Are you writing something niggers?

I've had this issue as well in the past. Try typing everything up in a font you can't read. Wingdings work, however I would suggest you use something you find aesthetically pleasing.

Personally I use something called "For The Glory of Helghan". Write 10k or so words this way, then go back and change it to a legible font. Then continue to write using your illegible font. You'll find you have an easier time editing a completed body of text rather than constantly flip-flopping over your direction.

> post apocalyptic
Huge market for that these days. Good for you, capitalizing on the demand.
> complete and utter freedom
You'll have to expand on that user, I didn't quite get you.

Focus on short stories, for the time being. You can set them as stories related to your grand idea, if that helps. But simple short stories are the ground spring from which you will improve your technique.

>Huge market for that these days. Good for you, capitalizing on the demand.
I mean, thanks, I guess, but that's not why I'm writing it. I'm writing it because I dreamt the ending and I wanted to write a story to go along with it. And, like I said, It's a catharsis for me.
>You'll have to expand on that user, I didn't quite get you.
Alright, so the world "ends" (about 10 yrs prior to the beginning of the book)- 90% of humanity just up and dies. it's left vague in book, because it doesn't really matter, but now 10% of humanity is just chilling, doing whatever the fuck they want with what's left over which is- everything. anybody can do whatever they want. There's no government, there's no law enforcement, there's no economy- it's just people doing whatever.
So, of course, the question arises what they should be doing.

We're told to go to school and get a job and whatever, to which we can adhere or rebel against, but now these young people have absolutely no outside input. Which is how the story starts.

Hemingway?

I find this sort of fiction quite appealing. Writing what you know and juxtaposing it onto a familiar but bleak version of the world. There's no need to inject something cliche, like zombies, disease or an alien invasion. By using nebulous, natural disasters as the catalyst, it frees you up to explore the characters more than the setting.

I'm writing something similar, set in the west of Ireland. It follows a fictional town and its inhabitants, after conventional fuel has become extremely rare. A sort of return to a proto-industrial western culture. 3 intertwined narratives play out at the same time.

2 farmers, former friend, come to blows over a stretch of land. Their conflict escalates from comical one-upmanship to an increasingly violent confrontation.

A young man, dealing with feelings of inadequacy and a need for identity, teeters on the brink of joining a para-military organisation. An old priest, in a country where the old catholic faith has all but died, attempts to save him by showing him a better path.

A woman from the itinerant community sets, alongside a few unlikely allies, to restore an old fishing trawler so they can escape the increasing desperate situation of their homes.

All the while, the weather gets worse and fuel becomes scarcer. Each of the 3 groups become more desperate and everything comes to a violent head.

> humanity is just chilling, doing whatever the fuck they want with what's left over which is- everything. anybody can do whatever they want.

Hedonism, and survival of the fittest. Sounds interesting, user. You're 40 pages past, yeah? I'd just advice you to look up on evolutionary psychology, and how people would actually react if such a situation occurred, and create possible plot points out of actual scientific research that has been done on these issues. Or use your imagination, whatever. It's a really simple story, so you have to be careful to not oversimplify it- honestly, I don't even know if I'd be able to write more than 2k words on it, so you're obviously doing a great job world(or lack thereof)building, and creating subplots. I wish you congratulations.

bluebeard the space opera set in an opulent, overripe feudal society + sexual slavery + obsession + impotence in the face of time

have about 30k of planning, plot, and character development. 7k of actual writing in very rough draft. expecting it to run 100kish.

I was planning on writing a standard 50k novel but I don't my story to feel more monotonous and aimless as it is, so I'll probably wrap it up around 30-40k words, at about 23k now. I keep deceiving myself because I like a nice size 12 font size but I'm using a 5 x 8 manuscript, so it looks like I've written a lot more than I actually have.

Don't worry about the length, user. You'd be doing your readers a favor by leaving the fluff out. Don't be lenient during editing- remove all that is not necessary to the plot.

>to the plot

yeah haha

Yours sounds interesting too. I do love character studies. Good characters will carry all kinds of stories. The stories of people surviving, and adapting to their new environments is my very favorite plot. Is it going to be sort of sad, or bittersweet?

Awww, thanks user. I'll definately take your advice and check it out.

I recently picked up a story idea I had in high school, but since I lost all my notes from 5 years ago, I'm going on vague notions of what the story was supposed to be while trying to fill in gaps in the plot that I never bothered to think through all the way. So far I can just say it's a story about fighting androids and explores the idea of AI beyond just "this dude falls in love with his robot friend". I'm curious to see how "anime" I can get without alienating my target audience- young adult nerds.

Try to condense your grand ideas into a short story. Once you begin writing the short story, it may just lead itself into a full-length novel. Lots of great novels (e.g. The Sound and the Fury) began in precisely this fashion.

I've written a good 568 pages of my autistic childhood fantasy. It's a pretty lame story, everything about it is cringeworthy, the plot is cliche and drawn out as fuck because it was something that followed my life for years and years and I still imagine it sometimes. A few years ago I decided to start writing it out. When I was NEET I wrote a good 100k words in a single year, and did a decent amount after that. The problem is that my writing is shit so I have to keep editing it, and I also launched into these subplots to try to fill in gaps in the story, before realizing that I have 500 pages and have only covered about 10 percent of the plot, possibly less, really like 2 percent (because I've had this story in my head since the age of 7 and I am 23 now), so I realize if I am ever going to finish it I just need to write what "happened" and fill in the bare minimum to make it a story, or else I will never finish. Except now whole vast swathes of it need to be rewritten. I had 338,000 words but I cleared out a lot and rewrote it to be shorter. I still need to delete a shitton of stuff. I will probably never finish because I still add more to the story in my head when I go for walks sometimes while listening to music. So I will likely never "catch up." I will just leave it behind when I die like Henry Darger, along with about 400 shitty drawings of characters, ships, weapons, important scenes from the story, et cetera.

well, that's fine, isn't it? You're writing because it does something for you, right? So that's fine. Publishing a book isn't the end all, be all of writing. Why don't you try posting sections of it on a blog. You might find a following of people who like that kind of weird, meandering story.

> Is it going to be sort of sad, or bittersweet?

A little bit of both. The 2 farmers are very much based off of the the Martin Mcdonagh studies of West Ireland; incredibly self centered and slightly vindictive, but not inherently evil. They learn a lesson without ever really learning anything. They'll be better people, at least for a while.

The young man comes to the conclusion that he can do better. He manages to be the better man, but it costs him dearly.

The woman and her comrades succeed in restoring the ship, but they set forth into a stormy ocean, unsure of whether they'll manage to reach the far shore, or if they'll survive in what they find.

I do have a blog, I made a tumblr account to hold my "art" and some sections of my worldbuilding autism. I posted some passages of the writing, as well. I guess the issue is mainly just finishing it and making it "good." Like, I can't change the story much, so if the plot is bad then that's just how it's going to be, but I want to make the prose strong and readable. I wish I could adequately describe the images and feelings I had in my head, but neither drawing nor my writing seem to really accomplish that, and it's incredibly frustrating. I wish I could make a movie, just from my head, but since that's not an option, writing is my next best option.

Repetition. Repeat a descriptive passage over and over, until you're happy with how it sounds in your head. Save all your attempts and choose from what segments you enjoy, I've always found that I approach description differently on a day-to day basis and at least some of it seems quite good.

thanks user that sounds like good advice.

This reminds me of Girlfriend in a Coma (Douglas Coupland's novel) and I don't think he really pulled that off.
Try to do that though it sounds fun.

Read Dhalgren

bump

I want it to be a romance novel because it would be easier to sell.

Just because you're pandering to the lowest intellect group there is does not mean you're going to write a best-seller (or even something that will get published)

I can't imagine how many people have tried to write (love story +monsters) or (Dystopian + Young Adult) since, you know, those TWO STORY LINES became popular. You know exactly which two book series I'm talking about.

And maybe a handful of "similar" stories got published. Some of them became successful, even getting movie adaptations, but none of them because the licensing juggernauts that they're predecessors were.

This is just my opinion, but you should never write a story thinking, "what can I market to idiots?"

That just means you don't have a good story to tell.

You are a wise man, user. But that is no excuse for Reddit spacing.

my apologies

>This is just my opinion, but you should never write a story thinking, "what can I market to idiots?"
I am also thinking "What is easier to write?". I think it would be better pratice for me to finish something on a relatively easy genre than writing literary fiction.
Also, English is not my native language, but there is barely any market to books in my language. The complexity of prose and vocabulary needed for literary fiction is often higher than the one needed to write a simple romance.

Cancerous forced meme.

Fuck off

and what language is that?

>here's a tip for you then. Get better at English. I mean, your English isn't terrible, based on your posts that I've read. But work on fluency, THEN come up with a story to write. No need to be in such a rush (rushing does NOT make for a good novel.)

It seems more like you want to get a paycheck than actually tell a story. Which, look, every aspiring writer would like to do so professionally. That doesn't mean it should be the only real driving force for your writing. You should want to write because you have a story... (or hundreds of stories, even!) that you want to share with the rest of the world. That you think is good enough to be told to the rest of the world. If you can't at least get that kind of mindset, you're never going to make it

Reddit spacing? Who the fuck are you?

Damn, learn to take a joke.

This sounds really familiar. You post about this before? Anyways, 568 pages is more than most people will ever write. Keep at it.

I'm writing a story about a boy and a magic shotgun struggling in the old west. Like everyone else here I have a gay anime super story on the back burner as well, but I'm holding off on writing that to write other stuff so I can get at least a little good at writing before tackling the world I've built in my head since childhood.
The first thing a wrote was a 10000 word garbo story about a girl stealing from god. I'm pretty sure it's shit, so I'll never show it to anyone.
I'm now 25000 words into the western and I pray its serviceable enough to get people to read and give feedback.
Once I finish one more story about the friendship and hatred between pepe and wojak I'll see if it's even worth writing the super story

coffee mug shinji is one of my favorite memes

god damn dude are you still around? you've been posting about this on the internet in various forums for like 8 years or something now

move on, your juvenalia science fiction elementary school tripe can't be 'saved,' either get a day job or level up. You've got a long way to go.

I was thinking of writing a story about a film crew trying to shoot a scene of a woman getting thrown through a window at a house that was especially rented for the shot.

The cuts don't pan out after some number of attempts, the woman's bf, the male actor, gradually turns violent and they stop trying. The director asks the woman some strange questions about the house. She reveals she only agreed to the film because her boyfriend would, "work better with her", but she enjoys being operable. She walks in on some randoms talking about collective conscious in the blue room and the lives spent in the area. Afterward she's asked to use her own body as the prop to be thrown out the window in a one shot scene and she accepts. It will apparently solve the problem they had. When she's hurled to the ground and there's no cast to retrieve her she enters a psychotic sort of reflection about being the only one in the neighborhood. When she tries to explain she wants to abandon the project she's confronted to stay and do the original shot again. Her boyfriend tries to convince her it'll be worth it by reasoning that, "this is our town" and some other weird stuff. When they leave together at the end of the day the woman complains she's driven down the block too many times and she doesn't derive as much sentiment from the back story of the house as was initially perceived at the time of the booking. It happens the road they're on is the longest avenue in the country. He tells her about how there's nothing like seeing a woman you know watching you deal with people, proprioceptive impairment in space and what'll look like to see something new. Then they hit a dog.

huh...It sounds like nothing. Felt meaningful as a silly early morning idea :~)

Trying to write a modern take on the tale of the swan knight while stretching it to incorporate more of a romance plot

Actually, that would be pretty entertaining as a short story.

Don't think it has enough meat for a whole novel. Perhaps a novella?

I say go for it

It's a historical novel set in the High Middle Ages. I already gathered all the materials concerning the timeline of events and world building.
It's shaping in my head, but I really need to sit down and get the structure down before I start actually writing anything because I'll fuck it up. It's a big mess.
Pic related is the what I'm aiming for, but on a bigger scale.

can you recommend some good ones?

tried the same. had theplot framework laid out, an indecisive, irresponsible teenager was my protagonist. I couldn't get anywhere because I ended up absolutley hating this shallow, pretentious deep character with every single fibre of my being.

It would have sold better than twilight.

I have the exact opposite problem. My main character and the supporting cast are darlings and I want nothing bad to happen to them.

Sci-Fi is moslty shit tier trash these days. Clean up the first 400 pages, sell them. Proceed to make money by writing a never ending series. The more books you write, the more readers you will get. Look at Game of thrones, ffs. terribly complex and just boring desu, but normies eat that shit up like its caviar.

Kill one randomly. You can delete it later on in the book, just kill them or hurt them in an offshoot. Become a sadistic god to your creation. Learn that your characters need tragedy to become believable. This is what made the original Die Hard such a success, seeing the protagonist really struggle AND win in a genre that was not used to this.

So just write a page of them all brutally being impaled on spikes or something, somebody tumbling off a cliff and really flesh it out. It's a writing excercise to get you to detach yourself from your characters and become the story teller, not a benevolent god mutating in to a meta deus ex machina.

Good historical novels?

Maurice Druon is amazing. Other than the Accursed Kings series he also has one about Alexander the Great.
Henryk Sienkiewicz has a great trilogy about Poland and a novel about crusaders and also Quo Vadis.
Robert Graves has I, Claudius and Belisarius which are pretty pretty good.
I also found Gore Vidal's Julian super interesting.

That image is genuinely amazing

Writing a Sci-Fi action script about a whole hearted egostactcial but lovable king who's name is ego people hate him and constantly belittle him since he has no business in being King so he hands down his power to his brother and leaves and starts the farm but one day is captured by by police force that runs the sector in so while in the prison ego joins this rebellion. And if you're reading this and you think this is the most autistic thing ever hear this is written like shit well I'm on my phone while is it's more complex than that I've had this idea since i was 12 but I've been working on this since last 5 months over 7 episodes written.

Oh and it's going to have arcs another interesting stuff to keep it going for episodes and episodes there's also magic called mysticism to make the combat more fun entertaining

>just pretending to be a redditor xd

Don't edit what you've written. Get it printed and make marks and take notes with a red pen. Rewrite the whole thing section by section with reference to the notes you compiled. Rewrite sections from scratch and compare them with the originals. Continue until you are satisfied.

I'm going to be threshing hardboiled fiction with Tom Clancy espionage. The wheat yielded will be framed against a matrix of sinister occultism. David Icke type stuff; COINTELPRO. People like all this right? I think the narration is going to be framed as an after-the-fact interview.

I have stacks of research to do and haven't started.

I have a day job, I never plan to publish this or anything. I just write it because I enjoy it even though I am shit at writing. And...I never posted this before 2014, that was the first time I ever shared it.

>This sounds really familiar. You post about this before?

Yeah a couple times... to say the least. Mostly just to share the shitty ""art"" I spent hours on.

>Clean up the first 400 pages, sell them. Proceed to make money by writing a never ending series.
Oh man, I appreciate the thought but there is no way I could sell this shit. I literally came up with it in second grade, imagining space wars at recess and then just kinda imagining it as an autistic habit ever since. i have no idea why I started writing it in retrospect but honestly it was one of the few things that kept me from suicide at one point in my life so I guess I shouldn't complain... but still, it's unpublishable. The plot is basically: guy and his gf grow up in a valley cut off from the world, bad guys attack, they join with good guys to destroy the bad guys' giant fortress after years of war, then they flee the destruction, get into a war against a second fortress and have children, the children survive the destruction of the second fortress but the original characters die, the children continue the story, their fleet flees to a giant tree-city many miles tall, all of the good guys, and they fight off the bad guys' enormous sieges for years on end until they finally crack (oh and at some point the new main character goes on a quest to learn the ancient origin of the war), the tree-city falls, the main character is captured, escapes, wanders, eventually leads an army to recapture it, has kids, dies stopping a biological superweapon, wipes out most of the bad guys by re-engineering it to kill them, apocalypse happens, survivors raise his children, his children become main characters again. It's basically just a giant war story, the characters are compelling but only to me because I roleplay them in my head. So yeah it's pretty much me just writing it for my own satisfaction because I have autism.

anyway none of this is Veeky Forums-related so I'll shut up about it now.

I've written a lot of edgy poems and short stories as a kid/teen. Some as an adult as well. I'm not by any stretch a good writer but I enjoy doing it when I can. In general I just like story telling.

I'm experimenting with teaching myself German by writing a page of a story in English, and then translating it. I actually have no clue where the plot is going since I've only written the opening but I figured I'll just run with it. I'm thinking something with a True Detective (or Lovecraft if you prefer) atmosphere.