"My character has a dead daddy and mommy, and it is the reason she is an archaeologist; NOT because she loves it, she just has no passion and drive of her own!"

OML, I hate you people.

(Based on the survivor fucklogy Lara Croft)

"Read to learn."

What does it LOOK like I'm trying to do?! I read ONE page and instantly start writing again. I CAN'T READ MIJO. I WISH I could read a book normally! The hands are glued to the keyboard شاطر! I'm not waiting around until I don't wanna write no more!

Hi all,

Happy Tuesday! Sooooooo I was thinking about starting a new food writing magazine about cuisine that looks like shit from a butt but probably tastes good? Like that one extremely relevant meme? Anyway, I was kind of hoping we like-minded writers could converge upon this post and form an editorial board. We're especially looking for a Wyndham Lewis type, and to publish things that are approximately midway between Anthony Bourdain and Ben Lerner.

More soon,

Lord forbid a wahman is an active player not a passive viewer in her own life. Yes, she is a fundie & an alcoholic, but she was not a fan watching from the stands, she was out on that ice, playing forward, shooting pucks, when she decided to make such decisions./metaphor.

I'm so unique, so quirky. No other writer gets it like I do.

No, I'm still in the worldbuilding phase. Why do you ask?

I don’t know how to do it without making it obvious. Is there anyway to allude to something without explicitly mentioning it? I want to show readers that X thing is going to happen without actually telling them.

See the redditor. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged uniqlo V neck sweater. He stokes the verbal fire of multitudinous r/datingadvice threads. Outside lie green fields of grass and the sun, untouched by him, and greener fields beyond which harbor a few real women. His folk are known for teaching K-12 and middle management but in truth his father has been an unemployed sex-offender. He lies in seedy 4chan threads, he quotes from internet legends who names are now lost. The redditor crouches by the gooncave and watches him.

Has anyone had the idea to look to history for their novels? I feel like there’s so many ripe ideas for stories or settings based on historical events or time periods. Just imagine using industrial age London for the backdrop of a tense and impossible romance, or the 1960s for a gritty detective novel. And the best part is the world building is already done for you!

You could even blend fantasy elements in, like super natural werewolves in Civil War America. I feel like Imperial China would be the perfect political system to base a faction off of in a fantasy novel.

Curious to hear what others think!

He ends up fucking the dragon in the end. Don't ask which holes cause there's A LOT

I read this book recently that was JUST "lore" infodump after "lore" infodump. NO ONE CARES. This is an objectively dogshit way to write a book. There are no characters that I care about in the slightest, no emotional throughline. I hate these modern obsessions so much.

Someone needs to kick this "Calvino" guy back to RoyalRoad

Sometimes tracing in art helps with learning how to draw. Has anyone ever tried tracing a writing, as in just typing it out?

Taking it a step further, has anyone tried translating a non text based media, let’s say a comic, into writing? Is that good practice? I procrastinate badly when I try to bring my own ideas to life (I know that’s a bridge I eventually have to cross), I feel like this might be a more time efficient way to practice prose.

I've been wasting all my time developing characters with interesting back stories and personality quirks, when all I needed to do was give them an interesting scar and job done.
Characters are so much more interesting with an unhealed wound and you really don't need to work out anything about them because the scar does all the work.
Evil character: Facial scar and maybe a white eye. You don't need to say how they got it. They are evil. They have a scar.
Tragic character: A scar from an accident that they can show people for sympathy, but is hidden and doesn't make them unattractive in any way. The scar is the only tragic thing about them you need.
Tough hero: Facial scar that somehow makes them more attractive rather than less. Bonus if you can explain the scar looks like something else, like a lightning bolt or cross, because that makes them interesting.

Inspired by https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/1xgbf0h/scars_are_great_for_character_development_and/

Your partner skimmed your novel. Do you say something, or let it go?

I spent four years writing my novel (the early days of ChatGPT were rough) and six months working up the nerve to ask my beloved wife to read it.

She was so sweet when she said yes, and kept telling me as she read how much she liked each part. I played it cool and didn't get all bubbly excited like I usually do when someone likes me, but internally I was *flying*.

But then came the kicker - "so, was Marnie supposed to be the sister the whole time or was that a twist?"

It wasn't a twist. The unnamed sister died in chapter 9. Marnie was the named neighbor I'm imagining fucking. I just kind of mumbled "umm, I guess maybe?" because I didn't know what to say.

My wife must have skimmed my novel because I spent like four chapters dwelling on it. If the sister hadn't died, Marnie couldn't have been available, so it was *important*.

Reddit, does my wife hate me? Does she know I'm trying to sleep with our neighbor? Is there any reason she might have asked this that doesn't spell the end of our relationship before I can even line up another chick?

Edit - I don't think it's relevant, but my wife usually reads cat mysteries and thrillers and I wrote a long, sad out literary masterpiece that is absolutely perfect and contains zero parts that could possibly mislead a reader into mixing up the characters.

Sauce - https://www.reddit.com/r/KeepWriting/comments/1xg4u0q/my_wife_finished_my_novel_and_asked_if_marnie_was/

Not word for word because I can do better than this guy's slop.

Fiction doesn’t exist, mmmkay? Everybody knows that all good ‘fiction’ is an autobiography every time.

We all know that authors of best-selling murder mysteries are real-life detectives who have brutally murdered dozens of people, right? This way, they can write about their protagonists (themselves) solving their own crime and pinning it on somebody else (someone who’s delusional or a pathological liar is best, btw) so that they can keep creating and fighting crime on paper and in reality in an infinite loop.

Have you ever read a book from the POV of an elderly person that was written by somebody in their mid-forties? Don’t be fooled. Either the author hired or bamboozled an 80-year-old writer, or they are just using the memories of their past life to write about their experience with inhabiting a withered, dying body.

Don’t even think about writing anything you haven’t gone through personally. If you do, I will know. So will the slavering masses you call your readers, hungry for your blood the second they realize you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

For instance, you don’t swear in real life, and you try writing a character who does. You slip in words and phrases like “fuck” and “holy shit”. Do you know how trite that sounds? A real person who swears for real never uses cliches. A true swearer is never predictable. The swearee should never know what’s coming. Foreshadowing should range from faint to nonexistent.

To write such a complex character, you must start swearing in real life and learn such creative slurs and insults that any recipient of your words needs to pause to decipher just how deeply you insulted their bloodline.

Beta readers never know what they are talking about, so forget research and early critiques. Those won’t save your shitty, inauthentic writing.

Oh, don’t get me started on woke writers who try for ‘representation’ or those who include ‘sensitive topics’ in their writing. If you aren’t the sensitive topic, then give up already. NEVER write a gay character if you aren’t gay. Never write any gender, race, culture, occupation, lifestyle, crime, hobby, sex act, event, emotion, disease, etc. that you aren’t intimately familiar with.

If you absolutely must write something you don’t know, you’d better have the tools, disguises, acting skills, and willpower to fully embody that role and infiltrate whatever culture, racial group, or life experience you wish to emulate.

Are you prepared to drive your car into a tree to write your novel about a crash victim? You’d better be.

Because writing fiction is impossible. If you try to write what you don’t know, I will hunt you down on every virtual platform, and in the flesh, and I will cancel you in every possible way.

... Just Lost The Game

1. Write one true sentence

2. Realize that sentence sucked because you lied in it

3. Write like five other sentences on top of what you already wrote.

4. Realize you hate it, erase it, then throw away your keyboard. After a while, you calm down and plug it back in. But you started sipping on whatever wine/whiskey/beer/alcoholic beverage you have on hand to soothe the pain.

5.Whine about your writing on the internet and watch YouTube videos about writing.

6.Realize that your passion in writing was editing all along and become an editor instead of a writer.

7.Realize that the real friends we made along the way were the stories in our head, so you simply stop talking, become cataconic, get sent to a place with those comfortable white straight jackets and never say anything ever again or write another word ever because you realize those stories made more sense when you kept them in your head.

I have no doubt my shit will sell worldwide. They will make movies, there will theme parks, all that jazz.

I don’t have any issue with trans people, though.

Why does that matter you ask? Because it seems like once you get famous and make billions, you have to fixate on them. It’s really weird and I’m wondering if anyone knows how to sidestep this or if it’s mandatory once you are comfortably at the top?

Also, and this is unrelated, does anyone else think Harry Potter is over rated and that JK Rowling is a stupid idiot?