/lit/ board staff suggestions to would be writers.
“As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I’m not sure that I’m going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says ‘you are nothing’, I will be a writer.” ~ Hunter S. Thompson.
As a writer you should write to your audience. In this vein we will make some basic assumptions about who you are and what you want to write. Our suggestions on what books to pursue will not help you to go professional, nor to get published, and Stephen King ain't gonna be sweating your arrival. This selection might demystify some aspects of the art and, if nothing else, will give a much greater appreciation of what else you read — even if you decide writing is not your thing.
We are going to assume you are beginner, and we are going to assume you want to write some fiction. And by fiction we mean that of the genera trash variety, or even fan-fiction. If you are trying to become the next Nabokov, Pynchon, DFW, or Joyce we can not help you.
1. But I don't wanna write fiction!
On Writing Well by William Zinsser.
It may come as a surprise to learn there is plenty of writing to be done outside of pop fiction. Zinsser would steer you away from fiction and into a whole new world. Far be it from us to even suggest such, yet his teachings will not hurt. Your visions of ray-guns and wizards will still be there waiting for you.
2. Dem prosody, mon?
The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry.
Any real poet will be disgusted by the idea that the purpose of poetry is to improve your writing style. Sure, but even plain old prose written by an experienced poet tends to make for an astonishing read. A study of poetry will improve the compression, precision, clarity, and vividness of your writing.
3. Cheerleaders.
On Writing by Stephen King.
Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury.
These two works are not devoid of lessons on technique, although they are hardly technical guides. They are more general, at times even subtle. If you do not have an overpowering urge to set pen to paper after reading them you have bigger problems than any technical guide can help with.
4. Meat and potatoes and bottomless details.
Structuring Your Novel: From Basic Idea to Finished Manuscript by Robert C. Meredith and John D. Fitzgerald.
The Elements of Fiction Writing (it is a series) published by Writers Digest Books. The specific titles you are interested in are: Characters and Viewpoint, Dialogue, Voice & Style, Scene & Structure, Conflict Action & Suspense, Description, Setting, Beginnings Middles & Ends, and Plot.
For newer writers these titles are listed in order of importance, from the most to least likely techniques you will need help with.
Yes, that is too much ground to cover all at once. Do not even try to power through them all in one go. SYN casts a wide net over various techniques; start here if you have no idea what to try. Each volume in the EoF series is more focused. Pick one, read a little, and go apply the lessons you find to a short story. Maybe try rewriting a section, or chapter, of your previous work. Go reread something from your favorite author while keeping an eye out for the techniques in use. You will be surprised now that you know what to look for.
5. Soul crushing PITA Nazis from hell: as painless a study of English grammar as we can make it.
Woe is I by Patricia T O'Conner.
The Grammar Bible by Michael Strumpf and Auriel Douglas.
This was also suggested on /lit/ as a straightforward one stop shop – let's cover everything – guide to getting grammatical:
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik.
Applied natural language machine processing is no longer in its infancy. In spite of this, we have yet to find a grammar checking application that will teach you grammar. They all tend not to explain why they are bitching you out, even when the hints they provide are quite useful. Without being able to speak their dialect, you will be lost in a trackless forest vision of nineteen fifties voiced robotic hints. Learn to diagram your sentences on your own and all that crazy warning waving robotware will become helpful.
6. And some comments of our own.
We said up front that we are not going to help you get published. That insistence still stands even though some of the resources above contain discussions about the business end of writing and publication. Skip these sections when you come to them; seriously, ignore them. We are not staring down our noses at you, as if in contempt of the very idea. We are looking at the problems you will face, and there are two insurmountable problems with any focus on publishing at this stage. The first is one of time, your time. The second is one of product.
Put aside time to study technique. Spend time daydreaming of ideas and worlds that entertain. Find time to form all that into a story, and write it down. Daydreams of publishing sabotage this process, so don't bother.
Without a sellable business product, you will not be published. Without a firm grasp on writing technique, you will never have a product to sell. Study will only make you aware of what needs to be done, to grasp it means practice, practice, practice.
Changing tack, we have one more suggestion about what to avoid. Traditional advise given to a beginner states one should start writing short stories. Next, move on to novels. We stand by such advise as well, but there is a more recently emphasized additional step exercising a strange and addictive hold on beginning writers. This is the idea of an epic series, a trilogy and then some. One reason to avoid thinking about a series is you are almost certain to fall into world building hell, a place where you never get any writing done. If this warning does not dissuade you (it won't), try to see it this way: a series is not an art form worthy of pursuit in of itself. It is a business strategy used by publishers to make more money. Now, we can tell you all about things like lock-in, and so on, but why would you want to study dreary business methodology when you could be writing a short story?
On the subject of novels, a collection of chapters stitched together are what novels are made of. A chapter is but a short story. If you think of it in this way you are looking at a path to that epic you dream about, formed of a single novel being a series of perfected short stories.
Lastly, take in some wisdom from a successful novelist:
“You can’t really succeed with a novel anyway; they’re too big. It’s like city planning. You can’t plan a perfect city because there’s too much going on that you can’t take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.” ~ Gore Vidal.
Vidal is not so much claiming you are going to fail. Rather, he is giving you permission to. Take that as encouragement. And with a novel being a series of short stories, so too is a short story a series of perfections of a sort. What is that? Reread what Vidal said, he stated it plainly.
7. If I can’t be published how do I find my readers?
It has been our observation that creative writing initiatives and groups do poorly on image-boards. Unfortunate, yet hardly surprising. The emphasis has always been with the visual arts. Book-chat boards, /lit/ here and elsewhere, do better by puttering along with much thinner volume and content relative to the other boards. Still, it would be a sickly anime board that strictly allowed only postings about accomplished artists and completed works of art. Bottom line, we welcome people asking for writing feedback here on 8chan /lit/. We won’t kid you though, good feedback can be a rare commodity. Plus, people here are unlikely to read more than a page of your work, at best. It is the nature of the beast. Embrace that nature and remember, write to your audience.
What should not be surprising is that image-board culture does have some outlets for a writer to get a bit of creative practice in. Get involved in a quest. Here on 8chan /qu/ and /cyoa/ are two better known boards for this.
A key to making use of a quest for writing practice is knowing you need only participate. Instead of shouting at the quest runner what ought to happen, try writing your suggestion in the voice of the character. Add some observations written in character. Work on description! Not just shouting where to go, show how the characters move and do. For a draw-quest especially, give the artist some direction. Get good at this any not only will you be entertaining the hard working quest runner, you can steer things a bit. Don't overdo it, as you must remain merely one among the masses of players lest you kill the game. Be selective.
Running a quest provides far more opportunities for writing practice, but beware. This is an activity demanding of a much greater skill set beyond the writing itself. A form of performance art requiring ever greater commitments of time, talent, and mind – all of which you should be husbanding for your non-quest writing.
For a more traditional approach, other places you can and should try are:
Any of the myriad of fan-fiction sites. Whatever gets you writing is a good thing.
Wattpad. If you are a beginner, you should be here. You will note right off it is something of an intentional hugbox. Be forewarned, be polite. You can always look for a no holds barred hammering of your work back here on /lit/.
Scribophile. We do not suggest posting your stuff here as they are set up more for intermediate and just short of professional writers. This level of skill makes an excellent spot for beginners to learn by lurking. One thing you can try your hand at is critiquing a work that is both out of the spotlight and not locked. Do not critique a work sitting in the spotlight as the authors are expecting more professional and detailed feedback than you will be able to deliver. Don’t burn their chance by pushing their work out of the spotlight with your feedback. Doing off-spotlight critiques earns you a smaller reward (aka "karma" which you won’t care about at this stage), and get some writing experience in. Critiquing another's writing is the next best thing to learning how to write because it forces you to learn why something does or does not work, and to articulate what that is. With some luck, you might also get feedback of your own feedback from a writer who knows what they are doing. A rather sneaky backdoor way of learning to write but there it is.
Inkitt. A new one to us, we are still learning about it ourselves.
If a work can not be publicly linked to from these sites you can still make us aware of it and ask for feedback. The board staff have been known to create an account just to check things out and have a go at it back on /lit/. Or, you could always copy/paste your writing to a temporary pastebin or to google docs, and link from that.