Writer Encouragement

Really need a thread with inspirational quotes and anons supporting each other.

Talk about what you love about the craft, tell us how far you are away from finishing your next piece and generally be positive pls. Tough love accepted if it's about helping with someone's laziness (like me)

I'm writing draft one of my novel, have the outline completely done and am on chapter three. Just getting already kind of tired of chipping away at it everyday, can't wait to be finished the first draft. Then I know things will go a lot faster.

Other urls found in this thread:

litrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rejected/
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

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I'm in the middle of a brutal as fuck second draft of my second novel and I'm writing very short stories to keep myself sharp in the meantime. I'll probably submit those to a few to magazines and see what happens.

Hoping it all turns out great for you, good idea breaking up your focus with unrelated stories.

Why is it so brutal? Long and tedious, or is there a bigger problem?

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What I love about the craft? The exploration and the characters mostly. I don't outline at all, so everything I write is a surprise to me just as much as it would be for any future reader. Due to this I'm not sure how far away I am from finishing it, but so far I got roughly 15k words piled up, so it's at least getting somewhere.

Gonna hate to read the first draft though, feels like I repeat a lot of words (especially "and", "then" and "but" strikes me as being far too common) while I write.

Hey, at least you're getting something out! That's excellent user, and it's very cool you write without an outline.

How do you stay in direction? Or do you let yourself write off focus? Maybe the end result will end up in a series, or several different stories

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I'm very much in the habit of killing my darlings. It was also my intention to give the novel a stark minimalist tone like Carver or McCarthy, and while I succeeded in part during my first draft there was a lot of room for improvement. The longer sentences have been broken into smaller, more declarative sentences. All exposition and character thoughts or feelings have been removed (show, don't tell). Superfluous dialogue has been killed off. Word count of first draft was 119k, I'm now down to 104k. I'm hoping the end result will be around 95k.

First post best post

Sounds like a challenge that will be well worth it in the end. You can do it user! A little everyday

>McCarthy
>Minimalist

p-positivity pl-please

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How the story goes tends to be straight forward and easy to keep its direction straight. How a story starts is usually just a concept or a scene I find to be intriguing, and from there the world kinda just build itself. Of course, if something makes me write off focus I will do so. I don't know the exact quote, but the author Darren Shan wrote somewhere in his guide to writing to not be afraid to write off focus since you don't know if it will lead to anything good or bad until you do so. At worst what you've written is something that doesn't add to the story, but has given you experience with both writing and experimenting.

And yes, the end result tends to develop the stories into series, something I'm not really fond of since I'm still very much an amateur writer, but hey, practice is practice!

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The majority of his work is simple and declarative. Blood Meridian is by far his most adventurous and couldn't be classed as minimal but Child of God, the Border trilogy, No Country, and The Road all contain very sparse, simple prose.

I can't seem to find the quote, I'm sorry.

But I agree, nothing is more valuable in writing than practice.

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guides and tips are also welcome

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I haven't had a bowel movement in days #ibsking

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I needed a thread like this too. I haven't worked on my novel in three months and I still have three other novels I want to work on. I always feel like I have to be in the perfect mindset to write but I just have to start doing it already.

I'll probably start on some short stories I've been contemplating and also get back to work on my main novel.

Establish a modest daily word count and a fixed amount of time per day to achieve it.

I feel you bro, on my novel I didn't touch it for maybe 5 months. But now, somehow, I'm able to force myself to write every day. I've been managing to do this for the last 5 days and written roughly 7.5k words under that time. My goal is 1k a day but a few times I couldn't stop myself or was too in the mood so I kept on writing. My record so far is 2k in one sitting, felt pretty damn good.

Moral of the story: Force yourself to write no matter how you might feel. The gratification after writing will make up for it, I guarantee.

That's it, user. It's okay that you took a break as long as the break ends and you get back to it. There's no perfect time to write.

It's what you do everyday, not once in a while.

What happened that you stopped, anyway?

daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn user that's some excellent work. Good job! Keep at it!

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I get so fucking depressed in the winter, mostly because I'm out of work until the middle of February and I tell myself I'm going to use that time to write, but instead I sit around worrying about money the whole time.

This year I did better than last year, I've written about 42,000 words in the last 4 weeks, but I really wanted to be done with this novel before the spring. Here I am, feeling cynical and anxious and utterly defeated. I'm a loser, Veeky Forums, a fucking loser ;__;

user YOU ARE NOT A LOSER

What do you do that's only seasonal work? Is there something you can do to minimize your concerns? Take a small part time job two days a week, then quit come your regular job?

Maybe setting up a budget would help, look at how much you bring in on season and how much you spend off season, that would help you to feel better that you're not wasting money or running out. But if you sit around writing all day, you probably wont spend that much money lol

congratulations on improving your stats, we all gotta keep working at it

Wew I didn't realize I was in tumbrl

I work as a lab technician at an engineering firm. We do geotech work, so during december and january the ground is literally frozen and there's nothing to test. I make enough money that I do fine, but it's usually a tight squeeze.

Some years my hours get cut to part time, but this year it's just been zero hours for the last four weeks. Every Monday morning I sit by my phone and wait for the call that we got a new contract and I can come in to get some new work. If it weren't for the money aspect, I'd be happy as a clam. In these dreary winter months, I get to cozy up at one of the libraries in this city and bang out 2-4k words on a good day. On a bad day, I sit here crunching numbers and shitposting on Veeky Forums until it's time go home again.

Last year I spent the entire winter in my bedroom watching anime and eating eggs, not writing a single fucking word. So at least I've improved on that.

How old are you guys? Me: 21, i just promised to myself to write every day in 2017, i am afraid i will never make it tho. Opinions on my writing are ambivalent, some likes it, most called me talentless hack. I regret not pushing hard when i was younger and full of energy and potential

In the last month I've written three poems. Some were written earlier, some was taken from drafts, but they're all dodecasylabillic French sonnets.

I'm very pleased, but feel as if my ideas are dwindling down. Most of ideas are already written to death about, so I'm afraid of cliches and repetitions.

I've found myself writing mostly symbolic poetry, but I strive to reach some kind of symbolism—imagism with hints of surrealism, but realize how difficult this is.

I am, still, not going to give up.

Do you like you're writing? I'm my own biggest fan.

no one gives a fuck

>regret not pushing hard when I was younger and full of energy and potential
You're still young, and should be full of both still. Potential is very likely still there friendo,I don't know what to say about energy, but it sounds premature. Keep at it.

Rude this is a nice thread

I'm 19, turning 20 in two months and I've also promised myself to write very day in 2017, so far so good.

>i am afraid i will never make it tho.

Missing a few days will happen, but as long as you try to push yourself to write, you'll do it.

>most called me talentless hack.

Don't beat yourself up over it. I guarantee you that whatever author you pick they had the same experience when they started out themselves. Here's a good source to overcome that: litrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rejected/ , a lot of these people were called useless writers by publishers, yet their books became best sellers. As long as you ignore comments not adding anything to your writing and only focus on actual criticism you'll go a long way.

>I am, still, not going to give up.
That's the spirit!

I imagined that the dogs were telling him to get back to writing, lol I'm SO random.

This is not a nice comment.

I really do recommend some sort of budgeting into a short term savings account to ease your mind. Anything you can do not to have to worry about it as much, and I think taking care of your financial house is step one. I can't tell you what to do tho, you gotta do what's best for you.
If you really enjoy writing, I know you'll find a way!

Other than that your job sounds really cool user!

I'm 20. Seems like a lot young people in this thread, maybe this board in general?

Were you looking to try and get something out there while you're young? Cause you still have lots of energy and potential, I can say. It seems like it's not because there's so much time and work ahead of us.

How many people have you shared your writing with? All from the same town or area? Maybe share it with others online in different countries, I bet it will connect with more people than you can imagine. Just keep practising!

Yes, don't give up! A few anons in this thread have mentioned the technique were you write about something totally different for a while and then go back to what you were doing before.

If you feel like you're getting burned out, you probably are. Try to write something totally different, even if you don't finish it. Some detective fiction or something. I bet it will work! Can't hurt to try

Woosh, be gone

This

Great job sticking to your goal, user! And some great advice. Rome wasn't built in a day, we all gotta keep at it.

rawr xD

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tfw so much inspiration and vision but my life is pic related

You never know, something mundane to you could be interesting to someone else. Or could develop into something very interesting as you go along... But you don't have to write what you know! You can write about what a life would be like taking away some of the things you have, or people in your life.

Thanks man, but i was more talking about the limits of my energy and hours in the day.

Oh oh oh, I'm sorry I misunderstood. Well you're very lucky, if I understand this part correctly, to have a family and all that.

Maybe you need to readjust how you write. Maybe it won't be on pen and paper. Maybe buy a recorder, or record yourself talking out a story or brainstorming in the car alone, to write down at a later date? Or one of those speech to text programs while you're on the go.

Or you just gotta go very slowly, record your routine habits and find places you can cut time so at the end or beginning of the day, you can write for a few minutes before doing abything else.

Idk man, just got busy with work and a bunch of other things I've been trying to study too. It's also just mostly me, thinking I need to be in like some perfect state to write. I just need to write and get back on it which you guys helped remind me of honestly

Well, certainly you can't abandoned what's important in life, like work and school. There will never be a perfect state to write, probably not a wrong one either.

I'm glad the thread at least gave you a little push or reminder! good luck and godspeed, glorious bastard

Anyone here ever write some bomb ass characters, excellent disjointed scenes, an amazing premise, epic dialogue, etc etc, but when you put it all together you realize it's flatline?

I just did that. I put months of work together into one text document, and realize it's a book about some great characters basically doing nothing. It's primarily internal monologue and shit.

Should I trash it, or is there actually a genre of novels written like this? I love the story too much to change it, I want to keep it as it is, I think it could be picked up by an editor even in a few more months after I polish it up and refine it, but it doesn't really do anything.

idk guys, writing is haaaaard.

Get an epic storyline and weave it through the stories you have at the moment. Extra points, try to not change much of what you've already written so that the epic storyline is a bridging theme that is more hinted at than overtly told.

>bridging theme that is more hinted at than overtly told

Thank you, this is what I needed to hear. I guess I could start by trying to relate all the characters in some way and seeing where that takes me?

Thanks again user, I'm not usually proud of my writing but I have an odd attachment to this one piece. I didn't even like it at first, I put it down for a month to work on something else because I thought I was going nowhere. Needed a break from that, so I opened the document back up and was kind of amazed, it aged well.

I left a story alone for a few months once and when I came back it was all gibberish. fuck I really wish I had written notes or some basic indication of what the fucking shit I was talking about oh my god

serves me right for writing some pretention post modern bullshit

watch your text, c/lit/s