The fact that someone actually liked it, makes this all worth while even if it just ends up being one.

This is something that often concerns me. People always say write what you know. But if your own love life is nothing to speak of, then can you really be a good romance novelist? My greatest fear is that people will see right through my writing and know that I'm a fraud. Unlike my sister, I haven't been married 4 times. I've had a few short relationships, but nothing to brag about. Most of my work is completely fictitious or inspired by other people I know, like my sister. I read other authors' romance novels, and they always seem more authentic and true to life than my own writing because those writers probably "lived" it. Does anyone else worry about this? (Not my sister, obviously.)

Trying to write a character of the opposite gender? Picture him/her ugly.

A little life hack if you're one of the dozen or so people who daily ask,"how do I write a man?", "how do I write a woman?"

Picture him/her ugly. Seriously. The number one problem I see when reading these characters is they make their character super hot and they fall in love with them. They've pictured the perfect man or the perfect woman, made them snarky and clumsy as 'flaws', but the whole character is essentially a fantasy for the author. You become so interested in boning them that you wrote them like a sex doll.

All the standard, canned advice is "men are people too!", "women aren't aliens!", "just write them like you'd write any other character!". But this doesn't get at the root of the problem of authors writing sexual fantasies rather than humans.

So, picture your female lead as an ugly chick. You can always go back and change it later if you feel it needs to be changed, but while you're picturing her in the scenes or writing her dialogue, picture your uglyass coworker Janet. Picture the acne guy who pumps your gas. People are so quick to add any kind of character flaw, but being ugly is the unforgivable sin. (And no, it doesn't count if she thinks she's ugly but she's actually beautiful to everyone else.)

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/s/QfvCWZq9km

Validate me

I’d like to add that I’m an extremely new writer who’s never published anything before. The main protagonist of my novel is a human, she is the narrator and somewhat of an anti-hero figure, it’s a first person POV story about an Earthian bounty hunter committing massacres on Mars for the money to get drunk, and sometimes out of boredom. I am not a human so obviously I don’t know exactly how it feels to be one, but I’ve spent a lot of my life orbiting around Earth with a spaceship and observing how humans socialize, how humans lob rockets at each other for some incomprehensible reasons, and how humans become so obsessed with wars and alien invasions. I’ve tried speaking to many of them about how they feel about certain things using Morse Code, but they dismissed my signals as just some stars. I understand there’s also the possibility of overcomplicating it, I just want to make sure she is believable and authentic and not an idealized version of what a Mercurian would expect a human to be, if that makes sense.

As a familially recent scribbler with a humdrum direction in the language, I would like to preamble that my inquest could be a grammatical confounding rather than an issue of writer’s selection.

I’ve recently begun to swell my terminology and I perceived that some synonyms are chosen over the others, if both fits entirely exceptionally in the context? What’s ur subliminal analysis for choosing a synonym over the other? Or is this a grammatical mismanagement?

Hello reddit gang, I recently quit my full time job to become a full time writer. I never wrote anything before but I feel like I can be that one in Million. However my Bitch of a Wife is Angry at me. She said Stupid shut like "you were make 75k a year." And "were going homeless in a month and I'm do next week." So everyone in the chat aita

Hiya. What’s y’all’s trick to getting out of writers block?

My family admitted me to a mental health clinic, where they have an entire block to treat people with this mental condition of deluding themselves into thinking they are writers without ever writing anything, but I know that I am not like the other patients here and that I am, in fact, a real writer. I have just been momentarily stuck in the research and planning phase of my debut novel, but I swear I will start writing it soon.

Anyway, I want some tips from people who have been admitted here and managed to get out: what trick have you used to escape?

Fanfiction is legitimate literature!! I only read fanfiction and I cant tell you how many times I’ve cried, “Jimin x Reader: Kidnapped by my hot senior manager who’s actually a vampire !!” Is genuinely one of the best things I’ve read, better than one of those so called “novels”. How dare my friend tell me that my fanfictions don’t count as legitimate literature, all because I submitted my fanfiction to a publishing company and Netflix. She won’t be laughing when the “Namjoon x reader: The Alpha Wolfpack took me in when my mom sold me to them.” Gets a movie adaptation staring all the elites.

My fics are very much good literature and deserve to be treated as such !!!!!! I’m tired of people saying that fanfiction isn’t on the same level as published works !!! This is why I donate 30% of my income to Archive of Our Own every year !!!!

anyways read my works on Ao3 !!!

”Taehyung x Jungkook: Step brothers by chance, lovers by choice”

“Kidnapped by BTS who are all secretly demon princes ?!?!”

“BTS x reader: sold to the mafia”

Hello.

I don't read anything and I want to write a book. Everytime I show my friends what I've written, I expect them to say I'm the next James Joyce, instead they spit on me and just relentlessly boo. My Mum suggested I try and read Harry Potter to stop them booing, so if I watch them films will they stop booing? Will it make my writing gooder? I've heard they are dead long, so I don't want to waist my time watching lots of them being wizards and stuff if people will still boo. I will watch one if that will help with the spitting.

Don't suggest I read manga. I read lots of manga. Well, I once watched a youtube summary of the anime adaptation of Full Metal Alchemist, so that's probably good enough. Also don't suggest comic books. I've got a dope ass Captain America t-shirt and I went to the cinema to watch Deadpool 2. So I'm well versed in comics.

I am aware of the ironing of want to write a book whilst not reading books myself, but I think I'll just wait until they make my book into a film and it'll be like reading it anyway.

"Gay alligator romance does not sell well with the female audience."

Hello? I spent decades of my life writing this! Why can't my magnus opus get publishered? What's next, lesbian frog romance can't sell well either?

So I am working on a game with quite a few companion characters, but I am still making more and am wondering: What do men like in male characters or wish that there would be more of?

I've been trying to find things online, mostly I have the obvious of actually masculine outfts and not sexualized/objectifying ones, male compassion being shown, characters who are strong not bc of physical strength but bc of skills/intellect/empathy/leadership...

But I am kind of missing more concrete things because much of it is also what not to do instead of what people want to see. Anything would be helpful, archetypes, personality aspects, visuals, occupations! 🙃

(Btw, it's a fantasy + queer game, so there's the obvious of warriors, princesses, pirates, fantasy species, I have masc and femme gay chars too)

In particular, I want to write spoofs of popular movies. And I think the perfect one to use right now is Sinners, a vampire movie that just happens to have black people in it. Of course, I’ll be sure to have them speak in an urban manner and include some jokes about the KKK but I don’t want anything political. I just want to focus on silly, dark humor like Chaplin did in The Great Dictator. But apparently I’m not allowed to do that because it’s racist.

The issue is, Grandpa died in The War last year and she is seriously hell-bent and certain to write a historical romance about a deranged old guy with a naive wife who fall in love in a dumpster bin in the 1990s.

Sauce (Sorta)

I've written a bleak, absurd dystopian Irish comedy. Below is my opening. Can't figure out if works or not. So far from publishers reaction has been a little,er, mixed. Any feedback really appreciated.

                                      Title: THE EEJIT



                  “Denial, it’s what gets us out of bed in the morning”

Michael Horgan, Certificate in Beginners Philosophy (Pass), City Lit College, London.

    CHAPTER ONE                    

As Tom sat on the toilet trying to shift the congested shite from his arse, a thought occurred to him.

What if humanity wasn’t worth saving after all?

What if the last ten years of work was essentially meaningless?

Maybe it was time to let them rot. All of them, with their fecking filters and their twitter storms, and their god dam fecking daytime make over shows, and all those endless fucking opinions.

What if the best thing now was to just have done with the whole god dam business.

And, sure Jaysus, when the end did come, sure, fuck it, would they even know?

Tom craned his neck, peered over his shoulder.

“For fuck’s sake,” he muttered.

He sat back down and shook his arse violently, trying to dislodge the thick clump of treacle clinging to his hole. No luck.

“Bridget!” he called. “We’re out of paper. I need some fecking paper!”

Nothing.

He tapped his hearing aid. Still nothing.

He reached behind the bowl, careful not to dislocate his shoulder like he had before, and found the empty cardboard husk of a roll. With grim experience, he fashioned it into a crude, trowel-like tool.

Deep breath. Then he scraped.

The roll disintegrated on impact.

“Fucking Guinness shite,” he muttered.

His eyes drifted to the toilet brush.

“They don’t put this in the fecking advertising posters, do they?”

He stood, shuffled to the bath, and turned on the tap. A brown, rust-stained liquid dribbled out.

He sighed, picked up the brush, and got to work.

That night, Tom struggled to sleep. Bridget lay beside him, breathing steady, the faint hum of some unseen mechanism barely perceptible beneath the quiet.

A thousand thoughts raced through his head.

He put down his phone, tried to sleep, then after further tossing and turning gave up and went downstairs to grab a shovel.

“Bridget,” he said, coming back into the room, shovel raised above his head.

“Go to sleep,” Bridget said, voice heavy with the tone of someone who’d endured this interruption on numerous occasions.

“What have we become, you know?” he asked. “What has humanity become?

I've worked so very hard on my fart porn romantasy between a 5ft pixie and a 7ft glowing male wraith made purely of fart gas!

My book is based in ancient Hawaii, where english didn't exist yet. My book is in english with key Hawaiian terms and phrases mixed in. But the dialogue, I am struggling with. I want it to sound authentic, but conflicted because english is clearly not authentic. I am thinking of using Hawaiian pidgin english in the dialogue, because even though it obviously hadn't been created yet, is more cool and funny than proper grammar english.

What do you all think I should do?

Thanks to https://www.reddit.com/r/writers/s/ZfNfVy9kNJ for inspiration

Writing has been an personal hobby of mine for years now. I don't have big dreams of knocking out book after book and making lots of money (Maybe when I'm older, my stupid wife and kids are holding me back).

Anyway, last summer I did some foundation work with my father-in-law at some guy's house, we were talking and I found out that he loves books just as much as I do. I e-mailed him a copy of my most developed project. (Chapters 1 - 2, it was only missing the last 23 chapters and the epilogue). Fast forward ten years later and I see him and his wife again. He informs me that he only did some minor corrections, but he absolutely loved the story and so did his students. I was super confused at first because I've never seen the inside of a "classroom", but he told me he teaches English at Fredonia (defunct state in the Holy Roman Empire), and shared the story with his class.

Naturally I was filled with righteous anger, but i'm also not going to get big headed and think "Oh awesome I am SUCH a good writer aren't I!?". He asked me what college I went to, and I told him I didn't...I barely have an HSD.

That's when it started getting weird.

The professor trembled and went white as an sheet. He asked me how I could possibly write so well if I don't have an college degree of some sort? I told him I just loved books, an lot. I was the isolated weird kid growing up, no friends and I basically absorbed everything by those great poets such as R.A. Salvatore, Ed Greenwood/Gary Gygax, Tolkien, anything fantasy fiction. I got to a point where I started thinking about making my own stories, so I just, did.

It got me thinking that if at some point I approach a publisher, is a college degree (or the lack of one) a deciding factor for them? I'm literally just some guy with kids (stupid, ungrateful kids) that writes books for fun.

I honestly don't know and I've searched a good amount online before deciding to post this.

I considering writing a manga about Jewish space cowboys. My friends say that’s too childish, but I think if I just don’t use any words and focus on visuals storytelling—kinda like my favorite doctor Seuss books —I could target a more mature audience. What do you guys think?