Writing

Recently, I've recieved an email telling me my application for a creative grant to write my book has recently been approved! I can finally work on my book full time! Not to mention that the funds I recieved is going to go towards hiring voice actors to voice in a audio book format along with paying me to create visuals for the book to!

Now, the thing is I'm caught in a conundrum. I am going to be going through with this audiobook but I do want my finished manuscript published. So, do I distribute the book myself through the socials or do I wait and send my manuscript to publishers first?

I'm aware of finding beta readers, maybe hiring an editor, but, honestly I'm not sure what to do.

A man is controlled by invisible strings. When he tries to tell people about the strings, they always control his mouth and he can't speak. He can't break the strings. They're so strong, that if he tries, they simply cut his fingers and sharp objects never work. He finds success, a wife; he has kids. He is still unable to tell anyone that he is a puppet. One day, he is having breakfast with his child. His son looks at him, and begins to speak about his obligations at school. He sounds optimistic, but he slowly begins to insinuate that he's being bullied at school. As he does, he begins to stutter, and blankly stares at the father.

My inspiration was the contortionist from the film "Mama". That's why I included the picture.

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/13thFloor/t/378569

We’re told that discretion equals compassion, but has this ever been true, in life or in literature? That we should bury character flaws in complex protagonists if those blemishes – however empathetically rendered – might fuel racist, xenophobic, or other hateful rhetoric. And yet, survivors understand viscerally how disturbing and uncomfortable and idiosyncratic the truth can be. When you’ve run for your life, you’ve likely made a few ugly choices. We think we are defending survivors with our demand for purity, but we are only making them feel less believable, dirtier, less worthy of rescue.

A story about torture should trigger us and make us afraid – the characters are terrified. A narrative neutered of its ugly detail is false. And why do we crave these safe narratives? Because we’ve quarantined ourselves from the worst and are too cowardly to read a story that confuses and hurts – that truly, wonderfully, transformatively hurts. We’re afraid of stories that make us grieve the suffering of unworthy characters. Relating to the discrepant reminds us that we, too, are unclean. In his brilliant essay A Moral Education, Garth Greenwell writes “I am a novelist because I think it is hard not to be terrible”. Later he writes a sentence that I’ve pinned above my desk. “A moral education depends not on condemning or averting our gaze from filth, the novel suggests, but on diving wholeheartedly into it.”

Link to Dina Nayeri's website

Hey all, I wanted to share this post I made on [email protected]. Hope you find it interesting.

I want to share an experience I had the other day that fundamentally changed the way I think about my writing and the way I process feedback.

One night before I went to bed, I had a spark of inspiration, an new idea that would finally gave me a satisfying way to tackle a project that had been bouncing around in my head for a long time.

I’m a fan of constructed languages– stuff like Klingon from Star Trek and the Elvish languages from Tolkien. One language in particular I thought would be a wonderful experience to let people learn together as a group, if only there was a way to make it enjoyable for people who weren’t particularly interested in linguistics. So, for several months, the idea stuck with me, never feeling complete. Then, that night, I realized an RPG might be the perfect medium to deliver the experience of learning a fictional language in a fun, engaging way.

So, the next day I had a lot of creative energy, and I started fleshing out my ideas-- writing out rules, roles, and mechanics, imagining scenarios of people playing. After a while, I had gotten the bones to a place I felt comfortable with, and decided it was time to settle on a setting, and went with something generic with the intention of developing it further later.

Finally, I had a draft/pitch to a point where I wanted to share it and get some feedback from the language’s community. Much to my surprise, I saw the creator of the language themselves had even replied to it! Unfortunately, their comment wasn’t one of interest-- instead, they found that my setting had some unfortunate implications, marginalizing certain groups of people, and expressed that that didn’t reflect the spirit they intended for the language.

I immediately felt deep, deep embarrassment. I hadn’t meant to make any stereotypical depictions… but that was what I had done. And instead of feeling energized and excited for developing my project further, I felt completely creatively drained and upset that I had made something that went against the spirit of the very work that I was trying to promote.

After a few days of ruminating, though, I tried to forgive myself and be honest about my intentions. Though I had made something that was not inclusive, I hadn’t intended to do so. I was just trying to explore the themes I was interested in, and had failed to be aware of my own biases.

So, the reason I wanted to share this story with you all was to underscore that point. If you ever make a mistake or poor creative decision that causes you to be ashamed of something you create, try to be kind to yourself. Be honest with your own intentions, and rather than being hurt by negative feedback, try to listen to it, learn from it, and grow. And more than anything, always try to exercise empathy while writing, and try to think of your messages not just in terms of what you see in them, but also what others will see in them.

Thanks for reading, I’m a pretty long-winded storyteller. Has anyone else had an experience like this before?

As far as I know, the beehaw's instance has the most active writing community, but lemmy.world is currently defederated with it.

As I understand, that means anything I post will only be a 'shadow' on the actual instance - only visible from behind the block.

Does anyone else still think its worth posting here, where if we ever refederate, our posts will be 'lost' into the future? Or does anyone else think it'll add a little more illuminati spice?

What's crackalacking! Yeah, I'm actually sticking to this, since it seems like a lot of people had a lot of fun with it last week, and I'm still having fun forcing my horrible ideas onto the unsuspecting populace of beehaw. And then you lot, entirely forgetting the point of all this take the bad ideas and actually make them entertaining! How could you?! I've actually become emotionally attached to Emo-Chan and her battle to defeat Hitler. Of the drama obsessed story teller food critic. Alice and her Woman Emotions. And, of course, the late entry of Timmy's Taco Tuesday Torment. (How could you miss the alliteration you MONSTER)

Jokes aside, I'm going to do things a bit differently this time. I've always found the traditional reddit writing prompt to be a bit too limiting, so I'll be trying to include some writing prompts that don't really follow the formula of "here's a story idea." To a greater extreme. Also, feel free to post your own prompts in the comments, I'll try to edit the post to include them, and if I find the time/energy to, I'll write a few myself. No promises though, I'm a lazy bastard.

Adding onto that, I want to stress that the point of this activity is just to write. Not write a complete or even good story. Just to write. If you don't like the prompts, ignore em, or make up your own, or write about how bad the prompts are. I don't care just write!

Now, I'll stop fudging around and give you the prompts of the week.

Bad Character Ideas

• Like, omigosh, did you see that Janet was going out with Hugnthlenbar? She totes just dumped Jason for him too! Ugh, what a, like, totes bitch, right?

• A young shonen protagonist, ready to take on the world with his best friend! The parasitic alien fungus that occupies the right side of his body. He is still relentlessly positive.

• Elves... As wise as they are old. And of course they all old, right? I mean, it'd be unthinkable for the wandering Elf spouting wisdom of the ancients for the low low price of $699.99 (plus gratuity) to not be old. R-Right?

Bad Setting Ideas

• In honour of facebook market place deciding that my one and only desire in this world is apparently milk kefir grains (no I don't know what they're used for either), the story is set and explained through horrible social media posts.

• Check it out! Fashion revolution, new styles and the hottest new designs to wear in the post apocalypse world!

• Everyone knows the get stuck in the videogame plot. And that's already bad. But what if the videogame also just sucked? Glitchy, unfinished, and nearly entirely empty.

Bad Plot Ideas

• A deep intrigue story filled with deep plots where everyone has their own interests. It's for a baking competition.

• Since I'm apparently on an anime roll here right now. The plot is that the cast is trying to kill God. God is just a chill dude though.

• An adventure story where the dohicky that everyone is after is lost media from a children's TV show from the 70s. This is treated with a grand amount of severity.

Unique Idea!

• Hey, you know that piece of media that you love? The one close to your heart? Write a bias an unfair review of it where you rip it to shreds and call it shit.

Alright, once more I'm running out of time before work. Thanks for reading, and double thanks for posting! I'm off and out, see you all next week!

Most of my creative writing is handwritten. I usually use legal pads, or more preferably wire bound legal pads. It's easy to write on both sides of them and for some reason the yellow just does it for me. Every once in a while I decide to by a fancy notebook. In the past it was Moleskines, more recently it was ones from etsy made with Tomoe River paper. I have a (cheap) fountain pen, so I figured I'd try some better paper.

The problem I run into is that I never use the fancy notebooks. The paper is better, and the ink flows smoother. It has a better tactile feel to it. But it is a fancy notebook and it should only be used for the good stuff—the stuff I want to look over a decade or two from now and be proud of.

So I'll be very careful and take my time to write in the best handwriting possible. I'll last for a few pages before my handwriting gets sloppier, or a have another idea that doesn't fit, and I abandon that fancy notebook. I go back to the spiral bound legal pads which contain a chaotic jumble of non-linear thoughts. There are notes and poems in the margins, things crossed out all over the place, and handwriting that becomes only legible to me if I squint real hard at it and pick it up from context.

So how do you feel about fancy journals. Are you able to treat them as the paper they are, or do you too put them on a pedestal?

I think this is the best place to post this, but I was going through my saved posts before deleting my Reddit account and thought that a lot of writers on Lemmy/Fediverse might be able to enjoy this one.

There's some great tips in these comments but this archive snapshot will make sure that information isn't lost.

Feel free to add your own tips here in the Fediverse as well!

Do you set aside a time each day to write? Do you write five pages stream of consciousness then trim it down into something that makes sense? Are you a planner? Do you write in a notebook? Do you write once, edit once? write twice, edit once? Write once, edit thrice?

I don't have a consistent process. I've been experimenting with writing in a basic markdown editor, maybe 500 words at a time, then stringing together multiple entries as best I can. What I find is I have lots of ideas and thoughts that are separate, and critical to my ability to form complex thought is correlating multiple seemingly unrelating things, which then creates a new more complicated and hybrid whole. I can't sit down and write 5,000 words on one thing, but I can write 500 words on ten things, and then use that as the basis of a mosaic piece that (when edited well) comes together into a unique whole.

(I haven't seen any writing prompts on here so far, so I figured I'd write the first one!)

Hey all.

I've been writing a novel recently - I'm only 2200 words in. It feels like so little and so much at the same time.

Until I graduated college, I loved writing. Reading, too. Then, it feels like my ADHD got much worse and I lost all the passion I had for both. I had about a year of really intense depression while trying to find my first job during COVID. I had basically written nothing for almost three years up until recently. I started, and did not finish, a short story, and am working now on this "novel". The problem is that I love writing in the abstract, I love putting words together in interesting ways and telling a story. But I can't stop looking at the word count and feeling hopeless. I can't stop feeling like there's no point to any of it because my writing is shit. I feel like all of my passion has just left and I don't know how to get it back, but I desperately want it back.

This isn't a question, really, despite the title. I guess I needed to vent and know if I'm not alone in having experienced this.

So this post is somewhat introspective but I am curious to how others feel about a similar topic. This is going to be a pretty long post, so I totally understand and pre-emptively forgive you for skipping through it and moving on to another post.

A quick introduction: I write nonfiction in the form of personal essays; occasionally I write reviews of books/movies/etc. but for the most part my lane is the personal essay. Mostly, I publish my stuff on either my personal blog, or on Medium.

Lately though, I have felt like I am turning too much to the idea of making everything my life "content". To better illustrate what I mean, recently I decided I wanted to specifically journal my health & fitness efforts because I've been struggling with that lately. My first thoughts after deciding I was going to do that were "what platform do I post this on?" and "what do I call this??" (because I didn't think it was a good fit for my already-existing platforms). I put a stop to that thinking and relegated these journal entries to a Simplenote document and it's 100% for my eyes only. Not everything I do or write needs to be fodder for the online community.

But I still like to write, and will go through alternating periods of having a lot to push out onto page, and having no output whatsoever (right now is one of those periods, and I'm fine with that, because I'm enjoying getting some good reading time in). My issue is that I don't have a sole focus with my writing, so it's hard to get people to see what I'm writing and engage with said people. If I published a book, I could at least see sales figures or downloads or something. I don't really trust subscriber or follower numbers on WordPress or Medium to mean anything.

Where I'm going with this - many collections of personal essays that get published come from either celebrities or at least public figures of some sort - they aren't people just throwing a collection of stories at a publisher hoping they'll get a book deal. So what's the point of me writing anything for other people? Nobody knows who I am outside of family and friends.

I do have one area I'm immensely familiar with: epilepsy. In the back of my head I have a small dream of putting together a short book of my experience since my diagnosis 4 years ago but I turn back to, "well okay, but will anyone care if they don't know who I am?"

So right now I am in a weird rut. I want to write things, but at the same time I don't feel upset about the fact that I'm not writing (apart from journalling). But I'd like to write something meaningful to me, that other people could be interested in reading.

Does anyone else feel this way? What are you doing about it? Am I just beating myself up for no reason?

I love writing and reading reviews. It started with film reviews. Reading Donald Clarke's scathing review movies in the Irish Times when I was younger was a formative experience. Often I find myself enjoying the critiques more than the movies! I've developed a soft spot for restaurant reviews as well.

During the pandemic I set up an Instagram page to start sharing food reviews, just for fun. They're not serious at all, I write them in a very tongue and cheek fashion and often try to incorporate what is happening in my own life in them. I love being honest about my own biases and having controversial takes about something as simple as ice cream flavour, I find it leads to some really fun discussions!

Who are your favourite critics? Do any of you here write reviews for fun or even for a living?

Hey there!

I try to find some new interesting writing content, mostly about lifestyle, self exploration, relationships etc. I'd love to get some fresh readings :)

Two of my current favorites: https://ava.substack.com/ https://mindmine.substack.com/

Share a haiku about your day!

A moment of peace,

That's all that I'm asking for,

Please go to bed now.

I’ve been working for several years on a novel, and in a lot of ways it’s been fun. I have some very interconnected themes, some plot twists that tread the line between being surprising, and meaningful, and a fair few characters that develop through a lengthy confrontation.

I’ve started to consult an editor about tuning it into something publishable. Due to the way I was writing it, I only recently got the tools to calculate a total word count, and we realized that in the end, it’s far longer than I wanted it to be; on the order of 370,000 words.

Apparently people like George R. R. Martin can sometimes get away with this length, but I understand this is way out of line for a first time author. I’ve been looking at ways of trimming this down, and admittedly, there’s a few chapters with low hanging fruit I can get rid of; but I think I’m in need of a lot more than that. My editor was suggesting getting rid of entire main characters that don’t have as much development as others.

But at a lot of turns, it feels like trimming out X causes 5 other problems (plot points lost, throwbacks disconnected) that might threaten to either make the book soulless, not make sense, or even fail to reduce word count when I tie things together.

The option of simply splitting it into 2+ books has been there, but…it doesn’t seem practical. There’s a very clear villain, with a steady buildup to their dethroning, that would feel unsatisfying pushed off to another story.

If I assume publishers, or even just readers, would show only mild interest in a 300k word book, it makes me feel a bit stuck. I’ve already committed a lot of time to the story, and it feels grueling to go back and redo large parts of it; while also aiming to make it shorter.

Curious if anyone has thoughts on what they’d do in this situation.

So, Grammarly is correcting me a lot on a phrase I tend to use, and I don't entirely understand the difference.

On a sentence that expands upon a previous sentence in dialog, I tend to have a character say "Which means [...]"

Grammarly wants to fix this to be "This means [...]"

It's become clear to me that I tend to use 'which' instead of 'this' when speaking, but I am not sure why one is preferred use over the other.

Can anyone offer me some insight? I already tried googling "which vs this", but I got results for "which vs that" instead, which is an entirely different use case.

Hello! I was curious how you guys like to share your work, particularly long-form works. I mean, excluding publishing because that sounds like a lot of effort I cannot be bothered to put in. I've been wondering what other people like to do, I don't really share my work that often.

Welcome to the first (unofficial) Bad Writing Prompt day of the Beehaw Writing instance!

I've been reading a bit on the instance, and I agree with the consensus that we're going to need something weekly to bring and keep a community together. So I'm doing my part!

Wait, what do you mean by bad writing prompts? Partially inspired by this post here.

“Don’t try to prove you’re a good writer, you’ll never write anything. Try to prove you’re a bad writer and you’ll write everything.”

So, here's my general idea. For now, I'll be posting 3 different things.

• Bad Character Ideas
• Bad Setting Ideas
• Bad Plot Ideas

For you to mix, match and use as you please! Again, I'm writing this off the cuff and with 20 minutes before work, so apologies for the short post, but without any more delay, here's what I got for you all!

Bad Character Ideas

• The disgruntled younger sibling of the "Chosen One"

• A food critic who actually suffers from no sense of taste, getting by on charisma and faking it alone

• A magical anime girl who has a strange hobby and obsession with taxidermy (Thanks to my coworker for giving me this one haha)

Bad Setting Ideas

• Cowboys and digimon. How that works I have no clue. Just. Cowboys and digimon combined. If you do this you have my eternal gratitude.

• Told entirely through the lens of the endless blurb you skip before a recipe.

• An office building set within purgatory itself.

Bad Plot Ideas

• The main character has traveled back in time to kill Hitler. Little do they know is Hitler is now a skilled killer of time travelers.

• A love story where two people are fated to be with one other, lest the world end. They hate each other.

• A heist on the Vatican vault.

Alright, I'm running out of time, and need to skip off to work. Hope to see some posts, and remember to make it awful. I want some real schlock and cringe. Feel free to use all of the prompts, or none of them! Your reward will be nothing. Ciao ciao!

An article I wrote a while ago when the LLM's were blooming, decided to publish it on paper.wf too!

I have always been fascinated by internet communities, and going through almost all of the versions of it so far in my life, I felt like rumbling about it, as I wonder where we will go from there.

For me it was advice from Dan Harmon: "Don't try to prove you're a good writer, you'll never write anything. Try to prove you're a bad writer and you'll write everything." Not perfect advice but it really does help me write when I'm being overly critical of my ideas.