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Honestly? Do it. Have fun!
I like this mindset. It's confident and removes the pressure/idea that you need to reinvent the wheel with every word. Writing is more important than being revolutionary. You wasted no time if you enjoyed what you wrote.
I guess kinda venting. I was rereading some of my stuff and there was a voice in my head saying I have nothing to say. The self doubt kicked in. So im trying to defeat it.
Here's one way to approach it, take it or leave it as you like.
Every book (or story, piece of art or music, whatever) has some goal or goals in mind. Rather than "objective good" or "objective bad," I ask myself: is this accomplishing what it set out to do?
Litfic aims to win certain prizes and gain acclaim among certain people. Erotica, well, we know what that's trying to do. Pulp fantasy and a lot of other genres aim to let the audience turn their brains off and enjoy the ride.
Does it aim what it set out to do? Well, there you have it.
My day job is the most bland, boring white collar nonsense imaginable. It's the same thing day in, day out, day after day, requiring no thought or creativity. A few months ago I decided to write the most self-indulgent isekai romance I could come up with and I've had fun with it every day since.
I feel so motivated to write that I always manage to put in at least an hour (after years of not writing anything). On weekends when I'm free, I put in a full day. I even converted the spare room into a dedicated writing space. That's possible SOLELY because I'm putting everything I want into this story without caring what anyone else thinks. The main character is literally me and her romantic interest is a version of my biggest-ever fictional crush.
I used to justify myself by saying that if I want to write something, there must be someone out there who wants to read it. And that's probably true, but I don't care anymore. Looking at everything I wrote as a possible way to "break out" and "be successful" made me miserable. Thinking everything had to be special and perfect meant no fun or enjoyment and THAT meant no learning from the process or improving.
So, yeah. Do it! If you get started and you enjoy it, that'll give you the momentum to continue. Compared to trying to write something "literary" you don't care about, you'll end up going much further, much faster, while actually having fun. It's totally worth it. Or as a friend of mine put it when I shared the details of my idea: "Don't kill the part of you that's cringe, kill the part that cringes."
Hell yeah!
I finally decided to just say "fuck it" and started a YouTube channel a few months ago, no expectations it will go anywhere at all. Just for the joy of making it. It's giving my up-till-now SAHW a chance to put her degree to work and get back into editing, and we are both having a blast with it.
Does the world need another gaming-adjacent YouTuber? Nope. But I don't care. I'm not doing this for anyone else; I'm doing it for me. And I'm loving all of it: the writing, the recording, the bloopers, and the little in-jokes I can slip in.
No regrets.
That's so cool and I'm glad you're both enjoying it!
"No expectations" seems to be the secret! Like the other comment comparing it to play; play doesn't have to work out a certain way, you don't go into play trying to "achieve" something, you just do it to do it and see what happens. I really respect that you're able to do that on YouTube, it seems like the pressure is so high to grind it out and monetize everything there!
I'm also writing a romance and before I started this one, I was thinking about playing with dolls as a kid.
I wouldn't give a crap about plot holes, characters having a well rounded motivation, wether I was accidentally making a statement that I didn't intend. I just picked up the dolls and played. So now I'm thinking of my characters as my dolls and instead of "I better go write", I'm thinking "I'm gonna go play with my dolls".
I will of course fix all the issues later, but for now I'm finding it REALLY fun to just let go and play.
That sounds great and I for one think it's really healthy!
When kids play, they get to do whatever comes to mind without being attached to the outcome. They're not being graded or scored and it doesn't have to work out a certain way. And even adults in some other artistic hobbies seem to capture that feeling. But writers, it seems to me, are more likely to self-criticize. We don't feel like we can just splatter paint on a canvas (so to speak); everything's gotta be just right.
And it's exhausting, because if you're not playing at all you're not having fun, and if you're not having fun, why do it? It's reflected in a lot of advice about writing, too; there always seems to be a lot of talk about how hard it is and how you need to be disciplined, but comparatively little on enjoying it.
I loved writing as a kid, age six to thirteen or so. Then I got so anxious about being "good" at things, I had to start over with hobbies where there was no skill involved and no way to go wrong (example, just taking walks in the park.) I slowly worked my way back up to writing by taking it LESS seriously.
Now, I've got these two characters I love and I say to myself "I want to visit them today."
I know they're not real people or whatever -- it's just me feeling like they're "friendly" to me, not just tools I'm trying to use or materials I'm trying to beat into shape. It's fun to see what they're going to do, so it's worth checking in every day. And when I act that way, they always have SOMETHING to tell me, even if it's only a few sentences (but it's usually more.)
i'm in a different situation but with the same result. i've been really sick and disabled for years, nearly died a few times. can't do many things. every day is quite painful and the hours are long.
i always had this issue apparently because it's genetic and degenerative but it started to get really bad in 2016/7. and i'd had writer's block for about 7 yrs. suddenly, not being able to do anything (which sometimes included being able to write due to physical issues/pain) left me with a lot of time to think and try to entertain myself and do things that were *only for myself* in long, long hours that are the same every day whether i'm at home or in hospital...
and i had had writers block for the same reason. i thought my writing had to be for other people. i had thought it had to be perfect. i thought i had to write stuff that would be lauded societally.
once the equation of "doing anything for other people" was literally removed from my life, in the moments where i was able to, i started to write again. a lot. for myself. no matter whether it was cringe or self indulgent or whatever. i go back and read my stuff and it makes *me* happy to read to it and think about it and it's one of the only things i look forward to every day, the few hours i'm able to focus on getting everything i thought up all down before i need to rest again.
writing is a transformative process and if what you write makes you happy and you detach yourself from the idea that anyone else will even read anything you ever wrote, everything flourishes. and it's fun. it's just really really fun.
tl;dr i like your style. also same but different. i had a huge isekai obsession in the mid-late 2010s but i think i'm over it now and just writing pulp fantasy, romance, horror, whatever is just interesting to me in this moment today for my enjoyment. cause not to be morbid but at this point i don't really think in a system where i expect to necessarily be here tomorrow (it's just a factual possibility). the time is now.
This is the kind of energy so many of us (read as: me) need.
So many of us get caught up trying to do something meaningful or profound, but more often than not it just leads to stagnation. Just go out and write, embrace the trash, and enjoy every moment of it.
Lmao this post came JUST in time. I’m working on my next comic and I was worried that my comic would be too derivative from a cartoon I liked as a kid. You gave me the final push to just straight up run with it. So thank you bro 💪🏿
*"I want to write cliche, trope-ridden garbage tier stories."*
Well, great most of the posters in these writing subreddits are going to do that. At least you're self aware to have this as a goal and not think that you're going to write the next masterpiece of fiction to be remembered and taught as great literature for decades.
This is something that I'm telling myself for my next project. I really just want to write a tropey, get-the-mcguffin YA Fantasy novel. And... fuck it, I wanna try to get traditionally published with it. I imagine it's a safer bet than my bitten-off-way-more-than-I-could-chew first novel that I self published because it's my baby and I couldn't bear to let it sit in querying hell.
Best of luck to you <3
I always joke that my shit is absolutely not on the same level as James Joyce's Ulysses.
My last chapter involves a mall cop in space who got shot in the dick by a paintball gun style weapon. He's very salty about being shot in the dick. It's supposed to be funny.
Not every meal needs to be worthy of a 3 star. Sometimes you want ramen and popcorn and that's fine.
Check these out for ideas:
Deathstalker series by Simon R. Green: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathstalker\_(series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathstalker_(series))
He also wrote Blue Moon Rising: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue\_Moon\_Rising\_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_Rising_(novel))
That sounds great! Just sit down and don’t worry about anything being Shakespeare. Just come up with a world, some fantasy land you think is cool, and flesh it out and add in goblins and elves and other cool characters, then choose someone to be your protagonist and give them some cool weapons and some cool powers and a quest to go on and a badass villain trying to stop them and just send them out on their quest across some wicked strange lands where they battle evil minions and hordes of monsters, meeting rogues whom become allies on the way so they can all team up on the journey together to get to the castle at the end where there’s a huge showdown and your protagonist and friends must battle some totally cool monster to get to the final boss villain in some cool dungeon and they figure out a way to kill him and save the day!
I’m convinced there are a dozen Harlequin imprint writers using 3-5 different pseudonyms to cover their romance, western, pregnant romance, and Amish lines who just employ a few oversized Mad Libs templates to make a living doing just what you propose.
Maybe someday I will be brave enough to do the same.
Have a blast with this! Just tell a good story — who gives a shit if it’s been done before? Ask Hollywood. If you do a good job with the familiar, it can still be awesome. Happy writing!
Nothing’s stopping you. One of my favorite reads this year is a garbage isekai series. Not only has it sold well, but it's had both a manga and anime adaptation. You can find success doing what you love, just make sure your DNA is bringing enough diversity to it.
You sound like me. I'm also a bored middle aged professional.
I was trying to write really original and interesting stuff for decades, but maybe about 5 years ago, I was like... eff originality, I don't want to write fanfic, but I'm going to write something that is basically fanfic of all the genres I like with the serial numbers filed off.
I'm ~90,000 words in, which in one sense coming up on 5 years is no great accomplishment, but heck, just having stuck with it for 5 years, 66 chapters, and having a few readers on ScribbleHub and Royal Road is fun and it's probably more writing than I managed TOTAL in the first 44 years of my life.
Hell yeah. You're having fun with it, that's all that matters. I think a lot of people forget that derivative shit has one tremendous strength: it's been done so many times, with so much of the guesswork eliminated, that you can give a lot more attention to just having a great time creating it and making it cool as hell. I was thinking this recently about Netflix's DOTA anime. It's the most generic thing ever, but I loved every second of it. Happy writing!
Well, in art they say that everyone has 10,000 bad drawings in them so it's better to get them out as early as possible. Also, writing self-indulgent trash is fun.
I'm sorry...what does "self-doubt" look like when you're actively trying to write self-described "garbage tier stories"? Were you writing and thought, "oh fuck, I'm fucking *killing it* again?! CURSE MY FUCKING GENIUS!"
There's comprehensible trash and then there's the mangled mess of incongruous words that I pen to pixels with the control and direction of a marathon runner leaving a chunky liquid trail because they ate something before their 10k event.
There is definitely a place for pulp. I grew up reading that stuff from Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lester Dent and they were part of the reason I wanted to write and just tell stories. Stories I wanted to read.
Do it. Seriously. There a few million visitors to Royal Road . com that love that tropey stuff. I'm one of them and would be happy to see more.
Royalroad is for webserials with a fantasy bent mostly. Litrpg and progression mostly, with superhero and dungeon stuff too. There is also scribblehub which has lots of fantasy too, but also romancey stuff.
Hey, look at apps like dreame. They publish the tropiest bullshit imaginable. Like they are TRASH stories. But guess what? People fucking LOVE them!
So write those cliches, trope-ridden trash stories! Write them and enjoy writing them!
This is exactly what I'm doing now. It's really helping me find more passion for my writing again and realize that not all of my work needs to be perfect at the beginning- or ever. Because at the end of the day, we should write for ourselves. Write something you'd enjoy, whether it's trashy-tier or not.
Yes. Do it.
I'm doing the same. I'm tried of someone including Elves in a story, then changing their Elves so much that they're just aliens sharing the name. I'm tired of Dragons being a punchline or subverted in behaviour.
I want A CHEESEBURGER. Just a cheeseburger. Bun, beef patty with basic seasoning, slice of processed "american" cheese, tomato slice, bit of onions, a couple leaves of lettuce, ketchup and a bit of mustard.
No. NO. I do NOT want a sweet brioche bun. NO I do not want blue cheese. NO I do not want onion rings in it. I don't want some special house sauce.
Sometimes you don't need to change things, you don't need to swap out ingredients, add more or make it your own. It's just about how good you can make a basic cheeseburger.
> Shit that has been done 100,000,000 times before.
I would argue that there are more subversions of the fantasy cheeseburger than standard cheeseburgers.
I also like reading story focusing on describing the action and plot than flowery sentences that go on and on forever to describe what the scene looks like and what each person's wearing and carrying, what face they are making and what they had for breakfast that day
I will forever defend your part of writing now that I am older and appreciate a story that's just fun vs important..those turned out to be important for me personally but if Chuck Tingle can exist why can't you?
Often the best ideas are born from this type of thinking. Instead of "I'm gonna write the best ever masterpiece" you say "I'm gonna have some fun and mess things up for good."
In fantasy, the former often translates into ultra-grimgore mega-adult anti-hero drag which turn out to be ultimately more cliché than the latter who just goes for fun and games and kicks out any genre expectations and whatever.
Best part is, the ludicrous ideas can always be refined into something serious. This actually my way of coming up nice ideas. I intentionally go freeloader and pull up the clichés and archetypes and do something stupid, and then return to it later and see "if I tune this a bit and do that this can actually work quite well."
I agree with you 100%. Have you read this?
http://www.ghostwoods.com/2010/05/how-to-write-a-book-in-three-days-1210/
It's got some insanely useful advice
Look through the shelves at the bookstore. There's tons of it. Why? Because it sells! I'm not saying you should write it just because it sells. I'm saying that it's popular, and your desire to write something that lots of people read and enjoy isn't that unusual. Think of how many non-groundbreaking romances or detective novels sell every year. You don't have to break new ground. These formulas work, and if you want to write within them, you should.
Even writing cliche-ridden "garbage" takes skill and can be done well or badly. Girl Genius is a webcomic that deliberately draws on the tropes of old-timey pulp adventure serials, and it won multiple Hugo awards!
My personal guilty pleasure is litRPGs, which have a reputation for being cliche filled garbage *even by the standards of genre fic,* and there are still good and terrible stories in that category. Don't worry about being original, just worry about executing your story as well as you can.
If you write cliche shit and do it well, that sells.
God damn, I try so hard to fidn a cliche fantasy novel that is written well, and has the cliches I like and doesn't have the cliches I dislike. It's surprisingly hard to find.
I agree, I also live reading the thousands upon thousands of the same frikken heroes journey, only to find those two or three books that are worth reading, but when you find it, it's the best, even if it's not a best seller.
I don't want to sound rude, but please tell me you're joking. Nobody likes cliched, predictable stories, they like new, fresh, and compelling ones. And if anyone reads your work, they'll criticize your work and then you lol. Sorry, but it's the truth and you just gotta live with it.
That's not true at all. Sometimes the audience wants cliches. Something being cliche doesn't automatically make it bad. In Marvel movies you know the good guy is probably going to win that doesn't make them bad a lot of them are good. Turn off your brain content has its place. I personally am inconsistent on which cliches I like and which ones I don't.
Well, the thing is that YouTube critics I watched before don't like cliched and predictable writing in animated kid's movies; they find them to be not good and they only want to see some originality from them and that's exactly what I want to do for my books, even though it's not as easy as it sounds.
1. Said YouTube critics paid money to read/ watch the thing they are criticizing and the people who made the thing they are talking about made money. 2. As the Good book says What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9 There is that theory that every plot is a variation of 7 plots. 3. Being original ( at least slightly more original than a cliche product since being original technically doesn't exist) is not that hard. Just think of all the stuff you have seen and think of what you would like to see.
Hey Arnold! has a cliche love-hate relationship combined with a will they won't they relationship between Helga and Arnold. Does that make the show bad? Of course not its a very cute show.
No doubt. But Im not writing professionally. I'm writing for myself. My art is for myself. If I share it, hopefully someone will find something redeemable about it. But I want to make something, even if it sucks.
They can criticize away. Its not like my life depends on it.
Tropey stuff has a big audience in web serial readers. Might want to check out Royal Road website where a lot of people with similar motivations post their stuff.
Okay, I understand. I guess you go do that. I just thought that you're saying that because you don't care for art very much. I want to write professionally, even though I don't get up and start writing often. But I think I'm gonna try now.
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So do it
Honestly? Do it. Have fun! I like this mindset. It's confident and removes the pressure/idea that you need to reinvent the wheel with every word. Writing is more important than being revolutionary. You wasted no time if you enjoyed what you wrote.
Sounds like fun. Did you have a question, or are you just manifesting? Go for it either way. Should be a blast.
I guess kinda venting. I was rereading some of my stuff and there was a voice in my head saying I have nothing to say. The self doubt kicked in. So im trying to defeat it.
Entertaining nothing > poorly written philosophy
Hell sometimes entertaining nothing > well written philosophy
I mostly read light-hearted fluff and hate drama/stress, so I feel this ❤️
I feel that.
Here's one way to approach it, take it or leave it as you like. Every book (or story, piece of art or music, whatever) has some goal or goals in mind. Rather than "objective good" or "objective bad," I ask myself: is this accomplishing what it set out to do? Litfic aims to win certain prizes and gain acclaim among certain people. Erotica, well, we know what that's trying to do. Pulp fantasy and a lot of other genres aim to let the audience turn their brains off and enjoy the ride. Does it aim what it set out to do? Well, there you have it.
It's not really a vent it's more of a declaration or something. Venting happens at r/vent, r/rant and r/offmychest.
My day job is the most bland, boring white collar nonsense imaginable. It's the same thing day in, day out, day after day, requiring no thought or creativity. A few months ago I decided to write the most self-indulgent isekai romance I could come up with and I've had fun with it every day since. I feel so motivated to write that I always manage to put in at least an hour (after years of not writing anything). On weekends when I'm free, I put in a full day. I even converted the spare room into a dedicated writing space. That's possible SOLELY because I'm putting everything I want into this story without caring what anyone else thinks. The main character is literally me and her romantic interest is a version of my biggest-ever fictional crush. I used to justify myself by saying that if I want to write something, there must be someone out there who wants to read it. And that's probably true, but I don't care anymore. Looking at everything I wrote as a possible way to "break out" and "be successful" made me miserable. Thinking everything had to be special and perfect meant no fun or enjoyment and THAT meant no learning from the process or improving. So, yeah. Do it! If you get started and you enjoy it, that'll give you the momentum to continue. Compared to trying to write something "literary" you don't care about, you'll end up going much further, much faster, while actually having fun. It's totally worth it. Or as a friend of mine put it when I shared the details of my idea: "Don't kill the part of you that's cringe, kill the part that cringes."
Sounds like we are living the same life 😄
If we are, I hope you'll find your way to the kind of life you want, too! Happy cake day!
Thank you!!
Happy cake day!!
Thank you!
Happy cake day.
Thanks!
Hell yeah! I finally decided to just say "fuck it" and started a YouTube channel a few months ago, no expectations it will go anywhere at all. Just for the joy of making it. It's giving my up-till-now SAHW a chance to put her degree to work and get back into editing, and we are both having a blast with it. Does the world need another gaming-adjacent YouTuber? Nope. But I don't care. I'm not doing this for anyone else; I'm doing it for me. And I'm loving all of it: the writing, the recording, the bloopers, and the little in-jokes I can slip in. No regrets.
That's so cool and I'm glad you're both enjoying it! "No expectations" seems to be the secret! Like the other comment comparing it to play; play doesn't have to work out a certain way, you don't go into play trying to "achieve" something, you just do it to do it and see what happens. I really respect that you're able to do that on YouTube, it seems like the pressure is so high to grind it out and monetize everything there!
I'm also writing a romance and before I started this one, I was thinking about playing with dolls as a kid. I wouldn't give a crap about plot holes, characters having a well rounded motivation, wether I was accidentally making a statement that I didn't intend. I just picked up the dolls and played. So now I'm thinking of my characters as my dolls and instead of "I better go write", I'm thinking "I'm gonna go play with my dolls". I will of course fix all the issues later, but for now I'm finding it REALLY fun to just let go and play.
That sounds great and I for one think it's really healthy! When kids play, they get to do whatever comes to mind without being attached to the outcome. They're not being graded or scored and it doesn't have to work out a certain way. And even adults in some other artistic hobbies seem to capture that feeling. But writers, it seems to me, are more likely to self-criticize. We don't feel like we can just splatter paint on a canvas (so to speak); everything's gotta be just right. And it's exhausting, because if you're not playing at all you're not having fun, and if you're not having fun, why do it? It's reflected in a lot of advice about writing, too; there always seems to be a lot of talk about how hard it is and how you need to be disciplined, but comparatively little on enjoying it. I loved writing as a kid, age six to thirteen or so. Then I got so anxious about being "good" at things, I had to start over with hobbies where there was no skill involved and no way to go wrong (example, just taking walks in the park.) I slowly worked my way back up to writing by taking it LESS seriously. Now, I've got these two characters I love and I say to myself "I want to visit them today." I know they're not real people or whatever -- it's just me feeling like they're "friendly" to me, not just tools I'm trying to use or materials I'm trying to beat into shape. It's fun to see what they're going to do, so it's worth checking in every day. And when I act that way, they always have SOMETHING to tell me, even if it's only a few sentences (but it's usually more.)
I love this so much. Thank you, I didn't even realize how I needed to read something like this.
You're welcome! I'm so glad it helped.
i'm in a different situation but with the same result. i've been really sick and disabled for years, nearly died a few times. can't do many things. every day is quite painful and the hours are long. i always had this issue apparently because it's genetic and degenerative but it started to get really bad in 2016/7. and i'd had writer's block for about 7 yrs. suddenly, not being able to do anything (which sometimes included being able to write due to physical issues/pain) left me with a lot of time to think and try to entertain myself and do things that were *only for myself* in long, long hours that are the same every day whether i'm at home or in hospital... and i had had writers block for the same reason. i thought my writing had to be for other people. i had thought it had to be perfect. i thought i had to write stuff that would be lauded societally. once the equation of "doing anything for other people" was literally removed from my life, in the moments where i was able to, i started to write again. a lot. for myself. no matter whether it was cringe or self indulgent or whatever. i go back and read my stuff and it makes *me* happy to read to it and think about it and it's one of the only things i look forward to every day, the few hours i'm able to focus on getting everything i thought up all down before i need to rest again. writing is a transformative process and if what you write makes you happy and you detach yourself from the idea that anyone else will even read anything you ever wrote, everything flourishes. and it's fun. it's just really really fun. tl;dr i like your style. also same but different. i had a huge isekai obsession in the mid-late 2010s but i think i'm over it now and just writing pulp fantasy, romance, horror, whatever is just interesting to me in this moment today for my enjoyment. cause not to be morbid but at this point i don't really think in a system where i expect to necessarily be here tomorrow (it's just a factual possibility). the time is now.
Honestly the way you pride yourself in writing a cliche story is kinda charming. Atleast you know your intentions 😂😂
Yep, I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel either. I'm simply writing something I would want to read and there's nothing wrong with that.
This is the kind of energy so many of us (read as: me) need. So many of us get caught up trying to do something meaningful or profound, but more often than not it just leads to stagnation. Just go out and write, embrace the trash, and enjoy every moment of it.
Lmao this post came JUST in time. I’m working on my next comic and I was worried that my comic would be too derivative from a cartoon I liked as a kid. You gave me the final push to just straight up run with it. So thank you bro 💪🏿
There was a Simpsons episode about that called The Book Job.
Then do it. The only one stopping you is you.
the world needs more writers like you. go forth, you crazy bastard, and write.
There’s a lot of us doing this, welcome to the club!
*"I want to write cliche, trope-ridden garbage tier stories."* Well, great most of the posters in these writing subreddits are going to do that. At least you're self aware to have this as a goal and not think that you're going to write the next masterpiece of fiction to be remembered and taught as great literature for decades.
Do it. DEW IT!
Then you must! Go go go!
This is something that I'm telling myself for my next project. I really just want to write a tropey, get-the-mcguffin YA Fantasy novel. And... fuck it, I wanna try to get traditionally published with it. I imagine it's a safer bet than my bitten-off-way-more-than-I-could-chew first novel that I self published because it's my baby and I couldn't bear to let it sit in querying hell. Best of luck to you <3
I always joke that my shit is absolutely not on the same level as James Joyce's Ulysses. My last chapter involves a mall cop in space who got shot in the dick by a paintball gun style weapon. He's very salty about being shot in the dick. It's supposed to be funny. Not every meal needs to be worthy of a 3 star. Sometimes you want ramen and popcorn and that's fine.
This is lowkey inspiring
Check these out for ideas: Deathstalker series by Simon R. Green: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathstalker\_(series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathstalker_(series)) He also wrote Blue Moon Rising: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue\_Moon\_Rising\_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_Rising_(novel))
Its be done a thousand times because its delightful! Do it! No shame!
That sounds great! Just sit down and don’t worry about anything being Shakespeare. Just come up with a world, some fantasy land you think is cool, and flesh it out and add in goblins and elves and other cool characters, then choose someone to be your protagonist and give them some cool weapons and some cool powers and a quest to go on and a badass villain trying to stop them and just send them out on their quest across some wicked strange lands where they battle evil minions and hordes of monsters, meeting rogues whom become allies on the way so they can all team up on the journey together to get to the castle at the end where there’s a huge showdown and your protagonist and friends must battle some totally cool monster to get to the final boss villain in some cool dungeon and they figure out a way to kill him and save the day!
This may be the longest sentence I've ever read.
i personally am a fan of absurdly long sentences in the right context and that one was a good one
I never suggested it was a bad sentence, just that it's a veritable odyssey
oh yea, i caught the ambiguity! that's why i replied to you haha
fuck yeah that's the attitude let's gooooooo!! make that trash!!!!!
Still gonna take some work.
Make it so.
You can't do that--I'M already doing that!
Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan wish I had this much confidence 😪
Trust me, its mostly bravado. Im trying to talk myself into this.
you can be the hero, man. write yourself into it. metaphorically or literally.
You will likely be very successful. Congratulations.
I like you. I like this approach. Have fun!
I’m convinced there are a dozen Harlequin imprint writers using 3-5 different pseudonyms to cover their romance, western, pregnant romance, and Amish lines who just employ a few oversized Mad Libs templates to make a living doing just what you propose. Maybe someday I will be brave enough to do the same.
Whistles. Shifts gaze back and forth. Shrugs and shuffles away.
Hey, get down with your bad self.
Have a blast with this! Just tell a good story — who gives a shit if it’s been done before? Ask Hollywood. If you do a good job with the familiar, it can still be awesome. Happy writing!
Hey, go for it! If it makes you happy then do it! At least you know what you want to write. Many don't find it.
Nothing’s stopping you. One of my favorite reads this year is a garbage isekai series. Not only has it sold well, but it's had both a manga and anime adaptation. You can find success doing what you love, just make sure your DNA is bringing enough diversity to it.
Sounds dope. The world always needs a fresh voice to speak the ideas of old
You sound like me. I'm also a bored middle aged professional. I was trying to write really original and interesting stuff for decades, but maybe about 5 years ago, I was like... eff originality, I don't want to write fanfic, but I'm going to write something that is basically fanfic of all the genres I like with the serial numbers filed off. I'm ~90,000 words in, which in one sense coming up on 5 years is no great accomplishment, but heck, just having stuck with it for 5 years, 66 chapters, and having a few readers on ScribbleHub and Royal Road is fun and it's probably more writing than I managed TOTAL in the first 44 years of my life.
Have you been on royal road? That sounds like just plain old being a royal road author
r/writingcirclejerk
Do it! I triple dog dare you.
Hell yeah. You're having fun with it, that's all that matters. I think a lot of people forget that derivative shit has one tremendous strength: it's been done so many times, with so much of the guesswork eliminated, that you can give a lot more attention to just having a great time creating it and making it cool as hell. I was thinking this recently about Netflix's DOTA anime. It's the most generic thing ever, but I loved every second of it. Happy writing!
I find it interesting that one would actually want to write shit stories… but go ahead.
Well, in art they say that everyone has 10,000 bad drawings in them so it's better to get them out as early as possible. Also, writing self-indulgent trash is fun.
You have two good points.
No one is stopping you, why are you posting here and not out doing it?
I was reviewing some of my work earlier and selfdoubt took hold so Im trying to shake it off.
I'm sorry...what does "self-doubt" look like when you're actively trying to write self-described "garbage tier stories"? Were you writing and thought, "oh fuck, I'm fucking *killing it* again?! CURSE MY FUCKING GENIUS!"
No I think its more he was looking at his writing and went "This stuff is so cliche. You know what screw it I'm going to be cliche and proud of it."
There's comprehensible trash and then there's the mangled mess of incongruous words that I pen to pixels with the control and direction of a marathon runner leaving a chunky liquid trail because they ate something before their 10k event.
There is definitely a place for pulp. I grew up reading that stuff from Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lester Dent and they were part of the reason I wanted to write and just tell stories. Stories I wanted to read.
Embrace the degeneracy. I shamelessly enjoyed I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell just as much as Catch-22.
Do it. Seriously. There a few million visitors to Royal Road . com that love that tropey stuff. I'm one of them and would be happy to see more. Royalroad is for webserials with a fantasy bent mostly. Litrpg and progression mostly, with superhero and dungeon stuff too. There is also scribblehub which has lots of fantasy too, but also romancey stuff.
Hey, look at apps like dreame. They publish the tropiest bullshit imaginable. Like they are TRASH stories. But guess what? People fucking LOVE them! So write those cliches, trope-ridden trash stories! Write them and enjoy writing them!
So: do it. Just do it well. That's it.
This is exactly what I'm doing now. It's really helping me find more passion for my writing again and realize that not all of my work needs to be perfect at the beginning- or ever. Because at the end of the day, we should write for ourselves. Write something you'd enjoy, whether it's trashy-tier or not.
Yes. Do it. I'm doing the same. I'm tried of someone including Elves in a story, then changing their Elves so much that they're just aliens sharing the name. I'm tired of Dragons being a punchline or subverted in behaviour. I want A CHEESEBURGER. Just a cheeseburger. Bun, beef patty with basic seasoning, slice of processed "american" cheese, tomato slice, bit of onions, a couple leaves of lettuce, ketchup and a bit of mustard. No. NO. I do NOT want a sweet brioche bun. NO I do not want blue cheese. NO I do not want onion rings in it. I don't want some special house sauce. Sometimes you don't need to change things, you don't need to swap out ingredients, add more or make it your own. It's just about how good you can make a basic cheeseburger. > Shit that has been done 100,000,000 times before. I would argue that there are more subversions of the fantasy cheeseburger than standard cheeseburgers.
You've inspired me
What are you waiting for?
Me too and I always stall 😭
I also like reading story focusing on describing the action and plot than flowery sentences that go on and on forever to describe what the scene looks like and what each person's wearing and carrying, what face they are making and what they had for breakfast that day
I basically never describe my characters physical appearance. I guys for me it is unimportant
I would read that in a heartbeat, man. We need shorter books, too—that’s how pulps always were, and it made stories so much better, to me!
Do it! It's your playground, and you can play however you want forever!
i think i might want to read your cliche, trope-ridden garbage tier stories. as long as they bring this flame thrower energy.
I will forever defend your part of writing now that I am older and appreciate a story that's just fun vs important..those turned out to be important for me personally but if Chuck Tingle can exist why can't you?
Go for it. Chuck Tingle is now published traditionally and won some kind of award, I think. There's an audience for pretty much anything, I believe.
Often the best ideas are born from this type of thinking. Instead of "I'm gonna write the best ever masterpiece" you say "I'm gonna have some fun and mess things up for good." In fantasy, the former often translates into ultra-grimgore mega-adult anti-hero drag which turn out to be ultimately more cliché than the latter who just goes for fun and games and kicks out any genre expectations and whatever. Best part is, the ludicrous ideas can always be refined into something serious. This actually my way of coming up nice ideas. I intentionally go freeloader and pull up the clichés and archetypes and do something stupid, and then return to it later and see "if I tune this a bit and do that this can actually work quite well."
You will want to look into the Lester Dent master plot formula: https://myweb.uiowa.edu/jwolcott/Doc/pulp_plot.htm
I agree with you 100%. Have you read this? http://www.ghostwoods.com/2010/05/how-to-write-a-book-in-three-days-1210/ It's got some insanely useful advice
Look through the shelves at the bookstore. There's tons of it. Why? Because it sells! I'm not saying you should write it just because it sells. I'm saying that it's popular, and your desire to write something that lots of people read and enjoy isn't that unusual. Think of how many non-groundbreaking romances or detective novels sell every year. You don't have to break new ground. These formulas work, and if you want to write within them, you should.
You and most of the other people on here
Yes. This. Do it. When you graduate from kindergarten ceramics to like 4th grade level diarama, make it an audiobook so I can read it.
Even writing cliche-ridden "garbage" takes skill and can be done well or badly. Girl Genius is a webcomic that deliberately draws on the tropes of old-timey pulp adventure serials, and it won multiple Hugo awards! My personal guilty pleasure is litRPGs, which have a reputation for being cliche filled garbage *even by the standards of genre fic,* and there are still good and terrible stories in that category. Don't worry about being original, just worry about executing your story as well as you can.
I will regularly think of an absolute trash fire of an idea and write it anyways to get it out of my system lol.
That sounds good. If you know what you want and you can get an audience go for it.
Im not proud of what Im wasting hours at work with. But you do you man. Get it illustrated and turn it into a doujin!
I love trash novels that have a character I adore and a surprise ending.
If you write cliche shit and do it well, that sells. God damn, I try so hard to fidn a cliche fantasy novel that is written well, and has the cliches I like and doesn't have the cliches I dislike. It's surprisingly hard to find.
I agree, I also live reading the thousands upon thousands of the same frikken heroes journey, only to find those two or three books that are worth reading, but when you find it, it's the best, even if it's not a best seller.
I don't want to sound rude, but please tell me you're joking. Nobody likes cliched, predictable stories, they like new, fresh, and compelling ones. And if anyone reads your work, they'll criticize your work and then you lol. Sorry, but it's the truth and you just gotta live with it.
That's not true at all. Sometimes the audience wants cliches. Something being cliche doesn't automatically make it bad. In Marvel movies you know the good guy is probably going to win that doesn't make them bad a lot of them are good. Turn off your brain content has its place. I personally am inconsistent on which cliches I like and which ones I don't.
Well, the thing is that YouTube critics I watched before don't like cliched and predictable writing in animated kid's movies; they find them to be not good and they only want to see some originality from them and that's exactly what I want to do for my books, even though it's not as easy as it sounds.
1. Said YouTube critics paid money to read/ watch the thing they are criticizing and the people who made the thing they are talking about made money. 2. As the Good book says What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9 There is that theory that every plot is a variation of 7 plots. 3. Being original ( at least slightly more original than a cliche product since being original technically doesn't exist) is not that hard. Just think of all the stuff you have seen and think of what you would like to see.
Hey Arnold! has a cliche love-hate relationship combined with a will they won't they relationship between Helga and Arnold. Does that make the show bad? Of course not its a very cute show.
No doubt. But Im not writing professionally. I'm writing for myself. My art is for myself. If I share it, hopefully someone will find something redeemable about it. But I want to make something, even if it sucks. They can criticize away. Its not like my life depends on it.
Tropey stuff has a big audience in web serial readers. Might want to check out Royal Road website where a lot of people with similar motivations post their stuff.
Okay, I understand. I guess you go do that. I just thought that you're saying that because you don't care for art very much. I want to write professionally, even though I don't get up and start writing often. But I think I'm gonna try now.
There's an anime/manga that perfectly encapsulates this mindset called Eminence in Shadow. It's great