>Writing a novel
>50,000 words in
>Realise that I'm only about 1/4 of the way through
>Realise that there is literally no market for 200k word books from unpublished writers without a connection in publishing
>Realise that there is no market for sub par literary fiction
>Realise that no one will ever read this book
Do I keep going and write for myself or just try to write something more marketable?
Put a teenage vampire in it, chop off your willy, and claim to be an extremely light skinned black activist on Twitter
They'll publish 200k words of you reviewing dragon dildos
You know, once you've been writing short stories for a while, you realize holy shit 5,000, 10,000, 25,000 words is nothing--'I could write that in a few weeks.' 50,000 starts to seem even more trivial in comparison.
Just keep writing it OP, don't let the thought of publishing shape the way you write it. Once you finish it, then you can pare and strike out great sections of it or 'darling' tangents and asides. Even just simply go through it line by line and frag unnecessary or redundant sentences. You'll find you have a lot you can remove and then you'll have already written the whole thing and have the easy job of restructuring and organizing it.
>not constantly improving your grip on your craft
>not having original ideas/insights
>not writing for it's own sake
>writing to become popular and not writing to create a work of timeless beauty
Cuck
The length is integral to the story, if I followed all of the ideas I have it could easily go 1mil+. The 200k version is the pared down version already, sure you can always lose some stuff in editing but it's just fundamentally a long book.
Buddy, just write your story. Stop worrying about publishers. If you want to publish it, you can always break it up into multiple books or delete huge fucking sections. Just write the fucking thing and stop fussing
Same boat but I have basically finished a first draft.
What can I do with it? (not going to post it because some of it is really not bad).
You can justify the hours wasted as just you honing your craft.
Write because you enjoy to
Write short stories
Submit short stories
Pay attention to the criticism the editors provide if they don't publish it
you do what all good writers do and shelve it. write some short stories, make it big and then put it out. at that point it doesnt matter if its sub par or not.
>writing a novel
>reach 600k words
>it's beautiful, a literary masterpiece
>not good enough
>sudo rm -f
>repeat
Help a bro out
>characters are in a rush to get from A to B
>somehow think the distance is long
>they spend a day and a night driving there
>check google maps navigator
>the trip should actually take barely 6 hours by car
>the story breaks if they arrive too early
How do I save this shit? I already had them walk into enemy ambush to buy time. Even if I made one of them get diarrhea, forcing them to stop every 5 minutes, it still wouldn't take the whole night!
Have them use iMap instead :^)
Clever!
Car breaks down and they're helped by a mysterious mystical man in a Trans Am who gives them mushrooms and takes them on a spiritual journey
Getting some Tom Bombadil vibes from the trans am guy. Tolkien got away with it, but I don't think my readers would be as forgiving. As undeniably effective as the idea is.
keep going man
you can self publish and just brag about having written a novel all the time
still a notch on your belt
nobody's gna read it anyways
Depending on where they are you could include some form of inclimate weather to delay them. Could foreshadow something later on and add depth or some shit.
OP here (not the other guy asking for advice)
You guys have convinced me to just finish it, I might try and shorten it a bit more though. Thank you for being so encouraging Veeky Forums
That could work. I first thought about ruining the roads, but they're driving a military APC, which are pretty much all-terrain. It would add a few hours to the trip at best. But if there's heavy rain on top of the roads being bad, the vehicle could get stuck in the mud and delay them by that one night. Kinda boring fix, but better than a gaping hole.
>Write the next War and Peace.
>Publisher wont even read it because it is too long.
Keep going you feckin' eejit.
>an extremely light skinned black activist on Twitter
top fucking kek
There are sites like webfictionguide or blogs if you just want a readership. You could also post it in a serial format and maybe get donations.
Post more info about the story and maybe someone will come up with something clever. For example maybe the military apc was on repair and is broken in some way so they have to find and replace a spare part. It should be easier to delay them before they get in the car
Okay, it goes like this. The characters (2) are looking for a certain person. At around 10 AM, they receive an email from said person, which allows them to learn her location. There's also a third party looking for the same person, so it becomes a race against time. They set off immediately.
Before they can reach their destination, one day and a night's worth of events much unfold elsewhere, so that they will get there around 2-3 AM the following morning, at earliest.
However, due to my brain problems, the trip that was to take 15-18 hours is actually barely 500 miles and perfectly driveable in 6 hours or so in the present day. But if they reach the destination ahead of schedule, then we get a BAD END, no two ways about it.
At around 1 PM, they are ambushed by a group of enemies on the road. After a tight fight, they spend time treating and interrogating a captured enemy to learn about their competition. This takes up maybe three hours if we're generous. They're still getting to the destination by 7 PM, more than 7 hours ahead of schedule.
Breaking their vehicle before they leave wouldn't work, because they would simply abandon it and steal another. Destroying the vehicle along the way is not a good idea, because both have flight capability and it would only make them get there faster. The only solid solution I see is, as said, making the weather so damn crappy they can only crawl forward.
Chances are you should edit the shit out of it and literally half the words and content is unnecessary
pretend the world is governed by forces of magic and when they are driving they come across a magical wizard who invokes the 5th amendment over and over again like some crazy broken record ever repeating himself while waving a staff around and creating frogs out of rain drops and after watching that for a little bit and get bored they go back to their car.
What if police were to stop them? They could be speeding to get there faster, ignore a particularly determined cop and wind up arrested for resisting the law, thus moving them to point C and forcing them to spend the night in jail.
"One day many years later, when you find your previous awareness, cognition and choices are all wrong, will you keep going along the wrong path or reject yourself?” — Gu Li
Otherwise a great idea, but I can't imagine anyone getting bored of that any sooner than after three days at least, delaying them way more than is strictly necessary.
They are the police. And they were already held back by an officer before, I'd be repeating myself.
kid, if you can write half as well as you can shitpost you're going to be the next pynchon
There are a lot of people on this board talking about these huge works, I would like to read one of them one of these days.
Bad traffic.
You could have the enemies win the ambush and knocking out the MCs and then transported to a hideout of theirs. They would be unconscious for a couple of hours and the hideout could be in the opposite direction.
Or one or both of them get so injured they have to go to the hospital first in need of emergency surgery.
Otherwise no way of delaying the sending of the mail or reading of the mail?
>Realise that there is no market for sub par literary fiction
That's literally all lit fic currently being published
>You could have the enemies win the ambush and knocking out the MCs and then transported to a hideout of theirs.
Where the villain will then deliver a slideshow to explain the plan to take over the world...Nah, the enemies are out to search and destroy. The characters being defeated would mean their deaths.
>Or one or both of them get so injured they have to go to the hospital first in need of emergency surgery.
Sending them to ER just to put them back on the road a few hours later would be Rambo-tier silly...And the characters already recovered from dreadful injuries earlier, crippling them again would get frustrating. The audience wants heroes who get the job done. And this is a two-parter, we need all men aboard for the sequel!
>Otherwise no way of delaying the sending of the mail or reading of the mail?
I thought about this, but due to limited online accessibility, the sender can only send the mail at that specific time. And since this is the miraculous age of the internet we're talking about, the message is delivered and received instantanemonously.
It would be pretty wacky for the search party to go like, "oh wow, we got a contact from our urgent missing person case but were too busy on facebook to notice!"
I can guarantee you, money back, zero risk, never any contracts, shipping included, your thousand page door stop can easily fit within the form factor of Crime and Punishment, or Moby Dick (or Ulysses).
All your problems have you in common.
They get arrested for reckless driving and spend the night in a jail, ironically delaying them through their intention to travel quickly.
Next.
Sorry fell asleep.
What about the mail, can you change what she knows and is able to convey so they need to search more?
The mail is encrypted and one of them gets it wrong, goes to the wrong spot.
Then you get the fantastic Tension in the Team.