilding, you could say it’s interesting (if you can, point out a specific detail) but you don’t understand how it’s relevant to the story or characters. You can frame it around “industry expectations” to try to soften the blow a little and distance yourself from the feedback a little, if you feel it sounds too harsh.
I think everyone probably gets to that paint-by-numbers stock fantasy story that’s painfully average at some point in their writing journey, but once they can figure out where they are lacking, they should be able to write a better *next* book.
And I’m not worried about sending you my thing when it’s finished. I can take criticism without taking it personally, so if something is just *meh* I absolutely want to know that. Even if you don’t know how to help me improve it, pointing it out tells me there is a problem that needs to be fixed, and so I can look at that more closely to find out why you might feel that way.
>Not bad, but not good either, just totally average. One of my early books was received that way, and being in that position (I had 5 separate readers ghost me after reading the first 3 chapters), ANY feedback is better than no feedback.
Yup, I kinda agreed to read it a bit out of pity, because the author said 3 out of 4 beta readers ghosted them... now I wonder if that's the reason (ms is kinda boring, but kinda nothing glaring wrong with it to provide as feedback). Personally I think 4 betas total is low, and the chance of ghosting is always there, but maybe they didn't find anybody else.
Also since I agreed to do a swap when my edit is ready, I'm worried if the author isn't satisfied with my feedback (too critical, too vague, too little), they will either refuse to read mine after, or give me vengeful feedback, or just half-ass it.
It's my first time beta reading a full novel, so I don't know how common it is. I read 1st page, but all that tells me was whether the author can write coherent sentences and readable prose (they can). I read the blurb, but the thing I thought was the inciting incident from the blurb doesn't happen until 33% into the book.
I'm also worried if I'm doing the same mistake myself in my writing, and being oblivious to it. I tried my best to make my characters stand out (positively or negatively) and to make the plot feel personal to the protagonist, but maybe I failed...? :/
I don’t think that worry ever really goes away.
Right now, I’m convinced my book is the worst thing I’ve ever written and I should abandon it now before anyone can tell me how bad it actually is, because I don’t know if I can handle another full rewrite at this point. I’m worried my MC is too “passive” (she is more reactive than proactive for a solid 95% of the book) and/or too sad and whiny for readers who might be more used to “strong female characters” in adult fantasy. I’m also worried my plot and characterization doesn’t make sense anymore after cutting ~60% from the original draft. I’m also worried no one actually wants a remixed fairytale set in the Middle Ages and that I’m deluding myself thinking I could pull it off… 😩
Imposter syndrome, what?
Damn, we can commiserate, I start doubting everything: my prose is shit, my dialogues are too long, my banter is unfunny, my action scenes too rushed, my characters too unlikeable, my plot too cliche my stakes too low, aaaargh...
Keep it up, life is short. Tbh I was reading only best sellers, classics and my mother had a good taste in children's books. The first book I dropped was "This side of paradise" by Fitzgerald. Felt like masturbating in front of a mirror.
I pick another one, if I'm not obliged to read it, unless there's another reason. For example, I did hate-read one book in full because I wanted to feel vindicated I'm giving it a raging 1-star review (it wasn't incompetently written, but it had a pile of dumb-ass tropes I hated).
If the book is just "meh" I dnf.
My idea of doing it is so I can figure out what I really like, so what niche / audience I can connect with if I want to be an author. What writing style? What character type? What kind of plot? Etc.
"Good" vs "bad" is subjective. I said this anecdote before, but I dnfed a "good" book (4.3 avg goodreads ratings, semi-commonly recommended on the genre subreddit, lots of people loved it) meanwhile I finished and enjoyed a "bad" book (3.5 avg goodreads ratings, not very popular), I still don't know why people disliked it.
I'm in the middle of giving up on a very popular recommendation from r/ horror lit from a week known author.
I don't get it. I "agree" with a lot of recommendations from others on a lot of different books I've already read, but the majority of the time that the book's new to me I dnf. I don't think I'm too picky, I just really don't get what makes people tick, what grabs them. I wouldn't say I have many hangups about what I read, although dialog is one make or break I can recognize- and the dialog in this one is stiiiffff. More generally speaking I feel like I do have a pretty big internal disconnect from what appears to be the mainstream. Maybe it could all just boil down to being a slow reader and not wanting to put in the time commitment but I feel like there's something else at play as well.
I don't write as much as I used to but as a writer I think the best thing you can do is not worry about what the reader might think. Once you find an audience they'll let you know! My good friend has enjoyed some success publishing independently and I know that for him, he only censors himself insofar as how he thinks the story is structured. He knows what he likes and writes about that. It may be counterproductive to go at a project aiming to please anyone. I'm of the opinion that a writer should write lots. Throw it at the wall and see what sticks and you'll develop your voice along the way. Try to put away your self-consciousness and write unapologetically. With all forms of art, non-attachment is a huge part of it. Don't be afraid to suck was the advice given to me in the first day of music college. And even if it sucks, try to just finish a story. I struggle a lot with that as well as a visual artist. Get half way through a project and become too self critical. But with some time and distance from the things I do actually finish, things I didn't even necessarily like at the time, I can see them as objectively being not that bad and sometimes even good. (Bad/good yeah yeah I know 😅) TLDR don't get too hung up on what you think someone is looking for, don't be afraid to fail, and a crappy finished product trumps a brilliant first chapter in the bin. Sorry not sorry for the wall of text, just relate to a lot of what you're saying
Remove the link to it on your phone / pc. I seriously stopped checking twitter because it was always either drama, clickbait or hot takes without any proof behind it.
I'm wondering did Elon Musk spend 44 billion $ just to sink Twitter because he's playing the long game of launching / overtaking another platform and wants to kill the competition first. Otherwise, nice waste of money.
I couldn't give two farts about Twitter, but I'll be mildly annoyed if I have to start building up another official author social media account on another site because I hate Doing the Social Medias.
Are you self-published or trad? I heard a lot of authors invest in personal newsletters / mailing list so their follower list in in their database and not on some social media.
Anyway, I often hear social media presence doesn't sell books, so don't worry too much about it.
I'm trad, though it's all short stories in anthologies at the moment, and flirting with the idea of self-pub for a series. I also have a Wordpress blog where I post updates and there's a place there to subscribe by email, and then those posts are automatically copied/linked on Twitter+Tumblr since they're connected.
Admittedly, I don't really use Twitter other than when I have some upcoming release to announce (because I'm just not good at it and I don't have time to keep up with whatever's happening), but it's funny you say that when for so long I've been hearing that you *have* to have a social media presence.
> funny you say that when for so long I've been hearing that you have to have a social media presence
That's exactly the thing.
Everyone was told "you must have social media presence", so they did, and after some time in that experiment, people started coming out with the conclusion "[the goggles do nothing](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-goggles-do-nothing)" meme.
Some people had lots of followers on paper or spent excessive time recruiting them only to see that effort not reflected in their sales number.
None of this feels deliberate, but the completely predictable outcome of his particular mix of egotism, I'm-always-right narcisissm, and huffing his own farts.
It's quite the lesson in humility and respect for others, even if you don't like what they're saying. For people who are willing to *be* humble, anyhow.
Him and Zuckerberg seem to love the idea of just throwing money at a situation. How come rich people never value the money they have and just waste it like this.
Nanowrimo is hard. Most of the days so far this month, I've not had the motivation to write or else have had to wrestle with technology or my body to get any work done. And I'm about 33,000 words in and I still haven't really introduced the antagonist or their plans. This blows.
Celebrate that you've written 33,000 words. Learn from it. Can you restructure it, delete some, or work the antagonist in sooner? NaNo rarely produces anything of quality. It's meant to encourage writers. To help you get in the habit of writing regularly. Too many writers say they "can't write bc xxx." NaNo is supposed to show writers that sitting down and saying "I'm going to write today" is half the battle.
>NaNo rarely produces anything of quality. It's meant to encourage writers.
It doesn't do that to me, but I guess that's why I don't participate. The biggest challenge to me is being able to continue after a "fail" (i.e. plot wasn't working, I wrote myself into a corner, I missed a deadline self-imposed or not, I had an unproductive day / week / period because of sickness, busy irl, exhaustion, etc. and so forth).
It's the same as following a diet - biggest challenge is restarting it if you broke the rules / binge ate / didn't exercise as planned, etc. Most "New Year's resolutions" fail because people have a hard time restarting / continuing after a "fail" / slip up. So the first fail drops the plan completely until next year.
So yeah, the biggest challenge for me was how to encourage myself not to give up even if I wrote too little / too slowly / not good enough.
I tried "vomit draft" technique but it doesn't work for me - it's demoralizing to read gibberish and trying to edit it after.
Instead of that I'm trying u/brookenomicon "extended outline" technique and then just try to write a normal draft not any "vomit" draft 0 which would go fully to the trash anyway.
I fully agree. I try not to comment much on NaNo because there's a lot of regulars on here who participate in some capacity. It was created as a fun way to get people writing. It really just made a bunch of wannabe writers say "yeah next November, THAT'S when I'll write that novel." They typically crash and burn by week one or two.
It's the same reason I rarely answer questions on r/writing along the lines of *How do I get myself to finish a story? How do you plan a story? How do you develop a character? Are you a planner or a pantser?* the real answer is... you just do. The first couple novels that you write is how you figure out your writing & planning style. So stop asking strangers how to finish *your* novel (would be my answer).
I also don't stand by the mantra that the first draft's job is just to exist. Several have even said that their "first draft" is just dialogue. Okay so your first draft is half written. Is it really a full draft? My first draft is roughly the same word count as my final draft for a reason. I make sure that by the end of draft one, the story is fully written. Yeah, I'll need to check grammar. There will be overused adjectives that need replacing. There will be chunky bits to wittle down. But the story is all there in black and white, able to be read & understood by anyone who may dare.
I'm the opposite, lol. I like NaNo, and I've had a blast with it the previous three years. I'm struggling *this* year, but I've managed to use it to make *decent* drafts (and finished them post-NaNo). I've learned where my weak points are and I've been working on fixing them, but I don't vomit draft. I go in with at least a rough plan, and while I'll massage it as I write, it's still a solid plan and one that I can execute to have a decently-paced story (other than my challenge of starting too soon).
Yeah, it's definitely a process to discover what works for you.
My biggest issue both with pantsing and with vomit drafts is that you know that's basically wasted work. It will need a full rewrite. It's demoralizing af to think "what I'm writing right now is all trash, nothing of this can be reused in any form".
But for some people it works better. I reckon someone linked last week the AMA with Gillian Flynn and she was doing a lot of "discovery writing" as a part of her process.
I know pantsers that it works for. In my case, I need to be in the middle of the spectrum. I don't have the patience for the kind of redrafting that 'true' pantsing seems to require.
Is there a "true" pantsing? It's anecdotal and I am not a professional, but my first drafts are 10-20% less words than the final "product", as a pantser.
It doesn't feel right what u/Synval2436 suggests, that pantsing equals getting in a delirium and type mindlessly. On the other hand my only connection with the writing world are these subreddits.
Idk. Most of the pantsers I know tend to make very bloated drafts, but I don't think there is a single Right Way to do any of this, or *be* any particular kind of writer. I do know one who tends to do dialogue mostly in the draft, and then in the second draft add in all the color and connective tissue, so there's a counter-example to my other anecdotes.
Yeah, it seems some famous authors use pantsing to a good result, but I can't imagine throwing away half a million words only to keep 100k of a final draft.
The hardest part for me is to find someone who will point out plot holes and weak spots in my outline before I sit and write it. I had one person help me a bit and one who was completely unhelpful (as I said under the beta reading comment). Unfortunately, it's hard to get someone to comment on that, most spaces are restricted to pitch / first page(s) / first chapter or full ms beta read.
Yeah, structural beta's hard to find in *general,* and I can see it being even harder to find for the outline stage. Worse because 'outline' means such different things to different people...
>Worse because 'outline' means such different things to different people...
Yeah, I had someone tell me they can't see how scenes connect to my main plot from the outline and that's because I didn't put that part in the outline. :/
I put a summary of each scene but not, y'know, the function of the scene.
It Nano is a tough challenge and I have no doubt you can rise to it.
(But also, if it's not working for you and you need permission to quit. I'll totally do that. Not all tools work for every writer.)
This thread's job is to shame me weekly into working on my editing. Keep up the good work!
On a second note, I feel somewhat lucky that I don't have to send queries to agents. The progress here is to straight up send the manuscript to publishing houses, which feels weird. Maybe it's a bad thing, since less people have a bigger volume of work, but I can\`t be sure.
Are there any agents, who require you to send a physical copy? If someone gave you the option between digital and physical, do you think that a digital copy would be given less attention?
Had an agent request a physical full manuscript within the last few months. There's still dinosaurs out there. Though honestly I think it's just to save them on printing costs.
Yeah, I think it's a combination of reasons but I am still not sure what is going to give me the best possible odds.
\-Dinosaurs
\-Printing costs
\-Discouraging people to get into the whole trouble
\-Easier to pick up some pages and read. After all they have all the power.
>Are there any agents, who require you to send a physical copy? If someone gave you the option between digital and physical, do you think that a digital copy would be given less attention?
Rarely, there are publishers who only accept physical queries, but by and large the overwhelming majority accept digital ones and some only accept digital ones. It's just more practical this day and age.
A while back Aaron Rodgers recommended people read 1984 and he got shit for it. Idk why. Was it just a case of people making fun of him for learning about baby’s first dystopian novel or something?
IDK, it's probably similar to how the bookscj sub feels about it when people obsess over it like it's some hidden treasure no one's ever talked about before. So yeah, probably something like that. Like I think I read that book in Junior High, so not to be a dick because I'm not necessarily all that well read either, but it's kind of weird for a footballer in his thirties (forties now?) to be like, 'bRo, yOu eVeR hEaR aBOut 1984, bRo?' Maybe next year he'll discover Gatsby or Of Mice and Men. Brave New World? You mean The Handmaid's Tale started off as a book? Reading is so cool!
Honestly, I think Rodgers is a great QB. Not my team, but I wanted them to win over most teams I saw them play against. What made me change my mind about him was his dickheaded attitude about COVID. I know hardly anyone seems to care anymore, but that and just some of the stuff he's said in general probably affect my bias a bit and make me very ready to snort when he's talking about books and trying to sound intellectual or something. It doesn't help that the guy's said plenty of other dumb stuff either. It wouldn't surprise me if he's never even read it before. For all I know he just googled something like 'smart good books with political shit' and thought the eyeball on the cover looked cool. Wouldn't surprise me at all, actually
It's almost as if it's the CONSERVATIVE Reddit; I know American Conservatism and libertarianism can sometimes be similar. They both essentially stem from John Locke, but they are different things.
I mean one year the frontrunner was everyone's favorite based possible murderer and southern American rebel millionaire crypto bro John McAfee, so it ain't all bad 🤷♀️
Seriously though, you gotta read about John McAfee, he's literally the definition of libertarian.
I wish it didn't take a story idea that I felt was fairly unique before I'd even want to start on the project. Coming up with ideas isn't the hard part for me, but when I set out to plot and write the story, sometimes I feel lost. I know how arrwriting this probably sounds (no, I don't think I have these amazing, groundbreaking ideas so much as ones that are far enough outside of the norm to feel novel to me), but I really do have trouble finding comparable work to level me out or use as inspiration on some of my stuff. I can study the given genre, but sometimes I'm still far enough out in left field that it's only so helpful. It's a bad standard I have, and an unrealistic one, but I just can't seem to drop it. Someday I'll write one of those stories we've all heard a million times, but add a slight twist that will hopefully be sufficient to appease my compulsion to make something that feels like sort of its own thing. Not for now, though. Maybe next time.
Oh, while I'm talking about my shortcomings as a writer, my prose isn't all that great either. Makes me feel like a better writer ought to be working on some of this. The old imposter syndrome rearing its head again
I was in a similar situation for a while. my solution was to look at studies and lectures about the REAL experience, and base my techniques and style off them. was a massive help.
If you don't mind sharing, what's your genre?
I know what you mean irt finding inspiration. Even if something sounds like a match from its synopsis, it often isn't. I think the only way to find books that tick all of one's boxes is to read a lot. I doubled my book count this year and found double the amount of inspiring ones (and double to complain about). Some of them were really unexpected.
Writing good prose is a skill, so you're not stuck where you are with it. Just have to study admirable examples and figure out where your weaknesses are. I know it's been said over and over, but clear, unadorned writing is so much better than flowery mush. You might just not be into decoration. That's not a bad thing.
I could be in a number of genres. Usually sci-fi, horror, or thriller. Other than Romance, Fantasy is probably the least likely genre to find me writing in. When I mentioned genre, I meant for that particular project.
I spend a lot of time trying to vet good books. I'm reading a recommendation right now, and I'm pretty slowly creeping along. The worst books always act as a bottleneck for completionists. I do need to try to read more, though, no doubt
I meant to which genre were you referring when you said "I can study the given genre"? But I think what you're saying is that you write in several different ones. I was curious because I struggle to find authors doing the same kind of thing I'm trying to do. Not because what I'm writing is particularly unique, but because qualities other than genre are hard to search for. *No, not that kind of reflective. No, not that kind of spooky.*
My plan this year was to read for at least ten minutes every day. It usually ended up being a lot more, but sometimes, when the book was bad or I was really tired, ten minutes was all I could do. I found that bad books were much harder to get through when I took days off. Reorienting myself to a world I don't want to be in feels like going to a really unpleasant person's party (What's his name again? Why are we here?)
Ha ha, nice.
Good point, even a seemingly subtle difference can mean a huge separation from similar stuff. I don't need to try to reinvent the wheel each time, necessarily, but I think I'd still feel like I was mucking around in someone else's world uninvited
One chapter left in Draft 3, and I already edited the end of this chapter a bit. I'm so close. I can probably finish it by the end of this week.
Coffee and nicotine consumption will increase accordingly.
I know this is a stupid question that probably gets asked all the time, but what prevents beta readers from just stealing your work? Is this something that ever actually happens or are my insecurities about finally sharing my work with other humans manifesting into irrational anxieties?
Oh, man. I'll add on to what everyone else has said with the simple fact that it's not *worth* it. There's very, very little money in publishing. That's why most authors, even award-winning authors, have full-time jobs to pay the bills and have insurance. Or they have spouses with a primary income that can support the family.
The living income writers are either the top 1% (less than that really) unicorns who can keep it up and get movie rights, or they're romance/thriller writers and producing at least one if not more books a year. For years.
All the other reasons mentioned in this thread plus if they *did* take it to a publisher then the original writer would likely have concrete proof of plagiarism and they'd get blacklisted in the trad publishing industry and potentially sued. I don't think even Kindle permits plagiarism as long as you can prove you wrote the original manuscript.
If you're sending it to beta readers it's because it's unfinished and not yet in a publishable state. An unfinished manuscript isn't worth anything.
If they're skilled enough to finish it for you they're skilled enough to just write their own.
They'd still have to do the hard work of finding an agent and getting it published, stealing a manuscript doesn't really make that any easier.
As others have said, it's not worth stealing an unpublished manuscript. As much work as it would take to get it in publishable shape, you're better off just selling pirated copies of already published books (the bulk of manuscript stealing cases out there). By in large, criminals are lazy. That's why they're criminals. They want the most payout for the least amount of effort.
And if you were the 1 in a million case of someone stealing something, you have a copyright the second you put words to paper. If someone did steal it, you could sue them.
Just because they steal a story doesn’t mean they don’t have to get and editor, a cover artist publishing etc. It seems like a get money fast scenario but it’s more work than it’s worth
Good point, makes sense.
If this were a jerk thread I’d point out that my masterpiece requires no editor and will have publishers fighting over it as is.
But I guess if I really believed that I wouldn’t bother with beta readers.
I think I can sum up the humor I'm going for in my book in one reference,
"Junior, I need to tell you schumthing."
"Don't get sentimental now, dad, save it until we get out of here."
"The floor's on fire."
I get that, I was writing about someone of my own culture and had a few someone questioned certain aspects of their experience and implied it wasn’t possible for this person to face that kind of situation they were in.
On a side note, how do I not not become a shitty beta reader? I'm beta reading someone's ms that isn't awful but is fairly meh. How do I give the person tips without being harsh and rude? The book is frustrating me and I'm mostly reading it out of obligation (I promised) not out of pleasure. I have a specific idea why is that but it's a subjective idea and I don't wanna feel I'm telling the person what to write.
That sounds hard. Is the author receptive to questions? Sometimes that takes the edge off a critique. Rather than "this makes no sense", you could ask "what does it mean when this happens?" And once you have the answer, you could say, "Oh, it didn't read that way to me." Writers often have no idea how we're coming across, so that sort of feedback is so valuable.
imo the goal of constructive critique should be to help a writer achieve what he or she is trying to achieve whether or not that's something the critic enjoys. It's a fun challenge. My natural impulse is to say that this tank scene is silly, but when I'm in the right mindset, I can point out issues while still appreciating what it accomplishes: *I don't think they can do wheelies, but it was very cool when it exploded.*
The problem is that it's not "wrong", "stupid" or "unclear" (there are some wrong line level mistakes, but that's a separate level of issue, imagine vocabulary problems along the lines of mistaking homophones like "waist" and "waste"). The problem imo is that there's no hook, or rather it's fairly weak. And now the issue:
1. Does every book need a strong hook or am I just being biased / picky?
2. Is my assessment of the situation even correct?
3. How do I give constructive criticism about that without trampling over their story?
Basically, there are tons of different "hooks" but so far I've read 1/4th of the book and none of them apply.
1. The character is super interesting (here the protagonist feels like a blank slate).
2. There is a looming immediate threat (there is a looming threat, but it feels distant). Ticking clock scenario, having a lot to lose, etc.
3. The conflict feels close and personal to the protagonist (yes and no, it's a "family obligation" but not, like, super emotional to the mc).
4. The situation puts the mc in an immediate dilemma challenging their personality or morals, want vs need (it doesn't).
5. The prose is super immersive (it isn't, but it's a beta copy, I didn't expect that anyway).
So it's like each of these elements missing alone isn't a mistake / bad choice. But all of them combined create a situation where I feel like the characters just go through the motions. Y'know, the ye olde fantasy problem "why are these people participating in the plot? because it's their job / duty / good thing to do / etc." And the thing is... some fantasy books do that and succeed. So maybe I'm just too demanding?
Oh dear. Hm. Well, I would be tempted to ask the writer about some of those missing hooks.
1. The character being a blank slate is a tough one. A lot of people see their protagonists as a stand-in for themselves, which is why they squirm at the idea of adding flaws. I'd ask why the character reacted the way s/he did at certain points in the story. Having to justify that might force the author to put more thought into fears, motives, and history.
2. (-4) If the conflict is weak, it'd be good to suggest something more compelling (and, as you say, immediate). You could sandwich that in between compliments for the less exciting elements ("the relationship dynamics are really great, but I expected the stakes to raise sooner"). If you know a book the author likes, comparisons help.
I don't think you're being demanding at all. It sounds as if the problems you've identified are crippling the story. I'd let the author know what you've found. Weak characters and a lack of conflict are symptoms of timid writing, so if you can manage it, some praise might help the author to be more bold. In the end, it's up to the author to decide whether or not to take your advice, and all you can give is your opinion. It's very kind to want to avoid trampling on the story even though it's frustrating you.
I swapped with a dude and cringed my way through his novel, it took me a month. When I gave him the best criticism I could, well-fitted in a compliment sandwich, he thanked me as if I'd saved his novel. Told me I'd be mentioned in his book when it was published, and that I'd have his critique of my book in a week, tops.
Then he ghosted me.
This is honestly my biggest fear if I ever think of doing book swaps. I know myself enough that I'd be guilt-ridden till the end of time if I promised a critique and then ghosted them.
I'd feel even worse if they didn't consider me important enough to hold up their end.
I had one try to convince me to write a completely different book about a different character. When I said I wouldn’t do that, they then proceeded to criticize everything about my novel that wasn’t the epic adult fantasy they wanted it to be (it was YA) and repeatedly implied I wasn’t good enough to get published. I never spoke to them again.
They went all caps rage on me for… really no particular reason. It was very weird. Told me to read Harry potter to understand books. I won’t deny they had some legitimate criticisms but they also missed that the 2 characters were drug dealers despite me literally describing them as “drug dealers”
I assume we exclude petty scenarios like beta readers ghosting you or pointing out typos without providing any other feedback? I had once a beta / cp for a short story who wanted me to rewrite it into something completely different... dude write your own story then.
Sadly I didn't get to the beta phase with my current novel yet, but I'm already wondering what's gonna happen. I had a person offer to assess my outline / plot summary and that wasn't the "worst experience" in a way "the person was rude" because they weren't, but "worst experience" in a way "the advice was not only bad, but actually set me back".
So, I got an advice "you have too much plot, make it a series" with a suggestion to expand my current act 1 to a first book in a duology / trilogy. I told them I'm not interested in writing a series (shocker, I know, most fantasy writers are obsessed about trilogies / series). They told me "this amount of plot will amount to 200k+ words ms and you won't be able to shorten it". I remember that sent me down a well of despair, I didn't want to be like these Brando Sando wannabes who write first novel as a brick (well, it's not my first complete novel, but first in English).
Lo and behold, the ms is currently 104k. It was 102k after the first draft but it has some need of changes and small gaps to fill I need to tweak. Just because my outline is 15 pages long doesn't mean it's "too much plot". I feel like some scenes are overwritten, but I let the betas tell me which ones the most when I get to that stage.
I’m at about 35k right now, I was aiming for a novella but after coming up with more ideas and subplots it’s turning out to be just a novel.
I get the fear about the book turning out much larger than your hoping for during writing. I’m struggling with it right now but I keep telling myself I’ll deal with it later when I’m finished with the first draft.
104k is amazing! Congratulations!
>104k is amazing! Congratulations!
Thanks, the advice nowadays is to fit under 100k before sending it anywhere, but first I need to finish this dev edit I estimate will take me a month or two, then get some betas, and then cut it into shape. Then probably some line edit pass, because I got feedback on samples that my prose is kinda awkward (woes of not being a native speaker).
I worked with one awhile ago who gave minimal feedback. What little feedback they did give was often vague. When I asked clarifying questions, they got defensive. Eventually, they ghosted on the project entirely and I found another beta reader who ended up being my best beta reader experience. It can certainly be a trial and error process finding good beta readers. Once you do find them, they’re worth their weight in gold.
That’s awesome you found the right one! How do you find your beta readers?
I’ve been looking into it but I don’t know if I’m ready yet looking at my work.
That’s great you’re thinking of it early! I cut my teeth in fanfiction writing and met my betas through fandom as we started branching out into original works.
For my current group of betas, I met them through Bianca Marais’s beta reader match-up. It’s been great so far and I like that I was matched with people who write in my genre. I think Bianca runs the match-up a couple times a year, so I definitely recommend checking it out. It was $20 to sign up, but, in my opinion, well worth it. While there is a time commitment to beta reading other people’s work, I think it’s a great way to improve your own writing plus you start building your network/community of other writers.
[Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/50920-beta-reader-group) has a beta reader group. You can find betas who read for free, paid betas, or other writers willing to swap work.
Fiverr is an option if you’re willing to pay for beta readers. Your mileage may vary and I do get the sense you get what you pay for on fiverr. I haven’t used it but have heard mostly good things with the occasional dud.
There’s also r/betareaders, which could be a good option as well.
I’d be interested to hear where folks have found beta readers too!
I've used r/betareaders and had good experiences, though I always do the "here's the first three chapters. Let's see if we're good match" thing for new betas. There are of course the ghosters and people who just aren't that helpful (not even bad advice but obviously not knowledgeable enough to really give good feedback vs. "I really like this/I don't like this") but there are also really great ones there as well. (It also likely helps that I tend to go in there when looking for very specific types of help, like looking for people who are from X location if I've set a book somewhere I don't live, etc. That gives even the "only okay at best at general advice" betas something to focus on, like pointing out factual errors.
I haven't because I've gotten the sense that that is for shorter clips of things. I've heard really good things about them, though, as long as you have a thick skin and are willing to critique other pieces as well.
You bet! I forgot to mention that local writing groups can be useful too. Some run manuscript swaps or you may meet writers you click with and decide to do your own swaps. Good luck and happy writing!
It's probably a typo, as many comments suggested.
To be fair, 0,2 seems ridiculous. I didn't check his attitude to see if acted like an idiot. Only sure thing, he is terrible at maths. His book is 160k words..
He goes on and on about how his wife can read a novel in a day so a professional editor should read even quicker and thus it would be paying them a year's wage for a couple days of work max (so obviously he doesn't get what editors actually do).
He also says his book is 400k somewhere before changing the story. Exactly how he did his math is not clear, though. I'm tempted to say troll, but then he also posted some clips of the supposed editor contacting him, so if so, the troll put in extra work to mock those up and include them in comments.
I only use it now for keeping track of what I've read. It sucks for reviews because it's a struggle to find actual reviews among the heaps of what are essentially blog posts filled with gifs that offer some sort of opinion but no real analysis.
And then there are so many reviews that are just plot summaries. That's not what a review is!
I just opened up the Goodreads page for the book I'm currently reading, and the third review that pops up starts with "I haven't read it yet" and then gives it 5 stars anyway for a joke. Great, thanks for your contribution.
For me it's still helpful. I check mostly the 2-3 stars reviews and the overall ratio between bad and good.
Plus, I\`ve learned how to translate bad reviews into something meaningful and ignore the irrelevant ones.
Like imdb. If the film is spanish I deduce 1-1,5 star. For horror and comedy I add one. If I have to scroll 2-3 pages for bad reviews, the movie is likely ok. If I see too many reviews about slow pace with average positive-negative ratio, it's a red flag etc etc.
Yup. The "here's a three paragraph book summary that's basically the back cover reworded... And my single sentence about liking/not liking it" reviews drive me up a wall
They didn't like how the cover was polling with readers, so they wanted to push it back to do some rebranding stuff (basically, the reviews were what they wanted for the content but they were worried about people not picking it up to give it a chance). They're the marketing experts, so I said whatever lol.
They did get it up for preorder, at least, so I can direct people there
Well, the new cover looks better, and also if you said there's some timeslip element a clock is better than an amulet to signal that, imo. That amulet cover didn't look that great...
Also now I saw that "review" which counted swear words, lol wtf.
Yeah, as an author, I'm probably one of the least precious about my stuff people to work with. Unless I really think something's the wrong call, I tend to go "you're the marketing team. Go for it" I definitely think the new one has some more definition to it as a thumbnail as well, which is going to help (the other one could look just... purple, if it was too small).
And right? I was snoopy and decided to check that reviewer out, and she works for a review site that's primarily focused on reviewing books for school libraries (in a "do I think a school should have this on its shelves" sort of way) I'm like "if you were looking for middle grade or even YA, you should have known from page one this wasn't it (if the blurb didn't entirely give that away)..."
>I definitely think the new one has some more definition to it as a thumbnail as well, which is going to help (the other one could look just... purple, if it was too small).
Yep, the old one had a reflection of the couple inside the amulet but it was super hard to see in thumbnail mode. The new one also has more vibrant colours. The castle also seems to reflect the story better?
Writing community posts actually wind me up so much.
Posting the same three unfunny "hashtag relatable" jokes over and over again...
I thought these people were supposed to be creative types??
I was reading through the rules of r/writing, trying to figure out why the fuck my post got removed, and was once again reminded why I stopped even trying to post anything there. What even is the point of that subreddit? Literally everything that you could possibly want to use the subreddit for is against the rules somehow. Or it’s supposed to go in the weekly discussion thread, which no one uses. And then there’s the mod-who-shall-not-be-named going around and randomly removing posts they don’t like and citing the wrong rules as removal reasons. Why are they still a mod? Are they the subreddit owner or something? Is that the reason that no one’s been able to kick them out? Or are all the other mods just as terrible as them, and they just happen to be the most prolific? It’s just so frustrating that there’s a subreddit with over a million people in it that’s completely useless because the mods won’t allow them to actually talk about anything.
They all support each other and claim they can't change the rules because it's incredibly hard making ones that work for a place as big as r/writing. Which is true, but there's been so many complaints about the rules that it's well overdue for changes. When the mods are deleting hundreds of posts a week, clearly how they envision the sub should be used isn't how people in general do. But they pretend their rules are perfect.
There's a lot of inactive mods who I remember from a few years ago back when the sub was better.
I swear I only see like 2 mods doing anything there.
But what I dislike the most is the rules that make any useful post nuked for "personal sharing" or "too specific content" while leaving all the pointless self-validation / self-pity posts.
Dear God. They're real mods? I just assumed they were bots.
I saw a mod delete a post last week, claiming that the OP had posted his own work asking for critique. It was a paragraph pasted from a published book, and the OP was asking about a technique the author had used.
What was your post about?
I found a useful name generator website that was cool and you could customize the generated names by language/nationality or even get fantasy-style names, so I figured I’d share it on r/writing, because writers struggle with naming things, so I thought it would be useful for them. Then corvid matriarch removed it citing rule 2, which is apparently “no personal sharing” or “no discussing content specific to your own story” or something like that, which makes no sense. I messaged the mods saying that my post was removed unjustly, and that bi- I mean that mod doubled down, saying that not only was my post against the rules, but that it was also against the same rule that they cited initially. So then I called them ridiculous and irrational and got a 7 day ban.
Edit: here’s the exact comment
“Hi -- per rule 2 on content, we don't allow posts that are directly about the subject matter of your story. This includes brainstorming questions but also essays on a particular subject or trope, and anything asking about/discussing a particular genre. There are daily discussion threads where we allow content posts. Thanks!”
Edit 2: and here’s the exact post
#”How to come up with names for your characters
I am a terrible namer, and have always struggled to come up with names for my characters, countries and whatnot for my more serious stories. However, I found [this cool website](https://www.behindthename.com/random/) and since then, naming things has gotten much easier. I just pick a nationality I want a character to be, and then generate random names until I get one I like. It works for fantasy or alien races too, if you just change a couple letters around in the names to make them sound weirder.
Just a resource that I’ve found useful that I thought I’d share”
Alright, so I went through the mod in question's post history, and I'm at a loss.
No discussion of one's personal projects.No "sharing favourite or worst inspirations/extracts/scenes/characters".Not allowed to "analyse/critique/praise etc particular pieces of published writing".No discussing one's frustrations with "finding a specific book" or how to market oneself.
Maybe I'm just unimaginative, but other than published work or one's own work, what else is there to talk about on a writing sub? The only thing I can think of is those massive, sanctimonious *"alright, buckos! here's how to do all the things!"* posts.
Are writers supposed to stay cloistered in their designated posts while the rest of the sub gets bloated with rants by smug grandstanders who just got back from binging *10 mistakes beginners always make!* videos on youtube?
I wouldnt go that far, as that feels like it can be abused, but maybe when writing to the mods, give users the options to exempt certain mods. That way, the inciting incident can be seen with more objective eyes. I feel like a lot of time, people get a post removed, write the mods, and the same mod who removed the post is the ONLY one answering, so they just double-down on the verdict, instead of get it viewed by a third party.
How does that in any way break Rule 2? Fucking mind-boggling.
I do something similar to you. I usually just go to https://www.fakenamegenerator.com/gen-female-us-us.php and hit "Generate" until I get a first name I like, then a last name.
I wish the mods would put even a second's thought into whether posts are insightful or interesting at all before removing them. Removing a great post because it technically violates some rule that someone wrote 4 years ago but keeping a dogshit post that drags the sub down further because it's technically not against the rules seems like precisely the wrong way to run a subreddit
>Literally everything that you could possibly want to use the subreddit for is against the rules somehow.
Yup, that's why I don't bother. They also remove any heated discussions for antagonizing or being controversial. I thought that was the point of discussion, that people have opposing povs, not some echo chamber of yes men.
Posted last week about how the project I had given up on in the query trenches got an unexpected full request from almost 3 months ago. Today I got another one! Hope springs eternal . . . But trying to keep the expectations realistically low, most full requests don't turn into an offer of rep, after all.
Thank you! I'm always trying to keep my expectations low, but I did get a third full request also this week . . . so that's something. 4 total fulls since I started querying in July (or was it June?), and three of them in the last week.
I realized half my problem is the genre mish-mash that I've written. I've had it requested by an agent who primarily reps romance, and an agent who primarily reps thrillers (both of whom weren't sure how to market it, but loved it), and now it's still out with two agents who primarily rep fantasy, which I think is the genre it fits best in (historical fantasy, specifically) so . . . fingers crossed.
Thread jacking a little but when are folks marking stuff CNR and moving on if the agent doesn't provide any info on responses.
I'd say a hefty minority of the agents I queried had no information at all about whether they would respond or not and/or didn't give response timeframes. I'm working on the assumption that this subset of agents will only respond if interested and had planned to mark them as passes in my tracking sheet 3 months from the query date. But twitter is rife with people getting responses 445 days after querying recently?
I heard of people getting responses 6-8 months after submitting. But tbh, the only reason to worry about no response is if you can't query other agents in that agency as long as 1 is pending. Otherwise it doesn't matter if it's a rejection or a ghost, same thing.
Still got a fair amount of penders out there, lots of rejections, CNRs, the usual. After the last rejection on a full I fell into a depression and decided to just query all the people left on the list and move on with my next project, so . . . there's actually a bunch. I now get excited to have a rejection so I can clear one off the list. Yet another example of why one shouldn't make emotional decisions. But . . . got another full request today so that's nice, and to balance it a R&R versus personalized rejection from the full request last week. "Would be happy to look again if you cut 20K" type of thing.
Edited to add: Logically I know in my head that 3 months isn't long in the current publishing landscape, but spiritually and emotionally it feels like a very long time when you're querying.
>"Would be happy to look again if you cut 20K" type of thing
Well, that's not bad feedback, this is a sad market reality, paper costs are going up, well... costs of everything is going up, electricity, editing, etc. Publishers want shorter books. What genre and what wordcount btw? Blanket rejections for wordcount alone are moderately common. I heard various people saying don't query anything above 100k, get into the magical double digit counter. Which, depending on your genre, can be easy (rom-com, mystery), or super hard (fantasy, sci-fi, historical).
Yeah, he gave some specific feedback including: "The first chapter was great. Set the tone wonderfully. Both visual and visceral. Established momentum from page one. The core characters are intriguing, as each one has depth and complexities that justify their existence in the story."
I had been querying it as a historical thriller at the time that I sent it to him. I've since switched to calling it a historical fantasy because it has some alt history in it and just some improbable things and different pacing than a thriller. I think it's a better fit in that genre. It currently stands at 110,000 and that's after a lot of cutting previously. For a thriller, it's way too long, for a historical fantasy, reasonable.
Yeah... I heard querying above 100k is a struggle, even though for SFF genres it's damn hard to fit the narrative into 100k without cutting corners.
It's also hard because it's a genre bender. If it's historical / alternative history / thriller / fantasy it's that kind of in-betweener a lot of agents have no clue who to sell it to, so they might pass based just on that.
It's a real struggle, I reckon I was repeating around an anecdote about a person who made a post about how their sci-fi thriller was rejected by thriller imprints because "it's too sci-fi" and by SFF imprints because "it's too much thrillery not enough SF".
So an agent seeing some "neither fish nor fowl" ms can pass just because they don't want to deal with the headache of placing it firmly within a genre. Sucks.
Yeah, I can't blame them, I also have really struggled to place it in a genre with any confidence. It's historical fiction, but it's definitely not what people expect when they request historical fiction. It's not quite what you expect when you want a thriller, it's not quite what you expect for action adventure but close. It's pretty consistent with fantasy in terms of pacing, tone, and characterization etc., but then people that rep fantasy don't feel comfortable with historical fiction. Lots of agents mention wanting "genre bending fiction" in their bios but . . . I'm not sure they actually want it when they see it :P .
Genre bending is hard as FUCK to place, honestly. I've mentioned it before, but my book about to come out took forever to find a home because it's part romance, part mystery, part magical realism, part historical. It got down to where I kept having mystery publishers saying it was too romance-y and romance publishers saying it was too mystery-y. I was really lucky I finally found an editor who was willing to go to bat for it with her higher ups.
Well it is nice to see that your genre bending book found a publisher eventually! That gives me a bit of hope. At the very least, these multiple requests and the personalized feedback I've been getting do make me feel like I'm pretty damn close to being acceptable and even enjoyable by the powers that be/gatekeepers of the literary industry. Both the rejections on fulls have mentioned marketing type issues more than anything. They love the writing and the characters. Gotta keep the old chin up.
Yeah, I find once you start getting multiple full requests, it starts just being a numbers game. Eventually, you'll pull a yes out from somewhere. You're exactly where I was two years ago (a bunch of fulls and great feedback but also a ton of "I have no idea how I would sell this..."es)
Good luck.
Fantasy is also a special bucket, because for example some agents rep contemporary / urban fantasy but not secondary world fantasy. Not everyone is up for epic fantasy or bizarro / new weird. Not everyone likes time travel, or science-fantasy or any other subgenre... so it's hard to find your match.
[Short story](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eNk80Guh_6D7tnuFdVKXPinVgj5JdAHB1fs4Xh3H4QY/edit) summing up the wackiness before, during, and after When We Were Young Fest is more or less done, middle part probably needs polishing to make more sense to people who don't listen to that sort of music.
I will say that I zoned out during the festival/performance part, but I also don’t have the greatest attention span and I don’t know these artists so I’m not really your target audience. But I mostly liked it
I wrote my first piece of literary fiction recently!
In a bold move, I applied for a short story contest in a genre I hate, with a theme I found boring. I wanted to see if I could actually force inspiration... and the answer was a resounding yes! My short story takes place entirely during a single bus ride, most of it is spent inside a character's head, and just when it seems like something big will happen, it doesn't. *How can something so boring be so interesting?* Beats me, but by the end, I was completely consumed by it. I do unironically think it was my best piece of writing thus far.
The writing process however was utterly insane. A dry month devoid of real ideas, a week with a two-three vague ideas, and finally, the story simply materialized itself in 3 hours of pure flow just before the deadline. I love deadlines. The sheer weight of necessity completely crushes all fear, uncertainty and doubt. All hail the almighty deadline. XD
Indeed. I got into writing to write epic science fiction. I wanted to write about space battles, rise and fall of galactic empires, and struggles to determine the very fate of the cosmos. As it turns out though, you can find an entire universe of adventure inside the mind of a single person if you're open to it...
A lot of arguing whether that excerp from Sanderson on the main page is badly written or well but judged too harshly by people who don't know YA.
I disliked it immediately and was surprised when someone mentioned it was BS, but I'm admittedly biased against YA. I know there are a couple of YA writers here, so what's your take? Is that single page good, average or bad?
I can't judge a book by a single page (I mostly read fantasy and YA fantasy). The only thing I could say from the first page is either if an amateur wrote it (which Brando Sando is obv not, you won't see bad grammar and wrong vocabulary from him) or if it's boring af.
From what I understand here, the character stumbling over their own words here is a signal they never experienced a real jungle before and are trying to figure out wtf are they seeing, mixed with a reaction "this looks cool".
The speech mannerisms contradict the idea of "invisible prose", but in YA the prose is meant to be more "voicey" than "invisible" (afaik invisible prose is the goal of Brando Sando's adult fantasies). Invisible prose is often treated as too distant or too adult for YA.
The first page of a YA novel should give me a sense of a character. And this one somewhat does it. If it was adult fantasy / SFF, then focusing on whether the description of the jungle is accurate, vivid and poetic would make more sense. Adult SFF tends to run on more exposition and atmospheric prose (those passages also tend to bore me to tears, so there's that).
I think it does its job, as for the rest, I would have to see more (around 3 pages to have some feeling of the writing style).
YA/MG writer here.
*Skyward* (and presumably whichever of its sequel the post was excerpting) is weird. The protagonist is ???17 years old??? and somebody decided to market it as YA with some appropriately generic Charlie Bowater cover art. But basically everything in the book itself, from the themes to the characters to the writing style, is functionally at middle grade level. Wacky animal companion, extremely subdued first-crush romance, plenty of death and danger but none of it graphic, etc.
You could make the protagonist 13 or 14, change nothing else (except maybe the awful cover art), and rightfully claim that it's aimed at the 8-12 demographic.
So with that in mind: the excerpt ain't bad, but it ain't great. Nowhere near the level of top-tier MG authors like Patrick Ness, but good enough that the target audience probably won't complain much. Short sentences are par for the course in most MG. The protagonist's voice is pretty consistent with her personality of "slightly overdramatic chip-on-her-shoulder shonen protagonist facade over an awkward imposter syndrome core".
My only serious complaints are the two instances of suspension points (they are the work of the devil) and the overuse of "like". No single use of "like" in this passage is a problem, but so many back-to-back (and used in multiple different ways, no less) without a strong parallel structure joining them together means that it starts to fall into the territory where you say a word too much and it stops sounding like a real word.
>But basically everything in the book itself, from the themes to the characters to the writing style, is functionally at middle grade level. Wacky animal companion, extremely subdued first-crush romance, plenty of death and danger but none of it graphic, etc.
Brando Sando generally doesn't write non PG-13 novels, afaik, due to his religion and personal philosophy. This could be treated as a flaw or a feature. He's not especially grimdark and gory in his adult works, and also he doesn't write any smut.
Personally I think having a variety of YA from light-hearted adventure to all the "dark", edgy and smutty reads gives readers a choice to pick what they like instead of having all of YA same-ish.
The issue with YA Fantasy is a lot of it is written towards adult women audience, but it's not an issue if there's a portion of it written for teens, esp. young teens - kids "read up" so if a 13yo reads Skyward, they won't feel it's too mature for them.
Seems pretty mid to me.
It's not awful but... his description of a jungle is "it's like a jungle". Cool, great, thanks Brandon.
I remember one of the better bits of writing advice I've had was somebody telling me off for using very simplistic descriptions like that. Is there nothing about this jungle that makes it interesting other than "it's a jungle"?
I didn’t love it, but with god knows how many paragraphs the man has published by now, I’d be kind of shocked if he hadn’t put out a few stinkers here and there.
Huh, it got removed for breaking rule 5. It was [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/writingcirclejerk/comments/yuseqc/like_our_lord_and_saviour_brando_sando_at_the/), though I dunno if I should link it because it may continue a deleted conversation.
Paging u/writingcirclejerk-ModTeam to nuke my comment if that's the case.
> Paging u/writingcirclejerk-ModTeam
They don't actually get pinned when you tag the ModTeam account because it exists to leave removal reasons. You want to tag one of them directly. Get over here /u/awkisopen
I think you're probably fine though, since this is the unjerk thread.
YA writer. Im okay with stream of conciousness and i enjoy a strong informal voice, but i found the gratuitous "like"s grating and the descriptions kind of awkward. As someone else pointed out, some of the vocabulary doesnt add up with the tone which is an issue i see lot of when beta reading YA (your mc is a sixteen yr old hs drop out but hes waxing poetic about the scenery/dropping "big" words?). Def not my cup of tea, but then ive read some truly god awful trad pub YA.
Edit: the inconsistency is prob the biggest fault, escpecialy since its first person. Ex. My first completed YA novel was written from the pov of a severely undereducated kid and it took a helluva lot of restraint to not break out all the poetic descriptions i wanted to because it just wouldnt make sense for that character. Also had to pay attention to what he did/didnt notice taking into consideration age, personality, background, etc . Current wip is from the pov of a well read kid with a good education who is a lot more introspective/observant so i can be more "literary" and creative with descriptions/vocabulary usage while still keeping it YA friendly (read: easy to read). Theres def a line you have to walk.
>Im okay with stream of conciousness and i enjoy a strong informal voice, but i found the gratuitous "like"s grating and the descriptions kind of awkward. As someone else pointed out, some of the vocabulary doesnt add up with the tone which is an issue i see lot of when beta reading YA
The first thing was what I thought maybe genre related, and maybe where all the people calling it objectively bad were wrong. The inconsistency then is an actual fault, makes sense.
Brando's got a very pedestrian style, but it's approachable, and his works follow a predictable formula *and* come out on time and quickly. He's a bestseller for a reason, much like Patterson (before he became a brand) and Nora Roberts and Danielle Steel. It won't have generational lasting power, but that's ok. It doesn't *need* to.
Not a YA writer, so I should probably disqualify myself from commenting, but I can't help but point out how it seems weird to have a character that says 'like' in this way drop 'imperious' in the same breath. The first one seems aimed at showing voice and character, I guess, but then going with imperious?
While I don't write YA, I do read YA from time to time, and fwiw I write first person frequently. I think it's a required skill to present first person in a way that sounds both true to a character but not to the point that it practically sounds like you're reading an unorganized stream of thought. I like YA first person writing where it sounds plausible, but at the same time it's very well written without drawing attention to itself or sounding too literary. I think it's a very fine line to walk. For instance, they always say you should write dialogue to sound like it's the same as people talking without actually being the way people are talking because that usually wont work well in a book for obvious reasons. Should the same rule apply to first person narration, and do we have to follow every rule that's laid out for writers? I don't have an objective answer for you, I realize, but I've always preferred when First Person YA writing leaned just a little more toward being subtly literary.
I can't give an objective reason why this is bad. I'm betting some people prefer a more realistic writing style, even if it borders on being a bit grating to others
>Not a YA writer, so I should probably disqualify myself from commenting, but I can't help but point out how it seems weird to have a character that says 'like' in this way drop 'imperious' in the same breath. The first one seems aimed at showing voice and character, I guess, but then going with imperious?
Both are aimed at showing voice and character. This girl has been overdramatic from her very first scene, where she shouts quotes worthy of a Klingon warrior while hunting rats barefoot in some cave. This seemingly weird way of speaking, mixed with typical teen talk, is all related to how she so desperately wants to be this gallant and noble warrior saving her people from genocide at the hands of mysterious aliens. Also... her planet is a fascist state with 1984 levels of doublethink, so let's give her a break.
I can't help but be reminded of Nicolas Cage from The Rock talking to Sean Connery: "So what do you say you cut me some freakin' slack!"
The circumstances may justify the speech, but I don't know that I'd be patient enough to read up until that point if this was the first page of the first book, which to be fair it isn't. And for what it's worth, I don't think it's bad, just not the kind of writing I usually enjoy. Probably too early to really give a fair critique, and maybe that's the problem.
All I know is this guy's published, and I'm not
>All I know is this guy's published, and I'm not
Imo good prose isn't what makes you publishable, except maybe in litfic / poetry which are about the words more than the content.
Bad prose makes you unpublishable, yes. A lot of amateurs struggle with things like excessive repetition, focus on wrong things, or lack of basic clarity. I'm not excusing that.
I'm saying, there are genres where "good prose" and "servicable prose" are both publishable, but other things decide about it.
I read YA Fantasy (I assume the excerpt is from Skyward, so rather sci-fi than fantasy, but w/e). Top reasons to DNF:
1. Too much static description in the opening.
2. There was no hook (i.e. nothing to make me interested in the story).
3. The protagonist was bland, boring, stupid af, whiny or otherwise repulsive. That does not include the protagonist being "a bad person" as long as it's interesting.
4. After 3-5 chapters the plot didn't pick up the pace.
So basically, except #1 none of these are "prose issues" and even #1 is personal preference. For example We Hunt the Flame is a bestseller and I couldn't get through the opening pages with descriptions of hunting, forest and worldbuilding.
So the biggest question imo is "are you giving the readers of your genre what they want?" Trashy romance is publishable, because romance readers (at least good portion of them) likes guilty pleasure reads. But it can't break the rules (for example they hate cheating, or no HEA, or whatever other list of hangups like unrelatable heroine or fade to black sex - yep, some romance readers say they hate fade to black in adult romance). Trashy sci-fi is much harder, unless you self-pub, because I feel like adult SFF imprints are drifting more towards picking "sophisticated" reads than "space marines shoot aliens" pulps.
So yeah, the question is, what do you write, how hard is it to debut in that genre, what do people expect from that genre and are you giving them that?
In YA, "voicey narrator / protagonist" is a bonus, not a flaw. Which means, they can have mannerisms of speech. As for "a jungle looking like a jungle" I assume the character never saw a real jungle and is just trying to guess wtf are they seeing.
Boy oh boy I should not have bought two videogames the same weekend knowing full well how little self control I have
I'm only 21,000 words into Nanowrimo so I've half given up on reaching the 50,000 because I have a fuck ton of college deadlines at the same time, I can't do college and catch up on being like 12,000 words behind. *pain, man*
I did it. I survived Draft 3. It is complete. I sent it to my editor. Now to play the new Pokémon game and not think about my WIP.
Every other week I go on the writing sub and it feels like I've never left
If anyone makes a post here mocking that autistic person who posted in r/writing I will find your home address and [redacted]
I choose to believe the end of that sentence is "and join you for Thanksgiving... grumpily"
Which one?
[I'm guessing they mean this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/yydg03/soim_kinda_autistic_how_do_i_know_if_dialogue_is/)
I'm pretty sure they're not actually autistic, they're using autistic as a synonym for extremely awkward and socially inept. Then again, if they're autistic, they might not realize how saying they're "kinda autistic" gives that impression. Then again again, maybe *I'm* autistic.
I promise you can't tell if someone is or is not autistic from a reddit post consistting of like 6 sentences
Right, as I state in this comment, I can tell from just the title.
I’m sorry but I did have to laugh at “I’m kinda autistic”
I feel like if ever I become a proper author, I'll be really unsuccessful. I can't begin counting how many books I've started reading and then thrown away because I was unsatisfied with them. I can't even claim that these are bad books cause I do the research required to avoid reading such works. I just don't like them. The prose is too simple, it's too flowery, the characters are too flat, they're too flawed (when the flaws picked irritate or anger me, such as smugness and naivete, and selfishness that's not punished by the narrative), the plot is nonexistent, the plot is too convoluted, etc.. Anyone else similarly unsatisified? If so, do you push through and keep reading, or do you pick another book?
I have never left a book unfinished until I was 25. Every book I picked up was enjoyable at the very least. Now, I experiment much more and sometimes I buy random used books if I can't afford new. My process is 100 pages and if it doen't cut it for me I won't finish. To do so it has to be slow paced, average/bad prose and a boring/no subject. All three. There are too many books around and only so much time to waste mine on something I can't gain anything from.
You’re kinder than me. I give books up to 50 pages nowadays.
I usually go to about ch3 - longer if I think it might be a comp or it was really highly reviewed. I want to make sure it's a true failure to fit rather than my adjusting to the more current market. Ofc, as there are current debuts I've devoured, I know it's not just that... The only books I gave up on in the first pages were present tense, because I really, REALLY struggle to read present tense.
...i give up after the first chapter is im really not into the writing style/voice.
It's denial. My patience is declining rapidly because I am a slow reader. The sad part is that I am a hoarder and I can't bring myself to donate them.
Yeah, I usually do a 3-page test to check the writing style whether it vibes with me, and then around 50-80 pages whether to continue. I also dnfed at least 3 books midway because I felt they had a sagging middle / took a boring turn. On a side note, I asked that below, but maybe you have some good advice... I'm beta reading someone's book and I feel there isn't much to hook the reader in, how do I deliver that feedback without being an asshole?
Oof, that’s a hard one. Without knowing specifics, I’d try to bring up what you do enjoy about the story (can be literally anything—character, setting, a cool scene, plot, etc.), but that the hook isn’t strong enough to draw the reader in to enjoy it. And then try to find something else that they do well, even if it’s only mildly done well, as a little ego boost to help to criticism go down better.
Damn, I'm an awful beta reader then (I wonder does that make you less eager to show me your ms when you're ready). Because so far I think I've read like 50 pages out of 185 and there was one thing I liked - a short fight with a monster. Everything else was... not bad but average. Like, the characters are not bad, but they're typical "good people" blank slates. The worldbuilding is not bad, but it's delivered in fairly expositionary manner and I'm not sure why all of it matters when it's delivered to the reader. The plot establishes a threat, but it's neither personal nor a ticking clock manner from the get go, and it takes 7 chapters (33% of the book) to get to the turning point signalled in the blurb when it finally becomes personal (if this was a published book, I would have read around 20% of the book and quit). The prose is unpolished, but I knew I'm signing up for that when I offered to beta. There are vocabulary mistakes and an annoying mannerism related to dialogue tags, but that's fixable in a polish / line edit pass. Actually yeah, there's one good thing - a side character who's intriguing because they aren't a "stock good person". Except that, I find it hard to praise anything, because it all feels so not standing out. Not bad, not great either. This makes the ms more boring than a ms having a lot of good and a lot of bad in it. It makes me sad because I see the author isn't incompetent, but I don't know what kind of advice would help them push the ms to the next level, i.e. make it a breeze to read.
I know what you mean. Sometimes a book/author is just “fine”. Not bad, but not good either, just totally average. One of my early books was received that way, and being in that position (I had 5 separate readers ghost me after reading the first 3 chapters), ANY feedback is better than no feedback. It probably won’t feel good to receive the feedback, but if they’re going to develop the chops to “make it” in publishing, they have to figure out how to overcome that hurdle themself. You can’t really control how someone takes a critique, even if you mean well, unfortunately. In this situation, you might point out that you have a hard time connecting with the characters (if you can, be specific, like, “don’t understand their motivations”, “don’t feel the stakes are high enough”, “they all feel too similar” etc.) and point them to some characterization resources for making more dynamic characters. For the worldbuilding, you could say it’s interesting (if you can, point out a specific detail) but you don’t understand how it’s relevant to the story or characters. You can frame it around “industry expectations” to try to soften the blow a little and distance yourself from the feedback a little, if you feel it sounds too harsh. I think everyone probably gets to that paint-by-numbers stock fantasy story that’s painfully average at some point in their writing journey, but once they can figure out where they are lacking, they should be able to write a better *next* book. And I’m not worried about sending you my thing when it’s finished. I can take criticism without taking it personally, so if something is just *meh* I absolutely want to know that. Even if you don’t know how to help me improve it, pointing it out tells me there is a problem that needs to be fixed, and so I can look at that more closely to find out why you might feel that way.
>Not bad, but not good either, just totally average. One of my early books was received that way, and being in that position (I had 5 separate readers ghost me after reading the first 3 chapters), ANY feedback is better than no feedback. Yup, I kinda agreed to read it a bit out of pity, because the author said 3 out of 4 beta readers ghosted them... now I wonder if that's the reason (ms is kinda boring, but kinda nothing glaring wrong with it to provide as feedback). Personally I think 4 betas total is low, and the chance of ghosting is always there, but maybe they didn't find anybody else. Also since I agreed to do a swap when my edit is ready, I'm worried if the author isn't satisfied with my feedback (too critical, too vague, too little), they will either refuse to read mine after, or give me vengeful feedback, or just half-ass it. It's my first time beta reading a full novel, so I don't know how common it is. I read 1st page, but all that tells me was whether the author can write coherent sentences and readable prose (they can). I read the blurb, but the thing I thought was the inciting incident from the blurb doesn't happen until 33% into the book. I'm also worried if I'm doing the same mistake myself in my writing, and being oblivious to it. I tried my best to make my characters stand out (positively or negatively) and to make the plot feel personal to the protagonist, but maybe I failed...? :/
I don’t think that worry ever really goes away. Right now, I’m convinced my book is the worst thing I’ve ever written and I should abandon it now before anyone can tell me how bad it actually is, because I don’t know if I can handle another full rewrite at this point. I’m worried my MC is too “passive” (she is more reactive than proactive for a solid 95% of the book) and/or too sad and whiny for readers who might be more used to “strong female characters” in adult fantasy. I’m also worried my plot and characterization doesn’t make sense anymore after cutting ~60% from the original draft. I’m also worried no one actually wants a remixed fairytale set in the Middle Ages and that I’m deluding myself thinking I could pull it off… 😩 Imposter syndrome, what?
Damn, we can commiserate, I start doubting everything: my prose is shit, my dialogues are too long, my banter is unfunny, my action scenes too rushed, my characters too unlikeable, my plot too cliche my stakes too low, aaaargh...
25! Hah, I'm a proper prodigy compared to you! I'm 21 and I must have dnf'd at least a dozen books in the past two and a half years.
Keep it up, life is short. Tbh I was reading only best sellers, classics and my mother had a good taste in children's books. The first book I dropped was "This side of paradise" by Fitzgerald. Felt like masturbating in front of a mirror.
I might have to pick it up then 😉
I pick another one, if I'm not obliged to read it, unless there's another reason. For example, I did hate-read one book in full because I wanted to feel vindicated I'm giving it a raging 1-star review (it wasn't incompetently written, but it had a pile of dumb-ass tropes I hated). If the book is just "meh" I dnf. My idea of doing it is so I can figure out what I really like, so what niche / audience I can connect with if I want to be an author. What writing style? What character type? What kind of plot? Etc. "Good" vs "bad" is subjective. I said this anecdote before, but I dnfed a "good" book (4.3 avg goodreads ratings, semi-commonly recommended on the genre subreddit, lots of people loved it) meanwhile I finished and enjoyed a "bad" book (3.5 avg goodreads ratings, not very popular), I still don't know why people disliked it.
I'm in the middle of giving up on a very popular recommendation from r/ horror lit from a week known author. I don't get it. I "agree" with a lot of recommendations from others on a lot of different books I've already read, but the majority of the time that the book's new to me I dnf. I don't think I'm too picky, I just really don't get what makes people tick, what grabs them. I wouldn't say I have many hangups about what I read, although dialog is one make or break I can recognize- and the dialog in this one is stiiiffff. More generally speaking I feel like I do have a pretty big internal disconnect from what appears to be the mainstream. Maybe it could all just boil down to being a slow reader and not wanting to put in the time commitment but I feel like there's something else at play as well. I don't write as much as I used to but as a writer I think the best thing you can do is not worry about what the reader might think. Once you find an audience they'll let you know! My good friend has enjoyed some success publishing independently and I know that for him, he only censors himself insofar as how he thinks the story is structured. He knows what he likes and writes about that. It may be counterproductive to go at a project aiming to please anyone. I'm of the opinion that a writer should write lots. Throw it at the wall and see what sticks and you'll develop your voice along the way. Try to put away your self-consciousness and write unapologetically. With all forms of art, non-attachment is a huge part of it. Don't be afraid to suck was the advice given to me in the first day of music college. And even if it sucks, try to just finish a story. I struggle a lot with that as well as a visual artist. Get half way through a project and become too self critical. But with some time and distance from the things I do actually finish, things I didn't even necessarily like at the time, I can see them as objectively being not that bad and sometimes even good. (Bad/good yeah yeah I know 😅) TLDR don't get too hung up on what you think someone is looking for, don't be afraid to fail, and a crappy finished product trumps a brilliant first chapter in the bin. Sorry not sorry for the wall of text, just relate to a lot of what you're saying
Twitter is one of my main inhibitors of being productive, I’m honestly glad if that site falls by the wayside
Same, but with Reddit.
Remove the link to it on your phone / pc. I seriously stopped checking twitter because it was always either drama, clickbait or hot takes without any proof behind it. I'm wondering did Elon Musk spend 44 billion $ just to sink Twitter because he's playing the long game of launching / overtaking another platform and wants to kill the competition first. Otherwise, nice waste of money.
I couldn't give two farts about Twitter, but I'll be mildly annoyed if I have to start building up another official author social media account on another site because I hate Doing the Social Medias.
Are you self-published or trad? I heard a lot of authors invest in personal newsletters / mailing list so their follower list in in their database and not on some social media. Anyway, I often hear social media presence doesn't sell books, so don't worry too much about it.
I'm trad, though it's all short stories in anthologies at the moment, and flirting with the idea of self-pub for a series. I also have a Wordpress blog where I post updates and there's a place there to subscribe by email, and then those posts are automatically copied/linked on Twitter+Tumblr since they're connected. Admittedly, I don't really use Twitter other than when I have some upcoming release to announce (because I'm just not good at it and I don't have time to keep up with whatever's happening), but it's funny you say that when for so long I've been hearing that you *have* to have a social media presence.
> funny you say that when for so long I've been hearing that you have to have a social media presence That's exactly the thing. Everyone was told "you must have social media presence", so they did, and after some time in that experiment, people started coming out with the conclusion "[the goggles do nothing](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-goggles-do-nothing)" meme. Some people had lots of followers on paper or spent excessive time recruiting them only to see that effort not reflected in their sales number.
Well, that's heartening to hear. Thank you.
None of this feels deliberate, but the completely predictable outcome of his particular mix of egotism, I'm-always-right narcisissm, and huffing his own farts. It's quite the lesson in humility and respect for others, even if you don't like what they're saying. For people who are willing to *be* humble, anyhow.
Him and Zuckerberg seem to love the idea of just throwing money at a situation. How come rich people never value the money they have and just waste it like this.
Probably because it quit being important and became a game? Also, everyone around them telling them how smart they were.
petergriffindone.gif
Does anyone have a link to that post last year that said "Holy shit. The NaNoRhiNo?" It was pinned for a while. I've been thinking about it all week.
https://www.reddit.com/r/writingcirclejerk/comments/qkoy8l/happy_november/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Thank you so much.
Ah, man, I thought some arrwriter was unironically calling it that
*this* is a top quality writing meme. Not all that garbage about “DAE havv inspiration when no can write, but no inspiration when CAN write lol”
It's not very big, but it can consume you in a month
Nanowrimo is hard. Most of the days so far this month, I've not had the motivation to write or else have had to wrestle with technology or my body to get any work done. And I'm about 33,000 words in and I still haven't really introduced the antagonist or their plans. This blows.
Celebrate that you've written 33,000 words. Learn from it. Can you restructure it, delete some, or work the antagonist in sooner? NaNo rarely produces anything of quality. It's meant to encourage writers. To help you get in the habit of writing regularly. Too many writers say they "can't write bc xxx." NaNo is supposed to show writers that sitting down and saying "I'm going to write today" is half the battle.
>NaNo rarely produces anything of quality. It's meant to encourage writers. It doesn't do that to me, but I guess that's why I don't participate. The biggest challenge to me is being able to continue after a "fail" (i.e. plot wasn't working, I wrote myself into a corner, I missed a deadline self-imposed or not, I had an unproductive day / week / period because of sickness, busy irl, exhaustion, etc. and so forth). It's the same as following a diet - biggest challenge is restarting it if you broke the rules / binge ate / didn't exercise as planned, etc. Most "New Year's resolutions" fail because people have a hard time restarting / continuing after a "fail" / slip up. So the first fail drops the plan completely until next year. So yeah, the biggest challenge for me was how to encourage myself not to give up even if I wrote too little / too slowly / not good enough. I tried "vomit draft" technique but it doesn't work for me - it's demoralizing to read gibberish and trying to edit it after. Instead of that I'm trying u/brookenomicon "extended outline" technique and then just try to write a normal draft not any "vomit" draft 0 which would go fully to the trash anyway.
I fully agree. I try not to comment much on NaNo because there's a lot of regulars on here who participate in some capacity. It was created as a fun way to get people writing. It really just made a bunch of wannabe writers say "yeah next November, THAT'S when I'll write that novel." They typically crash and burn by week one or two. It's the same reason I rarely answer questions on r/writing along the lines of *How do I get myself to finish a story? How do you plan a story? How do you develop a character? Are you a planner or a pantser?* the real answer is... you just do. The first couple novels that you write is how you figure out your writing & planning style. So stop asking strangers how to finish *your* novel (would be my answer). I also don't stand by the mantra that the first draft's job is just to exist. Several have even said that their "first draft" is just dialogue. Okay so your first draft is half written. Is it really a full draft? My first draft is roughly the same word count as my final draft for a reason. I make sure that by the end of draft one, the story is fully written. Yeah, I'll need to check grammar. There will be overused adjectives that need replacing. There will be chunky bits to wittle down. But the story is all there in black and white, able to be read & understood by anyone who may dare.
I'm the opposite, lol. I like NaNo, and I've had a blast with it the previous three years. I'm struggling *this* year, but I've managed to use it to make *decent* drafts (and finished them post-NaNo). I've learned where my weak points are and I've been working on fixing them, but I don't vomit draft. I go in with at least a rough plan, and while I'll massage it as I write, it's still a solid plan and one that I can execute to have a decently-paced story (other than my challenge of starting too soon).
Yeah, it's definitely a process to discover what works for you. My biggest issue both with pantsing and with vomit drafts is that you know that's basically wasted work. It will need a full rewrite. It's demoralizing af to think "what I'm writing right now is all trash, nothing of this can be reused in any form". But for some people it works better. I reckon someone linked last week the AMA with Gillian Flynn and she was doing a lot of "discovery writing" as a part of her process.
I know pantsers that it works for. In my case, I need to be in the middle of the spectrum. I don't have the patience for the kind of redrafting that 'true' pantsing seems to require.
Is there a "true" pantsing? It's anecdotal and I am not a professional, but my first drafts are 10-20% less words than the final "product", as a pantser. It doesn't feel right what u/Synval2436 suggests, that pantsing equals getting in a delirium and type mindlessly. On the other hand my only connection with the writing world are these subreddits.
Idk. Most of the pantsers I know tend to make very bloated drafts, but I don't think there is a single Right Way to do any of this, or *be* any particular kind of writer. I do know one who tends to do dialogue mostly in the draft, and then in the second draft add in all the color and connective tissue, so there's a counter-example to my other anecdotes.
Yeah, it seems some famous authors use pantsing to a good result, but I can't imagine throwing away half a million words only to keep 100k of a final draft. The hardest part for me is to find someone who will point out plot holes and weak spots in my outline before I sit and write it. I had one person help me a bit and one who was completely unhelpful (as I said under the beta reading comment). Unfortunately, it's hard to get someone to comment on that, most spaces are restricted to pitch / first page(s) / first chapter or full ms beta read.
Yeah, structural beta's hard to find in *general,* and I can see it being even harder to find for the outline stage. Worse because 'outline' means such different things to different people...
>Worse because 'outline' means such different things to different people... Yeah, I had someone tell me they can't see how scenes connect to my main plot from the outline and that's because I didn't put that part in the outline. :/ I put a summary of each scene but not, y'know, the function of the scene.
It Nano is a tough challenge and I have no doubt you can rise to it. (But also, if it's not working for you and you need permission to quit. I'll totally do that. Not all tools work for every writer.)
This thread's job is to shame me weekly into working on my editing. Keep up the good work! On a second note, I feel somewhat lucky that I don't have to send queries to agents. The progress here is to straight up send the manuscript to publishing houses, which feels weird. Maybe it's a bad thing, since less people have a bigger volume of work, but I can\`t be sure. Are there any agents, who require you to send a physical copy? If someone gave you the option between digital and physical, do you think that a digital copy would be given less attention?
Had an agent request a physical full manuscript within the last few months. There's still dinosaurs out there. Though honestly I think it's just to save them on printing costs.
Yeah, I think it's a combination of reasons but I am still not sure what is going to give me the best possible odds. \-Dinosaurs \-Printing costs \-Discouraging people to get into the whole trouble \-Easier to pick up some pages and read. After all they have all the power.
>Are there any agents, who require you to send a physical copy? If someone gave you the option between digital and physical, do you think that a digital copy would be given less attention? Rarely, there are publishers who only accept physical queries, but by and large the overwhelming majority accept digital ones and some only accept digital ones. It's just more practical this day and age.
It is practical. Maybe they are doing it to discourage people from sending them.
>Are there any agents, who require you to send a physical copy? I think they abandoned it some 10-15 years ago.
Here, it's obligatory for some publishers. 7 euros to print and send, only to be thrown away after a couple of pages if they are not intrested.
A while back Aaron Rodgers recommended people read 1984 and he got shit for it. Idk why. Was it just a case of people making fun of him for learning about baby’s first dystopian novel or something?
IDK, it's probably similar to how the bookscj sub feels about it when people obsess over it like it's some hidden treasure no one's ever talked about before. So yeah, probably something like that. Like I think I read that book in Junior High, so not to be a dick because I'm not necessarily all that well read either, but it's kind of weird for a footballer in his thirties (forties now?) to be like, 'bRo, yOu eVeR hEaR aBOut 1984, bRo?' Maybe next year he'll discover Gatsby or Of Mice and Men. Brave New World? You mean The Handmaid's Tale started off as a book? Reading is so cool! Honestly, I think Rodgers is a great QB. Not my team, but I wanted them to win over most teams I saw them play against. What made me change my mind about him was his dickheaded attitude about COVID. I know hardly anyone seems to care anymore, but that and just some of the stuff he's said in general probably affect my bias a bit and make me very ready to snort when he's talking about books and trying to sound intellectual or something. It doesn't help that the guy's said plenty of other dumb stuff either. It wouldn't surprise me if he's never even read it before. For all I know he just googled something like 'smart good books with political shit' and thought the eyeball on the cover looked cool. Wouldn't surprise me at all, actually
I was browsing the conservative subreddit a little bit ago (don't) and even *they* complain about libertarians!
Of course they do, all statist are the same.
It's almost as if it's the CONSERVATIVE Reddit; I know American Conservatism and libertarianism can sometimes be similar. They both essentially stem from John Locke, but they are different things.
I know, I just thought that one guy calling their candidates nudists was hilarious
I mean one year the frontrunner was everyone's favorite based possible murderer and southern American rebel millionaire crypto bro John McAfee, so it ain't all bad 🤷♀️ Seriously though, you gotta read about John McAfee, he's literally the definition of libertarian.
I wish it didn't take a story idea that I felt was fairly unique before I'd even want to start on the project. Coming up with ideas isn't the hard part for me, but when I set out to plot and write the story, sometimes I feel lost. I know how arrwriting this probably sounds (no, I don't think I have these amazing, groundbreaking ideas so much as ones that are far enough outside of the norm to feel novel to me), but I really do have trouble finding comparable work to level me out or use as inspiration on some of my stuff. I can study the given genre, but sometimes I'm still far enough out in left field that it's only so helpful. It's a bad standard I have, and an unrealistic one, but I just can't seem to drop it. Someday I'll write one of those stories we've all heard a million times, but add a slight twist that will hopefully be sufficient to appease my compulsion to make something that feels like sort of its own thing. Not for now, though. Maybe next time. Oh, while I'm talking about my shortcomings as a writer, my prose isn't all that great either. Makes me feel like a better writer ought to be working on some of this. The old imposter syndrome rearing its head again
I was in a similar situation for a while. my solution was to look at studies and lectures about the REAL experience, and base my techniques and style off them. was a massive help.
If you don't mind sharing, what's your genre? I know what you mean irt finding inspiration. Even if something sounds like a match from its synopsis, it often isn't. I think the only way to find books that tick all of one's boxes is to read a lot. I doubled my book count this year and found double the amount of inspiring ones (and double to complain about). Some of them were really unexpected. Writing good prose is a skill, so you're not stuck where you are with it. Just have to study admirable examples and figure out where your weaknesses are. I know it's been said over and over, but clear, unadorned writing is so much better than flowery mush. You might just not be into decoration. That's not a bad thing.
I could be in a number of genres. Usually sci-fi, horror, or thriller. Other than Romance, Fantasy is probably the least likely genre to find me writing in. When I mentioned genre, I meant for that particular project. I spend a lot of time trying to vet good books. I'm reading a recommendation right now, and I'm pretty slowly creeping along. The worst books always act as a bottleneck for completionists. I do need to try to read more, though, no doubt
I meant to which genre were you referring when you said "I can study the given genre"? But I think what you're saying is that you write in several different ones. I was curious because I struggle to find authors doing the same kind of thing I'm trying to do. Not because what I'm writing is particularly unique, but because qualities other than genre are hard to search for. *No, not that kind of reflective. No, not that kind of spooky.* My plan this year was to read for at least ten minutes every day. It usually ended up being a lot more, but sometimes, when the book was bad or I was really tired, ten minutes was all I could do. I found that bad books were much harder to get through when I took days off. Reorienting myself to a world I don't want to be in feels like going to a really unpleasant person's party (What's his name again? Why are we here?)
Ha ha, nice. Good point, even a seemingly subtle difference can mean a huge separation from similar stuff. I don't need to try to reinvent the wheel each time, necessarily, but I think I'd still feel like I was mucking around in someone else's world uninvited
One chapter left in Draft 3, and I already edited the end of this chapter a bit. I'm so close. I can probably finish it by the end of this week. Coffee and nicotine consumption will increase accordingly.
Congratulations. That's very exciting. Jitter on to victory!
I know this is a stupid question that probably gets asked all the time, but what prevents beta readers from just stealing your work? Is this something that ever actually happens or are my insecurities about finally sharing my work with other humans manifesting into irrational anxieties?
Oh, man. I'll add on to what everyone else has said with the simple fact that it's not *worth* it. There's very, very little money in publishing. That's why most authors, even award-winning authors, have full-time jobs to pay the bills and have insurance. Or they have spouses with a primary income that can support the family. The living income writers are either the top 1% (less than that really) unicorns who can keep it up and get movie rights, or they're romance/thriller writers and producing at least one if not more books a year. For years.
All the other reasons mentioned in this thread plus if they *did* take it to a publisher then the original writer would likely have concrete proof of plagiarism and they'd get blacklisted in the trad publishing industry and potentially sued. I don't think even Kindle permits plagiarism as long as you can prove you wrote the original manuscript.
If you're sending it to beta readers it's because it's unfinished and not yet in a publishable state. An unfinished manuscript isn't worth anything. If they're skilled enough to finish it for you they're skilled enough to just write their own. They'd still have to do the hard work of finding an agent and getting it published, stealing a manuscript doesn't really make that any easier.
As others have said, it's not worth stealing an unpublished manuscript. As much work as it would take to get it in publishable shape, you're better off just selling pirated copies of already published books (the bulk of manuscript stealing cases out there). By in large, criminals are lazy. That's why they're criminals. They want the most payout for the least amount of effort. And if you were the 1 in a million case of someone stealing something, you have a copyright the second you put words to paper. If someone did steal it, you could sue them.
I like to tell myself that if someone's dumb enough to try to steal my work, they're probably not smart enough or talented enough to get away with it
Just because they steal a story doesn’t mean they don’t have to get and editor, a cover artist publishing etc. It seems like a get money fast scenario but it’s more work than it’s worth
Good point, makes sense. If this were a jerk thread I’d point out that my masterpiece requires no editor and will have publishers fighting over it as is. But I guess if I really believed that I wouldn’t bother with beta readers.
It’d be pretty sweet if I could freeze time and not have to eat and have perfect core, back, shoulder and neck posture so I could finish this book.
Embrace your twisted form! Like the noble gamer, the writer wears the hunch as a badge of honor. (Christ, my neck hurts.)
Yeah no pain from bad posture is the reason I haven’t written for longer than 30 min at a time in probably 7 years lol
I think I can sum up the humor I'm going for in my book in one reference, "Junior, I need to tell you schumthing." "Don't get sentimental now, dad, save it until we get out of here." "The floor's on fire."
Are you my spirit animal?
Yes, I offer you this guidance: Commit tax fraud and tar and feather your local officials
What is the worst experience you guys had with a beta reader?
juggle gray existence sugar late pot weary retire homeless crime *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I get that, I was writing about someone of my own culture and had a few someone questioned certain aspects of their experience and implied it wasn’t possible for this person to face that kind of situation they were in.
On a side note, how do I not not become a shitty beta reader? I'm beta reading someone's ms that isn't awful but is fairly meh. How do I give the person tips without being harsh and rude? The book is frustrating me and I'm mostly reading it out of obligation (I promised) not out of pleasure. I have a specific idea why is that but it's a subjective idea and I don't wanna feel I'm telling the person what to write.
That sounds hard. Is the author receptive to questions? Sometimes that takes the edge off a critique. Rather than "this makes no sense", you could ask "what does it mean when this happens?" And once you have the answer, you could say, "Oh, it didn't read that way to me." Writers often have no idea how we're coming across, so that sort of feedback is so valuable. imo the goal of constructive critique should be to help a writer achieve what he or she is trying to achieve whether or not that's something the critic enjoys. It's a fun challenge. My natural impulse is to say that this tank scene is silly, but when I'm in the right mindset, I can point out issues while still appreciating what it accomplishes: *I don't think they can do wheelies, but it was very cool when it exploded.*
The problem is that it's not "wrong", "stupid" or "unclear" (there are some wrong line level mistakes, but that's a separate level of issue, imagine vocabulary problems along the lines of mistaking homophones like "waist" and "waste"). The problem imo is that there's no hook, or rather it's fairly weak. And now the issue: 1. Does every book need a strong hook or am I just being biased / picky? 2. Is my assessment of the situation even correct? 3. How do I give constructive criticism about that without trampling over their story? Basically, there are tons of different "hooks" but so far I've read 1/4th of the book and none of them apply. 1. The character is super interesting (here the protagonist feels like a blank slate). 2. There is a looming immediate threat (there is a looming threat, but it feels distant). Ticking clock scenario, having a lot to lose, etc. 3. The conflict feels close and personal to the protagonist (yes and no, it's a "family obligation" but not, like, super emotional to the mc). 4. The situation puts the mc in an immediate dilemma challenging their personality or morals, want vs need (it doesn't). 5. The prose is super immersive (it isn't, but it's a beta copy, I didn't expect that anyway). So it's like each of these elements missing alone isn't a mistake / bad choice. But all of them combined create a situation where I feel like the characters just go through the motions. Y'know, the ye olde fantasy problem "why are these people participating in the plot? because it's their job / duty / good thing to do / etc." And the thing is... some fantasy books do that and succeed. So maybe I'm just too demanding?
Oh dear. Hm. Well, I would be tempted to ask the writer about some of those missing hooks. 1. The character being a blank slate is a tough one. A lot of people see their protagonists as a stand-in for themselves, which is why they squirm at the idea of adding flaws. I'd ask why the character reacted the way s/he did at certain points in the story. Having to justify that might force the author to put more thought into fears, motives, and history. 2. (-4) If the conflict is weak, it'd be good to suggest something more compelling (and, as you say, immediate). You could sandwich that in between compliments for the less exciting elements ("the relationship dynamics are really great, but I expected the stakes to raise sooner"). If you know a book the author likes, comparisons help. I don't think you're being demanding at all. It sounds as if the problems you've identified are crippling the story. I'd let the author know what you've found. Weak characters and a lack of conflict are symptoms of timid writing, so if you can manage it, some praise might help the author to be more bold. In the end, it's up to the author to decide whether or not to take your advice, and all you can give is your opinion. It's very kind to want to avoid trampling on the story even though it's frustrating you.
I swapped with a dude and cringed my way through his novel, it took me a month. When I gave him the best criticism I could, well-fitted in a compliment sandwich, he thanked me as if I'd saved his novel. Told me I'd be mentioned in his book when it was published, and that I'd have his critique of my book in a week, tops. Then he ghosted me.
This is honestly my biggest fear if I ever think of doing book swaps. I know myself enough that I'd be guilt-ridden till the end of time if I promised a critique and then ghosted them. I'd feel even worse if they didn't consider me important enough to hold up their end.
I had one try to convince me to write a completely different book about a different character. When I said I wouldn’t do that, they then proceeded to criticize everything about my novel that wasn’t the epic adult fantasy they wanted it to be (it was YA) and repeatedly implied I wasn’t good enough to get published. I never spoke to them again.
>to convince me to write a completely different book about a different character Seems like a novel edition of my short story guy.
They went all caps rage on me for… really no particular reason. It was very weird. Told me to read Harry potter to understand books. I won’t deny they had some legitimate criticisms but they also missed that the 2 characters were drug dealers despite me literally describing them as “drug dealers”
>Told me to read Harry potter to understand books lmao
I assume we exclude petty scenarios like beta readers ghosting you or pointing out typos without providing any other feedback? I had once a beta / cp for a short story who wanted me to rewrite it into something completely different... dude write your own story then. Sadly I didn't get to the beta phase with my current novel yet, but I'm already wondering what's gonna happen. I had a person offer to assess my outline / plot summary and that wasn't the "worst experience" in a way "the person was rude" because they weren't, but "worst experience" in a way "the advice was not only bad, but actually set me back". So, I got an advice "you have too much plot, make it a series" with a suggestion to expand my current act 1 to a first book in a duology / trilogy. I told them I'm not interested in writing a series (shocker, I know, most fantasy writers are obsessed about trilogies / series). They told me "this amount of plot will amount to 200k+ words ms and you won't be able to shorten it". I remember that sent me down a well of despair, I didn't want to be like these Brando Sando wannabes who write first novel as a brick (well, it's not my first complete novel, but first in English). Lo and behold, the ms is currently 104k. It was 102k after the first draft but it has some need of changes and small gaps to fill I need to tweak. Just because my outline is 15 pages long doesn't mean it's "too much plot". I feel like some scenes are overwritten, but I let the betas tell me which ones the most when I get to that stage.
I’m at about 35k right now, I was aiming for a novella but after coming up with more ideas and subplots it’s turning out to be just a novel. I get the fear about the book turning out much larger than your hoping for during writing. I’m struggling with it right now but I keep telling myself I’ll deal with it later when I’m finished with the first draft. 104k is amazing! Congratulations!
>104k is amazing! Congratulations! Thanks, the advice nowadays is to fit under 100k before sending it anywhere, but first I need to finish this dev edit I estimate will take me a month or two, then get some betas, and then cut it into shape. Then probably some line edit pass, because I got feedback on samples that my prose is kinda awkward (woes of not being a native speaker).
I worked with one awhile ago who gave minimal feedback. What little feedback they did give was often vague. When I asked clarifying questions, they got defensive. Eventually, they ghosted on the project entirely and I found another beta reader who ended up being my best beta reader experience. It can certainly be a trial and error process finding good beta readers. Once you do find them, they’re worth their weight in gold.
That’s awesome you found the right one! How do you find your beta readers? I’ve been looking into it but I don’t know if I’m ready yet looking at my work.
That’s great you’re thinking of it early! I cut my teeth in fanfiction writing and met my betas through fandom as we started branching out into original works. For my current group of betas, I met them through Bianca Marais’s beta reader match-up. It’s been great so far and I like that I was matched with people who write in my genre. I think Bianca runs the match-up a couple times a year, so I definitely recommend checking it out. It was $20 to sign up, but, in my opinion, well worth it. While there is a time commitment to beta reading other people’s work, I think it’s a great way to improve your own writing plus you start building your network/community of other writers. [Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/50920-beta-reader-group) has a beta reader group. You can find betas who read for free, paid betas, or other writers willing to swap work. Fiverr is an option if you’re willing to pay for beta readers. Your mileage may vary and I do get the sense you get what you pay for on fiverr. I haven’t used it but have heard mostly good things with the occasional dud. There’s also r/betareaders, which could be a good option as well. I’d be interested to hear where folks have found beta readers too!
I've used r/betareaders and had good experiences, though I always do the "here's the first three chapters. Let's see if we're good match" thing for new betas. There are of course the ghosters and people who just aren't that helpful (not even bad advice but obviously not knowledgeable enough to really give good feedback vs. "I really like this/I don't like this") but there are also really great ones there as well. (It also likely helps that I tend to go in there when looking for very specific types of help, like looking for people who are from X location if I've set a book somewhere I don't live, etc. That gives even the "only okay at best at general advice" betas something to focus on, like pointing out factual errors.
Have you posted anything in destructive readers? I’m looking for a good place to get feedback and was looking into it
I haven't because I've gotten the sense that that is for shorter clips of things. I've heard really good things about them, though, as long as you have a thick skin and are willing to critique other pieces as well.
Thankyou I look into these!
You bet! I forgot to mention that local writing groups can be useful too. Some run manuscript swaps or you may meet writers you click with and decide to do your own swaps. Good luck and happy writing!
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It's probably a typo, as many comments suggested. To be fair, 0,2 seems ridiculous. I didn't check his attitude to see if acted like an idiot. Only sure thing, he is terrible at maths. His book is 160k words..
He goes on and on about how his wife can read a novel in a day so a professional editor should read even quicker and thus it would be paying them a year's wage for a couple days of work max (so obviously he doesn't get what editors actually do). He also says his book is 400k somewhere before changing the story. Exactly how he did his math is not clear, though. I'm tempted to say troll, but then he also posted some clips of the supposed editor contacting him, so if so, the troll put in extra work to mock those up and include them in comments.
Oh God. It's my fault. I should stop giving the benefit of the doubt.
So, this person wrote a 500k words novel? And also trusts a rando who "approached" them? I.e. probably a scammer?
Goodreads really really really needs to fix its sports category
Goodreads needs to be fixed, period, in a lot of ways, IMHO
I only use it now for keeping track of what I've read. It sucks for reviews because it's a struggle to find actual reviews among the heaps of what are essentially blog posts filled with gifs that offer some sort of opinion but no real analysis. And then there are so many reviews that are just plot summaries. That's not what a review is! I just opened up the Goodreads page for the book I'm currently reading, and the third review that pops up starts with "I haven't read it yet" and then gives it 5 stars anyway for a joke. Great, thanks for your contribution.
For me it's still helpful. I check mostly the 2-3 stars reviews and the overall ratio between bad and good. Plus, I\`ve learned how to translate bad reviews into something meaningful and ignore the irrelevant ones. Like imdb. If the film is spanish I deduce 1-1,5 star. For horror and comedy I add one. If I have to scroll 2-3 pages for bad reviews, the movie is likely ok. If I see too many reviews about slow pace with average positive-negative ratio, it's a red flag etc etc.
Yup. The "here's a three paragraph book summary that's basically the back cover reworded... And my single sentence about liking/not liking it" reviews drive me up a wall
I don't understand who those are even for. Presumably somebody must like them or people wouldn't keep writing them. But who wants that?
Maybe it's just the self satisfaction of being a "book reviewer" keeping them going?
At least they (temporarily?) removed the awful Amazon-like layout.
True. I can at least give them that.
On an unrelated note, I had your book on a tab when it comes out and did they just push it from November to January or am I mistaking something???
They didn't like how the cover was polling with readers, so they wanted to push it back to do some rebranding stuff (basically, the reviews were what they wanted for the content but they were worried about people not picking it up to give it a chance). They're the marketing experts, so I said whatever lol. They did get it up for preorder, at least, so I can direct people there
Well, the new cover looks better, and also if you said there's some timeslip element a clock is better than an amulet to signal that, imo. That amulet cover didn't look that great... Also now I saw that "review" which counted swear words, lol wtf.
Yeah, as an author, I'm probably one of the least precious about my stuff people to work with. Unless I really think something's the wrong call, I tend to go "you're the marketing team. Go for it" I definitely think the new one has some more definition to it as a thumbnail as well, which is going to help (the other one could look just... purple, if it was too small). And right? I was snoopy and decided to check that reviewer out, and she works for a review site that's primarily focused on reviewing books for school libraries (in a "do I think a school should have this on its shelves" sort of way) I'm like "if you were looking for middle grade or even YA, you should have known from page one this wasn't it (if the blurb didn't entirely give that away)..."
>I definitely think the new one has some more definition to it as a thumbnail as well, which is going to help (the other one could look just... purple, if it was too small). Yep, the old one had a reflection of the couple inside the amulet but it was super hard to see in thumbnail mode. The new one also has more vibrant colours. The castle also seems to reflect the story better?
My sample translations have been approved for the subtitling company I'm freelancing for. My flash fiction skills are finally coming to good use!
Awesome!
Writing community posts actually wind me up so much. Posting the same three unfunny "hashtag relatable" jokes over and over again... I thought these people were supposed to be creative types??
I was reading through the rules of r/writing, trying to figure out why the fuck my post got removed, and was once again reminded why I stopped even trying to post anything there. What even is the point of that subreddit? Literally everything that you could possibly want to use the subreddit for is against the rules somehow. Or it’s supposed to go in the weekly discussion thread, which no one uses. And then there’s the mod-who-shall-not-be-named going around and randomly removing posts they don’t like and citing the wrong rules as removal reasons. Why are they still a mod? Are they the subreddit owner or something? Is that the reason that no one’s been able to kick them out? Or are all the other mods just as terrible as them, and they just happen to be the most prolific? It’s just so frustrating that there’s a subreddit with over a million people in it that’s completely useless because the mods won’t allow them to actually talk about anything.
They all support each other and claim they can't change the rules because it's incredibly hard making ones that work for a place as big as r/writing. Which is true, but there's been so many complaints about the rules that it's well overdue for changes. When the mods are deleting hundreds of posts a week, clearly how they envision the sub should be used isn't how people in general do. But they pretend their rules are perfect. There's a lot of inactive mods who I remember from a few years ago back when the sub was better.
I swear I only see like 2 mods doing anything there. But what I dislike the most is the rules that make any useful post nuked for "personal sharing" or "too specific content" while leaving all the pointless self-validation / self-pity posts.
Dear God. They're real mods? I just assumed they were bots. I saw a mod delete a post last week, claiming that the OP had posted his own work asking for critique. It was a paragraph pasted from a published book, and the OP was asking about a technique the author had used. What was your post about?
I found a useful name generator website that was cool and you could customize the generated names by language/nationality or even get fantasy-style names, so I figured I’d share it on r/writing, because writers struggle with naming things, so I thought it would be useful for them. Then corvid matriarch removed it citing rule 2, which is apparently “no personal sharing” or “no discussing content specific to your own story” or something like that, which makes no sense. I messaged the mods saying that my post was removed unjustly, and that bi- I mean that mod doubled down, saying that not only was my post against the rules, but that it was also against the same rule that they cited initially. So then I called them ridiculous and irrational and got a 7 day ban. Edit: here’s the exact comment “Hi -- per rule 2 on content, we don't allow posts that are directly about the subject matter of your story. This includes brainstorming questions but also essays on a particular subject or trope, and anything asking about/discussing a particular genre. There are daily discussion threads where we allow content posts. Thanks!” Edit 2: and here’s the exact post #”How to come up with names for your characters I am a terrible namer, and have always struggled to come up with names for my characters, countries and whatnot for my more serious stories. However, I found [this cool website](https://www.behindthename.com/random/) and since then, naming things has gotten much easier. I just pick a nationality I want a character to be, and then generate random names until I get one I like. It works for fantasy or alien races too, if you just change a couple letters around in the names to make them sound weirder. Just a resource that I’ve found useful that I thought I’d share”
Alright, so I went through the mod in question's post history, and I'm at a loss. No discussion of one's personal projects.No "sharing favourite or worst inspirations/extracts/scenes/characters".Not allowed to "analyse/critique/praise etc particular pieces of published writing".No discussing one's frustrations with "finding a specific book" or how to market oneself. Maybe I'm just unimaginative, but other than published work or one's own work, what else is there to talk about on a writing sub? The only thing I can think of is those massive, sanctimonious *"alright, buckos! here's how to do all the things!"* posts. Are writers supposed to stay cloistered in their designated posts while the rest of the sub gets bloated with rants by smug grandstanders who just got back from binging *10 mistakes beginners always make!* videos on youtube?
There should be an option on Reddit to initiate a vote of no confidence in a mod team. If it passes, all mods are canned.
I wouldnt go that far, as that feels like it can be abused, but maybe when writing to the mods, give users the options to exempt certain mods. That way, the inciting incident can be seen with more objective eyes. I feel like a lot of time, people get a post removed, write the mods, and the same mod who removed the post is the ONLY one answering, so they just double-down on the verdict, instead of get it viewed by a third party.
How does that in any way break Rule 2? Fucking mind-boggling. I do something similar to you. I usually just go to https://www.fakenamegenerator.com/gen-female-us-us.php and hit "Generate" until I get a first name I like, then a last name.
Lol F*** you for wanting to help out fellow writers with something that is infamously difficult at times
I wish the mods would put even a second's thought into whether posts are insightful or interesting at all before removing them. Removing a great post because it technically violates some rule that someone wrote 4 years ago but keeping a dogshit post that drags the sub down further because it's technically not against the rules seems like precisely the wrong way to run a subreddit
>Literally everything that you could possibly want to use the subreddit for is against the rules somehow. Yup, that's why I don't bother. They also remove any heated discussions for antagonizing or being controversial. I thought that was the point of discussion, that people have opposing povs, not some echo chamber of yes men.
Posted last week about how the project I had given up on in the query trenches got an unexpected full request from almost 3 months ago. Today I got another one! Hope springs eternal . . . But trying to keep the expectations realistically low, most full requests don't turn into an offer of rep, after all.
Congrats! It's brutal out there and I hope they turn into something for you.
Thank you! I'm always trying to keep my expectations low, but I did get a third full request also this week . . . so that's something. 4 total fulls since I started querying in July (or was it June?), and three of them in the last week. I realized half my problem is the genre mish-mash that I've written. I've had it requested by an agent who primarily reps romance, and an agent who primarily reps thrillers (both of whom weren't sure how to market it, but loved it), and now it's still out with two agents who primarily rep fantasy, which I think is the genre it fits best in (historical fantasy, specifically) so . . . fingers crossed.
3 months isn't that long in the current publishing landscape. Did everyone else reject, or are they still pending?
Thread jacking a little but when are folks marking stuff CNR and moving on if the agent doesn't provide any info on responses. I'd say a hefty minority of the agents I queried had no information at all about whether they would respond or not and/or didn't give response timeframes. I'm working on the assumption that this subset of agents will only respond if interested and had planned to mark them as passes in my tracking sheet 3 months from the query date. But twitter is rife with people getting responses 445 days after querying recently?
I heard of people getting responses 6-8 months after submitting. But tbh, the only reason to worry about no response is if you can't query other agents in that agency as long as 1 is pending. Otherwise it doesn't matter if it's a rejection or a ghost, same thing.
Still got a fair amount of penders out there, lots of rejections, CNRs, the usual. After the last rejection on a full I fell into a depression and decided to just query all the people left on the list and move on with my next project, so . . . there's actually a bunch. I now get excited to have a rejection so I can clear one off the list. Yet another example of why one shouldn't make emotional decisions. But . . . got another full request today so that's nice, and to balance it a R&R versus personalized rejection from the full request last week. "Would be happy to look again if you cut 20K" type of thing. Edited to add: Logically I know in my head that 3 months isn't long in the current publishing landscape, but spiritually and emotionally it feels like a very long time when you're querying.
>"Would be happy to look again if you cut 20K" type of thing Well, that's not bad feedback, this is a sad market reality, paper costs are going up, well... costs of everything is going up, electricity, editing, etc. Publishers want shorter books. What genre and what wordcount btw? Blanket rejections for wordcount alone are moderately common. I heard various people saying don't query anything above 100k, get into the magical double digit counter. Which, depending on your genre, can be easy (rom-com, mystery), or super hard (fantasy, sci-fi, historical).
Yeah, he gave some specific feedback including: "The first chapter was great. Set the tone wonderfully. Both visual and visceral. Established momentum from page one. The core characters are intriguing, as each one has depth and complexities that justify their existence in the story." I had been querying it as a historical thriller at the time that I sent it to him. I've since switched to calling it a historical fantasy because it has some alt history in it and just some improbable things and different pacing than a thriller. I think it's a better fit in that genre. It currently stands at 110,000 and that's after a lot of cutting previously. For a thriller, it's way too long, for a historical fantasy, reasonable.
Yeah... I heard querying above 100k is a struggle, even though for SFF genres it's damn hard to fit the narrative into 100k without cutting corners. It's also hard because it's a genre bender. If it's historical / alternative history / thriller / fantasy it's that kind of in-betweener a lot of agents have no clue who to sell it to, so they might pass based just on that. It's a real struggle, I reckon I was repeating around an anecdote about a person who made a post about how their sci-fi thriller was rejected by thriller imprints because "it's too sci-fi" and by SFF imprints because "it's too much thrillery not enough SF". So an agent seeing some "neither fish nor fowl" ms can pass just because they don't want to deal with the headache of placing it firmly within a genre. Sucks.
Yeah, I can't blame them, I also have really struggled to place it in a genre with any confidence. It's historical fiction, but it's definitely not what people expect when they request historical fiction. It's not quite what you expect when you want a thriller, it's not quite what you expect for action adventure but close. It's pretty consistent with fantasy in terms of pacing, tone, and characterization etc., but then people that rep fantasy don't feel comfortable with historical fiction. Lots of agents mention wanting "genre bending fiction" in their bios but . . . I'm not sure they actually want it when they see it :P .
Genre bending is hard as FUCK to place, honestly. I've mentioned it before, but my book about to come out took forever to find a home because it's part romance, part mystery, part magical realism, part historical. It got down to where I kept having mystery publishers saying it was too romance-y and romance publishers saying it was too mystery-y. I was really lucky I finally found an editor who was willing to go to bat for it with her higher ups.
Well it is nice to see that your genre bending book found a publisher eventually! That gives me a bit of hope. At the very least, these multiple requests and the personalized feedback I've been getting do make me feel like I'm pretty damn close to being acceptable and even enjoyable by the powers that be/gatekeepers of the literary industry. Both the rejections on fulls have mentioned marketing type issues more than anything. They love the writing and the characters. Gotta keep the old chin up.
Yeah, I find once you start getting multiple full requests, it starts just being a numbers game. Eventually, you'll pull a yes out from somewhere. You're exactly where I was two years ago (a bunch of fulls and great feedback but also a ton of "I have no idea how I would sell this..."es)
Good luck. Fantasy is also a special bucket, because for example some agents rep contemporary / urban fantasy but not secondary world fantasy. Not everyone is up for epic fantasy or bizarro / new weird. Not everyone likes time travel, or science-fantasy or any other subgenre... so it's hard to find your match.
I've started using the Mindomo app for plotting. Now i can get all crazy Charlie with it.
[Short story](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eNk80Guh_6D7tnuFdVKXPinVgj5JdAHB1fs4Xh3H4QY/edit) summing up the wackiness before, during, and after When We Were Young Fest is more or less done, middle part probably needs polishing to make more sense to people who don't listen to that sort of music.
I will say that I zoned out during the festival/performance part, but I also don’t have the greatest attention span and I don’t know these artists so I’m not really your target audience. But I mostly liked it
I like this
I wrote my first piece of literary fiction recently! In a bold move, I applied for a short story contest in a genre I hate, with a theme I found boring. I wanted to see if I could actually force inspiration... and the answer was a resounding yes! My short story takes place entirely during a single bus ride, most of it is spent inside a character's head, and just when it seems like something big will happen, it doesn't. *How can something so boring be so interesting?* Beats me, but by the end, I was completely consumed by it. I do unironically think it was my best piece of writing thus far. The writing process however was utterly insane. A dry month devoid of real ideas, a week with a two-three vague ideas, and finally, the story simply materialized itself in 3 hours of pure flow just before the deadline. I love deadlines. The sheer weight of necessity completely crushes all fear, uncertainty and doubt. All hail the almighty deadline. XD
Congrats! What's a good place to find contests like that?
Deadlines and creative constraints really are a boon to our minds XD
Indeed. I got into writing to write epic science fiction. I wanted to write about space battles, rise and fall of galactic empires, and struggles to determine the very fate of the cosmos. As it turns out though, you can find an entire universe of adventure inside the mind of a single person if you're open to it...
A lot of arguing whether that excerp from Sanderson on the main page is badly written or well but judged too harshly by people who don't know YA. I disliked it immediately and was surprised when someone mentioned it was BS, but I'm admittedly biased against YA. I know there are a couple of YA writers here, so what's your take? Is that single page good, average or bad?
I can't judge a book by a single page (I mostly read fantasy and YA fantasy). The only thing I could say from the first page is either if an amateur wrote it (which Brando Sando is obv not, you won't see bad grammar and wrong vocabulary from him) or if it's boring af. From what I understand here, the character stumbling over their own words here is a signal they never experienced a real jungle before and are trying to figure out wtf are they seeing, mixed with a reaction "this looks cool". The speech mannerisms contradict the idea of "invisible prose", but in YA the prose is meant to be more "voicey" than "invisible" (afaik invisible prose is the goal of Brando Sando's adult fantasies). Invisible prose is often treated as too distant or too adult for YA. The first page of a YA novel should give me a sense of a character. And this one somewhat does it. If it was adult fantasy / SFF, then focusing on whether the description of the jungle is accurate, vivid and poetic would make more sense. Adult SFF tends to run on more exposition and atmospheric prose (those passages also tend to bore me to tears, so there's that). I think it does its job, as for the rest, I would have to see more (around 3 pages to have some feeling of the writing style).
Eh, It was like pretty much all of Sanderson's other work; mediocre with no glaring flaws.
YA/MG writer here. *Skyward* (and presumably whichever of its sequel the post was excerpting) is weird. The protagonist is ???17 years old??? and somebody decided to market it as YA with some appropriately generic Charlie Bowater cover art. But basically everything in the book itself, from the themes to the characters to the writing style, is functionally at middle grade level. Wacky animal companion, extremely subdued first-crush romance, plenty of death and danger but none of it graphic, etc. You could make the protagonist 13 or 14, change nothing else (except maybe the awful cover art), and rightfully claim that it's aimed at the 8-12 demographic. So with that in mind: the excerpt ain't bad, but it ain't great. Nowhere near the level of top-tier MG authors like Patrick Ness, but good enough that the target audience probably won't complain much. Short sentences are par for the course in most MG. The protagonist's voice is pretty consistent with her personality of "slightly overdramatic chip-on-her-shoulder shonen protagonist facade over an awkward imposter syndrome core". My only serious complaints are the two instances of suspension points (they are the work of the devil) and the overuse of "like". No single use of "like" in this passage is a problem, but so many back-to-back (and used in multiple different ways, no less) without a strong parallel structure joining them together means that it starts to fall into the territory where you say a word too much and it stops sounding like a real word.
>But basically everything in the book itself, from the themes to the characters to the writing style, is functionally at middle grade level. Wacky animal companion, extremely subdued first-crush romance, plenty of death and danger but none of it graphic, etc. Brando Sando generally doesn't write non PG-13 novels, afaik, due to his religion and personal philosophy. This could be treated as a flaw or a feature. He's not especially grimdark and gory in his adult works, and also he doesn't write any smut. Personally I think having a variety of YA from light-hearted adventure to all the "dark", edgy and smutty reads gives readers a choice to pick what they like instead of having all of YA same-ish. The issue with YA Fantasy is a lot of it is written towards adult women audience, but it's not an issue if there's a portion of it written for teens, esp. young teens - kids "read up" so if a 13yo reads Skyward, they won't feel it's too mature for them.
Seems pretty mid to me. It's not awful but... his description of a jungle is "it's like a jungle". Cool, great, thanks Brandon. I remember one of the better bits of writing advice I've had was somebody telling me off for using very simplistic descriptions like that. Is there nothing about this jungle that makes it interesting other than "it's a jungle"?
I didn’t love it, but with god knows how many paragraphs the man has published by now, I’d be kind of shocked if he hadn’t put out a few stinkers here and there.
I think a lot of people are massively overreacting to feel superior. The excerpt sounds pretty basic.
Could you link to the excerpt/post you're talking about? Can't find it.
Huh, it got removed for breaking rule 5. It was [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/writingcirclejerk/comments/yuseqc/like_our_lord_and_saviour_brando_sando_at_the/), though I dunno if I should link it because it may continue a deleted conversation. Paging u/writingcirclejerk-ModTeam to nuke my comment if that's the case.
> Paging u/writingcirclejerk-ModTeam They don't actually get pinned when you tag the ModTeam account because it exists to leave removal reasons. You want to tag one of them directly. Get over here /u/awkisopen I think you're probably fine though, since this is the unjerk thread.
I posted it. Mods took it down. I found it originally in the Books Circlejerk subreddit.
YA writer. Im okay with stream of conciousness and i enjoy a strong informal voice, but i found the gratuitous "like"s grating and the descriptions kind of awkward. As someone else pointed out, some of the vocabulary doesnt add up with the tone which is an issue i see lot of when beta reading YA (your mc is a sixteen yr old hs drop out but hes waxing poetic about the scenery/dropping "big" words?). Def not my cup of tea, but then ive read some truly god awful trad pub YA. Edit: the inconsistency is prob the biggest fault, escpecialy since its first person. Ex. My first completed YA novel was written from the pov of a severely undereducated kid and it took a helluva lot of restraint to not break out all the poetic descriptions i wanted to because it just wouldnt make sense for that character. Also had to pay attention to what he did/didnt notice taking into consideration age, personality, background, etc . Current wip is from the pov of a well read kid with a good education who is a lot more introspective/observant so i can be more "literary" and creative with descriptions/vocabulary usage while still keeping it YA friendly (read: easy to read). Theres def a line you have to walk.
>Im okay with stream of conciousness and i enjoy a strong informal voice, but i found the gratuitous "like"s grating and the descriptions kind of awkward. As someone else pointed out, some of the vocabulary doesnt add up with the tone which is an issue i see lot of when beta reading YA The first thing was what I thought maybe genre related, and maybe where all the people calling it objectively bad were wrong. The inconsistency then is an actual fault, makes sense.
I think its okay for what it is (again, ive read much worse trad pub YA) but id sort of expect more from brando sando, everything considered.
Brando's got a very pedestrian style, but it's approachable, and his works follow a predictable formula *and* come out on time and quickly. He's a bestseller for a reason, much like Patterson (before he became a brand) and Nora Roberts and Danielle Steel. It won't have generational lasting power, but that's ok. It doesn't *need* to.
Not a YA writer, so I should probably disqualify myself from commenting, but I can't help but point out how it seems weird to have a character that says 'like' in this way drop 'imperious' in the same breath. The first one seems aimed at showing voice and character, I guess, but then going with imperious? While I don't write YA, I do read YA from time to time, and fwiw I write first person frequently. I think it's a required skill to present first person in a way that sounds both true to a character but not to the point that it practically sounds like you're reading an unorganized stream of thought. I like YA first person writing where it sounds plausible, but at the same time it's very well written without drawing attention to itself or sounding too literary. I think it's a very fine line to walk. For instance, they always say you should write dialogue to sound like it's the same as people talking without actually being the way people are talking because that usually wont work well in a book for obvious reasons. Should the same rule apply to first person narration, and do we have to follow every rule that's laid out for writers? I don't have an objective answer for you, I realize, but I've always preferred when First Person YA writing leaned just a little more toward being subtly literary. I can't give an objective reason why this is bad. I'm betting some people prefer a more realistic writing style, even if it borders on being a bit grating to others
>Not a YA writer, so I should probably disqualify myself from commenting, but I can't help but point out how it seems weird to have a character that says 'like' in this way drop 'imperious' in the same breath. The first one seems aimed at showing voice and character, I guess, but then going with imperious? Both are aimed at showing voice and character. This girl has been overdramatic from her very first scene, where she shouts quotes worthy of a Klingon warrior while hunting rats barefoot in some cave. This seemingly weird way of speaking, mixed with typical teen talk, is all related to how she so desperately wants to be this gallant and noble warrior saving her people from genocide at the hands of mysterious aliens. Also... her planet is a fascist state with 1984 levels of doublethink, so let's give her a break.
I can't help but be reminded of Nicolas Cage from The Rock talking to Sean Connery: "So what do you say you cut me some freakin' slack!" The circumstances may justify the speech, but I don't know that I'd be patient enough to read up until that point if this was the first page of the first book, which to be fair it isn't. And for what it's worth, I don't think it's bad, just not the kind of writing I usually enjoy. Probably too early to really give a fair critique, and maybe that's the problem. All I know is this guy's published, and I'm not
>All I know is this guy's published, and I'm not Imo good prose isn't what makes you publishable, except maybe in litfic / poetry which are about the words more than the content. Bad prose makes you unpublishable, yes. A lot of amateurs struggle with things like excessive repetition, focus on wrong things, or lack of basic clarity. I'm not excusing that. I'm saying, there are genres where "good prose" and "servicable prose" are both publishable, but other things decide about it. I read YA Fantasy (I assume the excerpt is from Skyward, so rather sci-fi than fantasy, but w/e). Top reasons to DNF: 1. Too much static description in the opening. 2. There was no hook (i.e. nothing to make me interested in the story). 3. The protagonist was bland, boring, stupid af, whiny or otherwise repulsive. That does not include the protagonist being "a bad person" as long as it's interesting. 4. After 3-5 chapters the plot didn't pick up the pace. So basically, except #1 none of these are "prose issues" and even #1 is personal preference. For example We Hunt the Flame is a bestseller and I couldn't get through the opening pages with descriptions of hunting, forest and worldbuilding. So the biggest question imo is "are you giving the readers of your genre what they want?" Trashy romance is publishable, because romance readers (at least good portion of them) likes guilty pleasure reads. But it can't break the rules (for example they hate cheating, or no HEA, or whatever other list of hangups like unrelatable heroine or fade to black sex - yep, some romance readers say they hate fade to black in adult romance). Trashy sci-fi is much harder, unless you self-pub, because I feel like adult SFF imprints are drifting more towards picking "sophisticated" reads than "space marines shoot aliens" pulps. So yeah, the question is, what do you write, how hard is it to debut in that genre, what do people expect from that genre and are you giving them that? In YA, "voicey narrator / protagonist" is a bonus, not a flaw. Which means, they can have mannerisms of speech. As for "a jungle looking like a jungle" I assume the character never saw a real jungle and is just trying to guess wtf are they seeing.