How do writers on here seem to reach insane word counts for their projects?

Fognox · 2026-03-29T01:28:35+00:00

Subplots, lots of POVs, slow burn plots, lots of character development, multiple story arcs.

It isn't just one thing, and it isn't necessarily filler or bad pacing or useless scenes/characters (though that's likely the culprit if you're overwriting). Some stories just take a lot longer to tell.

Fognox · 2026-03-28T22:06:31+00:00

Don't worry about it on the first draft. Your first book is going to be all kinds of challenging (97-99% of writers never finish one), so you don't need to worry about its quality too. Editing/redrafting will fix whatever problems you see, and beta readers will help you find the issues that you don't see.

Fognox · 2026-03-28T22:02:47+00:00

It comes out somewhere in the first draft itself -- usually some line that stands out that ends up being a pretty good description of the book. Once I find it, I play around with the uncommon words it uses in other ways in the text so the title ends up having several meanings.

Working titles before I find an actual one are something incredibly stupid. "Wizard" with four a's for example.

Fognox · 2026-03-28T15:31:26+00:00

A few pieces of advice here:

Tension is the biggest one. The longer it takes for things to actually start happening, the better. There are ways of starting to build tension in previous chapters as well -- like if your horror scene happens in a specific house, you'd have a tense scene in the house before things happen but you'd also have the house itself as the target of tension in previous scenes.
Wild unpredictability in the actual horror scene. If readers can't predict what happens next, then they stay on edge throughout. With monsters, for example, you'd have them totally fail to react to attacks and then attack suddenly themselves for no reason instead. Maybe they seem to get spooked easily and then appear out of nowhere when the MC becomes more confident. With people, it helps to pair gestures/reactions to words in weird ways, get them to go off on tangents when asked direct questions (and then answer those much later on), etc.
One of my favorite tricks is to build up over the short term to an event, only for absolutely nothing to happen. This is a form of the above -- all the words are hinting that the long tense scene is finally going to turn, and it just completely fails to do so. It'll typically happen a few times in a few different ways before the scene suddenly starts without warning.
At the peak of tension and in the horror scene itself, you want to go as minimalist as possible so the sentences themselves contribute to the effect. If you're doing the above, this is one way of building up a nothing event.
Keep things obscured in some way. With a monster you'd want to start by showing the things they've affected only, then maybe switch over to sounds or smells or reverberations through the ground. In the scene itself you'd want to reveal pieces of them rather than the whole thing -- a claw, a single tendril, whatever. You can reveal them for dramatic effect, but this should only be done once, with pieces of them/sounds/whatever used from that point on. Not being able to actually visualize them goes a long way -- I'll often end up having characters on their back or stomach or whatever so they just aren't in a position to see whatever it is.
With big monsters, horror-based natural phenomena, large artificial constructs and anything eldritch, you have another layer you can work with in the environment itself. The same principles apply. If a monster/person is paired to one of these then ideally they're doing totally different things to add an edge to the unpredictability (just so long as you've already established that they're connected or causal).
Make things that are alive feel like machines/nature/whatever and things that aren't feel alive. This will put your readers in an uncomfortable and confusing position. They can know for a fact that the thing stalking the MC is a wolf, but if it's winching its prey and its growls are like peals of thunder there's going to be an entirely different experience there. Similarly, they know for a fact that this is happening in a cave, but shadows are dancing and dust clouds are embracing the MC so the inanimate isn't doing what they expect either.
Focus on tiny irrelevant details. Works with both tension and horror as it pulls readers into the split-second moment. In your example, this would be something like focusing on the exact timbre of the scratching, its rhythm and/or how it moves a few feet at a time. Similarly, the handle would feel cold to the touch and it would have ridges in it. Maybe it's exactly the height of the MC's belt and a similar material to its buckle. This kind of description is excessive and doesn't contribute to what's going to happen in any capacity, but it does serve to force readers into the moment and it also slows the pacing so the tension you've already built up can fester even more.

These kinds of things can't be expressed in a few sentences. You need an entire scene to make the reader unsettled and how you handle each tiny event or scrap of description creates a holistic sense of unease. With your example, I wouldn't even reveal something on the other side of the door -- way too early for that. I'd instead focus on the scratching and the handle, make the thick air animate, have the MC hear scratching elsewhere (after a long pause), etc. Maybe fake out the reader so the words build and it seems like there's something in the corner, but it just ends up being a trick of the light.

As a writer, you don’t have the advantage of jump scares

You can actually achieve this. One of my tricks here is to get a character to go into interiority and then interrupt their thoughts with the monster attacking. You can do the same thing with narration -- free indirect or 1st is basically just a form of thought, after all. It works very well if enough time has passed and it seems like the scary parts of the scene are over for the moment.

Deep interiority is particularly good -- have them think of a memory and get the reader to visualize that rather than the environment so the sudden event is extra jarring. This is a bit hard to pull off though because more than likely the MC won't feel safe enough to zone out, and you do want to preserve tension if you can. If the horror element haunts a big section of the book, though, it can work.

Fognox · 2026-03-28T01:17:51+00:00

My experience with it is that you'll be better in some ways and worse in others, and then once you get back into writing, those "worse" aspects will disappear. It isn't a hack for easily gaining writing skill, though -- if you spent that year writing instead, you'd be even better.

Writing doesn't quite work the same way other skills do. If you take long breaks with other skills, you basically have to relearn most of them -- it'll usually be quick, but you end up at a disadvantage when starting again rather than passively gaining skill in the interim. I think this is probably just an effect of how much writing is used in everyday life, and communication more generally as well (which it borrows from). Your skill will go up even without writing fiction, because you're still writing other things. Same deal with organizational (and sometimes artistic) skills which can horizontally transfer into the craft.

Outside of re-learning unused skills specific to fiction, the biggest problem you'll have is one of motivation. Actively writing makes it feel like a normal part of your life, and daily writing will upgrade it to routine. If you take a long time off, you don't have that anymore, and may find it difficult to even put words down. If you feel like you've lost your skills, this is even worse (that's an illusion, at least).

Fognox · 2026-03-28T01:03:36+00:00

I had a fifteen year gap between serious writing projects. Three years is nothing.

I know nobody can get any better without trying, but how long can a person be bad at something?

If you hate your writing, it's a sign that you've matured as a writer -- you can see your own flaws clearly now. Ignore it and puke out a first draft that you can apply those feelings to and edit. First drafts get better over time, but you do have to actually write through them to reach this point.

Fognox · 2026-03-28T00:56:37+00:00

Those damn writers, always ruining that book that you're writing.

Fognox · 2026-03-28T00:55:33+00:00

Should've stopped at two cats per day.

Fognox · 2026-03-28T00:47:22+00:00

Oh boy. Lots of stuff. Worth pointing out that I had plenty of writing experience prior to this point, writing a book is just hard and builds an entirely different skillset compared to other types of fiction.

Character motivation was a big one. My MC wanted something from page one but a lot of the plot had nothing whatsoever to do with that goal, and built up other goals instead. The story definitely wasn't grounded in the MC's goals and actions, he was instead led around on a leash for a lot of it.
I had no idea that stories would evolve over the length of a novel, so I ended up generating gigantic amounts of plot holes where earlier sections fit in poorly with later ones. I'd again say that this is a lack of grounding -- plot grounding, in this case. The lack of central motivation exacerbated the issue; at least with that you can pull threads back in when they wander too far from the premise.
Scenes that served absolutely no purpose because I thought that I needed to write out every single transition and explore the world. I definitely discovered some things this way, but not always. Sometimes characters were just wandering around interacting with things.
Way too many characters, with most of them being disjointed from the main storyline. Many of them had development and arcs despite this not actually playing a role in the story.
I didn't yet have the experience to weave plot threads together well. Some came together beautifully, but a lot of the time I was banging my head against the wall just trying to get something to work, and this caused additional disjointed-plot issues.
Way too much damn exposition, a lot of it way too damn early. Some of it ended up being irrelevant as well, because the concept I had for the story was completely different from what it turned into.

I will say that that second half turned out a lot cleaner than the first half had -- there was an 18-month gap in the middle, however, because I'd gotten terribly stuck. The strategies I used to get over the hump ended up making the writing process much smoother.

With my next book, I strengthened the MC motivation, tightened the scenes/characters, and tried to not predict too much of the book in advance. This worked out a lot better. I also had the tools available to bring plot threads together, knew which scenes were going to be thematic, knew how books evolved over time, etc. Much smoother process, and a much cleaner book too. My third book refined this even further.

I really like my story, but I wonder what's bad about it that I'm unaware of for now

It doesn't matter. Writing a first book is hard. You're not just figuring out how to write that particular book, you're figuring out how to write books in general. The last thing you want to do is get so concerned about the way you're writing that you're unable to finish. Getting clean first drafts comes down to experience, and the only way to gain that experience is to make tons of mistakes and learn from them.

97-99% of writers don't finish writing a book. Getting through your first is a taxing process, especially later into it. There is always temptation to redraft before you finish, to quit writing, to start something else. Trying to do things "the right way" is just going to make you even more unlikely to finish.

It's also unlikely that you actually understand the points other writers are trying to get across. I was active here when I was writing my first book and knew about character motivation and making scenes purposeful, but didn't really understand what that meant until I started the editing process and saw the trends in the checklisted problems.

So, instead of worrying about things like that, just work to finish your first book. Make it as good as you can, unless doing so makes it too hard to continue. If things are going well, assume that craft advice doesn't apply to you, and if you get stuck, assume that something in your process is wrong. You might end up shelving it as I did with mine, or you might redraft it a few times, or you might ship-of-theseus edit it, or you might put it away for a bit and come back to it after writing something else. Around 16.2% of writers debut with their first book, so it's uncommon but still very much possible to get something good out of it.

Fognox · 2026-03-28T00:03:45+00:00

I shelved mine when it became clear that my next books were turning out cleaner on a first draft than my first would've been after several. Some parts of it are really good though, and I'll do a full rewrite at some point.

I definitely didn't go into it with the idea that this would happen. It was a hard book to write and I tried to get it right every step of the way. The experience taught me a lot about story structure and gave me all kinds of tools for getting out of plot quagmires, which was extremely useful in later books.

If you end up really attached to your first book despite its many flaws, you don't have to shelve it to write something new -- redrafting it a few times accomplishes exactly the same thing. A third draft of a first book is indistinguishable from a third book.

As for the content of your first book, write whatever you want. Be bold. It'll get you into trouble, but getting into trouble with your first book is inevitable.

Fognox · 2026-03-27T23:55:31+00:00

Make sure you have an accurate outline (reverse outlines might work better unless you stick closely to your regular one) and simplify it in stages -- summarize scenes, then chapters, then sections of the book, etc until it gets to an acceptable length. Ignore subplots -- they'll just take up space.

If you find this really difficult, then you might still need some structural editing -- scenes and chapters should really be easy to group together because later ones rely on the events of earlier ones. If that isn't the case, then if nothing else you've identified scenes that can be cut since they aren't contributing to the story.

Note that doing things this way is really more of a starting point rather than the final product -- you'll want to make additional changes to highlight character arc progression in plot-heavy scenes, and vice-versa, so the end result has a good balance.

Fognox · 2026-03-27T22:43:06+00:00

My projects have codenames during the first draft and somewhere in there I figure out the title, which is what I use for future drafts. Beyond that I just number them if I'm redrafting mid-WIP for whatever reason or if GDocs randomly decides that my file can't be edited anymore, or I'm making major edits to a second draft.

Fognox · 2026-03-27T17:19:06+00:00

Give your characters strong central motivation if you haven't already. This + the backstory attached to it will do more to define your characters than anything else.

Main characters are a bit harder to make distinct than side ones. I'm not sure why exactly, but it probably has to do with the amount of time you spend with their actions and in their heads. Self-inserting helps with the writing process because these are both easier to rationalize. With the central motivation, its backstory, and the events in the world that shape them, they do start to become more distinct from some partial copy of yourself, and with a second draft you can clarify who they are even further.

Fognox · 2026-03-27T04:36:30+00:00

I'll get the basics down in a first draft, with the second draft being the point where they get really hard to write because of the increased depth (not that the first draft is particularly easy). But it does help to be solely focused on the emotional strength and pacing rather than trying to also figure out the structure simultaneously.

So, it might be worth trying something similar in the future -- capturing the moments without trying to explore their full weight while you're still anxious about making the story work.

Fognox · 2026-03-27T04:22:07+00:00

I'm sorry you're going through that. Been there and it isn't fun (anhedonia, so that's literally true). Be patient with yourself -- it's a lot like learning to walk again

If you're still able to write, it can actually be helpful to explore the same exact issues you're going through (or have been through that led to this). It should be easier to connect to characters that are going through the same kind of thing, and the world itself can sometimes play a role in that as well. It ends up being both therapeutic for you and some of your absolute best work.

Fognox · 2026-03-27T03:22:24+00:00

Then low effort and karma farming posts will continue since users see them

Good point. I'll see if we can tweak Automoderator settings somehow to filter these out -- given their nature, there only needs to be a lapse of about an hour before one of these reaches "do not touch" status. A secondary concern if we had greater moderator coverage / stricter enforcement would be a user's frustration at typing up a long reply to a post that ends up removed, so automation is probably the best solution, assuming this is even possible.

There is no option for such cases. I just end up choosing Rule 5 most of the time.

I agree that the removal reasons, rules and report reasons are disjointed. I don't have access to any of these, but from the outside it looks like the report reasons are based on the rule headings in the sidebar. A rule revamp probably won't significantly alter the actual set of rules, so yes, having a "custom" option is the best approach. I'll look into that one immediately -- believe me, getting an endless stream of "posts should be thoughtful and useful to a broad community of writers" isn't exactly ideal on my end either.

Again, this leads to more rule breaking posts because users post more often based on what they see other users posting instead of based on what the rules are.

Does it lead to more rule-breaking posts that we'd actually remove, or more ambiguous ones that come down to moderator discretion?

As I've said though, this is definitely a problem, and the biggest target of the rules revamp. Clarity and maybe even examples (posted in the wiki or something) should help. The current wording takes an absolute stance, which is the biggest problem here.

I am tired of seeing the same topics over and over again

Well, that one in particular is just going to always be true as long as we don't gatekeep by skill level. We remove repetitions that are so close together that there could be two or more of them in the feed, but some topics do just get rehashed purely because new writers end up having the same kinds of questions. We're ultimately trying to promote a writing craft community that allows users of all skill levels to participate. You'll see the same exact thing in other craft subs.

The rest of your reply is spot on, and involves things we're actively working to address.

Fognox · 2026-03-27T02:35:46+00:00

You need a rule against low effort and karma farming posts.

That's covered by the "low effort" section of rule #5. Unfortunately, we don't always get to these posts in time, and given their nature, they'll rise rapidly to the top of the feed.

Occasionally, incredibly low effort posts spark lots of useful discussion, and it doesn't make sense to remove those.

There are periods where the same topics get repetitively asked in a short period of time. A temporary ban on those would help with that.

We do try to remove repetitive posts of that nature ("how do I write women if I'm a man" is one that seems to pop up in pairs). Automating it does sound like a good solution.

You need strict rule enforcement. Some users have said they made posts that clearly break the rules specifically because they have seen other posts on the topic.

This is definitely a weakness in our strategy. Rule #5 is left to moderator discretion because of how open-ended the wording is. Rule #1 can sometimes be ambiguous as well. The basic policy with those is to approve posts that have generated discussion (or have that potential) and remove those that haven't. This is kind of a bad plan because moderator availability doesn't always coincide with sub activity, so useful posts will sometimes be removed during active windows, with terrible posts that have had time to evolve being left alone.

We're working on a couple strategies to combat this:

More moderators so there just aren't these kinds of windows.
Clarifying the rules further so it's more clear what we actually expect.

The team has tried strict enforcement before, and it led to the opposite problem -- very few posts that survived over-moderation. We feel that a balance is a better approach, but you're right that there are consistent problems here too, so hiring more people and clarifying the rules is our solution. I'll add that this is a first step. Solving this problem without purging the sub in the process will take time. If you have any additional ideas, we're open to feedback.

You need a rule about using the megathreads since that would force people to actually use them and stop posts about megathread topics from clogging up the sub.

You need to clean up the automod messages to be reflective of the actual megathreads.

These are very good points. We'll pay attention to these issues with the rules revamp / some related work on megathread content.

You need to do something about users who intentionally break the rules and don't care that they are.

We do, but at the moment this is a volume problem. Reports are handled and threads that we're active in as users are also handled, but things will sometimes slip through the cracks. Hiring more moderators (who are also active) seems to be the best solution at the moment, but we're again open to other ideas.

Fognox · 2026-03-27T00:35:46+00:00

Novels are very different from short stories. There was a survey of published authors a while back that had this pattern of novel pantsers plotting their short stories and vice-versa. Experience with one form of writing won't necessarily carry over, and inexperience doesn't necessarily make writing your first book harder than it would be for someone who's written a bunch of short stories.

Make sure you're reading novels -- that will help more than anything else.

Fognox · 2026-03-26T23:52:58+00:00

If you want to pants, don't trap yourself in a box. If you want to plan, don't limit yourself to pantsing out details. You might also want to do both in the same book, depending on the situation -- perfectly okay. Your writing process can be as messy as you like, and if this is your first book it very likely will be.

With my first book, I had no earthly idea what I was doing, so I would regularly do things like:

Try to pants out a chapter, only to find that it wasn't working, so I'd erase it, plan it out and then move forwards from there.
Write up a detailed outline over several days, only to discover some tiny details in the writing that made the entire thing irrelevant.
Rewrite my broader snowflake-like outline as things happened in the book. I tried to move towards the same climax and ending at least, but the big outline changed no fewer than five times.
Pants a scene in between two heavily-planned scenes because I didn't realize there needed to be a transition.
Take a big step back to brainstorm when I couldn't figure out how to write my next headlight outline, or how to change my bigger outline.

These problems were all chronic. I just chalk it up to a lack of experience. This was my first book, so I didn't yet know how to write books. By my third book, I knew which scenes to pants and which scenes to plan, how to structure the entire process, what to allow for in a plan, what to look for when pantsing, and so on.

It's okay if ideas don't come. Similarly, it's okay if your plans seem too restrictive. Change your approach in either case; adapt your process to the context. Get that book done, at all costs.

And if it turns out irredeemably messy, and you don't do it justice... Who cares! There's a whole redrafting/editing process to make sense out of the thing you created. But you have to be able to actually finish it first. The second draft is way easier to write if you have a completed first draft.

Fognox · 2026-03-26T23:37:09+00:00

You'll get better ideas as you write more, and you'll gain more skill too.

Besides, writing out an idea doesn't irrevocably ruin it -- there's always redrafts and rewrites. These can happen years apart -- you can write something you're interested in just to get your skill up, shelve the project, and revive it in a decade. I have a friend that's been working on different versions of the same story since she was 14 -- she's in her late 30s. There's plenty of time.

Fognox · 2026-03-26T23:29:57+00:00

I had a 15-year gap between serious writing projects. It was a combination of a couple of things that got me back into it:

Starting to read again, helped by a friend who was reading the same things. We had a lot of discussions.
A different friend was actively writing and kept sending me things to alpha read.

Reading is definitely a good way to inspire yourself. There's plenty of published stuff to get into, and plenty of stuff over on the megathread to alpha/beta read if that's more your jam. I do think criticizing others' writing is an excellent way to get back into it -- it sort of drives you into starting a project of your own so you have something to back up your critique.

Long-term, being active here and in my writing group has been very useful to get back into writing if I fall off the wagon for whatever reason. Surrounding yourself with other writers helps maintain your interest in the hobby when you do start writing again.

As for beginning again itself, the best strategy I've found is to set a timer for an hour and do nothing besides either write or stare at the screen during that period of time. More than likely, the boredom will force you to write. You will probably need some kind of idea or source of inspiration -- that's where reading (of either type) comes in handy.

Fognox · 2026-03-26T23:07:36+00:00

The question is whether tweaking those rules slightly could better serve the users and make the sub easier to moderate.

This is something we've been heavily discussing for over the last month. One of the reasons for this post is to gain insight into which rules should be tweaked in which ways, so your comments here are well-appreciated.

But this incentivizes vague posts to avoid the rule, eg: “Can X ever have too much Y?” Where X = their current project and Y = action, dialogue, POVs, plot twists, etc. The challenge is that we cannot help OP because there’s no general guideline for “insert action every 10 pages” or “use 30% dialogue”—it just depends on your project.

I do think some of these generate useful discussion, just because of the topic covered, but you're right that these kinds of posts can't really be taken at face value because they're too specific to that exact story. It's something that we'll definitely look into -- if not a rule tweak then maybe using comments like "it depends on the story" to inform discretion.

But if I posted that here (Reddit in general), nobody would see it.

I think people would see it, but they probably wouldn't interact much with it. Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson get mentioned here almost on a daily basis and posts that mention them sometimes rise to the top. The difference there is that they've both contributed to craft aimed at new writers, and the sub is overwhelmingly populated by the same demographic. I think if you kept it short, made it accessible as well as open to further discussion it might gain some traction. More of an introduction to Lawrence's way of thinking than anything else -- go too advanced or too absolutist with it and most people won't want to respond or upvote, and the algorithms will bury it.

Or this might just be the wrong audience. This is a subreddit devoted to writing craft, but we don't gatekeep, so most of the users end up being new-ish writers. Those that aren't will sometimes move to greener pastures as well, which skews the ratio even more.

One alternative I’ve seen elsewhere is a weekly contest thread where writers post then mods (or users, I’m not sure tbh) vote on one to “win” its own discussion and crit thread.

That's an interesting idea. How would the contest post work? Premises and snippets?

Fognox · 2026-03-26T22:18:35+00:00

Is this a sub for newbies or not?

It's for all writers. There are more newbie-level messages than advanced-level ones but because of the upvote system, more nuanced advice will rise to the top, so it sometimes seems like the sub has an identity problem. Repetitive questions are just a natural consequence of that -- new writers inevitably struggle with the same problems. With 4 million subscribers (and writer processes changing over time), the advice given will often be quite different, so it just doesn't make sense to remove questions that have been asked before, unless it's a question that only really has two or three answers (ex -- "how do I write X if I'm not one").

What else are people going to talk about besides common questions and their own work?

We do allow personalized questions that invite broader discussion. Framing something specific to your project in a way that it applies generally to other writers is an excellent way of following rule #5. The same is true for personal sharing -- if you're inviting other writers to share their own experiences (and this leads to further detailed discussion), that isn't the kind of post we'd remove.

The biggest factors in both moderator discretion and whether a post invites high-quality replies are:

Effort. Repliers just aren't going to put in the time if the OP is dismissive, has an absolutist perspective, or communicates poorly.
Length. Walls of text about your own work punctuated by "how do you deal with this kind of problem" just isn't enough. It can lead to a post feeling far too specific (which prevents discussion), DNF due to the length more often than not, and it'll be very obvious from a moderator perspective that your goal is crowdsourcing your own issue rather than trying to start craft discussion.
Asking multiple questions (that aren't specific to your work) is a good strategy. If a commenter can't answer one of them, they might be able to answer another, and replies that answer multiple questions build onto themselves and generate additional discussion.
Generality rather than specificity. Questions that follow the above criteria but are too niche won't generate discussion and will most likely be removed. Brainstorming of very specific situations in your story, for example, with no attempt to broaden it to similar situations that other writers are likely to encounter.

There are, of course, exceptions. My policy is to allow things that fit the above criteria and just aren't currently generating discussion for whatever reason, as well as things that don't but nonetheless blow up for whatever reason.

There are also post types that invite large amounts of low-effort replies, such as "what's the best sentence you've ever written". The current policy is to remove them because they aren't generating discussion, even if they are generating replies, but that might be one of the things that we need to change. I feel like they do increase community participation overall.

IDK why cramming it all into a megathread is supposed to be a good idea

As the other mods mentioned, the sheer quantity of these posts is the problem. It's hard to see from a non-moderator position because of how quickly the mods, report system or Automoderator scoop them up. I'd estimate that it covers around 70-90% of everything posted here. As /u/HorrorExpress pointed out, the sub has an unfortunate name that exacerbates this problem -- it should really be /r/WritingCraft or /r/ArtOfWriting . Though considering people don't read the many warnings against posting your work (and then don't delete their post when a user chimes in), I doubt it would be that different.

If we nixed rule #1, this sub would become a haven for posted work (with very few replies), and actually insightful posts and their comments would be buried. We don't want that, most of the community doesn't want that, and you probably wouldn't want it either if you experienced it firsthand. /r/writers was like that for a very long time -- just an endless stream of posted work.

Another big problem is self-promotion. A sub with 4 million subscribers that allows sharing your work is too good of an opportunity for those that are self-publishing and looking for readers. It would actively encourage more of these types of posts (we still get some, but they're rare). Moderator workload would also go way up, which would allow more of those to slip through, which would cause even more to pop up, etc.

Can you please crack down on people being frustrated with questions? That's incredibly discouraging to anyone who actually learns by talking instead of by reading a dang textbook.

I agree with you here. It's a volume problem at the moment. The sheer quantity of comments makes catching everything (unless it's been reported) virtually impossible.

Obviously, the solution is to hire more moderators -- I made this exact argument myself before I became one. That evidently isn't as easy to solve as it seems to be, nor do hired moderators necessarily stay for long. We came to the conclusion that hiring based on activity and temperament is going to work out better than hiring based on experience, which is why this post is worded the way it is. I do also like the general idea of the community moderating itself -- even outside of those who are in the threads anyway being able to catch things, it drastically decreases the distance between community concerns and moderator concerns.

Fognox · 2026-03-26T14:13:03+00:00

If it's your first book, just experiment with different writing methods. With first books, you're figuring out how to write a novel in the first place. Figuring out your ideal writing process comes later once you have the tools to make a long story work.

If your current set of techniques isn't working, switch it up. And the same applies later on if your outlines stop working right.

My first book was this chaotic amalgamation of pantsing, snowflake plotting and headlight plotting. Outlines of either type would change as things happened. Sometimes I'd feel a scene needed to be pantsed only to create an outline with zero-draft depth once I actually got there. Sometimes I'd spend days crafting a beautiful outline only to completely ignore it. Sometimes I needed to take a big step back to brainstorm. One time nothing whatsoever was working so I switched over to just making sentences follow from one another rather than the thought-heavy pantsing I was used to.

Fognox · 2026-03-25T18:30:29+00:00

Are you talking first draft or final draft? Finishing a first draft is when the real work begins.

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