r/writinghelp

I have had to rewrite this multiple times so I kinda need help.

How do i even write a man who can't feel pain or fear, but was kidnapped from his master, this is the main thing I struggled writing last time. I was thinking about having him kinda act like how sans would, cracking jokes and just being a little shit.

The problem with this being is that I don't know if I should make him more sarcastic and passive aggressive.

Mostly because the man who took him is well a demon that could easily crush him and he's aware of this.

I do apologize for any bad grammar or spelling.

Edit : THIS IS TO A FANFIC!
The characters I'm using are from creepypasta While I am trying to make it like a book

I mean... I read for pleasure, but how exactly am I approaching a text critically, looking for writing strategies and techniques? Whenever I realize it, I find myself distracted by the story I'm reading!

Self explanatory. I've heard "save the cat" is a great book to write good stories, but based off what I've seen I don't imagine it working out for video game stories (what I wanna make). If it's not worth reading, what are some good books I can read about general storytelling and writing?

So I'm almost done with my frist draft of mu first ever full lenth novel. Its tentatively called Rekindle the Fire.

I trying to think ahead as I will soon begin work on draft II. What's the best way to build a community interested in the book and it's world. How would I go about posting that. Would anyone be able to give me some feedback?

something that wouldnt get in the way of agriculture or other technological advances. maybe something about the prosses of making gunpowder? any advice would be helpful

So I haven’t finished my book quite yet, but I figured it was never too early to start looking at publishers. I was wondering if some people could recommend some small publishers that don’t need a literary agent to get a manuscript to. Here’s the information:
Book genre: fiction, YA clean
POVs: 2 one female and one male
Publisher has to be in: America
If you need any other information, don’t be afraid to ask.

Hello fellow writers! I’ve been writing since I was a child, and I’ve always dreamed of writing a book one day. It’s been almost three decades now, and I think I’m finally ready to take that dream seriously.

I’ve written consistently over the years, mostly for myself. Occasionally for public consumption, on and off. A recent foray onto Substack this year finally pushed me toward wanting to actually finally attempt a book.

The thing is: I don’t have a plot. All I know is that I want to write.

Through essays and shorter pieces, I feel like I’ve finally found my voice. Not necessarily a throughline yet, or anything concrete enough to build a long-form project around. Lately I’ve been setting aside a few hours daily and forcing myself to write (Dangerous Writing App has been great for this). What comes out tends to be observations from life, learnings, musings, emotional patterns, small moments.

I think what I struggle with is wondering whether there’s really an audience for this kind of writing in book form. In essay form, sure. But a whole book built from a perspective, a consciousness, a way of seeing? I don’t know.

Regardless, I’m going to give it a shot. I’d really love any advice from people who’ve been at this stage before.

Writers of nonfiction, can you recommend tools for tracking and organizing research sources and/or references. (Someone in my MA suggested Zotero. Anyone used it? Thoughts?) Thanks.

Ha, can you tell I’m frustrated?

I’m at this weird patchwork point. I don’t need “An introduction to Show vs. Tell”. But I also don’t know it well enough or in practice to be set loose. Man I can barely string any words together and it’s only gotten worse.

I could say a lot more if u have questions lol

I’ve been rereading some of what I wrote recently, and I noticed that a lot of my scenes don’t really move anything forward. Characters talk, things happen, but it all feels kind of… flat? Like if I removed the scene, the story wouldn’t really change. I think I’m avoiding conflict without realizing it, or maybe I’m just not sure what each scene is supposed to accomplish. Do you actively think about the “purpose” of a scene when writing, or is that something you fix later during editing?

This is one of my character's back stories.
For example, this is how I did my intro paragraph

>The orange sky stretched as the sun sank below the horizon. The last light dragged long shadows down the hillside, turning the dry scrubland gold. The wind moved through the brush in no particular hurry. 

>It stepped out of the shadow, its brown coat almost blending with the evening light. Its head tilted up, gazing at the orange-white clouds as they drifted away to the horizon. A sound louder than thunder ripped through the valley, striking the deer. The deer lurched forward and ran, its silhouette swallowed by the shadow of the hills.
A small white light shined from a bush,

I was giving feedback like too wordy and what stepped out of the shadow.

My improvement

>

The orange sky stretched as the sun sank below the horizon. The last light dragged long shadows down the hillside, turning the dry scrubland gold. The wind moved through the brush in no particular hurry. 

>The deer stepped out of the bushes, its brown coat almost blending with the evening light. A sound louder than thunder ripped through the valley, striking the deer. It lurched forward and ran, its silhouette swallowed by the shadow of the hills. 

>A small white light shined oddly from a bush, some distance away.
“Good shot, Mason.”

I think my problem is that I separate the setting from the characters or action, so I end up writing more than what is needed.

Idk where else to post sooo

Okay, so I’m writing a Dragon Ryder Civil War kind of story. And a big part of it is dragons specifically I need some help with the names. Currently, I’m stuck between two ideas for the dragging naming system. I’m thinking of just giving them normal sounding names, but I’d like a little suffix at the end that makes it identifiable as a dragon, or give them a warrior cat sounding name (Iykyk)
I thought the subreddit would be the best place to ask.

A very, VERY simplified version of this story: Basically, in my story there was this great evil that was created due to a hundred year war. This evil was then 'defeated' by three heroes, with two of them sacrificing themselves and only one surviving, the main character's mentor. However, the evil wasn't really defeated but instead sealed, and only a few people know this. Later on, not only does the evil escape and become the final villain, but it's revealed that it had been working from the shadows to free itself.

So how do I make them 'haunt' the narrative, not only so that their eventual reveal doesn't feel forced or out of nowhere, but also so that they had an effect on the world and on people? Destruction and abandoned battlefields don't really work since there were already multiple wars before it. I tried to think something else up but came up with nothing

So I have many OCs but I want to make a book or the “lore” about a specific thing but I am not creative at all with words. So basically the one character is real out of the rest. They all function normally, but the problem is I need there to be hints and stuff that they aren’t real and the main character called Marvin will discover those hints slowly overtime. I am not sure what they should look like the hints I mean. Just wondering if anybody has any advice, thanks!

If this helps is kinda like just a big friend group of them all going on adventures and hanging out etc, all characters have different unique personalities. Similar to a sit-com show I guess lol

I am working on a Western and am hoping for advice.

TW: Abuse, Suicide (implied)

She remembered once, years ago, catching her son crying after he'd split his palm open on barbed wire. He had tried to hide it from her. He had wiped his face before he reached her, but she had seen enough. She had told him that the world would smell weakness on a man before it smelled blood. By that night he had no bandages and had stopped crying. Much later, long after he had grown, she would sometimes catch glimpses of that same restraint in him. It is a dangerous thing to teach a child how to bury himself properly. Eventually he may become so deep you cannot reach him anymore. 
She had known that even then, though she would never have admitted it. She had seen the way he swallowed pain like a stone down his throat. Some mothers might have softened at that. She had not. Once you learned the feel of control in your hands, you reached for it without thinking. 
She remembered another morning, when her son had come in late from the barn, boots caked in mud. He had been young. Old enough to know better, of course, but young enough to hope she might go easy on him. She hadn't. She took his boots from him and set them by the stove. Then she'd told him he could have them back when he learned to walk like a man and not like something afraid of the wilderness. He'd done the chores that next morning without boots, without complaint, his feet raw by the time he came back inside. He tracked blood across the floor and said nothing. She felt satisfied. She had believed at the time that this hardness was love, and would train him to be a real man. 
It occurred to her, with the grim clarity of a pastor delivering a sermon too late to save his congregation, that a person can mistake cruelty for instruction. She had fashioned herself into severity, a keeper of the old frontier virtues, believing the world only respected those who refused to bend. And once she had taken up that mantle, she had worn it with the zeal of a prophet, convinced that each wound she permitted, each comfort she withheld, was a necessary tithe to survive in the frontier. She had raised a son so much as she forged a disciple. She taught him to bury his pain until he buried himself. She taught him that the world devoured the weak, and so he devoured his own weakness, completing the final loop within himself. Everything circles. Everything returns. And now the circle had returned to her: a quiet house, an empty yard, a windmill turning without wind, all of it bearing witness to a truth she would not dare speak aloud. 

Hello everyone, currently I’m planning a new story and I’ve been having troubles formulating ideas. I’ve got a good broad range of ideas but structuring them into specific arcs are challenging, I know how I want my first arc to open, and the way it ends, but I feel as if now having cliffhangers, flashy moments etc etc is a priority in the current market rather than going with the flow, and I’m not sure if this has been on my subconscious when writing, or not. So how do you all go about structuring your arcs, so far I’ve been doing:

1. Have an opening
2. Have an ending
   2.5) How do we get from 1-2 (I have trouble at this step)
3. What characters are going to be involved
4. Any cool scenes or specific character interactions
5. The Lore that should be revealed

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So im working on writing an alien romance series where its a like tribe of alien woman and a transport or human who crash land on their planet and im wondering if there is a genuine market for this? like a romance series where basically the woman are like the hunters and gathers and the dote on a take care of the men think they are precious and the men like stay home and do the house stuff like its a care based matriarchal society. Like this isn't some reverse gender role thing like they have their own society that's entirely like care based the bigger and stronger and tougher you are, the more ability and responsibility you have to care

im just wondering if people might actually be interested in it and drawn to it though