r/writing

Hi,
So as the title suggests, is protagonist age really the main distinguisher between YA and adult fiction. Like what if a book is dual POV with a teen and adult protagonist, which category would it fall under? Or then would the next distinguisher be who drives the plot more between the two ? And if the adult did happen to drive the plot more, could it still be marketed as YA if it does explore some YA themes ?

Morning.

We have made the following addendum to our How to Post guide which hopefully removes confusion about how this rule is enforced.

The entire rule now reads (amendments in italics):

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Happy writing!

With Steven Speilbergs movie coming out soon, all the US government releases on UFOs, USO, UAP, what have you...at what point does writing about aliens become fiction, non-fiction, or any other genre other than sci fi?

I'm not sure something like this has happened in our history, but if everything coming out is true, and disclosure is happening, at what point are aliens no longer considered scifi? Is there some kind of metric? Does it have to do with provable tech?

Let's say hypothetically one species appears, the next day someone writes a book about them in a crime solving novel. It can't be sci fi anymore because they actually appeared, right?

What is the onus here? Looking for a serious answer as the topic is just interesting to me and I'm curious what others would need to determine aliens are no longer science fiction.

Love,

AB

So I’m writing a book series, and I started wondering if people might decide not to read it because of the inconsistency in the cover, length, and style of the first book.

All the other books will probably be about the same length, and the covers will look really similar. Each one will be about a different character, and the cover design is pretty similar for each of them, just with a different silhouette on it. They’ll mostly focus on the life and backstory of each character.

The first book is different though. It will be a lot shorter, and it focuses on three characters who encounter one of the later important characters in the series. The cover will also be slightly different. It still has the main silhouette of the character they encounter, but in the front there are three silhouettes of the protagonists, shown in white, because they’re kind of meant to stand out as “different” from the rest of the characters.

And I’m not sure if that would put people off, since everything else in the series is very consistent, but the first book breaks that pattern a bit with the shorter length, multiple main characters, and slightly different cover.

At the same time, you don’t technically need to read the first book. It’s not necessary to understand the rest. The books are meant to be standalone anyway. The first one is more like an introduction to the world and how everything connects.

So I guess my question is: would that feel weird or off-putting to you as a reader, or is it fine and pretty normal?

I've recently thought of an idea for a novel. The single most important thing for me at the moment is to know is how everyone interprets these two words. "The Fool"

I’m not looking for a “correct” interpretation or fantasy-style definition. Just say what comes to mind immediately when you hear it. What it feels like to you, even if it’s simple or abstract.

Does anyone else have a recurring motive of all their books.

All my books kind of tie in together. they can be completly different characters, timelines, lives lived and Genres of fiction but they all tie back in together.

I have built over my manuscripts the theory that all lives in all worlds are leaves on the tree of life. Some burn brightly, some fall before they are ready, some end happy and some end sad but they are all from the same place "The rainbow tree".

For example Three books
Raising riley
Becoming Riley
Angry skies

All have the same characters imbedded in them but somethint changed on their leafs that changed the trajectory of their lives and shaped them into different people with different life experiences.

Hello everyone! I want to improve my writing but I really have a hard time in making progress. I do know reading books help but I want to find alternative ways to improve. Anything helps! Thank you.

First time poster here, long time lurker! I hope this is allowed, apologies if it is not!

How do you as an author make dialogue in your stories feel more organic? And how do you determine whether dialogue is specific to your storyline? Does all dialogue or does each interaction between characters have to serve a purpose or drive your storyline along? How do you as an author determine whether a piece of dialogue or story element or interaction serves the purpose you would like it to?

Essentially, I am curious about what everyone's "best practice" or writing process is that helps make conversation between characters feel like an actual conversation between real human people. I find I particularly struggle with feeling like I'm a child playing with dolls LOL! And also, how you personally determine whether elements are "good" for your story (i.e., serve purpose or drive the story along) vs. "bad" for your story (is just extra clutter that could be cut out). I don't have any formal training as I do typically write for fun, but I was just curious as to how other authors approach these things and what matters most to them :)

Then again, no one would write a book about themselves in the scenario wherein the entire text is riddled with their own biases and perspectives. Although books can never escape worldview-induced presuppositions, especially those detailing oneself, would it be the best case scenario that, in the possibility of my inevitable passing, I simply leave it to the few (or no) persons to compile the events of my life, albeit with their biases instead of mine?

Or is it all futile and in vain as no one would ever read a biography of some unknown, obscure, and frankly irrelevant adolescent off the southwestern coast of a tyrannical ocean set in the nomenclature of peace?

Would it perhaps at least be fitting for an unaccomplished failure of a writer to end his production with his final perspective? At least in this specific path would the last mounds of recognition be attained.

Or will it still remain in his relative's basement?

Reaching out to agents and/publishers soon.

Should I paste by query letter into the email’s body or attach it?

I wanted to share my recent experience in having an excellent editor, and how much that feedback has influenced how and what I write.

A bit of background first: I have been writing in some form or the other for ~20+ years, and while I've had short stories and such published in college, I never went beyond that.

During COVID, I decided to start writing more and dusted off some old ideas and a bunch of outlines and short stories. I took stock of all the ideas that I had and realized there were 14 books that I had started and stopped over the years in various stages of progress. Then life happened, and I put things on the back burner.

And this year, I made a resolution to write more, and in the past 5 months, I have dusted off 3 of those and actually made meaningful progress. I found a rather excellent editor who was willing to be patient with me as a debut author and he reviewed my first novella. He had some exceptional feedback.

First, while he acknowledged my good prose, he was very blunt that I needed to do a lot more work before my writing was ready for publication. He was also very clear that I'd always regret it if I published something that wasn't fully ready, because it'll affect how readers see my work and how I see my work. Even if it were simply self-published.

Then he had specific feedback to me, which I found super helpful. I've outlined some of this below, in the hope that other writers may find it helpful.

----

Emotional Arcs

You see, I am not a writer. I have never taken a creative writing class. I am an engineer and a former consultant. So I write like one. I hate dialogues because they feel... artificial.

So, his feedback to me was to practice at building an emotional arc -- not just for the protagonist, but also the antagonist and a couple of other characters. My MC was simply accepting what was happening vs. reacting emotionally.

Goal, Motivation, Conflict

This seems so self-evident after the fact, but making sure that every character and every arc has a goal, a motivation, and a "conflict" / work to achieve it.

The thing is, this means I needed to actually develop character depth. Not just who my characters are, but what's their back story. Where are they from? What drives them? What do they like? What do they dislike? And that profile affects how they react to the world around them.

This really changed how I looked at my writing, because now I really, genuinely needed to go in and change how characters react and behave in various situations, based on who they are as people. And I needed to get a pretty detailed character profile in my head, even if only a small sliver of it made it into the book.

Humanizing the characters so that readers root for them

Yeah, I struggled with this too. My characters are like NPCs -- they do things. You don't feel a connection to them. So, I needed to rethink how I can make readers care for them.

In fact, in most of my stories, the character just went and did "stuff". That's about it.

My wife had the idea of introducing a pet, introducing friends and family etc. so that the reader feels drawn into the life of the character. This goes hand-in-hand with the part about the GMC framework, and how can you tie the motivation of the character with the people in their lives.

In Media Res

Latin for "in the midst of things" -- a narrative technique where a story opens in the middle of the action rather than at the beginning. You see, I had the challenge of setting the stage over 5 chapters, during which readers simply lose patience. Now it may not work for every book, but it did make me reconsider whether or not a reader will be "hooked" to my book in the initial chapters.

A good friend of mine said "start with violence" (not literal violence, but rather with action vs. background) and that has now stuck with me.

Weather Reports

So many of my chapters started out with what he called "weather reports". I was just reporting what had happened between the end of the previous chapter and this new chapter. This goes hand-in-hand with the In Media Res feedback, where my stories needed a lot more "action" vs. "reporting".

Showing vs. Telling

I'm sure you've all heard this one, but the feedback here to me was very specific.

My editor's guidance was to unfold the "showing" in real time through the characters in a way that engages the readers and draws them in. It should feel like the story is playing out before them and that's how they learn what's happening.

I tended to "info dump" from characters and from narration, and slow-dripping the information is the right way to do things. And that takes time and effort.

Using all the senses

I'm not a visual guy. So I don't describe what someone sees very well. I also don't describe smells very well. I went back and basically a lot of my stories had things that smelled like ozone, burned rubber, "clean room" (wtf), or rubbing alcohol. Yes, really.

The feedback here was that I should look at using all five senses, and keep that thematic characteristic throughout the book. If my MC always notices the smells and how things feel, then her "micro takes" on these things builds an environment that's unique to that character (Andy Weir does this really well with Jazz Bashara in Artemis).

Passive verbs and adverbs

I am super guilty of this. A lot of my writing uses passive verbs, adverbs, and basically words like felt, thought, wondered, considered etc. which bore the reader.

So I've had to really go through and figure out where I can be more direct and not put my reader to sleep.

----

Long story short, I have a ton to work on. But my editor was clear that all of this will elevate not only the work that he edited, but any future work as well. He's now editing my second novella, and I did a rushed update of many of these changes. I know they won't be enough, and he'll have similar feedback.

But I will absolutely incorporate this feedback into all my work going forward, and I can already see how much of a difference it's made to my writing. In just one weekend, focused writing that incorporated his feedback has made such a huge difference.

Like any activity, having an expert guide you makes a huge difference, particularly if you are open to constructive criticism. I have done this with my violin and chess playing, where folks have given me targeted feedback and I'd engage in "deliberate practice".

I wanted to share this because if you are ever considering hiring a developmental editor, you should absolutely do it. And I hope you found some of what I wrote helpful. Good luck to you all!

I have been writing for a few years now and I know I've gotten much better. I've hired freelance editors who work at big publishing houses and have experience with my genre (middle grade) read my drafts and give positive feedback on the writing (and a lot of feedback on the plot). But still, when I reread my work, I absolutely cringe. Does this ever stop?

I have this thing where i feel like i have to make them see the exact cinema in my head so the descriptions get too persnickety, too many adverbs. I know you should trust the reader but you need to see this micro-expression this character made it’s so good 😔 ahhh what do i do. somebody make the darlings more killable. Is this an OCD-haver thing? If you were someone who used to do this, but don’t anymore, how did you let go?

I've been looking up a lot of writing advice - from videos and articles to reviews and analysis of books both good and bad. I've been also reading more "analytically" of late, and I'm generally able to pick out where prose is good or a bit rough and spot a lot of cool ways authors convey exposition or characterization...

But I feel completely hopeless trying to apply any of it to my writing. I wonder if anyone else struggles with this. Am I just being impatient or is there something I should be doing to help me absorb the information better?

Because it's definitely going to be a movie, and this is what I think about at work and in the shower.

Maybe a beginner technical question, I'd appreciate personal advice and discussion very much (Article or book recommendations would be great too) I've been regularly writing for 5 years and I still wonder if I'm really embracing my "voice" with everything.

I'm a young adult, after highschool I spent a lot of time trying to make my poems sound less "juvenile" and more "original". Hindsight is 20/20, and in reading way more modern poets I realized that free form just isn't what I want my work to sound like. I realize a lot of people go through this. I do open mics and talk with friends about writing, and they tend to agree this is a pretty average experiment-to-return to form experience.

But I'm feeling stuck now with coherent rhythm and rhyme scheme. Like I know "how" to do it and part of "why" I'm choosing it, there's just something missing so I get the feeling I'm hitting another technical wall. I'll frequently finish a draft or go back to something I was happy with just weeks ago and my form looks just redundant / derivative to me in a way I can't place, so don't know how to fix or improve upon. I'd really like to know why that is. Obviously not all poems have to rhyme, and if they do they should rhyme well. I guess what I'm asking is how do you understand and apply intentional friction in a way that's true to your own voice?

How would someone go about writing an irredeemable character that is likeable? Such as a character who is/was a killer, or someone who tortured people? What about without a redemption arc, or if the story has started after it happened?

I'm almost at the end of my first draft, just about 8k words to go out of maybe 92k total. I would consider this version 1.5, maybe even 1.8, because all this time I have been polishing as I go, even revising some sections outright. I even swapped with beta readers for my first ten and made changes already. I limit myself to around 2k words a day so I don't produce trash (it's just how my mind works, I'm very susceptible to diminishing returns), and any extra time goes towards editing, researching more about writing, the querying process and reading.

Anyway, so I've been seeing instagram posts about various writing contests from all different agencies and companies. The prizes are usually like a mentorship or you get paired with an editor for like a year. I guess I'm a little confused. The winners of these must have a pretty freaking decent manuscript right? Like the writers have got to be talented to produce these novels that get picked out of many dozens, probably hundreds, usually by professional agents and editors. Do they really need a year to edit their work after winning a competition? How long are you guys actually editing for? I

I have developmental editing lined up because my story structure is quite complex for a first time writer, but even after all that, and after revision.. I can't imagine I would take more than a month, maybe six weeks for a final script. Two months would be pushing it. A year though? Am I thinking about this wrong?

What's your approach?

I generally put in a lot of bizarre crap but make the dream thematic and somehow relevant to what is happening to the character currently.

The important part (since I'm writing in first person) is that the character takes what's happening completely seriously and treats it like the most normal thing in the universe?

I'm talking to a mustachioed owl who dispenses wisdom? Why yes, that's Mr. Owl. It's not weird at all!

Of course the talking grandfather clock has a bad back! He's a grandpa!