✍️ Writing
A community for writers, like poems, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, long books, all those sorts of things, to discuss writing approaches and what's new in the writing world, and to help each other with writing.
Rules for now:
1. Try to be constructive and nice. When discussing approaches or giving feedback to excerpts, please try to be constructive and to maintain a positive vibe. For example, don't just vaguely say something is bad but try to list and explain downsides, and if you can, also find some upsides. However, this is not to say that you need to pretend you liked something or that you need to hide or embellish what you disliked.
2. Mention own work for purpose and not mainly for promo: Feel free to post asking for feedback on excerpts or worldbuilding advice, but please don't make posts purely for self promo like a released book. If you offer professional services like editing, this is not the community to openly advertise them either. (Mentioning your occupation on the side is okay.) Don't link your excerpts via your website when asking for advice, but e.g. Google Docs or similar is okay. Don't post entire manuscripts, focus on more manageable excerpts for people to give feedback on.
3. What happens in feedback or critique requests posts stays in these posts: Basically, if you encounter someone you gave feedback to on their work in their post, try not to quote and argue against them based on their concrete writing elsewhere in other discussions unless invited. (As an example, if they discuss why they generally enjoy outlining novels, don't quote their excerpts to them to try to prove why their outlining is bad for them as a singled out person.) This is so that people aren't afraid to post things for critique.
4. All writing approaches are valid. If someone prefers outlining over pantsing for example, it's okay to discuss up- and downsides but don't tell someone that their approach is somehow objectively worse. All approaches are on some level subjective anyway.
5. Solarpunk rules still apply. The general rules of solarpunk of course still apply.
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It's cool to see so many people back! Seeing you all productive is amazing.
I've briefly jumped between series since my post last month, and I reworked about short of two books worth of an older dormant series with really extensive changes back to front. But I've since set it aside again. It was a nice breather from my main fantasy series, but both series lack an ending and currently the fantasy series simply has more concrete actionable ideas on how I'll wrap it up.
Currently I'm doing some more revision work however. The fantasy series with the disabled protagonist has quite some dark parts, and some of them are a little overbearing at times. Less so deaths and destruction, but longer ongoing illness and fights. I'm trying to make sure there's always enough of the main plot mystery arc and more lighthearted topics going on to make it easier to swallow.
But I've also had some tech work on the side, so I've been a bit distracted by that. In any case, I'm still hoping to wrap up the fantasy series before 2025 ends, but we'll see.
Endings can be so tricky to get right. Any ideas on why this one has been eluding you? I know for me it can take a while before the story fully clicks and I know what I want the arc to be.
It's mostly because I'm a pretty extreme discovery writer. (Not that I recommend it, but it's how I best keep myself going.) Hence I kind of tried to write a more definite ending and failed, twice, which is why there is now a third book. This time I'm forcing myself to do at least the minimum of essential planning about the overall theme and message to actually wrap it up in a manner that will hopefully be satisfying and meaningful.
Volunteering for some brainstorming if you need to get the ending right! I've done it many times for people in our (Italian) writing group 😁