So Veeky Forums, how's your novel coming along?

cool,

what about?

Don't you know? Veeky Forums is the dedicated literature board.
Veeky Forums is the dedicated video games board.
Veeky Forums is the dedicated movies & TV board.
Veeky Forums is the dedicated comics & cartoons board.
Veeky Forums is the dedicated anime & manga board.
Veeky Forums is the dedicated real life history board.
Veeky Forums is the dedicated real life science board.
Veeky Forums is the dedicated tropes that appear in various media board.
Veeky Forums is the dedicated ">a thing happened" board.
Veeky Forums is the dedicated fetish bait board.
Veeky Forums is the literally every topic imaginable board. Any thread on Veeky Forums is necessarily on topic because it is a thread on Veeky Forums and it is IMPOSSIBLE for a thread on Veeky Forums to be off topic.
That is why threads on Veeky Forums are NEVER deleted for being off topic. There has never been a single one. If you don't believe this, you are a fedora.

Duotrope is a mediocre site that is servicable enough for starting authors to get shit published for; basically gives a list of places accepting manuscripts for you to select from.

The asylum did not loom, as he had been told, but instead drooped at all sides. Every stone, brick, and hall sagged like a summer squash left out far past its season. The doctor packed his bag. From a small window the doctor could see the peak of the slope where a weather vane span, pointing an accusatory iron finger towards him. That morning the nurse had left green oranges and fresh milk on the table looking out of that tiny dusted window. In the quiet moments preceding dawn, after the moans of the committed's night terrors, but before their morning exercise, he had eaten the sour fruit. A finger rooted in his cheek, picking at a seed lodged into a molar. Accompanying the fruit had been a short letter, written to him by the nurse, explaining she had picked the fruit herself. During vigorous exercise he entertained two notions, first the possibility if the nurse was sweet on him, and the second beings some kind of indirect spite pointed towards him over his sudden arrival and displacement of the chief physician. Sweat dripped from his brow, and pooled in the small of his back to soak the over sized nightdress he wore. A cool towel pressed against his eyes soothed the dull headache, and as he prepared to bathe a pounding knock disturbed his routine.

r8 my writing m8s.

I made a shitpost comic about a CGI tongue floating around in a void, incorporated some concepts from the novel's setting, and now the novel is developing as a pretty bad webcomic.

...

Veeky Forums has never been strictly about traditional games. It's more a community centered around those things but often discussing all sorts of other things, literature on top of them.

My story's about a high-level ranger dying in an ambush and passing his identity and mission to the 1-1 HD goblin creature that happened to be present at the time. Said creature must then pose as an epic hero in order to get to see the world and earn his share of the great golden treasure at the end.

truth to be told, that's how most boards work which aren't complete shit

I got sidetracked setting up my environment and accidentally created a personal Linux distro.

Nothing special.

Just a fantasy setting with war between some newly formed Empire and the religious folk of the world.

As an extra spicy tid bit it involves a massive laser cannon

As it should be.

People complaining about how something doesn't belong to a board are completely missing the point.

I'm not that bad with writing stuff, and even plotting stuff, but I'm absolutely incapable of stringing things together coherently. I can't even practice, like Steven Hawking can't practice walking. So I write mods for Stellaris instead.

Maybe when the next NaNoWriMo arrives (Is it still a thing?) I try again.

well, it's Veeky Forums after all.
Anyway I come to Veeky Forums for the community. Which means the anons who are indeed part of the community. Not the shitposters who always argue what should be tg and what shouldn't be.

Pretyy good, my players are getting ready for the next session today!

It's finished. A 234 page sin against God. All of them.

I just need beta-readers.

I'll beta-read your book if you beta-read mine.

Why is it sin against god?

Sitting with an agent at the moment, should hear back in September or so.

Second one is in development at the moment: ~20,000 words. Am writing a couple of short stories too, while that second novel germinates.

You?

I have an explicit Christian learning magic and fighting against a demonic cult while trying to accept the (for him) brainshattering fact that there are gods plural, and the stories he's heard growing up are only one side.

I'll read your books alpha-mode and you'll like it.

Been doing great ever since I kicked a player that refused to play his role properly.

So if it's impossible to be off-topic do you think political debates and discussion belong on Veeky Forums? Because from what I've seen they tend to lead to bans and deletions.

>tfw promised Veeky Forums a sequel to my storytime almost a year ago
>tfw still see "Did he post it yet?" in greentext threads
Sorry, guys, I'm lazy!

Those tend to be far more volatile and cause all manner of bullshit that a mere book club never is capable of. That's probably the deciding factor.

I know exactly who you are, spiderwoodsanon, and you better stop shitposting and get back to work right fucking now.

>be far more volatile and cause all manner of bullshit
Nonsense. Have you seen some edition wars threads? They are the most vicious things on the internet I've ever seen.

y-you too

It's going. Still fleshing out all of the !vampire families and studying African/Middle Eastern myths for inspiration.

I am hoping Tingle-sempai will notice me with my new epic. Bisexual Orcs Slam My Ass-Pussy and Bang My Triceratops Ex-Girlfriend.

Turns out reading and writing a lot for my education kind of undermines my desire to write fiction.
I wish I wasn't salty, but I kind of am.

714 chapters in, I still havent figured out how mc and company are going to get around the demonspawn dragon without hitting the next cultivation level and they just broke through their last bottleneck and reached shining star rank.

Came here to post this.

>implying the drivel all you faggots """"""""write"""""""" isn't still inferior to Stephanie Meyer

I hope all of you self publish your garbage """"""""""novels""""""""""" so the world can get a good laugh at how shit you are.

This tbqh.

Go away Stephanie, you're not fooling anyone.

How many of your publisher rejections contain the words "keep trying," "amateur," "absolute dreck," and "was this a joke?"

Oh wait, you probably didn't even try because you know you're garbage and will always be garbage.

B+. Purple prose is fun when done well, but get to the motherfucking point.

>As an extra spicy tid bit it involves a massive laser cannon

fukken dropped.

It's not that Twilight isn't trash, it's just that your work is sub-trash.

/lit is so fucking pretentious tho

Grow a pair.

I said it wasn't special.

What makes a good story? Good characters? Expectations being subverted is popular. Greyish characters are popular, but not to the point of edginess.

What else can you guys think of? Trying to come up with general guiding principles for writing

Honest opinion: There never has been (nor will there ever be) a fantasy or science fiction novel in the same tier as academic literature.

Arguably there hasn't even been a novel this millennium that'd be remembered in 50 years.

>user projects hard to feel better about his own failures.

I started laying out the plot structure and world a year ago, I plan to spend another 9 years preparing the plot and then write it in the following 6 years before releasing all of the books at once. I've only worked on it for a few hours in the past couple days so I am really worried.

Havent gotten past page 1... I destroy everything once i reach page 4 or 5. Over and over and over.

>y-you're projecting! I'm a good writer! Really!

Anons on suicide watch

Slowly. I'll get there one day.

>Good characters
I wouldn't consider them part of the story. You can have a good piece with a good story and bad characters or a good piece with a bad story and good characters.

>Expectations being subverted is popular
If it's popular, then expectations aren't being subverted. You need to REALLY subvert expectations, not subvert expectations that people already expect to be subverted.

>Greyish characters are popular
I dislike grey characters, but they should still be used. If you want to go for realism, avoid grey characters and instead have almost every character be good. You can have a disastrous world of darkness without any grey or dark characters as long as there is reasonable complexity to the situation. I include evil characters that live off of the carrion left behind by the good though.

>but not to the point of edginess.
Edginess can be good, as long as the surroundings of the edgelord realistically respond to them. Most significant individuals are edgy as fuck when viewed from certain angles, especially philosophers.

>What else can you guys think of?
The unknown, leave concepts and lore vague to be debated by angry people on the internet.
Internal connections, don't try and connect a plot on a thin thread or a linear pole, make it a massive web with many causes leading to many effects. Ties into the latter point.
Write for yourself and not for others, don't try to make anything palatable or profitable.
Destroy everything and make new things, eventually you should lose your attachment to what you have created and achieve even greater freedom to rebuild the story. Things got so much better after I erased the last traces of my story after gradually replacing things.

First one's done, 4 chapters into second. Got rights to cover art last month.

>user continues to project.

Is this what you think passes for trolling? For fuck's sake, you're embarrassing yourself.

Lightening cracked overhead and martin ran stumbling through the rain up the slick grass of the steep hill. At the top stood a dark omen, the ruin of a black and broken tower with a great oak tree growing up through its ruined stones. From a window in the top floor dim light emitted a beacon to him and the fear of such a place was nothing to being caught by the guardsmen that had spotted him in the royal garden. Hunched, taking cover in the foot or so of space shielded from the rain at the doorway he slammed his fist against the dark wood door. After a moment a small hatch was opened in the door and a voice rung in the darkness

r8 my writing m8s.

The doctor packed his bag. From a small window the doctor could see the peak of the slope..

mentioning "the doctor" twice like that pulled me out of it

Suicide watch

Guys I need help.
I have completely and totally planned out the story for my series to it's conclusion, but I keep getting stuck on fine detail, like what occurs in a conversation, or the specifics of what happens on a journey ( My mc starts out as a cartographer working fir the government)

It's a fantasy novel btw, in case that helps.

Just write out one possibility for the conversation and see how it reads, if you don't like it, try it in a different way, just keep going and comparing the different versions until you get what you're looking for

Hmmm... that, my good sir, just might work. I tip my hat (fedora) to you.

>There never has been (nor will there ever be) a fantasy or science fiction novel in the same tier as academic literature.

Would argue with that. Tolkien, Lewis, Le Guin, Bradbury, Lovecraft, Dick and many more notable genre fiction writers are part of literary canon in one way or another.

Some notable "serious" writers both modern and old were writing a genre fiction. Bulgakov, Cormac McCarthy, Orwell, Zamyatin, Ian Banks just as a few examples.

I think it definitely shows something.

>Arguably there hasn't even been a novel this millennium that'd be remembered in 50 years.

It's been only 17 years, classic needs time to be recognized. I'm not into modern literature, but there are undoubtedly some modern classic books written in this millennium.

>I wouldn't consider them part of the story. You can have a good piece with a good story and bad characters or a good piece with a bad story and good characters.
I disagree. I think it's the characters that the reader comes for. The story is strictly secondary: it's nothing more than what happens to them, and the main draw is how they deal with all this stuff happening.

Fun fact: Jorge Luis Borges, without question one of the best and most educated literally scholars of possibly entire fucking history of mankind, considered Ray Bradbury on par, or better than H.G. Wells or Edgar Alan Poe.

People who dismiss fantastic literature as automatically genre fiction are morons and simply need to read more.

>le board isn't about what it's supposed to be about
Fuck off if you have nothing to say and don't try to pull other people in your pit of despair.

Veeky Forums
/thread general/

Shakespeare's plays were basically trashy TV shows of his time, and look how he ended up.

>and look how he ended up
Dead?

Planning would be started, if I could write something at least substandard and was creative and motivated enough to come up with something interesting.

I haven't gotten started, yet, but I'm still thinking!
Maybe in a few years.

Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?

I'm writing a patent, not a novel

I just realized I was typing the same post I made in the last thread.

Hopefully THIS will be the final version and the editor my mother talked to would stop harassing me every time we meet at the store.

There is a fortnightly thread on Veeky Forums for creative writing. Mostly, people use the images posted as inspiration, but you can post just about any creative fiction

current one is here
and frankly it could use some attention.

Also, all the stories that get posted in it go on a 1d4chan wiki page
1d4chan.org/wiki/Storythread

accepted its death and shittiness
I'll just run a game in existing setting, and stop trying to do something I can't do

I want to storytime out a long running (and I mean 3+ years long) campaign, here on Veeky Forums, but I really don't have the writing talent. My prose is far too flowery and I end up just having reams and reams of exposition between anything happening.

Do people ever greentext out their tales, or recount them in an otherwise informal/ easy manner? I'm aware it may be pleb as fuck, but I'm itching to share the story with the world.

>Ian Banks
The only reason he gets any attention is because he could write non-genre fiction as well. It's just the snobbery against science-fiction extended. Don't get me wrong, some of his stuff wasn't bad, but his works certainly weren't classics of science-fiction.

The only reason science fiction gets shat on by 'academic literature' is because the sort of people who go to university to study literature are the sort of people who can't hack it in a real subject like physics or maths. Frankly, they're just not bright enough to understand the author's themes, and they hide their insecurities by relentlessly tearing down 'genre fiction' and favouring the kind of stuff they write (i.e. dross with a pretentious gloss).

Writing letters to agents about it, books done, just needs some TLC from an editor.

Any of you going to the Midwest Writers Workshop?

Ever since this was taken as a fantasy writer's creed, we've had nothing but 'lol so quirky' snarkers floating around non-threatening cliche plots.

Still better than the alternative, a bunch of bland and utterly uninteresting robots going through some inexplicable political intrigue that needs three full readings to understand shit.

Without compelling characters, you're just reading fictional history.

Storytimes are always welcome even if they are not written in the best possible manner.

Just write however you can, but keep only essential details and put most of the required exposition in the beginning. Plan ahead and create some bullet-points if you're still worried about unnecessary derailing.

That's a nice false equivalency you're drawing there.

That comes from you average fantasy writer generally having no literary education or experience beyond consuming cheap pop culture, and thus thinks snark is a manifestation of intellect and quips a demonstration of wit.

For what you are arguing, I'd like to pull Jules Verne, even though the man was a competent writer for his time. 20,000 Miles Beneath the Sea and Whatsitcalled Island have in excess of thirty characters, but Nemo is the only one that comes off as a human being, everyone else is a cardboard cutout placed there by the author to keep the story going. That's not a good way to write in 2017.

You started it. I said character focus, you said 'lol quirky'.

>Ever since this was taken as a fantasy writer's creed,
I can assure that that has never been a fantasy writers creed to begin with. Seriously, name me all the entirely character driven fantasy books you can.

Don't blame bad writing on the focus on characters. Blame authors who don't write actual characters.

>name me all the entirely character driven fantasy books you can
A Song of Ice and Fire

...

Um accumulating studying material and ideas for when I am capable of overcoming my crippling depression and have the time to focus on writing.
Who am I kidding, I'm never going to finish this crap.

Great. Fair enough, really.
Now should we start listing fantasy that does not follow this approach? Because where I live, there are like twelve fantasy books released a year at least, and we are a very small market. I guarantee that eleven of those twelve will not follow the character-centric formula.

You can still get published like that. See Alastair Reynolds

Are those books any good, though?

But do you want to get published like that?