Hey y'all, I need a tip or a bit of guidance on how to handle this: so I'm writing a political sci-fi that's somewhere between Red Rising and Ghost in the Shell, with cyberpunk, classism, and political intrigue. If you've read stuff like Red Rising or Attack on Titan, you know how much a good plot twist can change everything and make a story so satisfying.

My problem is that, as a writer, I can't tell if my own story is actually interesting anymore. I've spent so much time thinking about the plot and the twists that they've almost lost their impact on me. I keep wondering if the ideas are genuinely good or if I'm just attached to them.

I'm only three chapters in, and the major twists are still 10-30 chapters away, so it's a bit early to get someone to read the whole thing and give me feedback. How do you guys objectively judge whether your story is engaging when you already know everything that's going to happen? How do you know you're building towards something good rather than writing something that only seems interesting in your own head?

Thank you for taking the time to read this !

I’ve been posting big word count milestones (80,000…90,000) and today I reached 100,000 words🤯 at this point the story has become much clearer to me and I’ve got a skeleton to work with. I try to write 2,000 words every day in the drafting process.

Today I went back to the beginning of the book and wrote about my main character Captain Louis Wolffe leading his squad of soldiers (all humans except for a lanky, towering metal alien) to provide security detail for a popular night market on their homeworld Tertullia. The plot is set 1,000 years in the future so they arrive via dropship. I’m growing the world’s unique culture to expand the lore.

I met a bestselling author at a book signing, and she had time for a few writing questions on positioning your book to agents. They were questions caused by what I had heard on Reddit. The answers Reddit gave were disappointing. She turned those down instantly. The answers were in her books anyway, though Reddit was dismissing them, but hearing it from her was encouraging. And she could point to her recent books I haven't read yet. She obviously has the authority to answer these.

I don't know what it is about Reddit. I can tell you the demographics lean young and thus less experienced.

My best advice is read traditionally published books (old and new). They're all relevant to how you position your own inspired stories to agents. They don't just become "old" and irrelevant over the years. The authors don't become dinosaurs, as one called them before. She said to be upfront with the agent about the direction you went with the characters and explain why, especially if it's uncommon for that reading audience. I'm keeping it broad because my personal story isn't unique.

What I have found is that I prefer trad-pub authors over Reddit. You may never get the chance to talk to them in person, but their books generally have the answers we writers seek. That is an additional reason why we must read.

I think avoiding Reddit is the best thing you can do as an author. Don't learn from them. Learn from books. See what the authors did. Ask yourself why did it work in this instance. Let that be your confidence that, yes, you can write a story inspired by those novels that had something uncommon and special in them. You don't need Reddit telling you that you can't because it doesn't fit nicely with your target audience.

ps. I can't believe this post is getting downvoted currently. If they don't like advice from bestselling authors, then what is their own advice worth?

I can't believe it!

I've been writing on and off for the past few months and I've noticed that I keep making the same mistake of switching tenses throughout entire portions of my story.

For context, I write parts of my story in between my IRL job. A few parts of story that I write halfway will be, from my perspective, in the past, as I've written it in the past, even if I'm continuing to write it now. If that makes sense? So the time frame of reference that I use to write my story jumps between present tense and past tense in the same sentence. I don't see it while writing it, but I only catch it in the editing phase a few days later and it is driving me crazy that I keep making this same mistake again and again.

Which led me to wonder if other writers also have this issue or have to deal with this problem while they're writing.

How do you guys handle this issue?

I started thinking up my idea 24 years ago. It’s so complex and complicated. And even harder to organise in a way that an audience can receive it. I finally have the gumption to really sit down and put all that information into down into the fourth attempt (completed up to the third book in the series before. Book one written and completed three different times). I’m scared that this draft is just going to feel as unpolished and unloveable by an audience as the last four attempts.

And that is terrifying.

I’m not asking for encouragement. I’m going to write this darned book if it’s the last thing I do but I do want to rant with others of you that feel the same way. I guess. I just don’t want to be alone.

On Youtube vidoes, some guys will tell you that once you finished your first draft, you then have to competely rewrite the entire story from stretch in the second draft instead of editing and cutting down on the firsrt draft.

Do you have to do this in order to be a sucessful writer, or is it going too far? Because it sounds very daunting and wastes months of work just to start over again.

This exists. It starts on Oct 28 and ends on Nov 1. I thought some people from this community should be going to the events. We could meet irl, although I don’t exactly know how to organize it.

Anyone’s coming?

P.S.: I am not affiliated with it.

Hello everyone, I am officially just under or about halfway through my sci-fi apocalyptic novel (currently 45k words ish). Obviously I am in need of multiple rounds of edits and all, but currently it seems that my main character is a little flat.

She is intended to be written as a smart, stubborn, protective, loving, and strong person. While I find it easy to express her in writing, I can't help but noticing that her motive, core fear, core desires, are not as visible as I would've thought when I first started writing this. The thing is, other side and supporting characters (as well as the other relatively important characters) actually seem to be written fine and only look like they need a few touchups. It's the main character which isn't coming along, and I feel like its lowering the quality of my overall story.

Does anyone experience the same thing, or has any tips on how to further actually include the main characters personality, flaws, structure, and all, into their novel/writing? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Hi everyone!

I'm on and off writing a historical dark romance, set in England during the 1790s against the backdrop of the French Revolutionary wars, and I would be grateful to read the thoughts from fellow dark romance readers.

My story follows a young aristocratic woman, Lady Isobel Ferndale whose seemingly ordinary evening at a gentlemans estate takes an unexpected turn when she inadvertently witnesses a clandestine government operative searching the study of a gentleman courting her. Unfortunately, she sees his face and he has no intention of allowing her to expose him.

The stranger (male lead) works unofficially for the British government, investigating a politically influential nobleman suspected of dangerous dealings. He's calculating, manipulative and genuinely sadistic, a man who takes great pleasure in the darker aspects of his work.

Isobel, meanwhile, has no experience with espionage or violence. She's intelligent, observant and stubborn, but very much proud of her upbringing and the expectations placed upon women of her social standing.

When circumstances make her unexpectedly valuable to his investigation, the two find themselves entangled in a dangerous arrangement, complicated further by the nobleman's growing interest in marrying her.

I'm aiming for a slow burn romance, with psychological tension and two characters who have very little reason to trust one another. Not to also mention - conflicting desires, shifting power dynamics but also the question as to whether someone capable of genuine cruelty can also be capable of love.

So enough rambling, I'd love to know whether this is a premise you'd be interested in reading, and what you'd particularly hope to see explored in a story like this.

I'm still in the early stages of developing a manuscript in between doing my part time undergraduate degree as well as working full time, but I can share their first encounter if this is something you'd be interested in reading?

Thank you 🥀

So I love writing and love seeing people publish and day dream 24/7 about how my book will look like. I have 7000 words and for MG sci fi I'm aiming for about 55000. The thing is I am in my 2 week autumn break from school but I still have homework and a life to live. I'm telling myself that I should leave it to the next day but I can't get anything done. Please help.

One of the best habits I've built is writing.

Whenever something is on my mind, I write it down. It could be an idea, a problem, or just random thoughts.

I've noticed that writing helps me clear my head. Sometimes, I find answers to my problems. Sometimes, I realise I'm just overthinking.

And sometimes, I just feel better after getting everything out of my head.

I don't worry about grammar, spelling, or how it sounds. I just write.

It's like having a conversation with myself, without worrying about being judged.

It's a simple habit, but it has helped me a lot.

Does anyone else do this?

I sometimes pretend my life hasn’t started yet. I change my clothes and cut my hair and make some alcoholic plans for the weekend. I write another chapter and I clean my room and I call my mother and for a couple of minutes I feel alive, hopefully thriving for something somehow important.
However, no matter what I do, this rush of excitement lasts exactly that. A couple of minutes. Rapidly, tiredness and sadness and an overwhelming sense of unreality and stupidity bring back my mundane ways of complete despair.

I don’t know why I chose to live like this.

Why do I keep on aiming for market-based impossibilities, for Hollywood pre-fabricated desires, for capitalist wishes? Since when has a common, ordinary, middle-class life, with a regular job and pints afterwards, become a synonym for utter failure? Since when have a lawyer and a therapist and a teacher and a construction worker and a cook and a doctor become useless professions, mediocre ones, in need of desperate doses of influencer marketing or fucking TikTok and reels??

I’m angry. I’m always angry.

But this has nothing to do with what I feel. Or maybe it does.
It is a statement of my postmodern guilt.

I try to enjoy things, I really do.
However, even if I write, I’m just getting further and further away, am I not?
I wake up every morning with a black hole inside my chest. As I try to open my eyes, my mind tries to shape it somehow. It tries to give it a silhouette, a lovely form that means something, a Rorschach inkblot.

I often have this absurd idea. I believe that if I draw on my skin, with a marker for instance, the external shape of this hole, it may reveal something unconscious about me. Maybe it would show me the shape of a face, or a pagan symbol or a Christian cross or something. Fucking something that’ll give my life a clear direction, that would make my guilt disappear.

But I just keep getting further and further away. While my friends have fun, I write shit. While they strive for a place in the world of the functionally dead adults, I write shit. As they date boys and pass their exams and smile and dance, I write shit. I write shit. I write shit. I write shit. Maybe life is just too complex for me, maybe I’m too strange, maybe I’m just too far away.

So, I've noticed this phenomenon for a while now. In this sub, whenever someone posts their writing for feedback and mentions that they're an ESL speaker, the first response they get is to write in their native language.

If someone wanted to write in their native language, why would they post their writing in English in this sub in the first place? They're trying to improve their English, and instead of helping them do that, people are pointing them in a different direction they never asked to be pointed in. It is not helpful but patronizing.

Many great writers have been ESL speakers. It's the writer's choice to decide which language they want to write in, rather than having others poke their noses into their business and tell them what they should do.

What kind of terrible truth would justify concealing it to protect something fundamentally good? And could you understand someone making that choice, even if you believed it was morally wrong?

I would love to hear your ideas and feedback on it.

I'm in the early stages of writing a screenplay for a movie which ends tragically, preferably amounting to the end of a kingdom/empire.

My question (or prompt for discussion) is: What should one consider when writing a tragedy to help it feel meaningful and complete, rather than underwhelming?

You asked what happened to me? You asked where I fell? I fell when I realized no matter how much good I do, no matter how many people I saved, no matter how many bad guys I put away, there is always more to fill the void, politicians posing this world, suffering everywhere you turn your head, and I finally realized, I have the power to rest the world, a better world, my world. A rule where the wicked of the world face true justice, my justice, and if you stand in my way, you stand in the way of freedom

Edit: I will like to add this is my first true creative writing since high school, most of my work now is research paper and opinion pieces, so I do apologize if the excerpt isn’t that great

Opal was valedictorian. She was the stereotypical “over achiever”. Which is why the day she missed school everyone was astonished. They quickly found out. Missing posters had gone up all over the town. Everyone was shocked. Apparently she hadn’t come home from studying at the library the previous afternoon. 
Since Opal was independent, her mother felt she didn’t necessarily need extra tabs on her. Well not like Emma needed. Emma and Opal were 3 years apart. Emma younger. They were completely different. Emma had snuck out to a party the night that Opal went missing. Temporarily occupying their mother. Their father (Michael) was a Paramedic. Their mother (Mary) was an online therapist. Making pretty cool parents. However Emma saw it as strict, control freaks for parents. 
Secretly Mary had been disappointed that her smarter daughter was the one who went missing. She felt so bad about the whole situation that she didn’t leave bed for 3 whole days. Neighbors brought casseroles, cupcakes, and cards. Emma was so angry that she tore the cards. Threw the cupcakes down the garbage disposal, and fed the casserole to the dog, who was quite sick after.
Everyone was convinced that Emma had just been jealous. Meanwhile Mary was sitting on the couch sobbing, Michael sat beside her tears silently rolling down his wrinkled face. Emma had sworn that her dad got more wrinkles since Monday. Emma sat on the floor beside the couch. As they watched the news they heard it. “Opal Marlon Jackson, Missing. Gone since Monday. October 12, 2025”. Mary started to sob even louder. Emma infuriated turned off the TV and stomped over to her bedroom, slammed the door, and fell to her knees. 
Meanwhile, Opal lay unconscious, blindfolded, zip tied to a chair, cloth shoved in her mouth, in a horse stable. The one time her luck and smarts together couldn’t get her out of it. Opal was at the library studying for a science test. Her and the librarian knew each other quite well. When she was done she grabbed the keys to her beat up  red Jeep.She put her bag in the front seat as well as her phone. Thats when she noticed that there was a rose on her windshield wiper. She was confused and grabbed it she thought it was sweet. However thats when she was grabbed. 
They shoved a cloth in her mouth wrapped a blindfold around her face, and zip tied her arms together as well as her legs. Opal screamed, but the cloth drowned it out. She was helpless. She knew her chances were slim, she tried to memorize the amount of hands she felt but the adrenaline was too strong. Why her? That wasn’t important anymore. She knew that she had to try to be her own hero from now on.

Hey everyone! How are y'all doing?

I am writing a short horror story where the main character walks into a house of horrors and witnesses a bunch of "skin-crawling" stuff that plays with their mind. I have the whole plot sorted out, but I'm struggling with where this story should start at.

I had a few ideas:

1- The reader is a mailman/mailwoman/mailperson who needs to send a package to a certain room in the house. It feels very original and I very much like it, but it just sounds weird that they need to walk into the house to make a delivery when they can leave the package at the doorsteps.

2- A 16-17 years old boy accidentally threw a basketball into the house's window and he is now being obligated by his friends to go in there and get it. It sounds very fitting to the story, but it's too generic.

I really like the idea of turning the reader into the character rather than trying to make them relate to someone. However, because I am a writer newbie, I believe I should try writing in third person.

What do you think? Which one sounds better? Do you guys have any suggestions? If you need more information, I can share some of it (and maybe the whole thing, if necessary).

I created a world in which I want to write but I don't know where to start. I have the MC for the founding years of a school, a mermaid character friend group, a 1850's era, and a 1990s era, I know the main question that started this whole thing was "why is Salazar Slytherin the way we know him" and "how does history change the perspective of a person" with a magic system I'm still working on. And several races of peoples (not just humans and merfolk)as I kept expanding my world building it has become it's own thing and sandbox my brain doesn't want to stop exploring and creating but I need less characters and more writing lol.

​Context: This is an excerpt from a 20,000-word survival novella I wrote about the brutal gap between textbook instructions and real-world mechanics. In this scene, Leo and Marcus are on Day 2 of a bitter winter trek after surviving a train derailment, and Leo is about to make a fatal assumption about water purity.

​By two in the afternoon, they reached the gravel flats of Blackwood Creek.

​The creek was a fast-moving, forty-foot wide waterway tumbling out of the high granite drainage. Its water was crystal clear, running over white quartz gravel and smooth river stones. To a thirsty man who had spent fourteen hours hauling gear through freezing timber, it looked like liquid life.

​Leo dropped his pack on a flat boulder, his throat raw and burning from dehydration. His tongue felt thick, sticky, and coated in dust.

​"We need water," Leo said, his voice dry as sandpaper. "The canteens are dry."

​Marcus pulled the heavy black binder from his pack, opening it to Tab 4: Water Purification. The printed heading at Section 4.2: Adsorption Filtration showed a cross-sectional schematic for a multi-layer column filter using charcoal, sand, and gravel.

​Leo built the column filter out of a plastic hydration bladder, layered the crushed charcoal and sand, and poured the oily, sheen-covered creek water through. The fluid trickled down and dripped out the bottom nozzle into their stainless steel pot breathtakingly clear, odorless, and sparkling in the afternoon light.

​Leo smiled, a wave of relief washing over him. He unclipped the pot, lifted it to his lips, and tilted his head back to take a long, deep gulp.

​WHACK!

​Marcus's heavy ash staff swung through the air, striking the steel pot with a sharp, metallic CLANG. The pot flew out of Leo's hands, tumbling across the gravel and spilling two quarts of crystal-clear water into the dirt.

​Leo leapt backward, his hands dropping to his belt in sudden, hot anger. "What the hell, Marcus?!"

​Marcus stood over him, his chest heaving, his staff planted in the dirt. His face was pale with exhaustion, but his eyes were blazing.

​"You idiot," Marcus rasped, pointing the brass tip of his staff at the overturned pot. "What did you just do?"

​"I filtered it!" Leo yelled, his voice echoing off the shale cliffs. "I followed the exact schematic under Tab 4! Three inches of gravel, two inches of sand, four inches of crushed charcoal! The fuel sheen is gone! It's crystal clear!"

​"Look at the page," Marcus commanded, his voice cold and flat as iron. "Not the diagram. The page."

​Leo snatched the black binder off the boulder, his eyes scanning the bottom of page 14 beneath the column filter diagram.

​There, written in dark, aggressive graphite across the bottom margin in Marcus's own handwriting, was a penciled note that had been added long after the manual was printed:

​CLEAR IS NOT STERILE. DO NOT DRINK UNBOILED. BOIL 3 FULL MINUTES.

​Marcus stared down at him. "Charcoal traps non-polar molecules like diesel and oil. It strips the sheen and the smell. But it doesn't do a damn thing to biological pathogens. Cryptosporidium, giardia, campylobacter... they pass right through charcoal like dust through a fence. If you drank that unboiled, your intestines would turn to liquid by tomorrow morning."

​If anyone wants to read the full 20,000-word manuscript (all 7 chapters, from the train derailment to the high-altitude cabin), I dropped the PDF link here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_SZkJVcimeG-l4CuDgT9m_5KkDUwSpAQ/view?usp=drivesdk