Writers! Come and Talk About Writing!

Fantasy yo, far removed from reality, yet still as realistic, deep and down to earth as possible, if that makes sense...

 

I've been writing since I was ten. Right now I have been writing a lot about people (mostly queer girls) and their lives. I've finally started a story about four gay girls that were unlikely to ever become friends with each other and suffer through school together.

Here's an excerpt (Actually, almost everything I've written on it so far) of my new story: 'Empty Closets and Open Secrets'

As I mentioned before, none of us have a choice. I guess when genetic codes were created in whatever way they were the little particles were like ‘Ha ha I’m going to be evil and make some people way different than others’ or something like that. It sure feels like they did.

I guess I never had much of a problem with being who I am. Sometimes it’s awesome. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes I just want to throw my hands up in the air and declare that I am not who I was born to be. Sometimes I just want to be… normal. Or, whatever the flawed version of normal is today.

There are people who have it worse out there. People who get thrown out of their homes just for being different. People whose lives become scattered shards that were once part of a stained glass window. People who take their own shattered lives because they were born different.

I never understood why people could be so cruel to one another.

 

I am in the process of writing a fantasy storry atm and for my youtube channel I write a storry aswell. The storry for my youtube channel is the one im working the most on ATM but the other storry does have 9 pages. Am i gonna add any chars in there that are gay/lesbian/trans or anything in between? IF it fits shure.

 

I hear a lot of people say that getting down to work is better than waiting for inspiration. You can fix a bad draft, but you can't fix nothing.

I've always written science fiction and horror, but eventually I stopped knowing what I wanted to do with it. I got a few form rejections from editors plus a personalized one in 2015. Now I'm writing two novellas in another genre.

 

I've been writing for years. I haven't had a real passion in writing since about a year ago, but it's been an interest of mine thanks to some writing assignments in English classes back in Elementary School. First stories I wrote were I think about my family camping, and one about a time I lost my tooth? X3

Now I have a passion for writing cartoons and...well, don't know what I want to do XD I have like 5 or more different show ideas and can never make up my mind on which one I like better. I guess I have passion on fanfiction, generally towards shows like Mixels and Wander Over Yonder. I'd link some of my stories but that'd break a certain policy here. Ah well.

For the genres I write? Mostly fantasy, kind of action/adventure, and a hint of mystery. Was intrigued to see this thread here.

 

Great ideas on writing here. I liked the advice on sticking with it and keeping everything you've written. I've also learned to keep the "deletions" if I change something about a character and put them into a separate Word file.
I write poetry and am currently working on a historical fiction piece. The experience of the historical fiction piece is really cool...it is the first time I've ever written a full, novel length manuscript with fully developed characters. At present it is going a bit longer than I think it's actually going to be, but only because I'm enjoying developing these characters so much! They're my own little creations and I can make them like or dislike whatever I want....I can make them have whatever flaws I choose, react the way I choose, it's really awesome! I have tried and failed to write novel length manuscripts before. The beauty of the historical fiction is that the plot is already written by history so you as a writer get to focus on two things: the research needed to keep the novel as historically accurate as possible (otherwise you're writing RPF, not historical fiction) and the characters. It's a great experience so far.
Wondering if any other writers actually have like and dislike for your characters as you would real people?

 

Right now Im writing a dark fantasy/horror story based on hallucinations I've had.....

Really dark, set in the Victorian Era. Basically, there is a giant castle/cave the size of a big town. Outsiders, rejects, etc. are kidnapped and taken there. Main character is a lesbian teen who ran away because of abusive parents, an edgy kid into some dark magic, and a really shy but completely brilliant guy. Amongst other relatively insane characters, they try to start a revolution against their evil overlord. Not totally original, but considering it is based on hallucinations I have had, it doesn't really have to be.

I also really want to do a sort of queer high school drama, once again not very original, but hey. I want to express my feelings about high school through the characters. If something happens in real life, I want to twist it into my story somehow. Im going into freshman year in about a week or so, and would love to slowly work on the story as my years progress.

Being darkly inclined *bats come out of graveyard* and a part of the goth subculture, I like creepy shit. But also fantasy. High fantasy and sword and sorcery stuff is vastly entertaining.

 

Goddamn, writing is scary as fuck. Reminds me of learning how to swim. I wonder at what point I'll stop looking at my work and thinking

"Not good enough
Not good enough
Not good enough
Not good enough
Not good enough
Not good enough
Not good at all
Not good enough
Not good enough
Not good enough..."

and actually make the jump. I know this is one of those things in which you can only get so good on your own, and once you reach that plateau the only way to keep improving is hitting "Publish/Post," leaving yourself at the mercy of others. Knowing this doesn't ease my trepidation though; in a way, it would be easier for me to strip naked in a room full of strangers. I can't think of something more intimate than my thoughts, and the idea of pouring myself in text for others to read, to analyze, to ignore, to judge, terrifies me. I can do bungee-jumping; I can do skydiving, yet this is what gives me vertigo (so to speak).

I'm at an impasse, and the sooner I come to terms with the fact that it won't get any easier, that there's no "waiting it out," the quicker I'll be able to move past this.

Heh, easier said than done.

 

^^It is possible to make the jump. The difference is that you need to get to the point of finishing a draft, thinking "not good enough" but actually knowing why specifically it isn't good enough. Then you're able to revise and edit it until you think "that's a damn good piece of writing." It'll come.

 

I used to write stories.. Not really, anymore.

I enjoy writing songs and poetry.

 

I write scripts for movies and tv but the process and the struggle are pretty much the same!

 

I like to write fanfiction most of the time, it's mostly one-shot stuff since I find it a bit hard to write more than that. I've had a few stories in my head(mainly fantasy) and I've been trying to make the history of each country represented in that story as rich as possible, making character's family histories as colourful as possible. Whenever I try to make the character as dimensional as I can, I always find that to be the hardest. Also, trying to write the intro of a story can be a bit hard for me to write as well...

 

I write "alternate historical" stories, stories set in histories other then our own; covering topics like politics and military

 

Woohoo! So glad to see there's a thread for writers!

I am mainly a free-verse poet; it took me a while to find my true voice as a poet until the past two years. Back in high school, I was so much more invested in trying to make my poetry sound and look fancy on paper, playing with rhyme schemes and otherwise dead words that it was all just so false. I was practically trying to go Shakespearean in my writing, so the sentiments of my work were so watered down because the poems were even inaccessible to me.

After a long break of not writing much of anything, I took a Creative Writing course in college with Robert Plath, a former student of Allen Ginsberg's. His assignments helped me out so much with getting back in touch with myself as a writer, and he was a huge motivator and supporter when he would read my poetry. He, Chris Cole/disembodied poetics and Frank O'Hara were huge inspirations for me, and I am so glad that I have learned what I could from Plath.

What I usually do when I write a poem, is just sit down for no more than fifteen minutes and work on it in one shot (unless it is a longer poem no editing, no deleting. Doing that helps me keep from trying too hard on the poem, and I've never been happier with my work than I am now by doing that.

I also write stories; I used to be an active roleplayer, and that's one of the hobbies that helped me become a better writer because I was in a community where there were so many eloquent writers that pushed me to practice and perfect the craft. I have actually been working on this one book for a few years now, still in progress but one day I'd love to see it in the hands of readers.

 

Got an experience a long time ago about writing:

It was a bad time. Depression got its grip around me. Something happened (I won't go to detail) and it caused all my confidence and my self esteem to crumble, sent me to the edge of sanity, with me scrambled to search for a reason to live, something to prove to myself that I was still worth living. I was hysterical, and my head was blank. Dark thoughts of death was hammering on the doors of my mind and I felt everything breaking down around me. I head off to my computer, typing what I thought, at that very moment, was my suicide note.

With tremble fingers and tears in my eyes, I went on about my feeling, about the pain and suffering I had. Then suddenly my writing mode kicks in, like on automatic, in a very flippant manner. Suddenly I begin to go over my spelling and grammatical errors analytically. Then I thought about the structure, without any flow and no beginning or ends, so I went over that again, and try to form a coherent narrative. Then I look at my word uses, picking adjectives carefully, avoiding needless repetition, show more tell less, and so on, until suddenly I realized my tears were dried and I am editing and writing my own suicide notes in complete calm and quietness.

Then I laughed, with my face shamefully buried deep in my palms. My mind was mine again, and the impulse to harm myself was gone. My writing habit literally (in that very sense!) saved my life. Looking back, the thing that triggered my crisis was completely silly and meaningless. But right then I was so blinded by self hatred that I couldn't see it, and honestly I don't know if I could stop myself from taking my own life. Thanks to the habit of a writer that I managed to save enough time to calm myself down, without consciously knowing about it, and not going through with whatever horrible idea I had then.

I guess the moral of this story is: Keep on writing and always spell check whatever you wrote! No matter what!

 

Oh, I do that too! :icon_bigg

 

I've had this idea for a story in my mind for a long time, and getting advice on the plot would be amazing!
In a fantasy kingdom, the people of Lunaris (there are a few spirits, one of the most important a moon/flying spirit), are ruled by a fair King and queen. Life is good for everyone, except for the outcasts of society, the Alaen people. Cursed with wings, they are treated as society's scapegoats, living in a mystical section of the kingdom with floating islands called Skylands and dark pine forests. After rumors that some Alaens have begun to search for the 6 Spirit Orbs, who will bring power to whoever gathers all of them, the Searchers, the kingdom's most elite spies, decide to infiltrate the Alaen people and gather the orbs for the king. Flynn is a half human half Alaen creature who has been a Searcher her entire life. Spying is the only way that she can redeem herself in the eyes of the kingdom. But when she is apprenticed in the Alaen Skylands to Jade, she begins to question her motives. Realizing that both groups have malicious intent, the two decide to journey across their kingdom to gather the orbs and return them to Selene, sprit of the moon.

What do you guys think?