r/writing

Look I get that everyone wants their characters to stand out but can we please talk about this trend where writers just throw random letters together and call it a day

Im a history teacher so I spend a lot of time reading different stuff and lately ive been running into so many stories where the main character is named something like Xaevynn or Khaelreth or whatever and its just exhausting trying to figure out how these are supposed to sound in my head

Like I picked up this one fantasy novel last month and literally every single person had one of these impossible names. Not just the fantasy creatures but regular humans too. Made it really hard to get into the story when I kept stumbling over basic character identification

The worst part is when its set in like present day Chicago or something but everyones named Bryxander and Kaelynn with no explanation for why everyone has these made up spellings

If youre writing fantasy there are tons of resources out there. Historical name databases baby name sites even those random name generators online. Spend like 15 minutes doing actual research instead of just adding extra consonants to everything

I mean do whatever makes you happy with your writing but from someone who reads a lot of this stuff it would be nice if I could actually remember whos who without having to flip back to check the spelling every chapter

Just my two cents as someone who loves fantasy but also values being able to pronounce things

Anyone else give a hard NOPE when people ask to read what you have so far?

I’m 20k words into my first actual manuscript (after dozens of started ideas that I flopped after the first 2k or so…) and I refuse to let even my closest book-worm friend read it. I don’t want any feedback, good nor bad, to interrupt my momentum/flow before it is finished…

Tell me I’m not the only one who hoards their writing like a secret stash!

Twelve weeks ago I woke up from a dream about a guy eating chocolate tart and started writing it in my notes app. Today I wrote the end of the relationship​ and realized that I'm at 94k words.

The main character has had a complete arc.

There is more story but it can't be one novel. It would be too long. So it's two books. And I think I just finished the first draft of book one?!

And I guess tomorrow I start book two? And get the story out of my head? Pretty sure I'm having an existential crisis now. So. Time to touch grass.

what do you do as writers, to improve your writing?

reading books?

watching films and tv shows?

walking and imagining?

resting or taking a break?

practicing your craft?

just writing it?

I've recently started writing only to improve my writing skills. But if I continue to write with my current skills and get no feedback on what to improve. How do I improve my writing skills?

Your critique submission should be a top-level comment in the thread and should include:

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* Title

* Genre

* Word count

* Type of feedback desired (line-by-line edits, general impression, etc.)

* A link to the writing

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Anyone who wants to critique the story should respond to the original writing comment. The post is set to contest mode, so the stories will appear in a random order, and child comments will only be seen by people who want to check them.

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This post will be active for approximately one week.

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For anyone using Google Drive for critique: Drive is one of the easiest ways to share and comment on work, but keep in mind all activity is tied to your Google account and may reveal personal information such as your full name. If you plan to use Google Drive as your critique platform, consider creating a separate account solely for sharing writing that does not have any connections to your real-life identity.

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Be reasonable with expectations. Posting a short chapter or a quick excerpt will get you many more responses than posting a full work. Everyone's stamina varies, but generally speaking the more you keep it under 5,000 words the better off you'll be.

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**Users who are promoting their work can either use the same template as those seeking critique or structure their posts in whatever other way seems most appropriate. Feel free to provide links to external sites like Amazon, talk about new and exciting events in your writing career, or write whatever else might suit your fancy.**

So, I recently published my first book. But I want to share a nightmare of an experience that set me back months of work and nearly cost me thousands of dollars. Hopefully this experience can help other authors avoid the same mistake, and hopefully, we can find an alternative cloud service that works better.

For Context, I switched to OneDrive for cloud backup years ago and have had very few issues with it overall. I have nearly a TB of files stored there for various projects spanning nearly a decade. So naturally, I trusted it with the many versions of my Manuscript over Google Docs (which I heard steals data from things written there)

Fast forward to when I finished the 9th and final draft of my first book (i know.... too many.) I sent a OneDrive link to my editor for him to work with. The intent was for him to track changes in Microsoft Word so that I could easily review what was edited and see his progress. My editor worked closely with me, often over voice call, to go over the changes. Once he finished, we reviewed the changes. I had the file open on my desktop word app, he had it open in the Office 365 web app. We could both see the changes the other was making as we reviewed his edits.

We finished the review of the edits and I saved it as the final draft. However, this is where the nightmare starts. Unknown to me, the entire time we were reviewing the edits together, there were file sync errors happening in the background. (not the ones that OneDrive catches.)

I sent the final draft in for copyright and started submiting queries to agents. Months in the querry trenches with nothing but rejections had me go back to my origional plan of self publishing.

So before I uploaded to Amazon, I did one final readthrough. Thats when I found them.... not only were about half of the edits my editor made no longer applied on any version in OneDrive, entire sentences, paragraphs and sometimes individual words, were duplicated and sometimes triplicated. I don't know how this happened, but it was either go back to version 8 or send it back to my editor to fix version 9. Thats about when I got a letter from the U.S. copyright office accusing me of using an LLM to write it. And no wonder, they had the version that had the repeated sentences and words. This is also the version I sent to agents, which is probably why I got nothing but rejections from the 60+ agents I querried.

Thankfully, my editor, an amazing person who is now my friend and permanent editor, re-edited the book free of charge and the copyright office accepted my evidence of human authorship when I sent in previous versions as proof. But this error likely cost me getting an agent, nearly cost me my copyright, and if I had any other editor, would have cost me thousands in the way of another round of edits.

Hopefully this experience helps other authors avoid the problem. I am almost certain it was caused by automatic sync between desktop and web apps while collaborating and tracking changes.

I am interested to see what software other authors use for cloud backup/cooporation.

TLDR: When you read more, you can actually realize that much weaker books than yours have reached the trad publishing. It's painful to read a book you just can't like but it's very motivational and liberating to see weaker works had success.

Recently I've finished the manuscript of my debut memoir and am currently in the middle of the editing phase. Waiting for feedback from my beta readers and initiating paid critical read from editor(s) to understand the strongest and weakest points in my text, if it has real potential for trad publishing and what should be my top priorities to have real chance of winning an interest from an agent. It's not in English (not my native language) but I've found a very strong translator and have ambition to chase the English market. I know, it's a very ambitious goal but I have some reasons to shoot so high.

While all that is happening I am reading one of my comp books and IMO it is... really bad. I'm in the middle of it and I just can't feel any empathy towards the problems the main character faced in his life. For me they're really mostly minor privileged first world problems. There are so many things that I am just not interested to hear about, like...whining for a few pages how he had to go to high school with a uniform and...have some lessons he didn't like...what? How he had bad grades on his public exams when he was 15 and his mom said that's terrible. How he got drunk while teenager and his mom was very disappointed and mad. You serious my guy, those are such big traumas that hey deserve a place in a struggle-recovery memoir? He's going back and forth between childhood and present and IMO the childhood part is so weak I just can't like the guy. Often while he's writing from the perspective of the child/teenager it's just so transparent that he's integrating thoughts and details that are artificially there and not part of what actually probably happened, just not the way a child/teenager would think.

I remember there was a discussion on this topic and someone linked an artiicle about how writers that dont read are bad. there was an example of author who famously in non-reader and published a book. and as example there was an excerpt from the book it was a scene from the court that was dedscribed poorly.

I started reading a lot of Terry Pratchett recently and one of my many favorite things about his stories is how he uses page breaks instead of chapters to break up the story. When reading his books I feel I can set it down at almost any point and retain the ability to seamlessly pick it back up later. With chapters (especially long ones), I invariably feel compelled to finish the chapter before taking a break, which can sometimes result in more hesitancy to pick up the book in the first place if I only have a short time to read (before starting my shift, for example).

How viable is this chapterless strategy these days? Terry Pratchett is the first author I've read who does this, which tells me it's really not very common. Will publishers insist on chapters? Are audiences prone to ignore a book like this in this day and age? What's the most compelling reason you can think of to avoid a chapterless structure?

My style has changed many times over the years. Sometimes due to the influence of writers I admire and sometimes due to the ongoing pursuit of a style that suits me and feels natural. I’m keen to hear about the experience others have had in this area.

I keep running into this weird thing where an idea feels really strong when I’m thinking about it, but the moment I try to write it down, it just… flattens out. Like I’ll imagine a scene with tension, subtext, all that, and then I read what I actually wrote and it feels basic or obvious. I’ve tried outlining more, editing less while drafting, even switching POV, but it still happens pretty often

Is this just part of the process? Or did you find something that helped bridge that gap between “idea brain” and actual writing?

I was essentially wondering how people approach early career writing if you’re not ready to hunker down and will a novel into existence. I’m aware of platforms like royal road, but what else do you guys do to get your stuff out there? Do you post snippets on social media, or find little gigs on things like fiverr? Where do you find little outlets so it doesn’t just feel like you’re screaming (politely) into the void? 😂

I wasn’t sure if I should tag this as a discussion or advice (and feel free to remove if this isn’t a good sub for this topic) but I was wondering about people’s experiences with their friends and families reading their work, whether finished or a WIP.

Have people close to you read your work? Did you ask them to? Did you get positive or helpful reactions? How did you handle it if your work has NSFW content?

I have completed my first novel (118k new adult contemporary fantasy) and am in the middle of writing book 2, and essentially nobody I actually know has ever read it. And I’ve asked them to.

My mother and stepmother both like fantasy and they haven’t asked to read it. My dad knows about it and is an avid reader and hasn’t read it. My best friend is an english teacher in a high school who loves fantasy and I’ve asked her to read it and she hasn’t. My best friend from elementary school literally has a character named after her and her sister, and she knows about the book and hasn’t asked to read it. My bf read an early version of my first book, but is struggling to get through reading the finished and vastly edited/changed version (he read few couple chapters over the span of a few months) and hasn’t read any of my second book (which is about halfway done).

For most of them, I asked them to read it once or twice, and have certainly mentioned it many times (when relevant), wanting to not be too pushy. I feel like at this point if I brought it up again I’d be begging them to read it, and I want them to WANT to read it, ya know?

Honestly, it’s really depressing me that nobody in my circle/family cares. Like, this book (trilogy) has been my life for the past 2-3 years now. I’m super passionate about it and I am just dying to actually talk/gossip about it with someone I know.

So, I was wondering what your experiences were with your family/friends reading your work or WIP. Any applicable advice would also be appreciated :) TIA

I often see posts asking about why people put down a book and never pick it up again, but now I'm interested to know: What made some of the most infamous books un-put-downable for you?

(By "bad" books I'm talking about stories that became ultra famous but also very polarizing in critique circles like Twilight, Da Vinci Code, Iron Flame, etc)

I do not see why rape is more controversial than any other atrocity.

Literature and otherwise whether TV shows, video games, or movies are full of physical violent depictions to the point that we all became so desensitised to the death of civilians, women, girls, and boys in wars and bombing campaigns.

But if, you share a rape plot or subplot in any part of your story, even if you depict it as a horrible event, then many lose their minds.

How can you even argue that rape is much worse than dropping bombs on thousands and even millions of people?

This puritan attitude is absurd and hypocritical.

I do not see the logic behind such moral panics.

I'm trying to decide between first person (leaning more towards past tense) or third person limited (past tense).

The premise is that the story takes place in a struggling nightclub where a woman works in bottle services and her long-term boyfriend is the club promoter/social media person, in a major city. Her boyfriend cheats on her so she leaves him, but can't find another job, so she's stuck. The club is sold to another set of owners, and eventually the woman and one of the club owners start a secret relationship.

I've tried the first few chapters in both styles and I'm torn. I also like to read both styles, but I do get weary of first person because it can feel so cold and distant in terms of the WHOLE picture. I feel the same about third person, in terms of intimacy with other characters.

It also doesn't help that I have ADHD lol. Help! I appreciate you guys so much.

I've had my debut novel, Dojo Riain (a coming-of-age story in the world of pro wrestling), on submission for two months now, and in recent weeks I'm looking more and more into self-publishing.

As I've been talking myself into it, I've noticed a real mindset shift. In pursuit of traditional publishing, being slow is almost mandated. For instance, if my book fails on submission, people might suggest my book and query package weren't ready, and that I ought to take the next 6-12 months reworking things. In reality though, the tangible results from that time and effort could equate to getting everything from 95% ready to 97% ready. It's also art, not an exact science. Through all those reworks I could go from 95% to 92%.

When I started talking about self-publishing, a friend reached out and said their parent is a retired graphic designer and could help me with the cover. In my trad-pubishing mindset I hesitated. I told myself 'No, you can't just take the first offer. You need to spend months trawling through designers to get as close to perfection as possible.'

But in shifting my mindset, I'm realising how freeing self-publishing can be. You don't have to trust some big, opaque system of literary agents and their whims. You have to trust yourself. If my friend's parent can't do what I need, I say no thank you and try and find someone else.

I have to trust myself to do things correctly (getting a professional editor, getting a good cover design, marketing well) without fearing doing things imperfectly (editing to absolute exhaustion, not getting the impossibly perfect cover). That's very freeing. I now see why people choose this route!

Someone can give me advice or recommend some books where the protagonist is a real coward, but he redeems himself later in the story in a satisfactory way by meeting his nature as a person who runs away from danger.

Hi all! I’m on final edits (I think ha!) of my first novel. I’m wondering if it might be helpful to do final edits on pen and paper? Just to get a different read and not get too keyboard happy? Thoughts or advice? Thanks!