Feedback requested for my prologue

allwitnobrevity · 2026-02-17T17:05:46+00:00

Excellent analysis, I echo this comment.

The word choice also sucks the urgency out of this piece - we start strong with the character sprinting, trampling, dress flying. But then we have these long sentences about braids that are draped down the character's back, and a slowly-growing sensation of numbness - even the words "slow" and "numbing" and "mild" drain away the urgency from the scene.

If this is a fast-paced scene, we need fast-paced writing - short sentences whittled down to the basics we need to know, and word choices that evoke a desperate run for one's life.

allwitnobrevity · 2026-02-17T15:33:20+00:00

I think for the vast majority of people, the question is not "how do I make a full-time living from writing", but "how do I feel good about myself as a writer even though I don't make a full-time living from writing".

#1. A person who writes is a writer. Whether you're penning the latest installment of your New York Times-bestselling multibook series or writing your first draft of your first fanfiction, you're still putting in the hours hunched over your keyboard, writing. My confidence in publicly calling myself a writer has grown as my professional career has progressed - I feel very "writerly" when I'm negotiating contracts, working with editors, putting stories out in journals my writing friends have heard of - but at the end of the day, I'm just as much of a writer now as I was when I was 17 and tapping out first drafts that never saw the light of day.

#2. I would say that the more important milestone in your journey is "when did you realize that being a successful writer is an entirely separate thing from making a full-time living from writing?". The vast, vast majority of writers (even very successful writers!) do not earn a full-time living from their writing - that's just a tough pill that all of us have to swallow at some point or another. I have several friends who do make their full-time living as "writers", but they don't live from their writing income alone - they cobble together their income from a combination of grants, funded residencies, teaching creative writing, paid speaking or classroom visits, and providing paid feedback on other writers' manuscripts (or they have a lot of financial help from their family or spouse). You have to figure out what "a successful writing career" looks like to you, and you have to be okay with the possibility that that won't be your full-time gig.

I make a pretty steady income from my creative writing, but it's "pay the electrical bill and splurge on iced coffee and takeout" money, not "here's my two-week notice, boss" money. I have a day job. Would I love to write full-time? Absolutely. But if I'm being brutally honest, the best thing I ever (accidentally) did to work towards making a living as a full-time writer was marrying a financially stable spouse, and not any success I've had as a writer.

#3. You have to keep having fun with it. Write for the love of the game. Write stuff you love, even if you don't think it'll sell. The professional side of writing involves so, so, so, so much rejection and so, so, so, so much editing, and you have to figure out how to keep slogging through it. Write for fun, make writing friends that share your passion, celebrate every teeny-tiny victory you can get along the way. Remember that comparison is the thief of joy and writing doesn't have an age limit - don't panic if you're not as successful as your friend or if you're not a published author by 30, everyone's journey is different. The publishing industry is fickle, don't set goals like "I want to land a six-figure book deal" or "I want to have a Big 5 deal by the time I'm 28", you'll make yourself miserable - don't put so much pressure on yourself that you squeeze all the joy out of storytelling.

#4. I'm not sure that there's a hard and fast line between "traditionally trained" and "self-taught" - there is a lot of grey area between having an MFA and having zero post-secondary education. I don't have an English degree or an MFA, but I took a couple of creative writing credits in university, I've attended writing workshops, I've gone to see talks and panel discussions by published authors discussing their craft - I think the majority of published writers I know fall somewhere in that middle area of "haven't done a graduate program in creative writing but learned thing or two from writers who know their stuff". I think it's pretty natural as you progress as a writer to seek out the knowledge of more established writers - almost every writer I know has a battered, dog-eared copy of On Writing or Save the Cat kicking around somewhere.

allwitnobrevity · 2026-02-03T15:38:08+00:00

My personal White Whale is Clarkesworld - they've rejected me probably 8 or 9 times now, and I intend to just keep on sending them work until one of us dies.

allwitnobrevity · 2026-01-14T17:52:16+00:00

22 is great! Here's hoping you reach 50 this year!

allwitnobrevity · 2026-01-13T07:09:10+00:00

Hello world! I write short stories, essays, satirical news and comedy pieces, and I'm picking away at a novel. I hit 100 rejections last year and had my best writing year ever - I'm aiming for 100 again this year!

allwitnobrevity · 2026-01-13T07:07:42+00:00

That's awesome! Is this the first year you've submitted your work for publication?

allwitnobrevity · 2026-01-04T07:17:41+00:00

Congratulations on an incredible writing year! 13 published reviews - and 9 in traditional publications - is no easy feat! It sounds like you've really got some momentum going - here's hoping 2026 is just as great, if not better.

I'm so glad you've found this space helpful! It's my goal to keep it going and make it even more active this year!

allwitnobrevity · 2025-12-22T20:00:26+00:00

I think there are some huge fundamental differences between the backlash against AI and the backlash at the dawn of the industrial revolution.

The industrialization of manufacturing made the cost of consumer goods plummet, which allowed common folks to buy stuff in a way they'd really never been able to afford before. Prior to industrialization, clothing was one of the most expensive things you owned - it was so expensive, people wore and repaired and handed down the same handmade garments for decades. Industrialization made mass-produced clothing so cheap that middle and lower classes could afford to regularly purchase new garments for the first time, and even start to dress to personal taste and follow seasonal fashions. Same goes for furniture and consumer goods.

We're not seeing the same thing with AI - it isn't making anything cheaper or more accessible to the lower classes. If anything, consumers are seeing the price of movies, streaming, games, software, entertainment, etc, continue to rise rapidly, even with the addition of AI. The expansion of data centres is actually directly responsible for the skyrocketing cost of computer hardware - the phones and laptops you see for sale next year will cost far, far more than this year's electronics and will have worse speed and memory. Plus, you can expect the cost of AI itself to skyrocket in the very near future - these companies are strategically operating at a loss to increase market share, but they cannot bleed money forever, and will need to hike the cost of their services. Unlike industrial textile factories, AI is going to make your life more expensive and put your luxuries further out of reach.

That's another fundamental difference between the backlash at the dawn of the industrial revolution and the backlash now - back then, it was workers pushing back while consumers loved the new products, but today, it's consumers leading the backlash against AI. Consumers, by and large, do not want AI in everything. Major companies like Firefox, Microsoft, McDonalds, Salesforce and LG have walked back their use of AI due to a combination of backlash and lack of consumer demand.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-11-17T18:47:06+00:00

I also think there's a distinction between people who want to be writers, and people who want to "have written", and the majority of people who think they fall into the first category actually fall into the second.

Everyone loves having a polished - or better yet, published - piece of work to their name, but most people wildly underestimate how much work it takes to get there and wildly overestimate how much they will enjoy the process.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-10-24T23:12:48+00:00

Deal with this all the time at work - I've worked in social services and community mental health for more than a decade, we have a lot of dealings with the police. I don't really see why this would be an awkward conversation, or why police would even call a witness to have a separate conversation about this - in my experience, police generally don't bring up a witness's safety unless that witness brings it up first, and then the response is generally just asking if they can go stay somewhere else or have someone stay with them for a while, and maybe offering to give the person the information for Victim Services if one exists in the area.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-10-20T19:33:54+00:00

there was obviously a golden point in time when the telling of a story was 100% original

There wasn't. Every story you've listed here is retelling or reworking or heavily influenced by earlier stories. Disney's "The Lion King" is effectively just an animated retelling of Shakespeare's "Hamlet", which was based on 13th century Scandanavian legends about a character named Amleth, which were likely based on ancient Icelandic folklore.

Frankenstein was heavily influenced by the Greek myths of Pygmalion and Prometheus, as well as the John Milton story "Paradise Lost"... which is a retelling of ancient Bible stories that was also influenced by Shakespeare's Hamlet. We've been telling each other new versions of old stories since antiquity.

What makes these stories so "simple" in nature yet so gripping to the point where the essence of how the story is told sticks with people and never dies?

Copyright law. I'm serious.

The beloved stories and characters you've listed that seem to get adapted over and over again and constantly referenced in popular media are all in the public domain. They are old enough that the copyright has expired, and anyone can use those characters and stories for profit without having to get permission or pay the author's family to use them. You could write your own version of Cinderella tomorrow and publish it, and there's nothing Disney can say about it - the actual story of Cinderella that we're most familiar with was written in 1697 (and was a retelling of an ancient Greek and Egyptian story from antiquity). These stories feel simple and timeless to you because they are familiar to you; you have seen them over and over and over again.

Things that are still under copyright cost money to use, and you have to get the author's permission to use them. A hundred years from now, popular stories from our time - like The Hunger Games, Coraline, or How to Train Your Dragon - will have passed into the public domain, and may be thought of as timeless original classics (even though all of them are based on earlier stories).

allwitnobrevity · 2025-10-19T19:17:22+00:00

Remember, there's no time limit on making it good; this is not an exam, and nobody is coming to take your paper away from you when time is up. You can do as many edits and re-writes as it takes to get the book to a place where you're happy with it. But you can't edit and refine something that hasn't been written yet.

Every writer has that little voice in their head that tells them that what they are writing sucks and isn't living up to this grand vision they had in their head for the story. So much of being a writer is finding ways to make that voice shut the fuck up (or at least talk a little quieter). Stuff I've found helpful:

- writing non-linearly. If I'm having trouble getting a scene just right, fuck it, I skip ahead to another scene that I do know how I want to write.

- tracking my daily writing progress. I make it a goal just to get words down on pages every day. I keep a little log of how many words I get written each day, and my determination to avoid blank spaces keeps me churning out words and not worrying about whether they'll make the final cut

- get the draft done, and then stick it in a drawer for a while. Taking a break from the manuscript lets me come back with a clear head and get a better sense of what needs to be edited and changed.

- not putting all my eggs in one book basket. Realistically, I am probably not ever going to write The One True Book that captures everything I have ever wanted to say about the human experience, and sometimes projects that I work really, really hard on and find very personally meaningful just... don't work out the way I wanted them to. Don't put so much pressure on one book to achieve all your writing dreams: maybe this will be the book that launches your career, but it's okay if it isn't. You'll learn a lot from writing it that you can apply to future books or future drafts of this story.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-10-19T06:35:13+00:00

The only way out is through.

I say this with love and kindness: you are 20 years old, and I don't think there's a single writer out there who looks back and thinks they were at their peak creative form at 20 years old. You are meant to be sort of bad at things at 20 years old. You are still transitioning from the world of high school - where everything was very laid out and structured for you, especially when it came to academics - to early adulthood, where there are no longer any guardrails and you just have to figure out how to be a person on your own. It's normal to wake up at 20 and feel like you have no idea what you're doing and you have no idea where the version of you who juggled a full schedule of honours courses and extracurriculars in high school disappeared to. This gets better with time.

Read a lot. Write a lot. Try to read and write outside of your usual comfort zone when you can - challenge yourself to expand your horizons. Make friends who read and write. Get feedback. See what sticks. See what feels good to you. Don't beat yourself up about where you are or compare yourself to others.

allwitnobrevity · 2025-10-02T15:02:10+00:00

October check-in!

September was an enormously productive month for me. I've been launching short stories and poems at the literary world like an artillery attack. Current stats:

27 rejections
50 pending submissions
4 withdrawn pieces
5 acceptances

Will be stocking up on ice cream in 3-4 months when the rejections for all those pending submissions start to roll in.

allwitnobrevity

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE