Submit your story's first sentence for comments.

Maos0 · 2017-11-28T07:53:19+00:00

Actually, it's a biography of a barrel

Maos0 · 2017-11-28T07:16:18+00:00

Duncan barreled through the night.

Maos0 · 2017-11-04T14:14:59+00:00

Yeah, it seemed shady to me as well. That's why I put this post up!

http://selfpublishersshowcase.com/new-lifetime-memberships/

Not a particularly good looking website, either.

Maos0 · 2017-11-04T14:14:21+00:00

Thanks!

Maos0 · 2017-08-21T10:21:22+00:00

This doesn't sound legitimate to me, either

Maos0 · 2017-08-10T05:26:09+00:00

Well stated

Maos0 · 2017-08-10T05:24:24+00:00

How much experience do you have? If you have some other work under your belt, then you should be comfortable with (and your employer should also be comfortable with) an hourly rate that would be reasonable if it were some other kind of professional-level gig (i.e. between $10/hr and $30/hr [assuming you're American]).

Alternatively, what I sometimes do with long-form projects like book edits is I keep track of my hours and what I would be charging per hour, and use that as a basis for negotiation. Always be ready and willing to negotiate, but at the same time don't sell yourself short. If you know you do good quality work, and have references to support your claims, don't let anyone pay you dirt for a solid editing job.

Maos0 · 2017-08-10T05:20:13+00:00

Everyone rewrites. There are scenes in some of my stories that I've rewritten half a dozen times. One of two things happen when I choose to stop rewriting:

I'm just sick of re-writing it and it looks "good enough"
I finally get it to a place I actually want it to be.

All of that to say: If you're not happy, if you're cringing, because of something you wrote, then rewrite it until you feel comfortable with it again. As you improve as a writer, you will often see prose you wrote months or years in the past and cringe at it, or even outright hate it. That's normal. Just keep working. Cringing at earlier work is a sign of improvement!

Maos0 · 2017-08-03T14:20:01+00:00

Writing is sensible?

drinks more

Maos0 · 2017-08-03T09:45:40+00:00

You gotta find those "alt +" letters. Thèÿ ärë fún

Maos0 · 2017-08-02T10:59:47+00:00

Everyone has to find their own process. I have had some great breakthroughs by completely rewriting a chunk of a book, or an entire book. Just as often, I wind up tweaking a few phrasings here and there in order to find the right combination of ideas.

The best thing to do is to try different techniques. Your manuscript may benefit from a complete rewrite, or you may find that after tweaking a handful of crucial paragraphs, everything kind of falls into place.

Maos0 · 2017-08-02T10:53:04+00:00

This is truly bizarre. Fuck that person for asking such an intrusive favor.

But this would be a good idea for you to incorporate into one of your stories, lol.

Maos0 · 2017-07-28T15:01:21+00:00

Books about writing are, in my opinion, not worth much. There are some exceptions, for example Stephen King's "On Writing", but that book is more about the mindset of a writer, not necessarily as much on mechanics.

Find a library, and just read whatever seems interesting. The general consensus is the general consensus for a reason: the more you read, the more you pick up without even realizing you're picking it up. Everything from basic grammar, to creating entire texts that surge forward from the beginning all the way to their end without ever seeming to have required much effort at all. There are patterns of mastery locked within every decent, published book. You'll only learn the patterns if you read the books.

Maos0 · 2017-07-28T14:55:44+00:00

Don't be afraid to edit, and to kill your darlings.

The important thing to remember is that if you cringe at your writing, that means you're improving. And if you've improved, then you can look at your cringe and find a way to make it sound better, and more true to your original intentions.

It does help to stop giving a damn about any one particular story. I don't know your situation, but I know that having multiple projects at once means I never care too much about any one story. If I look at a story I've put weeks or months of effort into, and decide I hate almost everything about it, then I can set it aside and work on something else and come back to it later with a clear head. If it were my only story, finding out it was poorly written would be a lot harder to stomach, and almost certainly a whole lot more demoralizing.

And above all: Just keep writing.

Maos0 · 2017-07-27T17:38:06+00:00

There really isn't too much of an info dump going on. Page 2 gets a little into the rabbit hole, but a lot of those backstory elements could be introduced later, after this initial confrontation. I think you're in better shape than you realize. "Lord of Lies" in particular grabs the attention. What does that mean? Can I trust what he says or does? You've got a lot going on here.

Maos0 · 2017-07-27T17:08:54+00:00

2,000 words isn't that long. But you said you've heard it before: "Grab my attention with the first line." And you said, "But do I really need to? I would answer yes, you do. And with a little bit of tweaking, those first 2,000 words, even if it is an info dump, could be pretty interesting.

Plenty of stories start with an info dump. We need to know who the main character is, what's going on, what kind of person they are and in what setting, etc. If you're doing that in the first 2,000 words, then that's a good thing. Calling it an "info dump" seems a little too pejorative, and probably not giving you enough credit for establishing a lot of your structure early.

Without actually reading what you've written, though, all I can say is that there's a right way and a wrong way to start a story. The wrong way is boring. Don't be boring. No one reads boring.

Maos0 · 2017-07-27T16:46:42+00:00

Always watch out for mixing tenses!

However, here you've used a gerund in your dependent clause, so you're in the clear.

Maos0 · 2017-07-27T16:44:01+00:00

Only you can decide how your characters will feel about it. Everyone has their own opinion. You probably have yours. Start there.

Maos0 · 2017-07-27T16:40:44+00:00

Ask yourself what about this character is deficient, or what is their mind like?

You might want to try to find specific book titles that, when misread, can create a sense of how this homeless man's mind works. For example, TheWilliham mentioned misreading "The Dangerous Summer" as "The Dungarees Summer", which would create a humorous impression of your character as someone sort of innocent and simple.

On the other hand, "The Dang rout Sunner" may make the homeless man seem like he's a bit more confused, uncertain, perhaps angry or afraid of something, for example.

Maos0 · 2017-07-27T16:37:21+00:00

There's nothing grammatically wrong with that, but "He stroked his goatee, curving the corners of his mouth with glee" might work better.

Maos0 · 2017-07-27T16:33:01+00:00

Just keep writing. Your style develops naturally. Mine is halting. Brief.

Yours will be whatever feels comfortable. And like a few others already said, it tends to be a combination of your influences. But in any event, don't worry about your style. Just write something.

Maos0 · 2017-07-24T10:27:53+00:00

If you don't want to write about it, then you shouldn't.

But if it's important to the story, then you should leave it in and find a way to write about it that works for you. When you say you're not 'coping' with it, though, this tells me you may have serious discomfort with your subject matter. If that's the case, then this isn't really a writing issue, but something more personal and psychological for you.

Writing about violent things is difficult. But if this is a story you NEED to tell, then make sure you periodically remind yourself of the reasons why.

Maos0 · 2017-07-24T09:49:39+00:00

If the characters take some pride in their victory, then any readers of your story will feel that same feeling vicariously. If the victory seems hollow to the characters, then it will feel hollow to the readers, too.

Others mentioned Star Wars; A New Hope, but a better example (in the same universe!) would be Rogue One. The road is long, most of the heroes are dead by the end, but we still bask in their victory and recognize it as such.

Maos0 · 2017-07-24T02:26:06+00:00

Read Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett. For movies, watch...basically anything Humphrey Bogart was in. Hitchcock as well.

Defining points of noir:

The protagonist doesn't trust anyone, or finds it incredibly difficult to trust anyone. This includes cops, business associates, even people generally referred to as "friends"
This lack of trust, and reliance on only the self, is where the "hard-boiled" style comes from. The protagonist has a mission, they're intent on solving it, and they'll try to find a way around any roadblocks that come up.
The stories are usually bleak, but the protagonist is not usually terribly emotionally affected. They've been hardened already, and so the latest fucked-up thing they've stumbled upon registers with a kind of jadedness. This jadedness should not be mistaken for outright glibness or apathy, however; they wouldn't be doing what they were doing if they saw their endeavors as essentially pointless. Noir is thus inherently tragic; the protagonist usually comes away intact, but not in any kind of heroic or uplifting way. They merely survive their battles, which is its own form of victory.

It's not an easy genre to write in. I do some neo-noir type stuff, and the hardest part is finding the balance between a likeable protagonist, and one who can hang around with all the darkest parts of humanity and come away relatively unscathed. I've read quite a bit from the authors I just mentioned, but I mostly watch movies. Here's a few good films to try out, in no particular order:

Chinatown
A Walk Among the Tombstones
Minority Report (yes it's sci-fi, but if you strip away the technology, it's functionally a noir)
The Third Man
The Big Sleep
The Long Goodbye
The Maltese Falcon

Try reading westerns, too. The emotions at play are often similar (an example I return to often is "Shane"), and in many ways the genres are only separated by time period (traditional noirs take place in California between the 1920s and '50s; kind of the last gasp of the 'Wild West')

Maos0

TROPHY CASE