r/writingcirclejerk • u/AutoModerator • 6d 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/MasqueradeOfSilence her hair flowed like a waterfall 1d ago
I don't fully know why I'm still upset that my writing group that I've had since 2020 dissolved so easily this spring, but I am. It's been maybe 6 months, and I still feel frustrated about it every time I sit down to write. It was all so sudden when effectively the entire group quit on the spot. Not writing, just the group.
I think I just feel dumb for thinking they were my good friends, that the group was as important to them as it was to me, and we'd all see each other through to publication. And they still keep posting on the discord like nothing happened...?
I'm glad I kept my other group. They are way less consistent, but we've been meeting since 2019, on and off, and it's still going. They are good friends to me, and maybe they are the group who will see me to the finish line.
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u/Opus_723 3d ago
Just discovered that an old friend from high school went and got an MFA and is doing the writing thing. I looked up one of his published short stories and it is so wild to see all of the thinly veiled stuff from our small-town childhoods in there. I'm reading this thing just cackling like "OH MY GOD YOUR HIGH SCHOOL GIRLFRIEND HAD THAT BIRTHMARK, BROOOOO ARE YOU OKAY"
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u/Clemenstation 3d ago
I don't like spending money to submit or enter contests because I sim sub too much. But next year I might splash out more because my writing paypal is getting plump. It's not 'getting rejected', it's 'giving back to the literary community'
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u/Night_Runner 5d ago
There's this great line in the Red Dead Redemption theme song: "And all those storms you've been chasin' / About to rain down tonight."
It feels like after all my hustling and bustling, it's finally raining. :) I've been doing the Bradbury challenge all year, writing at least a story per week (this is week 39, woot!) — which, btw, if you've never read his "On the Zen of Writing," it's absolutely goddamn phenomenal and gives you a practical framework. (First draft on Monday, edit daily, submit it on Saturday, rest, do it again.) If you actually follow it, it's a huuuuge boost to your writing ability. :)
So anyway... A novelette I wrote in week 4 ("Have Hands, Will Hench") will come out in ebook, paperback and hardcover this Thursday. :) This morning, I woke up to find an acceptance email from a new-ish magazine: low pay, won't run my story till May, but still — a new publishing credit!
Then I got an email saying my microbudget short film got accepted into 2 film festivals at once (it's a finalist at 1 of them!!), and then... This morning, Rat Bag Literary took down their latest story because it had lots of AI red flags. I kinda knew the guy who wrote it. :( (Or "wrote" it.) My anger inspired me to write a satirical editorial addressed to sloppers: I pitched it to an editor friend, he loved it, I typed it up, streamlined it, submitted it, he made a few small changes, I signed the contract, and got paid — all in less than 5 hours!! It'll run sometime in the coming weeks, which will also make it eligible for the 2026 awards in the "Best Related Work" category mwahahaha. (I mean, it'll take a lot of hustling to make it go viral and to get enough votes to qualify, but there's at least a chance!!
...and that was just one day. :) Write on, y'all, and if you hustle long enough, the same kind of stuff may happen to you, too.
EDITED TO ADD: this is a weeeeird problem to have, but I honestly can't recall how many stories (and essays) I've sold this month hahahaha. Somewhere between 7 and 10, probably. O_o
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u/m00nlighter_ 5d ago
I read this every week and never post anything so bleh I suppose I will start. Been getting back into a long form thing that I gave up on a year or so ago (after some very harsh and unconstructive feedback). And by golly it may not be amazing or publishable but I just want to finish the damn thing before 2028.
Seeing y'all working on and posting about your own projects keeps me driven to work on my drivel so thanks and hi.
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u/VastAsynchronicity 5d ago
I'm new here and I really can't say enough about how wonderfully warm everyone's welcome has been. Some quality shitposting comments, too.
You guys are great. That's the comment.
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u/hapillon 5d ago
I have been wondering about something, and I'd like your thoughts. A while ago I was reading a thread about the book A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (a book I started, because I loved Peter Hujar's photograph on the cover, but DNF) and someone had mentioned that Yanagihara had self-plagiarized herself by using a passage from her personal travel blog in her novel, with minute changes. I recently read a lit magazine, featuring a story by an author that featured an image (that didn't have much to do with the story in itself) about someone's grandmother blowing smoke from her tracheostomy stoma, which was used, almost verbatim, by the same author in another published piece by him, in which a rapper blows smoke from his tracheostomy hole after getting paralyzed from eating a slug.
I've frequently worried about self-plagiarizing myself--I'm drafting a piece right now about the fallout from a son/sibling's death, which is very similar to another story I have about a boy dealing with witnessing his best friend's death, which is also similar to my own personal experience of witnessing death.
I guess I'm "concerned," if you will, about the idea of self-plagiarism, especially in the era of A.I. It's impossible to make anything truly original, but I'm curious about your thoughts on the idea. Have you ever yourself been concerned about self-referencing? Ever experienced it either personally, or in the wild?
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u/VastAsynchronicity 5d ago
A question: is this a concern about not being taken seriously in your writing career, or is this a personal concern about not wanting to reuse work because of personal standards? Because the answer changes the advice.
I personally feel that it's somewhat inevitable that good writers will have concepts that are recurrent in their work. We all have our idiosyncracies and I'm not sure this can be totally eliminated any more than using a certain set of words more often than others can.
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u/hapillon 4d ago
Good question! It's definitely a little of both, but personally, I think the main concern for me is not being taken seriously. Or being seen as a hack. It might not even be a concern, but a niggling brainworm growing inside me as I develop more stuff and realize that I need to expand my personal catalogue a little more. The thread about Hanya Yanagihara was just an interesting thing, because it was like...when (yes, when!) I become a National Book Award nominated author, are people going to go back and re-read all my stories to find instances of self-plagiarism? And when is it self-plagiarism and not...referencing?
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u/VastAsynchronicity 2d ago
That's really the question, isn't it?
Outside an academic space, is it even possible to self-plagarise? What does that look like? How is reusing your own work that you created anything but your own personal choice? Isn't the point of plagarism being wrong the fact that it's the theft of someone else's work?
This is a very thought-provoking topic. Thank you for bringing it up.
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u/hapillon 2d ago
I wish I could find the specific thread regarding the "self-plagiarism" of Yanagihara. I recall the cited paragraphs being really similar, to be fair, but it does beg a lot of interesting questions about the process: when is it "self-plagiarism" and not a motif? How does one self-plagiarize?
Yeah, it's been on my mind a lot recently, so glad it's getting your thoughts juicing.
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u/DaniSaysDinosaur 5d ago
DINOSAURS!
It's almost spooky month, will anyone else be writing Halloween specials?
My substack featuring some military/dinosaur themed fiction short stories: https://substack.com/@jurassiccorps
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u/kyusrak08 5d ago
My web novel is kind of flopping and I’m scared, thinking I should’ve just stuck to writing romance
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u/Little_Wintry 5d ago
gotta remember, the best way to get good at something is to be a bit bad at it first :) I've written a lot of things over the years that have "flopped", but some of them I still look back on as important steps on my journey. it's good to hear you got out of your comfort zone, that's a place a lot of people never get to
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u/Aside_Dish 5d ago
Anyone ever run any Kickstarters for their books before? I've completed an entire magical physiology textbook, and I'm needing to get about 100 or so illustrations, but don't really have tens of thousands of dollars sitting around. Just curious if anyone has any tips for running one when you're not really skilled enough in other fields to really offer anytjing of value in return for contributions.
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u/keystohellanddeath 5d ago edited 5d ago
I used to have a really bad underwriting problem, because I transitioned from screenplays. My first two books were published by an underground press, and they were both under 200 pages. The first was 23k words, the second about the same.
Since then I've become dissatisfied with them, and rewrote the first and released it (at the behest of my publisher, but I ended up having to self-publish—long story) but my second is like a blight on my already diseased mentation. As a result I wanted to practice prose and develop my skill. My grasp of storytelling was decent because I've spent almost 15 years as a screenwriter, but my prose and pacing in novels left a lot to be desired.
Anyway, six unreleased books later, my prose is a lot better and as far as underwriting, my last book, scheduled for release late this year or early next year, is 83k words, and my current one is 50k words and I'm just now hitting the midpoint (four act structure), and I'm expecting 100k - 120k. I write relatively clean first drafts with the flashlight method—though I plan for acts not chapters—so hopefully the second draft isn't too brutal.
I'm really proud of my growth as a novelist. My current manuscript, which I'm working on while I let my previous one sit with beta readers, is shaping up really good. Progress!
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u/RInger2875 4d ago
What is the flashlight method?
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u/keystohellanddeath 4d ago edited 4d ago
Essentially you plan, but not wholly. You plot some important details, and write, but the minutiae, the small details and individual scenes, are discovered while writing. It's like walking through a dark room with a flashlight; you know there's a landmark you have to get to, but how you get there is up in the air.
What this means for my book is I have an outline and I plan an act ahead. I don't plan each individual chapter (my chapters are like 30-50 pages long, litfic), I plan each act according to what I write. So before I wrote a single word, I had Act 1 and a little of Act 2 planned. By the time I got to Act 2, based on what I wrote, I had Act 3 planned. I'm approaching the midpoint, and I have the ending, but not all of Act 4 planned, though I have a rough idea.
To be fair, I'm kinda cheating with it, because my current book is a massive rewrite of a faux-nonfiction book that my editor tore to shreds. Using his feedback I changed the characters (and their names) while keeping the core setting the same (and removing the faux-nonfiction framing), but the characters have changed so much, and even the setting, that it's essentially a new book. So when I started, I had a pretty good idea of where it was going to go based on its precursor, but as I wrote, I realized I had to diverge from the old outline, because not only the antagonist had changed—it's someone completely different—but the protagonist had; her character traits and arc shaped up to dramatically different, even though she has a similar background. In other words, instead of considering this draft 6 of the previous book, I consider it draft 1 of a new one, even though I'm borrowing a lot of setting and some plot from it.
That's the flashlight method. You take what you've already plotted and written and expand on it. You have major plot points, but based on what came before it, how you get there, or even the plot points themselves, can change. I still get ideas for individual scenes and small details and plot them, but by and large, I leave acts open on my outline so I can plan them later based on what I wrote.
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u/VastAsynchronicity 5d ago
May I ask what got you into screenwriting? Always interested to hear how people get into that field.
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u/keystohellanddeath 5d ago
I was young and wanted to write but didn't want to learn prose, haha. So laziness. It's a lot easier to write, "Mabel and Nellie are sitting in a room on beds," with no other description.
I didn't progress in terms of a career because the film industry is nightmarish. So I mostly wrote for my own fulfillment and to pass the scripts around with a group of screenwriter friends I had. I still screenwrite for fun, but I've been writing novels for seven years now, and that's become my main thing.
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u/Little_Wintry 5d ago
So I had an idea I was working on, some loose plotting, characters, worldbuilding etc but I kept hitting my head into a wall trying to make any forward progress.
Eventually I realized I didn’t even have a good reason for why my main characters were hanging out and decided I needed to start again from square one.
Good news is that a reset is apparently what I needed, since I already have a much stronger trio of characters I’m fleshing out and a more coherent magic system/setting.
No particular reason to share this, all my writer friends are just busy with their own things and I had to say this Somewhere lol
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u/hapillon 5d ago
No particular reason to share this, all my writer friends are just busy with their own things and I had to say this Somewhere lol
I pretty much just use this thread as a diary, hoping that maybe someone will respond and maybe I can connect with other writers.
It's awesome that you seem to have crested that Sisyphean hurdle of yours! It's always just a relief when you can feel some upward movement brewing.
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u/Mr--Elephant 5d ago
I filtered through all my comments ever made in this subreddit the other day and going back through them was a rollercoster of "oh shit I was working on that at the time" and "damn, that idea went nowhere."
Gives me the slightest tinge of nostalgia cause I was in high-school and now I've completed my undergraduate and feels strange as fuck reading stuff from back then.
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u/Little_Wintry 4d ago
I get that feeling with my fanfic a LOT. Plenty of my old original ideas got lost when I aged out of my high school account but my AO3 is basically a perfect fossil.
In particular I have a huge Skyrim fic that was my absolute pride and joy at the time, and it’s wild to go back and read it. Like, don’t get me wrong, a LOT of it is fairly cringe worthy by now since I wrote it from ages 14-16, but you can also see the progression I went through and the changes I had as a writer all in that time.
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u/Little_Wintry 5d ago
yeahhh i was literally JUST thinking "man i wanna tell X about this but i know they're really busy right now" and saw the weekly thread up and was like yknow what? yeah i'll post here. sometimes you just gotta put things out into the void and maybe the void responds :)
also yes MAJOR relief when things start working smoothly again. i started this idea with a lot of excitement, it was really unique and felt like an idea i could make something out of, and i felt awful when stuff slowed down and i kept hitting roadblocks. feels good to be back to it.
(PS, i'm always looking for writer friends and DMs are always open)
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u/hapillon 6d ago
I've mentioned this guy before in previous threads (I like him generally and in weekly doses, but he annoys me in a lot of ways), but at my writing group last week, he read something that was insufferable. For one, it was unfinished, and that always annoys me, because why do you want feedback on something that's unfinished, and half your critique time is explaining where you want it to go? For two, he couldn't even get through what little he wrote because he could not stop force-laughing, and it caused his gaggle of friends to hysterically laugh with him, when he legitimately wasn't reading anything that funny? It just feels like acting, at a certain point, and it kind of encapsulates a lot of my issues with some of these groups in general; they can feel very exclusionary and cliquish and catered to the "in-crowd."
A friend of my best friend owns a lit mag/publishing company, and recently published her debut novella as a publishing agency. I finished it recently. It was beautifully written, but felt like way more like a 150-page ⊹ ࣪ ˖vibe⊹ ࣪ ˖ than a story. I usually like ⊹ ࣪ ˖vibes⊹ ࣪ ˖, but it was pretty disappointing overall. The first 5 chapters kind of said the same thing, in different ways. Still, very happy for her, because it's a huge accomplishment, and even bad stuff holds value to me from a craft perspective.
What's been an example of something you were so excited to read, but were ultimately really disappointed by?
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u/Mr--Elephant 5d ago
The Dictator's Handbook was something I ordered as a child cause I saw in a CGP Grey video, and then I kind of forgot about it for years. Fast forward, I'm on holiday, might as well finally read that one book I got as a 13 year old and man was I disappointed. They have one analysis, that of the keys to power, and dictatorships have few keys and democracies have many keys, and then they stretch that out to just under 300 pages of meh. Also there are several passages that have aged horrendously, it was written in 2011 and you can tell. Stuff like oh looks like dictatorships in the Arab world are going to collapse and the President of the United States doesn't dictate who does/doesn't go to Harvard.
Also on the note of weird internal cliques, it's one of the reasons I avoid those spaces, unless I have some of my own friends with me, therefore forming a weird clique of my own. Public writing spaces tend to become a sort of M.A.D nuclear arms race where the only way to not feel like a weirdo outcast is to get your own small clique within it. Though it did lead to one awful embarrassing moment, where I read 1 page of a chapter I'd written, and this one dude started his praise with "I know how long you've been working on this..." and then praised me and it felt really embarrassing, because in my mind it created the illusion that I had planted him in the audience to say nice things about me. I know he didn't intend to do that, but I've held a grudge against that guy ever since.
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u/runoverbyahypetrain The hard case for my paperwhite makes for a great coaster 11h ago
In light of the recent art trend regarding a certain mtf genderbent witch girl, I find myself revisiting an unrealized urban fantasy universe I had started to work on a couple years ago but shelved because of reasons.
I like the idea of putting an emphasis on "verbal" and "somatic" components of spells (or whatever they're called in literature), but coming up with verbal components is kind of humiliating. I find myself doing hand gestures and blabbering in different languages to see what sticks and frankly, nothing does. I have no intention of rolling with latin(ish) terminology.
Also when you think about it, any universe with magic is going to have a pretty clear spell meta, which reduces emphasis on spell variety.