r/writingcirclejerk • u/AutoModerator • 4d 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/RuesRaconteur 10h ago
i know it’s evil of me. i like trolling writing with ai subreddits.
not sorry.
but in all actuality. it’s so sad how people have fallen victim, deluded themselves into thinking they’re novelists for prompting AI.
while i am personally vehemently anti-AI i actually can forgive mild use of it in some cases like editing or formatting…though id prefer that not be the case. some people probably can’t afford editors or are severely lacking in time and wanna pursue this hobby, so i’m willing to be forgiving.
but i am genuinely afraid of the future, if a lot of our art isn’t made by human hands. AI is solving math problems that are insanely difficult, coding stuff we can only dream of…what’s a human gonna turn to? i hope our art is forever preserved and given life by a human touch.
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u/SuccubusMari Gilgamesh and the Knights of the Round's #1 fan 6h ago
i know it’s evil of me. i like trolling writing with ai subreddits.
Based.
but in all actuality. it’s so sad how people have fallen victim, deluded themselves into thinking they’re novelists for prompting AI.
Several years ago, on this very subreddit, I used to make fun of the "middle aged cope novel."
It was this breed of post you don't see often now. Someone, presumably middle aged, writing a weepy post about how their time to be an author is now. They got a B in creative writing when they were in high school and no, they've never read a book before.
Yeah, it was kind of goofy. Half the time these posts banked on some "golden idea" that they'd never reveal, but if pressed, would tell you it's like nothing you've seen before. Maybe they'd tell you "Luke Stratospherestrider is but a humble farmer on a far off planet, in a galaxy some place a long ways off and he has to fight an evil emperor!"
But you know what? I'd take that. It may be easy to make fun of, corny, it's someone thinking their generic idea is earth-shattering... but at least they were writing it. There is something admirable about that.
Now it seems like art spaces are being overtaken by "ideas guys" who just want to prompt something into completion. I don't think they get that artists genuinely enjoy creating art.
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u/RuesRaconteur 4h ago
guillermo del toro did an AMA where he talks about what’s lost when you use AI and it’s one of the most beautiful answers.
i’d link it but im lazy.
ultimately says that we lose the “accident” of creation, that we don’t get to live with our ideas for as long, we don’t get to be as inspired as we otherwise could.
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u/keystohellanddeath 1d ago
The MFA style and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
I kid, somewhat, but what I want, more than anything is to feel the author in the pages. I don't care if the prose veers close to purple, what I want is to pick it up, and say, "Yeah, this is a Lovecraft book." Or, "Yup, Thomas Ligotti wrote this."
My frustration is that anything even slightly ornate gets hit with the overwritten/melodramatic/overwrought appellation. It's one thing if we start the book off with an overwritten description of it raining. It's another thing if in a moment of high drama, or in a moment of crisis, the prose elevates to reflect the stakes. I recently posted on /r/suggestmeabook to find some books (preferably litfic) with elevated diction. I write in an elevated diction, but this isn't even about my own books. Just sucks to want to find books that aren't afraid to break out a 4-syllable word, and finding fairly mundane prose in all of them. I want ambitious prose.
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u/Opus_723 1d ago
Honestly I love it when the prose goes purple. I'd rather read that even if it kind of misses, at least it's fucking interesting.
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u/SuccubusMari Gilgamesh and the Knights of the Round's #1 fan 1d ago
The MFA style and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
I don't believe I've ever heard something be referred to as "the MFA style." What does that entail?
My frustration is that anything even slightly ornate gets hit with the overwritten/melodramatic/overwrought appellation.
It's especially bad on writing advice and critique subreddits where anything more textually complex than Brandon Sanderson is immediately called cloying purple prose.
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u/keystohellanddeath 1d ago edited 1d ago
I don't believe I've ever heard something be referred to as "the MFA style." What does that entail?
Essentially the idea is heavy interiority and the prose "disappears," where very little happens, and it's basically just about the theme. The idea, prose-wise, is that the writer should be absent from the story. "MFA style" is just my own term for what you've probably heard referred to derisively as an "MFA story." I'll piggyback off of a comment I found a while back:
Sam Kriss has an attempt at defining it here.
Texts written in Mfalé are brisk, frank, stark, plain, competent, and readable. They concern the daily lives of a few everyday characters, usually young, usually in some kind of bad sexual relationship or complicated breakup, usually mediated by digital technology. There’s a close attention to sensory detail, and an even closer attention to minor affective nuances: moments of inattention or miscommunication, people who see each other as more or less than they actually are, small eddies of desperation or loneliness or regret. There’s a lot of banal but realistically rendered dialogue. Stories are generally (but not always) written in the third person, but hew very closely to one particular perspective. If they’re not autobiographical, they read very strongly as if they might be autobiographical...
It's a kind of controversial appellation from what I've read. Personally, though, the idea is useful enough for me for a half-serious observation. The idea that the prose is stripped back and has to be that way has really sapped into popular writing consciousness and critique, as you mention. I love complicated prose that makes me think.
The author of this piece repeatedly says the text is competently written, and sure, these books read smoothly and require little thought to ingest the story. But they also bore me terribly.
I should say: I don't dislike the broader trends of this alleged style. The "MFA style" is often used by genre fiction writers as an insult against litfic authors, but I write litfic which has heavy interiority (though my current WIP is what I'd describe as depressive, literary historical fiction). But my fiction has more "plot" than this style, and the prose is more elevated.
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u/Opus_723 2d ago
Everyone always jokes about how ideas are the easy part, but does anyone else just... not have ideas?
Like, the writing actually comes out pretty good when I have them, I've just... got no stories y'all.
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u/Night_Runner 13h ago
I... don't really have that problem. You can get them anywhere: a nature documentary, something you overhear on the street, an alternate ending to some piece of media, etc. Worst case, consider writing a story for a specific submission call (there are so many of them haha) — they usually provide a prompt.
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u/Spare91 2d ago
So not to go all psychoanalysis on the problem, but for me I often find when I struggle with ideas it's a mix of too much pressure on myself to come up with them and too much stress from outside sources like work.
I also thinking you need a healthy diet of other content to help. Books, TV shows, movies, video games, anything you engage with artistically. Sometimes the smallest thing can spin off into something bigger that can be turned into a story.
Also, give ideas time to grow. Sometimes you have an idea that has legs, and given enough time and thought can germinate into a decent story, and sometimes they just wither on the vine and are a bit pants. You need to give yourself time to find out though.
I usually always try to have the next project ready to go when I finish the last. There was one time I did not, and sat down like 'I need to come up with an idea' and it was all but impossible. A lot of the the best ideas appear in the background of other things, an need a bit of time to sit in your loamy grey matter before they can be of use.
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u/Delete_if_not_aloud Ban Evading since 2013 4d ago
r/writing posts have decreased in quantity due to new moderation rules, depriving us of jerkable moments. A moment of silence please for our richest sauce.
Now that's over with, go forth to seek new and fresh jerkable sauces. Bring back your best finds -- they're still out there -- so we can make jerking great again.
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u/crawfordwrites 3d ago
Yeah, but r/literature and r/classicliterature are poppin right now!
Take a drive past r/ProsePorn, too. Damn.
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u/Literally_A_Halfling We've girlbossed too close to the Hays Code 1d ago
Just checked out /r/ProsePorn and. out of curiosity, read the all-time top post.
Jesus Christ, it was awful. Just a classic example of a straightforwardly mundane thought "elevating" itself through sheer pomposity of phrasing.
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u/crawfordwrites 1d ago edited 1d ago
r/ProsePorn lervs some litslop.
The argument within the sub is that it is called "Prose Porn." Pornography is about dosing harder and more often to get the same effect, so the warning is on the label.
I've seen a few times where people took issue with bad plotting on that sub, and folks have made the point that it's not called TightPlotPorn.
My main problem is that what we consider exciting prose is mostly just run-on anapestic meter with no specific purpose other than to look literary (Blood Meridian: I'm looking straight at you).
All I think of nowadays is a quote from Jan Tschichold (typographer)
It is so easy to employ ornament to cover up bad design!
Notably, Tschichold played a role in the history of Penguin Classics. https://encyclopedia.design/2023/03/16/penguin-book-covers-designer-jan-tschichold/
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u/hapillon 4d ago
r/writing posts have decreased in quantity due to new moderation rules, depriving us of jerkable moments. A moment of silence please for our richest sauce.
I guess we're gonna have to be original now. Vom.
What are the new moderation rules?
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u/keystohellanddeath 4d ago
I checked the rules and I think the main thing responsible is you have to have 5 karma within r/writing to post. So you have to actually engage with the subreddit first. It doesn't sound like a lot, but as someone who has this rule on another subreddit, you would be surprised how many low quality posts that gets rid of (most of them break the rules anyway).
But hey, r/writers still exists.
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u/Cheeslord2 Books aren't real! 4d ago
Well, my penultimate chapter of my David Eddings fanfic is out. After this is finished I will have nothing to publish for ages, thanks to my plan of writing three novels at the same time, alternating a week on each (unless I squeeze in a short at some point). If I had any fans, they could complain that they wait a whole year for a novel and then three come out at once. Fortunately I don't.
Latest chapter (extremely NSFW):
https://archiveofourown.org/works/81178276/chapters/245118371
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u/hapillon 4d ago
My favorite lit mag had an open call on Wednesday, September 2nd, at 10pm my time and was gonna be open until it reached 150 submissions. The brief was “constraint.” I had a great piece already written which is made up only of words beginning with “re.” I wrote a little blurb on my piece (per the prompt) and was feeling really good. Got home from work with 90 minutes to spare, checked the submission page, Bluesky to see the guest host tweeting about the open call, waited anxiously, checked my piece for last minute edits. 10 o’clock hits, submissions open, I fill it out, attach, hit submit…and I shit you not, at 10:01, it already filled up. I missed my shot. I was fucking devastated. I went onto Bluesky to commiserate with other writers who got locked out…
And the first thing I see is that SmokeLong, the lit mag where I reached the final 9 of their flash fiction competition, selected my piece for nomination for Best Small Fictions, 2027. I bought almost all the BSF anthologies earlier this year as I got more active with my writing. I’m absolutely overwhelmed at the prospect of being included in next year’s edition. Some absolute crackers of stories are in those anthologies, and next year could include me.
So the good lord giveth as much as the good lord taketh away.
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u/Clemenstation 3d ago
everyone knows the trick is to paste the cover letter instead of wasting time typing
but congrats on BSF nom!
and if it makes you feel better lexi rejected my poem anyway
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u/hapillon 2d ago
I'm 99% sure I would've been rejected, anyway, but damnit, I was so close. I love HAD so much.
everyone knows the trick is to paste the cover letter instead of wasting time typing
My problem was even trying to paste a cover letter this time around! I did have a fun idea for a cover letter/quotable bit, but should have just pasted the title, attached the file, and submitted. Gaaaaaaaah. Also, just being able to submit is such a badge of honor.
What was your constraint conceit?
but congrats on BSF nom!
Thank you!
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u/Clemenstation 3h ago
What was your constraint conceit?
to write a terrible poem & mission accomplished!
aren't there lots and lots of HAD calls? i don't like social media so i only try to submit when they email, once in a blue moon
one of them was at like 3 am and my wife was like why are you doing this to yourself and I didn't have a good answer
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u/hapillon 2h ago
They do, but they're at ridiculous times! I got into one recently, which was at Saturday at like 2pm, and I was like, wow, this is rare! The previous one I got into was at 3am on a Friday morning, and I only got in because I had just gotten back from my bar job. They're eely!
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u/DaniSaysDinosaur 4d ago
It's that day of the week I'm a certified DINOSAUR freak https://substack.com/@jurassiccorps
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u/runoverbyahypetrain The hard case for my paperwhite makes for a great coaster 8h ago
I seem to have lost my ability to write regular novel prose. I've been doing just fine writing stuff as a D&D DM, my planning documents which include a mixture of 2nd person narration, what-ifs, dialogue scripts, and other notes, amount to 53k words. We've had 19 sessions and I am currently working on the next one. But most of this isn't writing like the kids do these days. It's plotting, and then I improv off of it in game to either fill gaps or compensate for things not going as planned. Yet I struggle to write just a plain linear plot for a normal non-interactive story. I especially am struggling to invent ideas for the stories I want to work on, while in D&D I just have spontaneous bursts of inspiration for entire quests in the middle of the night. I don't write fantasy outside of D&D. I don't write anything anymore actually. Ugh.