Advanced guide on writing:
Just do it.

Theme: https://youtu.be/hiRacdl02w4

Wish me luck

>>25059978
Great job outing yourself, retard.

>>25060037
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Only retard so far's been OP

Do you think anyone will be able to tell I'm just writing a heavily watered down version of The Crying of Lot 49?

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pls critique (wrote it a year ago)

>>25059976
Is there a thread somewhere for screenwriters?

>>25060534
Occasionally there's an /swg/ on /tv/, but that board is too fast for it to stay alive more than a day.

>>25060308
there's plenty to work through at a sentence level, but i can't really tell what you were going for. this was intentionally "stylized", yea?

>>25060534
>>25060667
Anyone use storyboarding software?

>>25061242
I use my mind

All this work improving my craft and I've still never written anything more successful than the erotica I wrote in high school

Why is there so much AI slop in the writing community? From actual writing itself, to AI art, AI-prompted feedback/critique etc

>>25061440
>Why is there so much AI slop in the writing community? From actual writing itself, to AI art, AI-prompted feedback/critique etc
Writing slop exists because everyone is obsessed with speed. People want to feel productive without actually sitting in a chair and doing the hard work. Writing used to be a slow process but now anyone can push a button to generate hundreds of words that look real but say absolutely nothing. It is a volume game where the goal is to flood every corner of the internet with generic text to grab a few clicks before the reader notices it is hollow. This has ruined feedback too. Giving a real critique takes a lot of mental energy because you have to find the one good sentence in a bad draft. Most writers just want a quick pat on the back so they use AI as a yes man. It gives them shallow praise and they walk away feeling like they accomplished something when they actually just consumed empty calories.

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>>25059976
do you ever write something that is intended to be taken one way, but people reviewing it frequently think of it another way?

>>25061440
Because there are far more people that are interested in the idea of being an author than actually becoming one.

You'll soon get people saying they're authors even after extensive AI use

>>25059976
Finally had a workflow going on my Mac and iPad just to have updated Pages on my iPad and now it's just being obsessively annoying with ai suggestions. I liked the convenience of the cloud but if Apple is going to destroy their free software I need either a way to revert or alternatives.

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>>25061554
Come home, White man.

>>25061575
I have and use Linux for general use, but for writing I found Pages with an iPad exceptionally helpful. Doing illustrations and stuff was also really helpful. I take it you use LibreOffice?

>>25061605
oh, I don't write.

>>25061641
Yeah, we know, threadshitter.

>no one has posted their ao3 or wattpads
Are none of you men?
Where are your balls. Let me read your fanfictions

>>25061440
Massive quantities can be produced with zero effort and low/no cost nearly instantly.
It's hard to filter out, especially since most ai bros are literally scammers in mindset so intentionally bypass or ignore anti ai policies. So they can and do spam their valueless shit to inhuman extremes to push out human made "content" in the hopes of tricking people into consuming their slop so they can use the attention economy to get rich quick without effort or skill.

We are living in the scam economy where everything is a fucking scam or rip off.

>>25061777
I have never and likely will never write fan fiction.

>>25059976
How do you keep a story pumping through the mushy middle? I have a well driven first and last third but the middle sags imo. I think I need to keep the stakes turning with a tweaked chapter or two without going and removing all that I already have. How do you do it?
>inb4 idk lol

>>25061818
>inb4 idk
Well yah,
It would help to have some samples or to know more about the story.

>>25061803
There are plenty of good fanfics out there that are not smut or self insert OCs.
Fallout Equestria comes to mind immediately. The same, Methods of Rationality-- that one started a cult though.

>>25061818
Specific plot points must happen at specific points.
>The catalyst at 10%
>The midpoint at 50%
>The 'all is lost' at 75%

Readers are already hypnotized to expect certain hits at certain points.
https://savethecat.com/genre-mapper
Keywords to research are neuro narrativotology and trope density.

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>>25060308
The first sentence is fucking borked as hell, my dude.
It's doing 3 things at once.
Don't start your story with a name if you're going to drown it under a run-on sentence.

Learn how rewrite your sentences in hyperbaton to see if you're overloading it. When you make yoda read it, you learn to appreciate brevity more. You don't need to remove details, you need to pace out your sentences.

(I only read the first sentence, I'm not going to continue if that's how you start.)

>>25061818
Figure out how your story's gears are meshing together.
Do a classic "a happens so b happens then c happens so d happens" plot chain.
I usually see mushy middles happen because the author has lost focus on the mechanisms of their story. Look at your chapter from above and know why it exists in the gear train of your story. There is no such thing as a "downtime" chapter, even rests need to mesh together.
If you're still feeling the chapter reading like it's thick, it probably is. I like to read chapters paragraph by paragraph backwards. Read the last paragraph, then to the one before. Really lay bare what each paragraph is supposed to be building towards.

>>25061909
That sort of schlocky advice. Show me your prose, you sound like you write like a workhorse.

Thinking about going to traditional book route because I hate adhering to a schedule, but my story is firmly in the progression fantasy genre even though it has heavy focus on philosophical elements. Is it even viable?

Just dont write alot, it allows u to tumble and polish ideas in ur head if u dont

I let all my ideas marinate for a few years before writing them out

>>25062340
Who knows? Webnovel readers tend not to go for actual books and actual readers tend not to go for webnovel-type books but who knows.

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What do you guys think about writing a second person novel. And what if I tell everything rather than showing.

>write 11k words over the entirety of last year
>this year decide to actually focus on it, before work forces me to go back to the office full time
>at 36k words after January
It's actually progressing along nicely, I wish I had a whiteboard to write key points on, would probably be less annoying than alt-tabbing every now and then

I got kicked out of my writing group for using the word “ravished.” One young woman in the group was once sa’d and so seeing the word upset her. I tried to explain that I wasn’t using it to describe grape but how passionate, borderline animalistic, the characters were together. No matter how much I insisted they just look up the word’s meaning they said that I was writing violent, misogynistic filth without the courtesy of properly warning people. Then they told me to leave. I want to unalive myself now.

I've expanded my 8k word novelette to 13k words. We're reaching novella status!

>>25060667
Thanks. I'll watch for that thread.
>>25061242
I recently discovered Causality (https://www.hollywoodcamerawork.com/). A huge point in its favor is it runs on Linux.

>>25062641
This never happened but if it had your creative spirit would be better off away from those people

>>25062700
>I'll watch for that thread.
Might be a while, we just had one yesterday that died with only like 10 replies. Usually it's at least a week before the next one will take off, if not a month. That board doesn't host very many creatives

>>25062732
Any recommendations of places to chat with other screenwriters?

>>25062318
it gets good after the first paragraph, I promise

>>25060684
could you be more specific? are they 'borked' (whatever that means) like the other anon said? I think my vocabulary and clarity may need some working on , though

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>>25061803
>I have never and likely will never write fan fiction.

You're limiting yourself. A lot of the writer block that people go through pertains to what to write about and about whom to write about. First exercise in writing class was to write a scene using characters that have already been developed. Place that character in an ordinary life scene.

I'm a fan of the Breaking Bad Universe, so I placed the character, Gus Fring (the methamphetamine kingpin) in an ordinary scene of getting into a car accident. It's kind of a hack to get you writing.

Other scenes by other students (as I remember):
1. Superman goes shopping at whole foods.
2. another one-that got the prize of most funny and intersting: Carl Sagan the famous writer of science fiction and also an Athiest dies, and is in line at the Pearly Gates gated community, waiting to meet God at his judgement day.

Those few stories/writing exercise ideas
i saved in my head. I'm not saying write fan fiction, but it's good to play around characters you are familiar with.

The next topic we went over was fleshing out your characters in your short stories or novel ideas. Some used index cards, or print outs with traits, race and proclivities. I know a girl who has published 1 story in New Yorker that uses computers to create an image of a person. This was like 2015 or so before prompts became a thing. The website creates an image of a person's face using parts of faces from thousands of faces. I think i have it book marked on my other computer.

Maybe this board needs a general thread-with a cool acronym-about misplaced characters or something in regular life. In fact, isn't Aberaham Lincoln a vampire hunter now? Vampires are not regular, but you get the idea: complex characters in ordinary life or vice versa.

Attached image, just a funny recent news article, not related to topic.

>>25062700
>Causality
looks interesting, I'll have a go at it. What I'm looking for is something like: color coded character boxes, click on the character box, and have the characters traits and motivations available, then be able to drag/drop character into another box that indicates a scene. So two characters get dragged into a location box. Then a built in editor to write the scene. Also no proprietary db for the information. Maybe a comma delimited character file. I wonder if open office has a postit note add-on for written fiction. Sadly, the tried and true postit note on cardboard is out of reach to me currently, because of some medical issues that I'm dealing with, so seated with laptop is my only go to option available.

>>25062641
I was banned from a group once because I said "Sony's business practice is economically retarded"
People genuinely don't understand words have multiple meanings

>>25062845
>Sony's business
? who is Sony? the audio comp or the mafia character? or someother?

>>25062845
That didn’t happen, either.

>EVERYBODY I WROTE 15K WORDS TODAY
>14,500 words of exposition

>>25062761
>It's kind of a hack to get you writing.
You're kind of like a hack that shouldn't be writing.

>>25062709
>>25063034
>libtards don't exist chud!!!
quit the cap

>>25063295
>You're kind of like a hack that shouldn't be writing.
i disagree. everyone should write if they want. This bread is about getting people to fill up that blank page. Accentuate the positive! Please copy/paste something so that we can all contribute our ideas.

>>25063318
I strongly disagree. Virtually no one that writes should. Filling blank pages for the sake of it is exactly the problem and toxic positivity is a root cause.

>>25062340
How difficult are the sentences to read?

>>25062498
There are a lot of (You) second person stories. There are readers who like it that way.

>Imagine
Harry Styles: hey, y/n. I saw you reading that Colleen Hoover novel and I was just wondering if it was good or not?
Y/n: yea, i lik it alot
Harry Styles: wow, y/n. You have really great taste in books
>Harry Stylez gets close to your air and whisper
Harry Stylez: you've got that one thing

Please rate

>>25062761
Ao3Gen would be based

>>25063305
Are the libtards here with us now?

>>25063439
they're not on 4chan, they're in irl book clubs/writing clubs and other social media sites

>>25063532
Please tell me more about these spaces you rarely inhabit

>>25063533
Sure, what would you like to know?

>>25063547
I'd like to know nothing, which is why I'm asking you

>>25063563
>I'd like to know nothing
You're already there.

Do you guys pay attention to your iambs, trochees, dactyls, anapests and forth while writing?
Im writing some gay erotica and Im exhausting myself tweaking lines and paragraphs to keep a rhythm.

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>an entire sitcom about a 29 year old woman who fucked a 17 year old teenage dude and got pregnant
>You know 100% a gender flipped version would never fly
So is writing a male teenager with an adult woman completely acceptable to mainstream audiences?

>>25063844
it's always sad when the attentionwhores don't even know how to attentionwhore properly
make it its own thread, dumbass. this thread is slow as fuck

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>68k word first draft finished in 21 days
Satisfied but tired now since I wrote 9k words today alone. Now comes the actually hard part of editing kek

>>25063676
No that sounds incredibly exhausting. Write from the bottom of your little faggot heart, and edit later. Your natural voice will have a cadence of its own. If you overanalyze while writing it you'll get filtered before you get anywhere imo

If you ever feel insecure about your writing, just watch the Star wars sequels

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oJGknviQ4Cc?feature=share

>>25063844
Yes because life is full of double standards like that. True equality is something people pretend at having, but it's just a social agreement that flies out the window on daily basis.

>>25063927
The world is not ready for this faggots stream of consciousness

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Has anyone here ever come across a book written in the format of a historical newspaper?

Basically, one where the book is presented as an anthology of pieces from a fictional newspaper. News reports, opinions, investigatives, editorials, obituaries, what have you. Yes, I am thinking of churning out an entire archive of samizdat. Bored of narrators innit.

>>25060308
Drop the big fucking words man. It's just baggage that the reader is forced to carry.
>paternal obnoxiousness
>circumferential
>neutralised
>crossing the line of injustice
>the blood for the instinct of brotherhood
Always prefer the short Saxon word over the long Latin one, and divide your sentences into two or three clauses rather than five or six. On a positive note, I loved some of your simpler turns of phrase. ("An unlikely prison", "secretly considered the bravest", "what her deal or name was".) Just go for smaller words, smaller sentences.

>>25064187
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistolary_novel

Have you ever read Dracula?

>>25064196
Yes, it's not quite what I mean. That's an assortment of various sources and formats of writing following a specific story, of which news articles are just one sort.
I was thinking rather of something that presents itself as simply a reprint of a singular newspaper or other periodic publication, as it covered the general existence, concerns, and slices-of-life in a fictional area.

>>25062752
sorry, i havent been around... if you still are:
the formatting, style, etc. is not standard. it's unusual and therefore distracting. if you're going for some effect, fine; (but) everything outside of the norm should be purposeful.
if you don't read novels/short stories, you need to (in order to) form some frame of reference. otherwise we can't really be expected to give you practical feedback. i mean, we could go on intuition but if we're working w/ the same foundations it'd be ideal.

>>25063676
you should do this all intuitively

>>25064204
>That's not quite what I mean is (an epistolary novel)
ok buddy

>>25064187
>Drop the big fucking words man.
>>paternal obnoxiousness
>>circumferential
>>neutralised
>>crossing the line of injustice
>>the blood for the instinct of brotherhood
I didn't think any of those were big. I think your critique is more of a personal preference thing. there is no reason in preferring saxon to latin. the part about the sentence length though I get.
>On a positive note, I loved some of your simpler turns of phrase
thank you!

>>25064317
yes the style is intentional. you may see parallels between it and One Hundred Years of Solitude, as that was the book I was reading at the time. I was partial to its straight-forward, historical, tell-it-how-it-is style of narration. but otherwise I need you to be more specific with what about the style makes reading it so distracting. do you mind giving me an example excerpt and detail its unbecoming qualities?
and I don't really understand what you mean by that last part.

>>25064187
>ne where the book is presented as an anthology of pieces from a fictional newspaper. News reports, opinions, investigatives, editorials, obituaries, what have you.
War with the Newts is exactly what you are looking for, specifically the second part

>>25064548
>there is no reason in preferring saxon to latin
I should've clarified that it's more an issue of simplicity rather than etymology. Being able to say "hometown" instead of "the village of his origin" (just an example) while still preserving the potency of the sentence.
I can't speak for the other anon as to why he finds the style distracting, but for me a big part was the vocabulary choices. Unless you're doing this intentionally for a specific stylistic goal, it risks leading to ordinary readers focusing more on your writing than the story/content it's enclosing.

>>25064554
Thank you! I'll check it out.

>>25064409
>understands a question
>able to help
>spergs out on label/category point instead
The Reddit is pungent with this one.

What’s with the absurd waiting period for short story querying? I am looking at the response time for some of them and they are around from a month to 3 months.

The shortest one I have seen is 3 days and that was for Clarkesworld magazine. Speaking of Clarkesworld, what in the world do they accept even? Do they even like fantasy and science fiction?

>>25064548
you're telling me it's intentional; yet you're asking for specifics. surely you can deduce this on your own. but,
you have 1/3 page paragraphs, non-standard formatting, it's all telling (as you intended...)-- but besides all this, the phrasing is awkward as hell (ESL?). i could probably nitpick every single line. but you wrote this a year ago and you're a new man now.

>>25064736
Even the obscure ones are flooded with more writers submitting their trunk stories than they have readers. And you're supposed to read some of their recent publications to learn more about what they're likely to accept. If you'd done that for Clarkesworld you'd know that they only accept trash.

>>25064736
With AI, lots of jeets keep churning out random writings and hope to get a few extra dollars. They'll even say they did not write with AI. They don't care. And it takes a long time to shift through it

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I've expanded into mosaic novella territory.

If anyone is interested in beta reading, the call is still open. It's a mosaic novella grit-lit fever dream piece about the people of the dying and drug-crippled Appalachian Rust Belt.

carlvandine@proton.me

>>25064548
>Saxan vs Latinates
So, when Hitler wrote Mein Kempf, he did so in Patton Deutsche (Platonic German)
He used a older style of writing and mostly limited himself to one syllable words and short sentences. People criticize it as a rant, but it all seems to be rhetorical decisions by the author that WORKED.
>When a German reads Mein Kempf, their ancestral soul is reading the words.

Latin is full of transitive verbs and nominalizations of thoughtforms like we create the egregore Anxiety from just anxious thoughts.

>>25064409
This. Its the found footage of writ.
Maybe anon is esl or just really wants to be original so he's denying reality

>>25064705
I'd go even more patton Saxon. In place of 'hometown' I'd say 'returning to my kin-folks' or choose a physical location or trait to the area call that the home.

>>25062827
This is an extremely specific feature that doesn't exist in current screenwriting software. The good news is this is something you can certainly build with AI.

>>25064409
>>25065001
>yes, I too see that the guy calmly asking about a writing format is esl and DENYING REALITY, you're so smart my fellow anon
People can see when you samefag here, lmao. I thought you were just an innocently retarded reddit tourist, not that you were also so socially frustrated that you feel pressured to reply to yourself for the illusion of validation.

Look at >>25064554 who gave me a book rec, I'm combing through it rn on Z-Lib and it's a very insightful example of the format I was curious about. That's an example of a person useful to other people and to society. Be like that other anon.

>>25065005
>Saxon
>"returning"
Nope. This technique might be workable in German (still ~85% native vocabulary I believe?) but English feels a hopeless case unless you pack the text with artificial OE revivals.

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>>25065328
>im on /lit/ so i am smart

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spent an hour staring at the screen without writing anything again

>>25065388
In addendum, you asked for a name to the format, I supplied it.
Then another anon suggested a title that falls under the epistatory category.
That is what it is called.

>>25062641
Yeah, progressives are a bane of artistic expression these days. Women self-inserting themselves in men's entertainment has been a catastrophe. They constantly fuck up settings with their overt inclusivity bullshit, making no attempts to make the worldbuilding feel organic.

The only writer's group I have is this general

>>25065553
same

You may hate my book, but at least AI likes it.

>>25065553
>>25065636
It's sadly the realty that a there are few if any legitimate, intellectually honest writers' groups anymore. They're bound to be so inundated by "leftists" and "progressives" that they're just barely disguised echo chambers turned struggle sessions when challenged, concerned with critical theory and limiting free expression rather than art or craft. I don't particularly care what anyone'ss politics or views are, and I'm happy to be challenged, but that's not what I wrote about, and I won't tolerate every reading and discussion being turned to micro aggressions and the critical theory of why everything I say is homophobic and racist and mysogynist because I was born a straight white male by no choice of my own. I don't know why anyone would tolerate that.

>>25065686
I'm more than likely indifferent to your book

>>25065781
I wrote Victoria

>>25065841
I didn't hate it, I just couldn't even get you to write even a sentence about it that would make me want to read it. Therefore, indifference.

Do you think there could be a CIA operative named Victoria?

>>25065841
But I wrote Victoria.

>>25065841
Yours is the worst kind of slop. It's not the blantatly ignorant kind with egregious spelling and grammatical errors and run-on sentences. It's the kind that, while technically sound, has nothing to add to the ongoing conversation of literature. There's nothing to discuss about it beside its execution. It's not art.

>>25065924
>engaging with art
lol.

>>25065924
storytelling predates art (as you know it) by maybe 200,000 years

Funnily... I think my sister's middle name might be Victoria. Idk for sure.

>>25066071
Yeah that's not funny

>>25065686
Do you think we simply need to use AI to write now? It speeds up research, it gives instant feedback, it is good for bouncing ideas off of.
Gemini has a writing editor "gem"

For the likes of Brandon Sanderson, AI is actually competition at putting out filler books for people to read just because its new.
Everything he writes is so formulaic thay an AI actually can do the same job he does. Same goes for James Patterson and Tom Clancy.

>>25066242
No you don't need AI to write, but there's definitely benefits to using it. AI does twists very poorly and loves fantasy. No matter what genre I try to put in, it defaults to fantasy.