Fiction Writer's Thread

[Kaodi]

Might be a bit of a thread hijack so spoiler tags:

Spoiler

If I may be permitted to momentarily crash another thread; by the definition that a writer is someone who writes I am not a writer. I have thought plenty of times that I should write something and I have thought from time to time about that something should be. But I do not actually write things. In part because as long as I do not write something there is still the illusory possibility that the thing I "could" write would be good. And this is despite knowing that first drafts are, loosely, supposed to be bad. Even hot garbage.

I even asked Felicia about this on stream and for about five seconds before she understandably got distracted by something else she said that I should just start with something really bad for the next thirty days. That was seven to ten days ago and I have written nothing. Not even started a new word document or broke out the paper and pencil (which might be a better approach for me). It has been years since I actually even really started the pretense of something. This extends to both fiction and non-fiction writing - it has all been a wash.

There are some reasons for this: I tend to lock my objectives between other objectives, like I have a whole bunch of stuff on the PVR to get through, much of it with my Mom, some of it with my Dad, and some just me. But I also think that I am kind of locked into the idea that if I write something that it has to have purpose. And I do not really think I am up to the task of writing with purpose. Like, did political science and philosophy in university, but that was years ago now, and honestly I am kind of a crank. Maybe a very reasonable crank in many ways, but still (I even described myself as "Likely Internet Crank" in my bio on Twitter, back when it was still Twitter - I quit before it wasn't). I also spend most of my time on video games, though I am in a bit of a lull in that right now, so if I were going to something else now would be a time to try. But the feeling that I if I write it should not just be pulp fiction is real.

I do not really know where I am going to going with this.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Might be a bit of a thread hijack so spoiler tags:

That's a lot of words for somebody who's not a writer...

 

[trappedslider]

 

[BookTenTiger]

I got a positive rejection from a literary magazine today that complimented my "flow of writing."

Though the rejection is not good, it's always good to get feedback!

 

[Eyes of Nine]

View attachment 441405

Too real...

 

[Zaukrie]

Posting to keep this thread in front of me.....

When I got laid off more years ago than I want to think about....I wrote a bad fantasy novel. 4-6 people read it, and um, it isn't great. I re-wrote the intro, and my wife said she finally understood one of the (way too many) characters, so that was good. While writing that, I kept dreaming about another character in a different part of the world, and tried to ignore it, to no avail. I wrote like 3 chapters (?) about him, and that writing is much, much better, but I never went back.

Then I wrote about 40% of a SF book, and that writing is much, much, better, but I could never figure out the middle of that book. One of the bad guys was named Jefflon (after two very rich people we know), which I named before we knew that one of them was a nazi type.

Some day, maybe, I'll go back to one of those and finish them.

I also wrote a lot for DMsGuild, but I mostly make pennies for that.....I had a website with lots of free DnD stuff, but no one went, so I stopped paying for it. Maybe I'll put that here someday?

Anyway, good luck everyone. Writing is HARD. Ideas, easy. Writing? HARD.

 

[BookTenTiger]

A story of mine was published today! "The House With No Doors" is about a neighborhood in which there is a house that has no doors, but a man still lives in it, and there's a group of kids who are obsessed with it.

Here it is:

Fiction: The House With No Doors by K Russell Breakstone

In our neighborhood there was a house with no doors.

jmwwblog.wordpress.com

 

[Autumnal]

Congrats! Marking that to read soon.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Not heard the term before, but the story I posted above comes into that category. The point is, it's something you can finish in one sitting (possibly revisiting a couple of times for proof-reading and general polish).

The trouble is, it's not a commercial format. Everyone feels they need to write a best selling novel (and if it's fantasy, it must have doorstop proportions). But these days, the market is so oversaturated that even if your novel is great it's hard to make a liveable income from it. You really need to already be a celebrity for your novel to stand out in the crowd.

So, unless you want to build up a YouTube channel first, you are back to writing purely for your own amusement.

Coming back to this comment, flash fiction is actually a very publishable category now. Most of the magazines (online and print) accept flash fiction, and there are whole magazines / sites that focus on flash fiction.

 

[Fifinjir]

I did write out a novel length thing, I think I accidentally lost it when transferring files from one computer to the next though. Which really sucks, it wasn’t great or anything, it was a story that changed so many times since I first came up with it that elements of all the different versions were starting to clash with each other, but I still would have liked to have it. Maybe I still have a backup email.

Couple of novellas, I realized I like that dormat. One’s pretty good but the other I’ll have to get back to and figure out what was the actual story I wanted to tell with it.

Right now I’m working on something with the intention that I can say the story is finished in one document.