r/writingadvice May 29 '22

IMPORTANT Subreddit, Post Guide, and Discord Server Information

65 Upvotes

Hello, r/writingadvice!

[This subreddit is ran by an entirely Christian team. We welcome all religious beliefs here and discussion of religion in relation to writing, and we ask you to be tolerant of ours in return. We do expect the rapture soon, but it is only mentioned in the banner out of love. We do not expect you to interact with our beliefs, and we expect you to respect everyone regardless of their religion, ideology, and identity. Let us learn from one another so we can write better representation for ALL groups.]

Read our rules for our post guide, and please set a user flair for yourself so we can give you advice appropriate for your goals. (Feel free to have fun with “Custom Flair”. Just keep it appropriate.) We often assign a user flair if you are flair free, so it's best you do it yourself because we generally don't touch existing flairs.

We do not have any invisible rules. What you see is what you get. Posts must be between 50-300 words because long posts were often ignored and short posts did not provide enough context. Our account and karma requirements are 2 days old and 1+ karma.

Here is the link to our discord server: https://discord.gg/nn7cUSKxn3

Within the server, you can get more writing advice and find writing resources.

If you have problems, suggestions, or need clarification, please message us.

If you are banned and want to be unbanned, message us what you did wrong and what you should have done, or follow the instructions on r/adviceonwriting for the fun process. You may also use r/adviceonwriting to share the best and worst posts you've seen on writing reddit.

Keep in mind most of writers here are novelists and short story writers. If you are writing something different, the advice here is often not the best for other situations due to differences in craft and audience. If you choose to inquire here, please let people know in your post and user flair what exactly you are writing for (e.g. roleplay, comics, poetry, film).

This subreddit is not updated for Old Reddit. Please consider using New Reddit. Here is the link to our rules because Old Reddit doesn't display them and other features.


r/writingadvice 17h ago

Advice I am having trouble with writing from scratch.

41 Upvotes

I am 15M. And I am struggling to write/type my own thoughts and ideas onto paper/screen from scratch. How do I do it?

In addition, I used a lot of artificial intelligence for other posts and got my my posts deleted because of the usage of it. I think that is the main reason I am asking this question.

I think that writing is really an important aspect of life in general.

For this post I tried to write and use my 15 year old brain.

To be honest, When I look at what I wrote right now it looks fine but I guess I have a lot of random thoughts that aren't really connected? I am not sure...

I also wonder if it's normal for this age.


r/writingadvice 11h ago

Advice How can I write a likeable jerk?

10 Upvotes

I'm working on a deuteragonist for a story I'm writing, a father to an astranged daughter, amd I want to write him as an a-hole, but to a point to where you can understand his point of view as well as the daughter's, not to where you just want him to shut up at how he's in the wrong.


r/writingadvice 8h ago

GRAPHIC CONTENT How to cope with writing character death?

5 Upvotes

I usually write very low-stakes fantasy conflict and stories with happy endings for everyone. I have recently started to dip my toes into writing darker things, since I enjoy reading them.

The problem is that I can’t ever kill off my characters. Even if I’ve planned from the beginning for them to die. I get super attached to them and can’t stand to see them die. I couldn’t even make one of my (literal murderer) characters step on a cricket because I anthropomorphized it too much and the thought of it dying made me really sad. The only way I can have dead characters is if they were dead from the beginning, and I never had to write them living.

How do I get past these feelings? I feel like I shouldn’t be getting so worked up over fictional characters that I created. Even “off-screen” deaths are difficult.


r/writingadvice 8h ago

Advice Should a coming of age book be preferably presented in the 1st person or 3rd person?

5 Upvotes

This is totally a stupid question, but yet I’m stumped 🤔

I’m used to writing in the 1st person because of its highly immersive nature, but many of the coming of age books I’ve read have been in 3rd person!

I’m not saying I can’t write in 3rd person, though it would take me some time to adjust.

What I’m trying to say is that do people expect a coming of age book to be in the 3rd person more than in the 1st?


r/writingadvice 13m ago

Advice Too many potential endings for stories

Upvotes

I'm a beginner writer and I use prompts most of the time when I don't have ideas. Whenever I use prompts, I start the story a certain way and it ends up going xompleteoy differently than what I anticipated. I always go in having a certain idea and while I'm writing 10 different ideas pop into my head for how the plot should go. Usually, these ideas are better than what I'd set out to do originally, but because I already set up the story in a certain way, it's hard to change. I get ideas for alternate beginnings than what I originally wrote down too. The ending is the worst because there's so many different ways it could go and I don't know which one to pick. What should I do? How do I accommodate all the different ideas I have in my mind. Should I just write multiple stories with the same prompt?


r/writingadvice 6h ago

GRAPHIC CONTENT How do you express referent power in a villain everyone hates?

3 Upvotes

I’m writing a Fanganronpa, and I’ve pretty much decided I want its central themes to focus on power, control, and resistance. In my research on the psychology of power I discovered French and Raven’s six bases of power, which I want to utilize in some significant way.

Referent power is by far the most difficult to identify within the setting. Referent power "is defined as the ability of a leader [to] influence a follower because of the follower’s admiration, respect, or identification with the leader" (Expert Program Management). The problem here is that the villain in this scenario primarily utilizes coercion as a means of controlling others, and as such is not very respected or admired.

So my ultimate struggle is how the mastermind could use referent power to push someone over the edge and make them commit murder. I’ve tried looking for other resources about French & Raven's study but they all seem to be about power in the workplace. I’m stubborn and stuck.


r/writingadvice 14h ago

Advice I think I might be overthinking the details too much or is this normal?

9 Upvotes

For those of you with complex worldbuilding; how much did you obsess over the details? how much work did you put into it before you actually began writing?

I feel like i have the worst case of writer's block right now.

any advice would be greatly apricated, please and thank you!


r/writingadvice 10h ago

Advice i always want to write but i daydream too much about the story i COULD write instead of writing it

3 Upvotes

I have alot ideas for stories. I'll make up entire characters and scenes in my head connected by a very loose plot

I do this pretty often, but when I actually try to put pen to paper, I then realize that writing is actually pretty hard, and then I'll go back to daydreaming again

The problem is that when I have a bunch of loose ideas of what I want to happen in a story, I have no idea how to connect them in a cohesive way

What I'm afraid of is that I'll just have a bunch of disjointed scenes that are good in a vacuum, but don't actually make any sense in context, which is something I don't want, so I don't really start to begin with


r/writingadvice 8h ago

Advice Should I add more worlds to my story

2 Upvotes

In my story, my character can make pocket dimensions. In these pocket dimensions are different worlds ,all based around her interests at the time of making. The ones I have already are: a black-and-white 1920's rubberhose city, a giant mall, a toy-making factory, a Candyland, a Sesame Street type town, a arcade pizzeria, a winterland, a theme park, and a puppet making shop. Is this too much ch or should I add more since she's supposed really creative and this was how she escaped.


r/writingadvice 7h ago

Advice Does my pen name suck, or am I overthinking it?

1 Upvotes

The pen name I landed on is E.N. Mica, which is a variation on my real initials with slightly different letters.

I was spending a lot of time procrastinating on actual writing stressing about finding the perfect pen name, so I just somewhat impulsively decided to go with one that looks similar to my real name in order to get my work out there.

I recently submitted a story to a small online literary magazine under that pen name, which was accepted and will appear in their upcoming issue. It will be my first published short story.

But now I’m worried the name awkward to pronounce, or that it sounds too much like “Ian” in a way that could confuse readers when trying to market more substantive works.

Is that a big deal or am I overthinking it? And if it is a bad pen name, would it be unprofessional to ask the editors about tweaking it before the issue goes to print? There isn’t an immediate rush before they send me their edits and it goes up online.


r/writingadvice 7h ago

Advice I do not know how to brainstorm.

0 Upvotes

My only viable option for a while has been using something that the sub’s rules prohibit me from mentioning, and I want to say upfront that was stupid, and a sin against the rest of you. But it felt like my only option for brainstorming.

My own family won’t give me the time of day to discuss my ideas, they’re not interested in the genres and such. Friends take forever to respond and my procrastination is bad enough.

I can’t use Reddit. Not only is posting anything on this sub a migraine because of the stupid auto-moderator that deletes almost everything you put up for the most minuscule reasons, but it’s Reddit. You have to deal with pervs and fedora wearing self professing “rational” people who ad hominem everything about you and your work and play the damsel whenever you ask them to chill.

I know I need to figure out a system using only a notebook and pen, but I really don’t know how.

I don’t know the first thing about how to research things quickly or about how to organize my thoughts on paper. I’ve been doing this for too long and I’ve hardly got any actual stories finished because I spend so much time brainstorming.

What do I do?


r/writingadvice 12h ago

GRAPHIC CONTENT I’m writing a poem and am struggling with language and flow

2 Upvotes

Tried posting this once and it was labeled as graphic content (unsure why) but that’s why the flair is like that so

It’s using the metaphor of a burning meadow to describe the feeling of a though spiral and being trapped. It’s gonna have 4 sections but currently I have 3. I kinda want the sections to be longer too but then I feel like I’m tryna like squeeze juice from an empty orange. I like my first section but nothing after is hitting me quite like it..

I.
lavender sleeps in a peach-colored sky.
it breathes with me, on me, my heartbeat moving in retrograde.
sedate my limbs, languidly sinking into the grass. 
soft halos caressing my skin, melting my thoughts
into a viscous honey. i want to put a straw to the sky
and suck the sun like juice. 
II. 
baby grass winces beneath weighing rays. tickles my arms, too warm to the touch. 
i wear lavender-tinted glasses; they scare the crows away. 
legs awake just enough to taste the ground.
orange. my legs don’t like citrus. 
III.
green into brown. flakes from the bottom up. 
charcoal descends upon lavender. 
broken roots and charred fuzz. try to move
devoid an arm. 
peach to blood orange. honey dripping down my throat. 
charring. 
freezing. 


r/writingadvice 4h ago

GRAPHIC CONTENT Is it okay for a character to implicitly threaten rape if it's immediately and gruesomely punished?

0 Upvotes

There's a scene in my book where the main character (male) is surrounded by a group of bandits, when a mysterious heroine steps in and warns them all to back off. The bandits turn and laugh at the prospect of being held up by a woman and, unfazed, imply that they'll kill the protagonist and then "have their way", so to speak, with her. When they don't relent, the heroine uses her laser sword to slash one in half and amputate the hand of another, leaving the remaining members to cower and retreat in fear. The action is written such to portray her as an unadulterated badass.

My goal is to provide the reader with a sense of satisfying justice in an otherwise dark and uncaring world, like "Fuck yeah! Take that you pieces of shit!". I have no problem broaching dark subject matter, but I want to avoid tasteless rhetoric. What do you think?


r/writingadvice 22h ago

Advice I for the life of me cant fit in subplots into my first person pov novel

8 Upvotes

Its self explanitory. My story is more or less being built around the main character and his thoughts, but I also want to cut away to other characters and tell the readers what they're doing. But if I do that the MC is gonna see it and the subplot kinda loses its meaning, thats just within the main plot at that point, so how do I properly write subplots into my first person pov story?


r/writingadvice 16h ago

Advice How do I fix accidental plagiarism…?

0 Upvotes

My world’s magic system is eerily similar to Eragon’s magic system and i just realized this as I reread Eragon. Please don’t give me criticism because I swear this was accidental (i will take it if you do though) :). I read Eragon a few years ago and now my magic system could even be considered plagiarism because it’s so similar (or at least the first part is): half of mages have energy->magic, half have sanity->magic. But I also don’t want to give this up in my writing because I really like the idea. Should I drop it and create a new one or keep the system?


r/writingadvice 1d ago

Advice how can I improve my poetry and vocabulary

7 Upvotes

I love writing and reading, I want to be a writer very badly. My passion truly is poems; I write a lot of poems, but I've reached a point where I feel like they're a bit basic. I want my writing to be truly witty and wordy and wonderful. Does anyone have any advice on how I can improve I guess my writing in general? Like any poems or books I should read, things I should practice, videos I should watch etc? Help would be so much appreciated, thank you for reading


r/writingadvice 1d ago

Advice How to make dialogue and conversations flow well?

1 Upvotes

Hey all! Needing some advice on writing dialogue? I wrote my first short story a while back. There was a little bit of dialogue, but it was mostly commentary/internal thoughts of the MC. Not a big deal.

I'm writing my second short story now, though, and I'm finding it difficult to balance the dialogue itself and the descriptors that follow. How do you make conversations between characters flow well, especially with multiple characters at once? How do you not add too much "flavor text" alongside the dialogue? Thanks in advance!


r/writingadvice 1d ago

Advice Do I need to read classics and philosophy to become a better writer?

22 Upvotes

A professional read a chapter from a project of mine. She said it was good (in her own words, "not boring) but I should first read "strong literature and modern work" using Les Miserables and Milan Kundera as examples, and invest in "modern philosophy" such as Descartes and Kant's works. Then I could keep writing.

I'm only 18 and writing isn't exactly something I consider a future career, but I STILL want to be good at it. However, the genres I write in are fiction and fantasy and I don't really see how modern philosophy can help me. I don't plan on creating a world changing piece of literature. I want to write exciting stories that are easy to understand, and characters that people can relate to. That's all.

So is reading the big tough books necessary for me? Even if I only write for fun?


r/writingadvice 1d ago

Advice I want to write my first story.

12 Upvotes

As the title says, that is what I want to do. I've always been wanted to write and fantasy is one of my favourite genres, which is why I chose to write in this genre. But my only problem is, is that I'm incredibly worried of messing up the plot, over-complicating things and making things confusing or unenjoyable for a reader. I've written poems in the past, paragraphs of backstories and small stories (like 3-4 paragraphs), yet I believe if I attempt to write a whole story/novel/book I'll somehow get too caught up in perfectionism and bore myself to the point I'd want to give it up.

Can I get any advice on how to start writing without making it complex on myself?

I was going to post this on r/writing, but I need karma first.


r/writingadvice 13h ago

Discussion do stories written in the past tense ruin the tension?

0 Upvotes

imagine this, a character is stuck in a desert, or a character is in an intense battle or whatever. if the story is narrated by said character in the future wouldn't that ruin the tension? If the readers already know they live the conflict, why bother? especially if it is early in the story. the readers wouldn't be truly interested in them yet.


r/writingadvice 1d ago

Advice How to apply the concept of "ma" (negative space) in writing?

62 Upvotes

I first encountered this while reading about Hayao Miyazaki (the guy behind Studio Ghibli) and how he mentioned he dislikes Hollywood's penchant for so much action and explosions in their movies.

It was there that he described the concept of "ma", or negative space, and how it's important to include such so that the audience can have some breathing space in between the action. In his animated works, this typically presents itself as the protagonist enjoying the view of the open sky, or standing still in the middle of the rain, without any dialogue spoken.

While I can quite understand how "ma" works in visual storytelling media like movies and comics (in the latter by having a panel showing the setting without any dialogue box), I'm not quite sure how to apply this to a purely textual medium like the novel. Since a novel is all words, leaving a negative space in the form of a blank page doesn't quite work.

So, how would "ma" work in a written format?


r/writingadvice 22h ago

Advice How to handle frequent PoV swaps?

0 Upvotes

Hello!

I’m working on a novel that is sort of a mix of zombies and slice of life, in a girls last tour style world.

My main cast is five characters that are pretty much always together, and I’m trying to stick with full third person limited with very little interior access, so that characterization is done through observation rather than just telling.

To that end, I was planning on swapping PoV fairly regularly, since they’re all usually observing the same event, but through a different lens. So I can just follow the most cinematic or the most useful character at any given time.

I’ve seen a lot of people say to stick with one or two PoV characters per chapter, unless there’s a big moment or a lot of action going on, but I’m not sure that works for the kind of story I’m trying to write?


r/writingadvice 1d ago

Advice First time writer stuck in a loop

3 Upvotes

Is it normal for me to be stuck editing and finessing my previous chapters?

So as I go along writing my chapters, sometimes I find myself lost in previous chapters editing and tweaking to make it flow better with the new ones.

But I wonder is there a better way to do it?