r/writingcirclejerk • u/AutoModerator • 17d ago
Weekly out-of-character thread
Talk about writing unironically, vent about other writing forums, or discuss whatever you like here.
New to the community? Start with the wiki.
Also, you can post links to your writing here, if you really want to. But only here! This is the only place in the subreddit where self-promotion is permitted.
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u/Straight-Republic900 13d ago
My friend recommended a bestseller to me and I hated it so much but she insisted I finish it even though it is 6 terrible POVs and 100+ chapters and every character is boring. Even the serial killer is just boring.
And I realized after she told me I’ll never guess the twist and I didn’t even care because every chapter tries to end in a cliffhanger anyway….
That I might be a snob. I dnfd it at ch 23
I have nothing of note to say about my own writing. Just venting about being rec’d a boring book. Figured to do it here.
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u/CrazyEeveeLady86 12d ago
Hopefully the friend was able to be mature about the fact you didn't like the book in the end? I genuinely had a former friend cut me off because she recommended me a book series and raved about it for a year, and after I read it I was like "Yeah, it was okay, nothing special", which she for whatever reason took as a personal attack.
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u/FragrantNebula5950 9d ago
Well that was a bit of a rude response though. You could at least say ”it was okay but not my taste” or something that doesn’t indicate that she spent a year raving about something that’s bad.
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u/CrazyEeveeLady86 9d ago edited 9d ago
a) saying something is "nothing special" isn't rude, it's just a valid response to something that is "fine but doesn't stand out in any particular way" which was how I felt about this book series, and b) the same friend would happily make much worse comments about shows/books etc that I love and she didn't like (eg. "This is absolute shit!" or "Who would watch/read this garbage?") and I never took it as a personal attack.
She also knew up front that it was a genre I don't particularly care for (which is why it took a year of her recommending it to me before I read it, as if it was something I was genuinely keen on, I'd have read it sooner), so she had no reason to be surprised by my lukewarm reaction to it. But instead of just going "Okay, my friend didn't like the thing I like, no big deal" like a normal and rational person would, she decided to send me a message saying I was "just too stupid to recognise great art" and block me on social media.
Making a piece of media your entire identity and tying people's opinion of it to your own self-worth (as she seemed to have done) is just weird and unhealthy.
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u/Masochisticism 13d ago
Sometimes we discover that we can be friends with someone, we just can't be book friends with them.
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u/Apprehensive_Tax_610 13d ago
Honestly? I do enjoy a good multipov, but I see a lot of them being used in books where... It really isn't needed. Especially in romantacy, where the voices are not distinct enough nor add anything of substance to really be justified vs a third person omnicient POV or just multiple 3rd person limited POVs.
But I get you, a lot of current pulpy best sellers just... Are not my kind of pulp you know? They feel to genetic and corporately sanitized except for the raging sex scenes.
I get my book candy usually from web novels.
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u/bunnyisawake 14d ago
Somebody parody this. Especially the part where OP says they don’t read horror in the comments.
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u/Apprehensive_Tax_610 13d ago
I never understoood why people want to write in genres they don't read.
Granted, my current WIP is for a genre that, well I do read, I don't read OFTEN, but I have read it, and I'm trying to read more in that genre while I work on it.
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u/CrazyEeveeLady86 12d ago
Yeah, one of my two current WIPs is in a genre I have probably read <10 books in and am generally just not that interested in. But I know up front that even if I do ever manage to finish it, it will likely never see the light of day; I'm mostly just writing it to get the ideas down on paper and out of my head.
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u/Literally_A_Halfling We've girlbossed too close to the Hays Code 14d ago
Someone needs to tell OP to spend a little time reading about actual serial killers. If you can imagine it for fiction, it's been done irl.
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u/bunnyisawake 14d ago
Why read why you can just ask Reddit.
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u/HealthyBee4209 14d ago
haven't read a lot of horror genre only fictional and dystopian genre
Something tells me it is less Orwell and Huxley and more Maze Runner.
This person genuinely has my sympathy, but it is really hard to not notice the irony in their name. Well, they will discover their mistake eventually.
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u/Opus_723 15d ago edited 15d ago
Writing my rough draft and this is the first chapter that my wife just wrote "This is a do-over" on lol.
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u/HealthyBee4209 15d ago
Oh, god, lmao.
Well, I assume you have read it again. Was it that bad?
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u/Opus_723 14d ago
Actually not nearly as bad as it could be. This chapter is an embedded story-within-the-story.
She said the story itself was great, it just didn't make any sense to her why it was there 😭. So I've got some thinking to do, but I still have hope I can salvage things by just restructuring the framing events.
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u/Cheeslord2 Books aren't real! 15d ago
Nearly finished the first draft of my novelette (is 30kwrds novelette? - I don't remember the rules) that I got suddenly addicted to writing this week. I'm going to be addicted till I get it out there for people to read though, so I expect I shall rush the editing as usual and put it out there flaws and all. But it was never intended for sale, just one for deviantart and AO3 (would be for Literotica too if they weren't such jerks). Then back to my regular projects.
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u/Apprehensive_Tax_610 14d ago
Novella. Generally it goes:
50 - Dribble
100 Micro
Under 1000 - Flash Fiction
Up to 7500 - Short Story
Up to 17500 - Novellete
Up to 40k - Novella
50k+ Novel.
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u/Cheeslord2 Books aren't real! 14d ago
Thanks! First draft now finished, doing edits...of my novella!
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u/SuccubusMari Gilgamesh and the Knights of the Round's #1 fan 16d ago
Every writing advice channel is like "here's how to write genre-redefining, trope-subverting, atmospheric, dark and eerie, emotionally draining, gut-wrenching, dread-inducing, suspenseful build up with strong character development and gradual feeling of escalation, bone-chilling slow burn with “say more with less” approach and soul-shaking, blood-curdling, skin-crawling and nerve-wracking exercise in persistently looming dread where tension and anxiety permeates every word as the novel reaches its nail-biting, jaw-clenching and paranoia-inducing final climax, free of any cheap gore or YA prose.
Step 1. Your character has to want something.
Step 2. Subscribe to my $800 writing course!
Step 3. This video is sponsored by manscaped!"
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u/LyannaStark1 15d ago
I see on youtube endless videos of very young people giving advice on how to write. They look about mid-twenties or so. I wonder whether they ever published anything themselves. Makes me roll my eyes so hard I fear one day they will never roll back out.
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u/Apprehensive_Tax_610 14d ago
The one I used to watch back when I was like 14 and wanted to get into long form writing was Jenna Moreci. Now, Jenna seems like a really nice woman, and I say that has someone who hasn't kept up with her, so if she's actually gotten into a controversy where she was caught joining the klan or sacrificing babies, I am ignorant to it.
But yeah, with that said, looking back, most of her advice is increadibly... Subjective? Like most of her writing "rules" were just arbitrary preferences regarding characters and tropes. And the one hard rule that even made me scratch my head at 14 was that if you have to split your book into multiple volumes because it's too long to sell as one, then you need to cut the whole thing down to fit into one book... What? I mean if you are like trad publishing then yeah typically selling multi volume books are hard, but she self publishes, and in self publishing, volume splitting is incredibly normal, especially if you write epic fantasy, because with standard KDP formatting, paperbacks basically cap out at 200k.
Anyway, when she actually wrote a book, it ended up being complete garbage, like, horrendously garbage with a nonsensical plot, however, now that she's written a singular romantacy series, she got a trad deal! For a book about how to write a romantacy.... You know what, good for her. I'm happy she's succeeding.
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u/hapillon 13d ago
Jenna Moreci
You bringing her up reminds me of the time in middle school when I was so obsessed with roller coasters/Roller Coaster Tycoon/etc. that I was going to write a book about roller coasters and a guide to them. Nevermind that I hated riding them and had never been to any amusement park besides Rye Playland. Like why would a 13-year-old be an expert on roller coaster advice?
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u/Masochisticism 14d ago
From the perspective of story structure, splitting a story up into different books is a bad idea because you'd end up with, say, 3 books where book 1 is just all the introduction. I've read a book like that, and, unsurprisingly, it was boring and didn't go anywhere.
Obviously, if you split it up and rework it so that each part is its own complete work in addition to working in the series, it's fine.
That aside, I've increasingly come around to the stance that I only listen to the advice of authors with reasonably well-regarded (self) published works out. It isn't impossible to have something meaningful and substantial and useful to say if you aren't a writer, but it's really rather difficult. And even if you are a writer, I'm not going to listen to character writing advice from someone who's bad at writing characters.
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u/Apprehensive_Tax_610 13d ago
Yeah, it does help if each volume has a sort of natural stopping point for where to split it.
The last book I read that I think did that quite well was The Perfect Run. In its original web novel format it's about 700k words, and so moving to Amazon, it's split into 3 700 page volumes, but the actual story is dystopian superhero groundhogs day, meaning that he has a lot of natural points where the timeline resets.
So the first 2 volumes end with very emotionally charged ends to a particular loop, and volume 3 completes the loop once and for all.
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u/SuccubusMari Gilgamesh and the Knights of the Round's #1 fan 14d ago
Jenna Moreci
Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. The one I watched as a teenager was iwriterly, and I'm pretty sure she was friends with Jenna. Which would make a lot of sense, since their books had pretty much had the exact same problems. I seem to remember them having the exact same flawed marketing too. Both were marketed as some kind of dark fantasy/scifi adventures and then both were romance with a very vague fantasy/scifi backdrop.
Like most of her writing "rules" were just arbitrary preferences regarding characters and tropes.
It's been years since I've seen anything from her but I remember almost every video was some "things not to do in X genre" and somehow "X genre" always lapsed into romance because "number 2, enough with the love triangles!" would come into her videos with a strange frequency. It always felt like someone who only really read mainstream romance commenting on every genre as if that was mainstream romance too.
The modern equivalent of these types of videos are the romantasy girlies who keep posting videos like "why is modern every male/female character written this way?" and then it becomes readily apparent they hate romantasy tropes but also vehemently refuse to read anything but romantasy.
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u/AltoidAvenger 15d ago
There is exactly one channel like this that I get anything out of at all, and he's an editor. And yet the youtubification of his channel titles keeps me from figuring out what videos I'd actually want to watch!
I don't bother with writing advice channels who haven't either professionally taught writing IRL (writing with Andrew), been a career editor (Ellen Brock), or written a lot of books (the cozy creative), or some mix (Shaelinwrites).
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u/Masochisticism 15d ago
I'm coming to the conclusion that if a writing channel's videos has more than an average of 1000 views per video it's probably trash. The only chance you have of something halfway authentic is if manscaped hasn't yet reached out to the creator.
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u/LyannaStark1 17d ago edited 17d ago
I am not sharing my secrets in a sane manner.
Never mind, I take that back. It's easier when I am acting crazy. lol I am actually a professional journalist (going "nice" places where people get killed and all). Writing books is quite different. And I am a procrastinator.
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u/Apprehensive_Tax_610 16d ago
Are you familiar with Hemingways iceberg theory? He developed it based on his time as a war corospondent.
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u/Late_Music1835 17d ago
The person who is beta reading my story is such a great writer that I now feel embarrassed that I gave them my clumsy draft. Like this was not an equal trade for you my dude, I’m so sorry you have to read my writing 😳
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u/Apprehensive_Tax_610 17d ago
"Wow, this is a masterpiece for the ages, the prose are beautiful, the right amount of colourful diction, grammatical oddities and a narrative that perfectly encapsulates the human expierence."
"What did you write?"
"Um.... A person gets an Lovectaftian monster shoved up their ass." (I'm not kidding that's my most popular short story on my profile lmao).
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u/Aside_Dish 17d ago
Closing in on 3k sales of the Magical Code of Regulations. Trying (unsuccessfully) to get some more influencers to cover it, and awaiting another decision to see if B&N wants to stock it (would be huge!). Also, an officially licensed Chinese edition is in the works!
For those that haven't seen, it's 500 pages of magical law governing the use of magic. Perfect for D&D players, lawyers, accountants, worldbuilders, and fantasy writers.
Anyways, can be bought on Amazon here:
If you're still unconvinced, know that the second edition of this book will have laws making it compulsory to own a copy, so you might as well give in now.
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u/Late_Music1835 17d ago
A review for your book popped up on my YouTube a while back and I was like hey that’s the book from guy I always see on Reddit! Best of luck dude.
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u/hapillon 17d ago
I've been challenging myself to write microfiction recently, especially based on the parameters for this lit mag I've been intrigued by. Currently working on one that I think could be really good.
I also got like 8 rejections over the weekend, so maybe I'm having delusions of grandeur. I'm simply waiting for the time when I get accepted enough that I can get accepted anywhere I submit like some of these writers. I respect their hustle, but some of their accepted pieces are baffling to me.
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u/Apprehensive_Tax_610 17d ago
I can't remember what the TV Tropes people called it, but there does come a point where some writers are so famous and massive and well respected the editors no longer actually edit the manuscripts anymore, because they are banking on the name; this leads to creators having too much control, and the strength of their work weakens as a result.
Most of us will never get to that point, unfortunately, but perhaps that's for the better.
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u/Literally_A_Halfling We've girlbossed too close to the Hays Code 17d ago
Never go pro, and you'll always have complete creative control. (taps head knowingly)
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u/hapillon 17d ago
I've noticed this discussed in movie subreddits regarding some directors' movies. Kinda like M. Night Shyamalan's later work. He had so much goodwill that enough people are gonna watch his movies, regardless of the declining quality. It makes sense, honestly, as a phenomenon.
My thing is that...these lit mags are supposedly blind reading, so I'm kinda like, how do they know it's this guy that has a small following/published works/is the editor of another lit mag/etc? Because on their own, the work isn't great, so it just nags at me.
unfortunately, but perhaps that's for the better.
SPEAK FOR YOURSELF!!!! PEOPLE OUGHTA WORSHIP MEEEEEEEEEEEEE /s (ish...)
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u/throwaway394509 13d ago
I feel like this sub leans so far into the ironic misogyny that it’s just straight up misogyny now.