u/A_C_Shock

I linked the first chapter last week which is available for free online. She gives examples of other works (in the public domain) that use language in a fun way. I actually have a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God that's moved across the country with me multiple times and I've only read once. The interesting part about some of the authors that are picked out here: they're not afraid to use dialect. Modern writing says NO ACCENTS WRITTEN PHONETICALLY because it makes it hard to read. But then you have someone like Nora Zeale Hurston who writes

>"At dat she ain't so ole as some of y'all dat's talking"

Or

>"Don't keer what it was, she could stop and say a few words with us. She act like we done done something to her," Pearl Stone complained. "She de one been doin' wrong."

And there's a way in which that dialogue feels a lot more real to me. If I'm reading out loud in my head, I can hear these women discussing. Maybe that's an art we lost and everyone wants things to be in clean English nowadays.

But the point being made in this first chapter is:

>A story is made out of language, and language can and does express delight in itself just as music does.

The two exercises for this chapter are:

1. Write a paragraph to a page of narrative that's meant to be read aloud. Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect--any kind of sound effect you like--but NOT rhyme or meter.

2. In a paragraph or so, describe an action, or a person, feeling strong emotion--joy, fear, grief. Try to make the rhythm and movement of the sentences embody or represent the physical reality you're writing about.

As always, there's no fee to participating in the weekly so save your crits. If you try the exercises, leave a top level comment and just let us know which one you did. Everyone is welcome to comment on how successful they think the attempt was (unless the author says they want no comments).

But remember: READ THEM OUT LOUD TO YOURSELF. Make a vocaroo and send it directly to u/glowylaptop. Flood him with sound.

I'm going to add a few more top level comments for discussion. Feel free to participate in those as well.

Well, I was going to do a poll but that's unavailable unless I download the app. No thanks. I collected all the book titles that came up in last week's weekly. There will be a comment for each one. Please upvote the one you'd prefer to do. I need a winner to help organize this, so probably best to pick one.

As always, any other topics are welcome in the weekly. Posting is free so save those crits!

My update: I'm right around the 50% mark of my long work in progress and do things make sense anymore? Impossible to know. But my beta reader who told me I forget about the POV character whispers in the back of my head, so I don't get as distracted with all the other fun side characters! Probably.

Mods - take this down if it's not appropriate.

In the search bar, if you look up r/Fantasy, reddit now tags this community for recommendations riffing on Tolkien and flawed heroines. (AI is making the tags, probably.) I'm so sad about this. I see a lot of great content and reviews coming out of this subreddit that are more than just Tolkien. And I also don't understand how they got the flawed heroines. Is that really the defining topics for this subreddit? I feel like it's not.

I had two requested topics for the weekly. I'm taking up the first one: outlines. The second one, I'm wondering if anyone else would be interested: book club where we discuss a writing craft book. If there's interest in the second, let me know in the comments and suggest a book.

Alright. This is my process for organizing my writing. Please share what you do in the comments!

On the first draft, I start with a high-level outline. I like to at least know my destination, so when I pants half my stuff, it's hopefully not that obvious. Here's one for a WIP that I'm not actively working on right now:

---

Act 1: the exam

Intro to the World

Inciting Incident

Moral Dilemma

Act 2: the laboratory

The Experiment

New Requests

The Ultimatum

Act 3: revelation and escalation

Uncovering Secrets

Major Setback

Act 4: climax and resolution

Final Plan

Climactic Showdown

Resolution

---

There is a brief paragraph for each of the sections, not enough to create a whole chapter but enough to give me a checklist of things I want to accomplish. I might then write a short sentence for the next 3-6 chapters saying what I think needs to happen. Those are typically things like 'Character A and B have a fight'. I have also started doing quick summaries before I start writing chapters where I'll go through what has happened up to this point and where I think the chapter needs to end up, so I can figure out what scenes I need. I keep this brief because I don't like to plan too much, but if I ignore these steps, my characters never end up where I need them to be.

I will also write the dreaded query letter. I like to ensure I've thought through the main conflict and given my POV character some stakes. I'll go through the main points of a query (what do they want, what are they willing to do, what happens if they fail) for major side characters as well. I think this helps me flesh them out more.

So for the above outline, here is my very very early draft query (that is to say, if it sucks, of course it does. I haven't written enough to flesh it out.) I used the online query generator for this and seem to not have edited it into something more formal.

36-year-old lifelong academic Florence Spalding just wants to pass her qualifiers, but when a voice starts speaking in her head giving her the answers, Flo cheats on her exam and passes. Now, Flo is given a new top secret research project because of her excellent scores.

As Flo integrates into her new research lab and develops a romance with one of her labmates, she discovers the voice in her head is making increasingly dangerous demands. Flo is put to the test when the professor threatens to kick her out of the lab if she doesn't complete the experiment, and when the experiment requires her to sacrifice her new romantic partner, she has to earn her place in the lab and scientific history or lose the only person who cares about her.

Wow, that one is not great. As I write, I would work to give more specifics to Flo's romance and the dangerous demands from the voice in her head. It's pretty fluffy right now. I've only written the first chapter of the first draft. Usually, I polish between the first and second draft and let this be guidance for how I tackle draft two.

After the initial drafts, I do a process called reverse outlining. You read the chapter you've already written and write down what happens. I break it down into scenes. Each scene also gets a single sentence for the takeaways and any notes about what I think isn't working and why. I also might brainstorm ideas as I'm working through the parts that aren't working because I tend to get stuck when I'm in writing mode.

Here's one of mine for a scene that's been reviewed here:

Scene 1

Zara goes into the intake ward, makes a mental inventory of the patients for Marc, and adjusts the medications on the patients there. Rachel comes to warn her about Harper who shows up and reprimands Zara for not doing her job well. Zara and Rachel argue about the treatment of magic users. Zara searches for charts and argues with the head nurse Deb about how they’re missing. Scene nuggets: This scene should establish the diseased patients and the mystery around why asymptomatic people are being treated and disappearing. Deb can be cut and Rachel/Zara should receive a harsher punishment.

On revision, I ended up moving this to Scene 2 because there was too much going on to track the scene nugget I called out. The rewritten scene is more focused, I think. I also ended up cutting Deb entirely and drastically diminishing Rachel's role. Marc gets introduced differently and later. Harper also gets introduced differently and later.

That's my larger organizing process. I do something similar on a smaller scale for short stories. Flash fiction, I just write. It's short. I don't need plans.

Is that recognizable from Casablanca? Because I always think of Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart when I hear that, but apparently it's attributed more to some sports type person. You see where my priorities lie. Very old movies.

Anyway.

We were talking about chapter endings and scene endings and strategies as it relates to either of those things. And then I realized I have no strategy at all with anything and stuff falls out of my brain in a random fashion that occasionally happens to work. But maybe everyone else has a strategy? Are there rules? There can't be, right?

Anyone have some kind of epic ending they want to share? Or have you figured out the secret to really phenomenal endings and you're hoarding it like a dragon?

Also any other random things can go here in the comments.

This is a different thing. Like a purge piece for my thoughts.

Feel the need to note: this is a fictional creative writing piece and not an indicator of my personal mental health. Thanks for the concern to those who expressed it! Helped me understand I got the voice I was going for right.

1570

I can’t close my eyes because that’s when the nightmares come. Someone is waiting for me, in the dark, though it isn’t always dark but that’s not the part that matters, not when my feet start moving on their own and then I’m propelling myself forward even though all I want to do is turn around and run. It’s just…you know that feeling when you’re not supposed to want something but you do and you know you should stop but you don’t? It’s kind of like that but without as much guilt or conscious thought. Well, no conscious thought really, when I’ve closed my eyes. The someone never turns. I’m not even sure who they represent but I can feel them. They reach through the blank space between us somehow and the pressure of them aches down my side and latches around my ankle and drags me closer though I always stay far enough away to not be able to touch or hit or kick. And then, the nightmare follows me into waking and I am filled with holes in the spots where that someone grabbed me. So, I don’t close my eyes. I’ve been working out the best ways not to close them. After the first day, it got easier. But I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up and, I probably shouldn’t say anything, but the nightmares are starting to filter into my waking moments. I press my fingers into my eyes and press until, when I pull them away, the world is covered in spots of various colors and, in those spots, lurks that someone. If I blink quickly enough, the image fades and I’m left with the grit that’s built up from days spent trying to keep my eyes open in a world devoid of someones. And yet, when I run my hands over my body and prod the various crevices, I find new pieces going missing. New gaps I can’t account for. And I’m starting to think there’s something I haven’t quite puzzled out just yet waiting in the corners of my mind that might reveal itself if I embrace the nightmare, stop resisting, let myself reach that someone. That maybe I should let my eyes close, just for a minute, and see if the nightmare is as bad as I’ve been imagining. Maybe I’ll be fine…

One of the fun things about moderating is explaining to people what AI writing sounds like and then wondering what is going on when they come back with 'You don't understand! This is my life!' OK, calm down. It's just reddit.

In this process, I've started to gather some hilariously bad things AI has come up with. New favorite:

"he sank the way dead men sink--not dramatically, not slowly, just down."

I was a theater kid. We used to get to go to a fancy adult Shakespeare theater every year and perform our mini versions of the great plays. They'd call kids up on stage to do mini-challenges during the intermissions. My favorite was taking the line "And thus I die" and being assigned very ridiculous ways to die. It was the era of JNCO jeans. One girl's death was being consumed by her pants.

Now I'm wondering if everyone here has epic death scenes just waiting somewhere inside their brains. Or hilariously bad. What's a better version of sinking neither dramatically nor slowly? Give me your best death scenes.

Glowy and I have been chatting about when and how to reveal information. You have this cool backstory in your head where the character who is keeping secrets is really, I don't know, a drug trafficker who is dating a cop. You let the reader suss out that there's some kind of secret but you don't want to tell them what it is. When does that get frustrating to read?

I've seen this workout a few different ways. The author drops many cryptic hints that are consistently related but never quite enough for you to understand until the very last hint and you piece it together right before the reveal. That's fun for me. I also like ones where the secret is easy to guess as a reader and I've figured it out but the character hasn't figured it out. Then I'm waiting to see what happens when the ball drops. But less fun is when I know where everything is going and the characters do too. Then I'm just slogging through to the end because I can't DNF. I'm looking at all the books that have some kind of prophecy.

I have also read ones where the author was doing a great job building tension and then got to a point where they blurted out all the secrets but there was still a quarter or more of the story left. It can make an exciting story go to a boring story in a few pages.

So, what are everyone's strategies for handling big reveals? Do you like a Gone Girl style twist? Or must you give away everything up front?

Of course, it's the weekly so anything goes in the comments. I don't have a writing prompt but if you wanted to show us something about information reveals, I'm all for it.

Before the regularly scheduled programming: we've had some reports of people getting unsolicited emails with critiques instead of reddit comments. When you share a Google doc, anyone can get your email by looking at the Shared page in their account. That's why we recommend using an account that's not linked to you irl so you don't get doxed. I suspect most of the email people are using AI for whatever critique they sent you and trying to get you to pay for some kind of service. The mods over at r/betareaders tell me they get a lot of people from Brazil doing this. Ours are Italian. I can't really do anything to stop people from emailing you. I can ban people who are interacting on Reddit, but that doesn't stop them from seeing your content. Best bet is to ignore them, just like any other scammer, if they email you.

I don't care about rainbows. Someone tell me why there are so many stories about frogs this week. Or maybe the better question is this: why are there not more stories about frogs? So, I'm up for another writing weekly.

This past week, I've left a few comments for people saying I think there's a lack of specificity that kills immersion. I'm now wondering what would happen if I gave a vague outline of a story and asked all you writers here to fill in details. I suspect that I'd get a bunch of very different versions of the same story. Let's try!

Non-specific story:

One day, a boy walked out to a pond where he found a frog hopping around. He was excited to find a new friend, so he scooped the frog into a bucket and carried him home. His mother didn't like frogs very much. The boy snuck the frog up to his room and hid it in the closet where he was keeping a fish tank.

That's the outline. I'd like to see what kind of character you all can bring to my very flat short piece.

As always, you do not have to critique to submit to the weekly. If someone is open to critique of something they post, they can indicate that in their comment (and you're welcome to declare you only want people to say nice things!). Respect the requests.

If there's anything else anyone wants to discuss (like what's so interesting about frogs), go ahead and comment that too.

I finished a book yesterday. Well, two this week. I went to look at the reviews and was surprised by the rating being lower than I expected. I guess the author wandered into some controversy about her attempts at diversity being less than favorable to some of the other cultures she was depicting. I mean, I didn't think any of the cultures were depicted favorably but I guess that doesn't matter.

Anyway.

I clicked on the one star reviews because I was curious what it was I liked that other people hated. Long sentences. Info dumping. Telling rather than showing. And I didn't notice any of that! Those are comments I've made about other books I've read recently but not this one.

There's not really a formula or anything that says this writing is good and this writing is bad.

I guess I don't know. That's what I was thinking about this week.

Before the regularly scheduled programming, did you all know Grammarly is now a Free AI Writing Assistance company? They acquired two new AI companies in 2025 and seem to be re-branding. If you are using it to help with grammar, be aware it has the same issues you might find natively using any other LLM tool (that being, it rewrites your sentences). This is my old man yells at clouds moment.

Here at DestructiveReaders, we love a good writing challenge. So, I have a new game. Have you played one of our games before? It goes like this:

Make a top level comment that contains:

• A trope

• A list of required words

Then respond to any comment that inspires you with a story. We don't expect people to critique these and critiques here wouldn't be for credit. Post the story in the body of the comment or in a doc link.

Example:

• Trope: Butt-dialing Mordor (A character, through recklessness or bad luck, ends up unintentionally using some form of long-range communication in a manner that contacts an evil entity.)

• Words: peckish, colt, anabolic, compel, silk

Example:

On Sundays in fall, I try my hardest not to leave the house. You see, the Colts play and I love Indianapolis and if I don't watch them they'll surely lose. There are so many other things I might do that would cause them to lose but leaving the house is the most surefire way. I have a journal where I've kept track of all of their wins and losses since I was five. It's here, the pattern, in plain ink. Anyway, this fact of life leaves me in a bit of a predicament: food. I can't cook. Left to my own devices, I survive on stale cereal and expired milk until someone manages to deliver a meal, so I've become rather dependent on food delivery services. As soon as I start feeling peckish, I log into my favorite one and dial in on the hot wings and pizza.

Except not today. The website crashed at 12:49 on the dot. Without wings and pizza, the Colts have a 30 percent higher chance of losing their game. I start typing frantically in the search engine---where can I get hot wings in time to ensure a Colts win????---and an answer pops up.

"Deviled Hot Wings are guaranteed to grant you your heart's desire. Do you want to know more?"

"As long as I can get them before the game, I don't care! How long will it take to deliver?"

"That depends entirely on you."

"What does that mean?" I mumble out loud.

A voice, silky as a quarterback’s jersey, fills the room, not from the speakers on my laptop but somehow loud and close and all encompassing. "Everyone has a special thing they have to offer. I only ask what you would be willing to give up for your dreams."

"For...the Colts to win the Super Bowl?" Those stupid first draft picks are embroiled in an anabolic steroid scandal and I’d given up hope on our chances. They could use any additional help I could give them. "Anything."

A basket of hot wings floats down from the ceiling. I hold out my hands and cradle the gift. Later, I'll mark down in my notebook what happened, track the changes in my team. I might even win my fantasy football league this year.

"Remember," the voice fades as I tuck into my wings, "if you feel compelled to follow an instinct, act immediately."

The clock ticks to 1:00PM and the Colts win the coin toss. Off to a good start.