r/writing

Hi everyone. I'm 71, and I'm writing my first novel. It's autobiographical — the story of my family from Sherstin, a small Jewish shtetl in Belarus, through revolution, war, and emigration, up to my own childhood in Grodno and life in America.My father is the heart of it. I'm writing it for my grandchildren, so they know where they come from. I write in Russian; an English version will come later.Did anyone here start their first book this late? How did you keep going?

100,000 words of a meticulously researched, non-fiction sports history book.

I've done 4 full revisions. Everything from restructuring chapters and cutting/adding whole sections, all the way down to line-by-line editing for punctuation, grammar, and repetition issues. I feel like, at this point, I've gotten it as finished as I'm capable of making it and anything else is just tinkering and nitpicking.

So now I kind of feel stuck.

It could probably benefit from a professional editor. Is that my next step? How do I approach that? From my understanding, most nonfiction books are sold on a proposal rather than a completed manuscript. That ship has sailed. The book is written. Do I pull up QueryTracker and start blind-submitting it to agents? I've read that the editing process is usually handled by the publisher in the case of nonfiction books but I don't know how true that is? This is all uncharted waters for me.

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Additional Note: When I say the book is finished, I should clarify that there are things I could, and would love, to do. For instance, there are a lot of people I would like to interview for it, just to have additional stories and comments to help color the narrative. I've reached out to a handful of them. But I've gotten mostly silence or rejections.

And I understand. I'm a nobody, without any previously published works to show for myself, no publisher behind the project, no agent, no particularly notable social media presence....just a dude in his office at home who's spent the last couple years working on a dream. Part of me thinks maybe I would have a better shot at scoring some of these interviews if I had an agent or publisher behind the project, but what do I know?

So what do I do next? Any advice would be appreciated.

I've been editing my manuscript and got feedback from a beta reader that my foreshadowing is a bit too on-the-nose. So, I was wondering if you guys have any good examples of good but subtle foreshadowing? The kind that, once you actually know the whole plot and go back to re-read or check your annotations, you go "oooh, I see..." and not "yeah, duh."

Concrete examples from published books or general advice both welcome! Please and thank you :)

I finished my final draft of my book. After about 10 years of on and off writing and then a year of locking in re-writing after beta reads, I can say that I have reached the "it's done" phase. Problem is, I am not a writer, not in the traditional sense at least. I have never written anything, barely read anything honestly, but I have somehow come up with this 65,000 word novella and have no clue what to do with it. Not really interested in making a fortune off of it (although that would be nice). I just want people to experience the story I created. Do I contact publishers? Get an editor to go over it with a fine tooth comb? Publish it myself as is? I feel like if I do any more re-writing I will just make it worse looking for perfection.

Edit - Apparently 65k words is a novel, my mistake :)

Hey everyone, was wondering if anyone has any tips/advice/hacks (?) for outlining a story well! I've decided to properly try planning an entire novel first before sitting down to write, but I'm a bit overwhelmed atm because of all the story structures out there (Freytag's Pyramid, Save the cat, etc.). Does anyone use them to help with outlining a story? (Or do you think it's actually better to just outline on your own and not use a popular structure?) Would love to know what people think and what's worked for them!

I'm looking for some older English words, possibly forgotten or archaic. I need ancient names for places and I'm having trouble looking for them. For example, "weald" is an old name for "forest", but if I go to thesaurus.com, it doesn't list that as a synonym. I need a place that does.

If anyone's curious, I'm trying to name a region of a shared fantasy world of largely wild, untamed nature. And I'm open to word suggestions as well.

I sent my draft novel to a well-respected professional beta reader and received feedback. Lots of feedback. Good and bad. So, worth the effort. I'm planning to send it out to additional beta readers both professional and friends. How many is too many? Also, should I also use a sensitivity editor or can a targeted beta reader accomplish the same thing?