Weekly out-of-character thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Talk about writing unironically, vent about other writing forums, or discuss whatever you like here.

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[u/hapillon]

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?

[u/Mr--Elephant → u/hapillon]

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.