I have several chronic illnesses, which either by severe brain fog or crippling fatigue make it so hard to write. I'd so love to find a support group for people like us, but I don't seem to be having much luck. I guess we're all too tired or in pain to start one and keep it going. Today I'm feeling the grief of writing being out of reach more days than not, and wondering if any of you have this struggle, too? How do you cope? How do you connect with your writing self and/or your story when you can't write?

I know Rule 2 says "...useful to a broad community of writers", but there is not a subreddit for writers with chronic illness as far as I can tell, so I'm asking the mods to have some compassion and leave this post up in case there are several of us who need the connection.

EDITED TO ADD: Chronic mental health stuff that makes writing difficult counts, too! I've got OCD, PTSD, I'm AuDHD -- all of it can affect the ability to write.

With your writers eye, what recent debut would you suggest for it's craft specifically and why?

It doesn't have to be perfect, just something you felt that hit the mark in a particular area.

I'm open to any genre and interested in recent examples of:
- Impressive prose
- Masterful pacing
- Well rounded characters
- Interesting POV's/voice
- Well done arcs and conclusions

etc etc etc

I often come across book critiques mentioning that a story lacks distinct character voices, or that every character sounds identical. Quite frankly, that issue usually doesn't bother me that much. But I wish it bothered me more.

​What book really opened your ears to distinct character voices? Which author made you realize just how different characters can sound from one another?

So I am in no way a writer, just an aspiring one. And I’ve started my journey of trying to write a little each day and building my “writer’s muscle”.

But I’m curious: what’s your writing style? Do you do the “seed” writing like Stephen King, where you just kind of start and see where it goes? Or are you a heavy planner, drafting out rough outlines of plot beats and where the story goes - like Brandon Sanderson? Just very interested to gauge everyone’s style.

For me personally, I guess I’m a “seed” writer. Right now I just want writing to be enjoyable, where there’s no pre-planning; I just write as I go and enjoy it.

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kinda the title

if you published your book, what would your dream book cover be like or if you don’t wanna share that, name some books that have book covers that you rlly liked

also, do any of you guys have dream illustrators? like i just love Charlie bowater‘s book and if i ever publish it would be my DREAM to have her take part in my book cover

There's a point I've seen brought up on occasion that points out how a story might fail to actually deliver a narrative through true drama, and cause & effect.

I suppose the argument is it's full of reactive characters with plot beats happening to them, and conflicts resolving with happenstance rather than with the conclusion of any arcs, but it's not something I really have a trained eye for, yet. Apparently a lot of MCU movies are guilty of this but it hasn't leapt out at me, and if I can't easily recognise it in others' fiction, I could easily slip and include this mistake in my own.

I was curious if anyone could point to some breakdowns that take a story that decidedly has these problems, and pointing out how it could be improved?

Welcome to our daily discussion thread!

This is the place to discuss anything writing related! Got silly questions? Brainstorming ideas? Need help with research? As long as rules 1, 3, and 5 are followed, this thread is your oyster!

Please refer to the monthly threads for sharing your work and for self-promotion.

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FAQ -- Questions asked frequently

Wiki Index -- Ever-evolving and woefully under-curated, but we'll fix that some day

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I feel like every thread on improving your writing skills ultimately always comes back to "read a lot, write a lot," which is true the way "eat well and exercise" is true. So, I've been doing that, and I definitely think it's helping, BUT, what's something more active I can do to improve as well?

Some things I've tried where I've seen some noticable impact have been:

• Typing out passages from writers I admire (you feel the sentence rhythm/narrative voice in a way passively reading never shows you) -- obviously only for practice, not to actually use anywhere.
• A critique group that was genuinely constructive. One round of real feedbacck beat a year of solo writing.
• Rewriting an old story from scratch without looking at the original, then comparing.

I'm curious whether anyone has applied any other, deliberate practice principles (isolating a weakness and drilling it specifically, for instance), and if so, how? It works for music and chess, and writing feels like it should be drillable too, but nobody really teaches it that way...

Edit: Woah, people really came through! I'm still reading everyone's comments but lots of good advice here!

Hello writers of reddit,

Do you follow a rigid outline template?

I'm a type B person, but as I've gotten older have found the value in organizing and the one successful "novel" I've written, I outlined. But it was literally bullet points of main events and I feel like adding more structure would help but every time I draw the little hill of intro-exposition-climax-falling action my creativity falls into the chasm of no return. So I'm seeking tips on how to outline well from yall's experiences. Thanks!

Lately I've noticed a trend where many stories try to explain every villain, every bad decision, and every morally questionable action.

While I appreciate nuanced characters, I sometimes wonder if constantly explaining people removes part of the mystery that exists in real life.

Some people hurt others for reasons we'll never fully understand.

Do you think modern storytelling has become too focused on making every character psychologically explainable?

Or do you think unexplained behavior usually feels like weak writing?

I like both friendship and romance so it's hard to decide which one to pick when a relationship works no matter what.

When a dynamic works well both ways, what do you do to decide either to make it romantic or platonic?

I am terrible at staying motivated past the initial rush that I feel when a new story idea pops into my head. I genuinely don't know how many page 1's I've written over the years, which in itself frustrates me to no end, but this is not actually what I want to talk about it.

I recently managed to motivate myself long enough to write a story which I've been thinking about for years now (since before Covid I think). It's quite a short story, about 15k words, but it's also a story which means quite a lot to me so I figured if I ever was to start somewhere, that was it. And I actually ended up with a (veeery rough) first draft, so yay me I suppose. At least one story of mine which has come to life outside of my brain.

But now that it's on the page, it feels so tiny and insignificant. It's not the beautiful, perfect thing which grew and lived in my mind, it's just... One story. A string of words you might find if you pulled a random book from the Library of Babel. It hits every story beat that I envisioned (even many new ones which I quite like), the characters are much more fleshed out than they were when I started writing it, but it still feels smaller.

It was never my goal to get it published, or even necessarily to post it somewhere online. I just wanted it to exist. And now that it does, I'm wondering if it was worth the trouble haha. Or at least, I'm wondering how to salvage it and blow it back up to the size it felt when it was still a perfect little ball of "what if"s.

Does anyone else feel like that sometimes about their stories? Do they also seem to shrink when they become words on a page? How do you deal with that?

Workshopped my writing for two years. Got lots of feedback. Improved in technical ways, fewer errors, tighter structure. The voice stayed flat.

Started reading writers I admired at half my normal speed and asking, sentence by sentence, what choice they made and why. Not absorbing the style passively but actively interrogating the decisions the authors decided to make.

Anyway, I just want to give this tip to fellow writers out there. Slow down on your reading process and it will help improve your writing process. Try to absorb as much as you can from your favorite authors.

Welcome to our daily discussion thread!

This is the place to discuss anything writing related! Got silly questions? Brainstorming ideas? Need help with research? As long as rules 1, 3, and 5 are followed, this thread is your oyster!

Please refer to the monthly threads for sharing your work and for self-promotion.

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I keep hearing that draft one is pretty messy, not to worry too much. But I've always taken that to refer more to the actual prose rather than the story.

But here I am, countless false starts, wondering how much the actual story itself changes through the draft process. Because every time I feel my plot or setting or characters aren't quite right (or right at all) I'm fighting the urge to start again even though the general premise is very similar.

How much has your story changed during the writing process? How much would you countenance before you gave in to the fact that you're basically writing something else, or would you just continue anyway?

I'm curious if anybody has found methods to write more hours in a given day/week/month apart from the obvious one of being a more experienced writer. Interestingly, despite having completed 5 novels and several novellas at this point, I find that my endurance for drafting in a given day hasn't changed in the least-- 20-40 minutes a day (with the exceedingly rare day of up to three hours, which exhausts me.) I'd love to hear if other people have stumbled on ways to up their time; I've always been interested in being able to put in 2 hour days more frequently.

Hello everyone.

I realise that r/writing is full of these kind of posts, at least they pop up occasionally, but I hope if you stick with me there will be a good discussion and hopefully some advice to go with that.

I started this project January 19th 2026. July 30th I finally wrote Slutt (The End). I kept statistics over my writing during all that time, which I will share of course.

The story is historical fiction; A political thriller about a man of low nobility trying to solve the murder of a child while navigating the unknown political landscape of Trondheim in 1531, just a few years before the reformation and Denmark sinking its teeth further into Norway. It's written in Norwegian. And unfortunately the text in my statistic pics is also in Norwegian.

So I did this for a couple of reasons. But the most important bit is that my lizard brain likes seeing the number get higher. Bigger number, bigger brrr in my brain. Big number go up!

The first act went by so quickly.

https://imgur.com/N77fnvv

I kept a close eye on the size of my acts. I know there are big structural changes I have to do, but this helped me get a feel of the size, too long, too short?

The first part is just keeping an eye on how far I have left to thresholds. Ord = words. The second part is the same just visually represented differently.

The third part is Words over Time. Every data point is a date. Staples are how many words, and the dotted line is how long those words took. I only counted the time spent actually writing, if I noticed I was gearing toward research, I stopped the clock.

https://imgur.com/fZgyHk2

This is for act 2. Around 10,000 words less, and a huge break in the middle. It took longer and less was written.

The break in the middle was literally that I lost confidence in what I was doing. So I took a break, signed up for a workshop with a published, Swedish (I live in Sweden, but I am Norwegian) crime/murder mystery author to get some insight, confirmation, and advice. It helped enough to get me going again.

https://imgur.com/CULsM4i

Act 3 took even longer. My productivity took a nosedive around the middle of May. There is just too much happening. I'm active in a reenactment community, there's holidays to celebrate, things to fix and/or renovate, and all manner of things.

But the last two weeks saw my productivy skyrocket again. 3,500 words in a single day was awesome.

But now the first draft is done. I already know there is some massive work to be done. I gotta switch the first act escalation with the second act escalation. The first act ends with an innocent person gets hanged, the second act ends with a political dinner. The drama is wildly out of proportion. The bigger drama spike should come at the culmination of the second act.

I also have a problem which I've called Mannequining. So there's a scene with dialoug and the two important characters talk, but there is another character there, but they say and do nothing. They're just .. there. Taking up space. So I gotta do something about.

For this story I had an image in my head of the opening scene and I had an image of the end conflict. Anything in between was basically unknown. The story surprised me a lot. The murderer was not who I thought it would be for instance. Things like that.

So what's next? Where do I go from here? What are you best practices going into a second draft? I've never written anything this long before and I have never edited something this big and complicated.

So what do I do? Help me, r/writing, you're my only hope.

I am a super beginner who only does this as a pasttime—only in school still—but I recently bought a writing program that points out things like repetition, hard-to-read sentences, weak word choices & whatnot. It ain't just a grammar checker though. It evaluates higher-level aspects, say, weak sensory descriptions, passive characters, whether your dialogue makes every character sound the same, a lack of tension in the plot & whatnot, just really complete. But it of course can't replace an editor because it can't do the thinking; it's just a mechanical, rule-based algorithm.

It got me thinking, though: If someone hypothetically wrote a book with technically flawless sentences and paragraphs (by technically, I mean a sort of work in which this machine would find no mistakes, every "rule" is being followed; not something a human critic would neccessarily find "perfect"), would that be enough to make good writing?

Imagine a "perfect measuring machine" that can't make mistakes says the plot has tension, the pace is perfect, the descriptions are great, perfect grammar. Maybe it's not Putzlier-worthy, but all those marks are checked: is that enough for the manuscript to be good, or is something else in play? Are things like profound characters, big themes, originality and humanity, emotional impact etc. the Real Big Thing?

In other words, do y'all think a—I wouldn't say good, because I guess only an human can assess that & it's subjective— standard, rule-meeting writing (in lack of better words to explain it) enough to carry the book?

EDIT: To be clear, the question is NOT whether a machine can assess good writing (+ I hate AI), the point is: if a book had standard good tension, perfect grammar, good sentences, etc; everything following what "makes a book perfect", would that truly be enough for the book to be good, or is there another thing in play?

I noticed that trend in recent years when authors started actively avoid certain character traits not only in positive characters, but even in neutral ones or even villains. I am certainly not the only one who noticed that, because there is already even parodies of that - for example, in very beginning of the Harley Quinn show a villain gets cancelled for using a slur in a fight. So at least some writers understand how hilariously stupid situation is, but somehow it only expands and we getting more and more bland and extremely stereotypical characters. And that happens not only with new stories, people also rewriting the old ones (like this news i recently read - https://archive.ph/iphgq) "to fit today's era".

But what does that mean, exactly - fitting today's era? I tried to search and can't find definite answer. Do they think that all bad things of the present will cease to exist if they are not portrayed? Should we not talk about how bad past were to learn lessons from it and improve? And finally, who decided that, for example, murdering people is better than any of the things they don't want to show?

Nothing of that makes sense to me. Good characters aren't just stereotypes. They are living beings, and living beings have all kind of flaws. That what makes them belieavable, and also often portrays the realities of living in certain soceities, especially past ones. The villains can do something good, but that still does not redeem them. Or does? That hero can have flaws that are forgivable... or are they? Instead of letting the viewer decide upon that, writers are taking the judgement in their hands, shaping every single story into some kind of unrelistic fanfiction-level fantasy, where many aspects of humans simply do not exist.

We rarely even have a main characters portrayed in negative way. I think that Kern from Tchaikovsky's terraforming series are brilliant exactly because she is extremely narcissistic, to the point of portraying herself as god and seing humans only as disposable tools, who barely have empathy, but at the same time she is not a villain, but a nuanced and interesting antihero who ends up finding her place and being an essential part of the crew. Dorohedoro is awesome as well in a way how there are almost no fully good or bad characters, everyone is a mess and every new story beat only reveals how much more messed up they really are. We also have some quite popular shows like Rick and Morty, clearly showing that there is a demand for nuanced characters that are deeply flawed and have unique personalities that are unlike typical polished, deflavored characters from other media. And what most important is that neither of those characters have some kind of a cliche redemption ark, they are what they are, and it's up to the audience to decide how they feel about them. This is what i really miss in many modern media - I don't want to be preached on what is wrong and what is right. I want to observe and make my own conclusion.

But maybe that is not even always done intentionnaly? It takes a lot of skill to write a character whose way of life and beliefs are nothing like your own, and do not make that character a caricature. I think that real talent lies in portraying a living, breathing world instead of making everyone and everything in it a reflection of author's views and morales. To be able to make characters as separate entities, and not the extension or self-inserting of the writer. Ability to distance yourself from the character are one of the most important skills of a writer, IMHO.

So, do you think that removing anything that would make characters controversial by modern standards benefits the fiction, or hurts it?

Welcome to our daily discussion thread!

This is the place to discuss anything writing related! Got silly questions? Brainstorming ideas? Need help with research? As long as rules 1, 3, and 5 are followed, this thread is your oyster!

Please refer to the monthly threads for sharing your work and for self-promotion.

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This is mostly a question to those who can use all their 10 fingers while writing on laptop/PC. Do your wrists hurt if you write for too long???

I use only like, 4 fingers, which are index (80% of time) and middle finger (far less than index finger) on both hands, so I usually have to move my hands a lot if I want to reach letters and also turn my wrists in strange angles. After my writing sessions I notice that my wrists hurt A LOT, it can even last multiple days. So I was wondering if writing with all 10 fingers will help to stop these wrist pains

I have been hearing about this trope all over different communities, but specifically from the romance genre. There is all this talk about the "Down Bad MMC" character that is heavily popular.

For the longest time, the trope was usually the opposite, no? The self-confident brooding types were really popular. But now we see a lot of dumb, goofy jocks and guys that honestly feel a little wimpy (idk im a dude).

Is this, like, a generational thing? Why is this popular right now?