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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:Well, as always the first step is to read books in your genre. Have you done that? This post makes me think you just read Armada and thought "come on, even I can do better than this!" which is maybe a decent motivator, but won't really get you anywhere. It's most likely to lead to a boring re-tread of the same stuff. I have actually read/seen all of these! But no, I just wanted to know if anyone here had successfully written YA before and had some definite don'ts to point out.
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Mar 27, 2016 01:48
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Young Adult Lich, for ages 60-80
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Mar 27, 2016 04:06
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Speaking of writing software, I've only used Word, but was thinking about how nice it would be to have something intuitive that easily showed different sections and let you hop between them. Maybe broken up into different panes that you could hop between; ie, characters, scenes, concepts etc. And maybe you could then dive deeper into each category in the same way.
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Apr 9, 2016 04:30
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General Battuta posted:Is this a weird joke I'm not getting where you just describe Scrivener? If not you should buy Scrivener, it's literally this. (And you can try it for free). Nah, I've just never tried anything else. But now I will!
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Apr 9, 2016 15:30
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What if I want to write about white people in Canada? Just toss in some bagged milk mentions?
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Apr 14, 2016 23:41
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Fan-fiction is still fiction writing, right? Congrats! Plop 'em in Harry Potter.
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Apr 17, 2016 13:50
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The addled addict of a writer trope only applies if the person has talent to begin with.
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May 8, 2016 16:38
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Also, how do people come up with good titles. This is one skill I am sorely lacking.
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May 10, 2016 00:33
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"hosed in the Butt by a Maple Tree"
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May 10, 2016 00:42
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General Battuta posted:angel opportunity's advice is great (though I don't know if you could really sell a 50k novel, but I'm not very widely experienced). But also here is a completely bare bones structural outline. Try forcing yourself to stick to this. I found this funny because I'm reading The Department of Speculation right now. For those of you who haven't read it, every paragraph is a self-contained short story and the main plot sort of drifts around. The chapters don't really delineate anything. It's 200 pages, but still very short because of the spacing and margins and large font. Of course, Offill already knew how to write a book before she tried to branch out into something different. it's also really good
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May 20, 2016 04:08
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I guess my advice is just "keep writing and editing your lovely books until you can accept that they're bad. Then write better ones using what you've learned".
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May 20, 2016 04:10
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crabrock posted:everytime i need a character to say something, i have them clip their nails. then if it's going on for a long time their nails get shorter and shorter, raising the tension in the scene so that the reader can relate. Is it a bad sign if your characters end the scene with bloody stumps instead of fingers
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May 29, 2016 21:32
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Real talk though, if you're looking to get published at all then it's a good idea to follow at least a few agents on Twitter. They all seem to love giving out helpful advice, and one piece I've taken to heart is "if your characters spend more time talking about their adventures than having them, your book is bad".
change my name fucked around with this message at 02:14 on May 30, 2016 |
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May 29, 2016 22:24
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General Battuta posted:I decided to bang together a fun trashy adventure novella for Tor.com, since they are hungry for material and the market is eating their stuff up. A month later it's almost 70,000 words As someone who's friends with a guy who used to man the Tor slush pile, I can tell you that they probably won't buy something that isn't well thought out. Edit: oops, Tor the website and Tor the imprint have totally different submission standards. But this is still a good place to drop that a lot of publishers get a lot of unsolicited crazy "god told me to write this!" books on the regular.
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Jun 7, 2016 03:03
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I know it's torture on the people reading them, but I really love awful books in a "this is what not to do" way. It'd probably wear on my sanity to have to consistently take all of that in, though. And yeah, not to mention that even if you do submit unsolicited and get picked up, you're probably going to have to wait twice as long for a worse deal.
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Jun 7, 2016 04:23
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Get ready for acid reflux
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Jun 7, 2016 18:37
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What's everyone's opinion on bland, generic literary fiction "The ______" titles. I have one for be new thing I'm working on now, but another book already has the same title so I'm not sure anymore.
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Jun 10, 2016 16:03
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Szmitten posted:A title I've had in mind for a long time and would love to write a story for is The Gay Gardner's Wife. The Wendigo's Wife The Girl with the Syrup Tattoo
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Jun 11, 2016 16:52
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After unsuccessfully querying a few more agents for that urban fantasy novel I was asking for help with earlier, I think I'm going to just self-publish it and start on a new project. At least it was good for a dry run? I know "debut novel" is usually like a third or fourth finished book for most authors.
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Aug 20, 2016 01:50
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RedTonic posted:We need a :justpublish: version of Well I did it (if anyone's interested they can check out the self-pub thread), and now I've started outlining my next book. Because it's about pop-culture obsessed dorks, each character description includes [Doesn't smell] and [Does smell] tags.
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Aug 25, 2016 18:37
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. This is what I did. I think eventually I'll manage a tradpub deal and go the hybrid route, but until then, I'm writing more books, more queries, and self-pubbing. Do your best and keep writing.
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I started writing a contemporary romance novel, and has anyone else queried or self pubbed under a pseudonym? I assume self publishing like that is as easy as putting in a different name on the form, but how does actually talking to an agent work?
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Sep 7, 2016 04:07
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Naerasa posted:New pitch for a story: dude who competes in the drug olympics and has to take the most drugs to win. He's cool, hot, and a certified sex-haver, but the popularity courts will rip up his sex-having certification if he fails the drug-off. If he wants to succeed in continuing a life of awesome hetero-sex, he's got to do drugs in a cooler and more badass way than anyone has ever done them before. Also he's got a magic rock. Wasn't this just The Magicians?
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Sep 10, 2016 22:57
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I'd read a fantasy novel about Jane's Addiction.
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Sep 11, 2016 16:45
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Thoughts on mixing first and third person narratives? I want to do something similar to what Murakami did with 1Q84 (3rd person narrative with first person thoughts in italics) but much more constrained to a single character and only on new lines as to not break the narrative flow. He kind of went overboard in that book.
change my name fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Sep 17, 2016 |
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Sep 17, 2016 04:44
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I actually just started writing a Lovecraftian science fiction novel too (but more as in fiction about science) that began as the cheap schlocky romance novel I posted about earlier. It's still about a heartbroken widow moving to a small town to find solace, but she's a trained astronomer who starts noticing small, scientifically impossible phenomena that the normal residents had been overlooking.
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Sep 21, 2016 01:32
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General Battuta posted:Goonspeed to Carla and may she find much happiness with Cecilia I said small things.
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Sep 21, 2016 15:14
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anime was right posted:yeah but how do i do it without any talent or effort this is important to me, a person who builds huge imaginary worlds in my head that i think have consistency but are really just a hodgepodge of anime tropes Have you tried TVtropes?
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Sep 24, 2016 17:11
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Have any of you ever written a novel before without much planning or forethought before? How did it turn out? My last book was overly structured and I'm trying something similar to what McBride describes in this article this time around (just throwing myself into it with a very vague outline): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/10/guardian-book-club-eimear-mcbride-how-i-wrote-a-girl-is-a-half-formed-thing
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Nov 1, 2016 05:48
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General Battuta posted:There's nothing to bloat your wordcount like a protagonist who pauses after every loving line of dialogue to consider possible hidden meanings, clues about secret alliances, and ramifications for the grand global conspiracy Hey, but then you can break up your book into 2 parts and still have people consider it for the Nobel! Thanks, Murakami.
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Nov 8, 2016 06:25
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How far along in the story do you all usually get in your first chapters? For my last book I noticed there was a lot of meandering and things didn't get going until the second chapter, so I had to sit down and combine the two. I have read a lot of books where the inciting incident(s) doesn't happen in the first chapter, though. For the one I'm writing now, it goes like this: The main character is an astronomer returning to her summer home in the Hamptons after the recent death of her husband -> She gets harassed on the bus and warned about something -> After being dropped off at their now run down bungalow (it's been about 3 years since they last visited), she heads out to the beach to drown herself under the stars, BUT -> She hears a ghostly party coming from the house, and remembering the warning from earlier, tears her way back to find everything in shambles. Egged on by scientific curiosity she decides to keep living, at least until she can definitely prove one way or another that what happened was real. I guess writing something bad first and learning from your mistakes in the best way to improve? This seems like it's much faster than my last one.
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Nov 27, 2016 19:29
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Stephen King's steps for writing: get blasted until you can't remember how you wrote the book, include a fat woman as a villain, something something psychic Mainers.
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Dec 25, 2016 21:53
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In the case of Girl on the Train, you could try reading a book you liked and just ripping it off.
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Dec 30, 2016 21:14
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magnificent7 posted:Is that what that was? It's a ripoff of another story? (Gone Girl seems to come up in reviews) Was the original story similar, in the way it distanced itself from typical forgettable books? It's not a direct ripoff per-say so that was a little harsh, but yeah, the author lifts a lot of the tone and style from Gone Girl. It's more of a cash-in on the new popularity of the "bad girl/noir" genre directly.
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Dec 30, 2016 21:18
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Buy my new erotica hardcover, it's a fantasy novel that you can read if you want but it also doubles as a fleshlight.
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Jan 6, 2017 07:06
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Think of writing as being one of those North Korean soldiers who have chairs smashed over their backs every day so that they grow more bone mass.
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Jan 6, 2017 20:14
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Also I guess it stops "genre bleed" before it starts, and keeps you on topic? For instance, if you were writing sci-fi and started throwing in magical realism because you had a cool idea or whatever. Sometimes having set limitations forces you to come up with interesting ideas (although genres are pretty broad anyways).
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Jan 8, 2017 23:23
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