After over a year with these Characters, knowing them, shaping them, loving them, it's time to let them go. Sending my first draft to literary agencies first thing tomorrow!

EDIT: I've been told first draft is the wrong way to describe this! To be clear, this is a completed manuscript that's gone through 6 different revisions and a boatload of rewrites. I, mistakenly, thought the "first draft" meant the first completed version of the story you send out, not the first version you write. That's totally my bad, and I misspoke. Please don't be sad on my behalf.

I can't believe it!

Hey y'all, I need a tip or a bit of guidance on how to handle this: so I'm writing a political sci-fi that's somewhere between Red Rising and Ghost in the Shell, with cyberpunk, classism, and political intrigue. If you've read stuff like Red Rising or Attack on Titan, you know how much a good plot twist can change everything and make a story so satisfying.

My problem is that, as a writer, I can't tell if my own story is actually interesting anymore. I've spent so much time thinking about the plot and the twists that they've almost lost their impact on me. I keep wondering if the ideas are genuinely good or if I'm just attached to them.

I'm only three chapters in, and the major twists are still 10-30 chapters away, so it's a bit early to get someone to read the whole thing and give me feedback. How do you guys objectively judge whether your story is engaging when you already know everything that's going to happen? How do you know you're building towards something good rather than writing something that only seems interesting in your own head?

Thank you for taking the time to read this !

I started thinking up my idea 24 years ago. It’s so complex and complicated. And even harder to organise in a way that an audience can receive it. I finally have the gumption to really sit down and put all that information into down into the fourth attempt (completed up to the third book in the series before. Book one written and completed three different times). I’m scared that this draft is just going to feel as unpolished and unloveable by an audience as the last four attempts.

And that is terrifying.

I’m not asking for encouragement. I’m going to write this darned book if it’s the last thing I do but I do want to rant with others of you that feel the same way. I guess. I just don’t want to be alone.

Hello everyone, I am officially just under or about halfway through my sci-fi apocalyptic novel (currently 45k words ish). Obviously I am in need of multiple rounds of edits and all, but currently it seems that my main character is a little flat.

She is intended to be written as a smart, stubborn, protective, loving, and strong person. While I find it easy to express her in writing, I can't help but noticing that her motive, core fear, core desires, are not as visible as I would've thought when I first started writing this. The thing is, other side and supporting characters (as well as the other relatively important characters) actually seem to be written fine and only look like they need a few touchups. It's the main character which isn't coming along, and I feel like its lowering the quality of my overall story.

Does anyone experience the same thing, or has any tips on how to further actually include the main characters personality, flaws, structure, and all, into their novel/writing? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

To be effective in a writers group you need to be descriptive with your critiques rather than prescriptive. The writer you are critiquing does not need to know how you would have done it. They need to know the effect of their writing on the reader. What did they feel and think while reading? What was missing from the experience? Where did it land?

When do you know a manuscript is "done"?

I’m currently working on the 6th draft of my manuscript and feeling a bit stuck on the finish line.

I still haven’t reached that definitive moment where I finish an edit, close my laptop, and feel 100% confident that it’s a completed masterpiece. It makes me wonder if I'm holding onto an unrealistic fantasy of how the end of the writing process actually feels.

For those who have finished a book:

• How many drafts did it take you to get to the final version?

• Does that "magic moment" of total satisfaction actually happen, or do you just eventually have to stop tweaking and let it go?

So I love writing and love seeing people publish and day dream 24/7 about how my book will look like. I have 7000 words and for MG sci fi I'm aiming for about 55000. The thing is I am in my 2 week autumn break from school but I still have homework and a life to live. I'm telling myself that I should leave it to the next day but I can't get anything done. Please help.

Hello there, I'm a game developer who's writing a story for a new RPG, and I came across this sub to ask some feedback about one of the plot's places.

The story's settings are inspired on the Divine Comedy, however, I didn't want to copy them though, rather adapt them in my way cause I wanted to make everything original and unique.

In the game indeed there are three worlds, named Umbra, Penumbra, and Antumbra (the three phases of the lunar eclipse), but all of them have the same concept as Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

Those worlds are meant to embody allegorical books, with the water and the ocean embodying the ink, the earth, nature and the trees embodying the pages, the air embodying writing feathers and the fire embodying the candles writers used in the past as a source of light when writing in the dark.

I already did adapt Umbra (Inferno) properly, However I still didn't do so with Penumbra, cause I do have a nice idea to adapt it but I felt like that idea might not work well, hence I was a bit hesitant on bringing this idea into fruction, and that's the part where I need feedback.

To put it in short words, in the divine comedy, Purgatorio is a mountain that lies on an island with a garden on its summit, and it's in that garden that Dante got cleansed and ascended to Heaven just by looking at Beatrice's eyes.

According to my idea of adaption instead, Penumbra is rather a volcano surrounded by grass and moss who has a garden inside of its crater, and under the crater there's a lot of water, hence, its name is "Mount Penumbra ".

Rivers of water however spill from the volcano and give life and prosperity to the island and to the ocean around of it. Inside of the garden, there's a tree named "Tree of life", a tree who gives a sense of peace and purity to the person who lies their sight in front of it.

Since Purgatory by itself is a place where damned souls are in awaiting for their redemption, every soul who gets cleansed by the tree, the volcano will erupt and make the soul fly towards Antumbra (Paradiso) and cast tons of water, however the tree of life regenerates the water and the garden inside of it everytime the volcano erupts.

I wanted to chose the volcano because allegorically symbolizes the dual forces of creation and destruction, and I thought it would embody Penumbra quite much because Penumbra is meant to balance the dark and the light.

So that's the idea I had but I was really hesitant on whenever I should include it in the plot as it seemed a bit unoriginal and lame to me since many plots have an erupting volcano on an island and things like that.

Is it good enough for the tale, and if not do you have any advice to improve it?

Chodzi mi o takie "rytuały"

When you first started or desired or even around the discussion of story telling. What‘s a something that helped you understand how to write better; dialogue, description, narration and atmosphere.
To me it’s do not over explain anything, use mystery and subtext, so leave it to the audience imagination. Sometimes something is cooler or scarier in one person’s head than another one.

People are indirect, they are not robots who give blunt, honest responses, they use simple vague responses like they are almost hiding something. Like if someone asked about my day regardless of if it was amazing or bad, I usually say “alright, fine or good”.

Brake up dialogue with action. When I say action I don’t mean explosions or violence, instead simple things like, the character wipes their head or drinking water. Even If your character is doing some big speech, describe some little action to break it up for a bit.

Everyone speaks differently. There’s many types of people like farmers, the wealthy elites and immigrants who are learning a new language. Older people use shorter sentences, because they don’t have the energy to speak longer sentences. People in the country use more hick twang dialect and phrases. But also how people pronounce certain words based on their region and accents.

Don’t always worry on grammar but don’t use it to excuse or ignore bad grammar, at least know basic grammar so people know what you are even saying. And knowing how to spell is part of it. Because it can add character and immerse the reader. Like the story is set in Southern America or the outback of Australia, or the narrator’s second language is English and struggle with it.

The setting and location is also a character with history, when a character enters a cabin, don’t just say “He enters the cabin and sat in chair”. Describe the texture, the smell- make the reader believe they are in the cabin or forest or anywhere. Nature isn’t an object, it’s a place filled with life and I just don’t mean animals, but the trees and plants as well. A forest is old and massive, so write in the scale that makes people feel small and at their mercy.

Do not use “And then” a lot, to make the story structure make sense use “but” & “therefore“. ‘I woke up wanting breakfast, so THEREFORE I went to get the cereal and milk, BUT I discovered that I ran out of milk, so THEREFORE I need to buy more-‘. You see where I’m going?

Styles work for certain settings. If you writing a medieval fantasy then you need to write in an older style like what Tolkien does. Be more poetic and archaic, give it a soul and fairy like. So don’t use modern slang, that ruins the escapist immersion for the reader. And do something similar for science fiction, which more about the material scientific angle of life. So be more minimalist and technical terms, you are not reading about dragons or goblins, but spaceships and aliens. If you use the fantasy style in sci-fi, it wouldn’t work because it’s not what either genres are made for.

Not every rule is the laws of God like the 10 Commandments, sometimes say “screw it I want to experiment and do things my own way”. But like I said, only sometimes and not all the time, there must be a reason to it.

I've been writing on and off for the past few months and I've noticed that I keep making the same mistake of switching tenses throughout entire portions of my story.

For context, I write parts of my story in between my IRL job. A few parts of story that I write halfway will be, from my perspective, in the past, as I've written it in the past, even if I'm continuing to write it now. If that makes sense? So the time frame of reference that I use to write my story jumps between present tense and past tense in the same sentence. I don't see it while writing it, but I only catch it in the editing phase a few days later and it is driving me crazy that I keep making this same mistake again and again.

Which led me to wonder if other writers also have this issue or have to deal with this problem while they're writing.

How do you guys handle this issue?

There's no direct action, just a more intimate and emotional scene between two of my main characters. Would it get boring or too much?

I keeo writing more and more despite the fact i havent actually finished editing the first one my currently three books. Ive now hit a wall where ive hit every main plot points I had at the time and realized how much less well written the first half or so of the first book was.

I know I need to go back and edit, rewrite parts and add a lot of details and all that, but God i just want to keep writing!

Ive managed to put myself into a spot where u have more ideas but no idea how if or when to actually do them as well. Living the dream.

Also side note, got my first rejection from a agent! Sad about it but also neat lol

One night I lean on my windowsill
and see a shadow,
white and still,
on the highest floor.
Seven stories, I count,
and nothing under it
but a light breeze.

I can’t tell what it is.
The dark keeps its edges to itself.
I make out a stubborn stance,
all my strained eyes will give me.

A cat, I tell myself,
or some stray thing the wind has found.
It could be anything.

All I ask
is that it’s not a who.

The shadow drops,
not with a body’s weight
but in a slow unfolding,
a white cloth slipping its clothespins,
sailing down the dark.

A sheet.
Just a sheet.

Now every night at the windowsill,
my face drifts from the moon to that edge,
and then the ground beneath it,
blurred again
by a slightly leaky eye. 

I have a story in mind about 2 Continents , 1 magic land and 1 technology land. This story has a victorian setting like around 1800 to early 1900. Both factions are at odds of each other with the main antagonist, taking the opportunity of the feud to control both worlds. The tagline is "2 worlds, One fate."

Let me know your suggestions below. Thanks

On Youtube vidoes, some guys will tell you that once you finished your first draft, you then have to competely rewrite the entire story from stretch in the second draft instead of editing and cutting down on the firsrt draft.

Do you have to do this in order to be a sucessful writer, or is it going too far? Because it sounds very daunting and wastes months of work just to start over again.

Hey everyone! How are y'all doing?

I am writing a short horror story where the main character walks into a house of horrors and witnesses a bunch of "skin-crawling" stuff that plays with their mind. I have the whole plot sorted out, but I'm struggling with where this story should start at.

I had a few ideas:

1- The reader is a mailman/mailwoman/mailperson who needs to send a package to a certain room in the house. It feels very original and I very much like it, but it just sounds weird that they need to walk into the house to make a delivery when they can leave the package at the doorsteps.

2- A 16-17 years old boy accidentally threw a basketball into the house's window and he is now being obligated by his friends to go in there and get it. It sounds very fitting to the story, but it's too generic.

I really like the idea of turning the reader into the character rather than trying to make them relate to someone. However, because I am a writer newbie, I believe I should try writing in third person.

What do you think? Which one sounds better? Do you guys have any suggestions? If you need more information, I can share some of it (and maybe the whole thing, if necessary).

Hi everyone!

I'm on and off writing a historical dark romance, set in England during the 1790s against the backdrop of the French Revolutionary wars, and I would be grateful to read the thoughts from fellow dark romance readers.

My story follows a young aristocratic woman, Lady Isobel Ferndale whose seemingly ordinary evening at a gentlemans estate takes an unexpected turn when she inadvertently witnesses a clandestine government operative searching the study of a gentleman courting her. Unfortunately, she sees his face and he has no intention of allowing her to expose him.

The stranger (male lead) works unofficially for the British government, investigating a politically influential nobleman suspected of dangerous dealings. He's calculating, manipulative and genuinely sadistic, a man who takes great pleasure in the darker aspects of his work.

Isobel, meanwhile, has no experience with espionage or violence. She's intelligent, observant and stubborn, but very much proud of her upbringing and the expectations placed upon women of her social standing.

When circumstances make her unexpectedly valuable to his investigation, the two find themselves entangled in a dangerous arrangement, complicated further by the nobleman's growing interest in marrying her.

I'm aiming for a slow burn romance, with psychological tension and two characters who have very little reason to trust one another. Not to also mention - conflicting desires, shifting power dynamics but also the question as to whether someone capable of genuine cruelty can also be capable of love.

So enough rambling, I'd love to know whether this is a premise you'd be interested in reading, and what you'd particularly hope to see explored in a story like this.

I'm still in the early stages of developing a manuscript in between doing my part time undergraduate degree as well as working full time, but I can share their first encounter if this is something you'd be interested in reading?

Thank you 🥀

I'm in the early stages of writing a screenplay for a movie which ends tragically, preferably amounting to the end of a kingdom/empire.

My question (or prompt for discussion) is: What should one consider when writing a tragedy to help it feel meaningful and complete, rather than underwhelming?

Lakura ran through the forests of Thavamar, her heart pounding. Behind her she heard, almost felt, the footsteps of her pursuiters. She couldn't kill the Nezarun, the Undead. Her father had found that out the hard way.

As she saw a river, she jumped in and noticed the water wasn't that deep. Lakura kept running through it, pushing against the ice-cold water. As she crossed, she felt something change, yet Lakura needed to keep running. She climbed out of the water, ice cold water droplets running down her back, like knives cutting through her skin. She kept running through the forest. Behind her she heard the ghostly echoes of water splashing.

Her heart was pounding.

Her breath was becoming faster with the seconds.

She needed to slow down.

Lakura had trained for years for these kinds of moments, and it had given her results, but now even she couldn’t keep up with it.

As she ran, she instinctively avoided the darker spots around her, feeling that something was wrong with them. Silently she hoped that the murderers would run through them. Her hopes apparently worked, because she heard some of them fall.

Lakura ran through a branch, and more ice-cold water ran down her back. Eventually, as she ran into a clearing, she needed to stop. If I run further now, I won’t be able to fight.

She tried to keep her breath under control and turned around.

She was ready to give up. But... She decided... She wouldn't go down without a fight. The Nezarun broke through into the clearing, and was, strangely enough, not panting. Both pulled out their swords and put themselves in a fighting stance. He doesn't need to protect himself. Lakura realised. Because he doesn’t die from wounds. He attacked, a straight hit for her heart; she parried with a flick of her wrist, stepped to the side and turned her sword under his, attacking his side. She knew it wouldn't do much. She couldn't destroy him as long as he had that bracer. The murderer attacked again, stabbing her in her hand. She didn’t parry but took her chance and tried stabbing the bracer. It made a hole. But not deep enough.

She had come to close. He grabbed her arm, threw away his own sword and twisted her arm to make Lakura drop hers.

The Nezarun grabbed her by neck, pushing her up against a tree.

She couldn’t breathe, everything started to feel numb, her eyes flickered black. She couldn’t move, couldn’t do magic, it felt as if it was being sucked out of her, her vision tunnelled…

Something flickered.

A blade flew towards the neck of the murderer.

A loud, booming voice that gave you the chills called out. “You dare to enter my forest with bad intentions?”

The Nezarun dropped Lakura, who fell to the ground gasping for breath, and he turned around.

The owner of the blade was a tall, broadly shouldered man, with pointy ears and a heavy brow. It didn’t walk like a man, but also not like the elves Lakura had seen.

The man attacked the Nezarun again, and as it hit the murderer’s right hand, he pulled back and stepped away from it. The Nezarun took his chance and went for his own sword. The man went into a fighting stance, his eyes more open than before.

The Nezarun swung for the man’s side. He parried and staggered backwards once more. The man stabbed forwards, but the Nezarun hit the sword to the side, came in close and gave the man a hard push.

Lakura tried to scream but couldn’t. She tried to move but couldn’t go further than her hand. The movement helped though.

The man fell to the ground, and the Nezarun came to stand above him, his sword held high.

She needed to do something. Anything. She focused on the magic field. A black string was wrapped around his hand. She pulled, as if snapping a cord, and the man got pulled towards her, his eyes staring into the sky, not seeing anything anymore. The sword flew away and landed into the high grass.

They were safe.

For now.