Please limit excerpts to one post. Give advice as much as you receive it to the best of your ability. Discuss the written works below for practice; contribute, and you shall receive. If you have not performed a cursory proofread, do not expect to be treated kindly. Edit your work for spelling and grammar before posting. Shitposters should be ignored and reported.
>Beginner guides on writing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHdzv1NfZRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPnobbck9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAKcbvioxFk
>Intermediate guides on writing: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48654.Story https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3097766-borges-on-writing https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23056.Image_Music_Text
This is the second draft of a military love story I wrote a long while back. Feedback is appreciated. I'm reworking it chapter by chapter since the whole thing is a 140k words put together (and will be longer once I lengthen certain key moments I didn't have the foresight to write well due to it being the first draft). Anyway, please tell me what your first impressions are.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)00:12:07
>>25328072 well written I guess. Is this a Narnia fanfic? torture porn is an automatic -2 deduction on my /10 scale. so, 5/10.
>>25328063(OP) Why are writer's workshops filled with utter incompetents?
I go to one once a week, and for the most part the human critiques are awful. I'm only permitted to read 15 minutes' worth of text (so about 2500 words) and then have to sit and listen to 5-7 people "critique" my work. Which usually boils down to several things:
1: Because the workshop is full of wokie liberals, if you write anything that they don't agree with, or if it has something they aren't 100% comfortable with, they will tell you because their need to virtue signal is never-ending. Waste of time 2: So many goddamned surface level critiques about grammar, imagery, and dialogue 3: Critiques about the plot or characters of some other shit because it's impossible to give the needed context for the section of the novel. 4: One guy who actually provides something of consideration.
And all of that takes 3 hours of my time to get, because I have to drive to workshop and sit for 3 hours listening to other people's gay shit (lately they are obsessed with writing contests rather than actual passion projects and novels)
Compared to AI, which does:
1.Use AI to plan a scene. Put all the notes and items into Plottr. 2 Write the scene out. 3 Present to the AI model (Claude or Gemini) and have it critique my work. 4: Because I pay for the premium plan I have the notebooks, and can dump the last 10-15 chapters and a shit ton of notes into the project folder. 5: Provides actual feedback in under two minutes with no wokie bullshit, and advanced context-based responses based on the provided supplementary materials, with rationales and reasons for WHY it thinks i should do something to the work. 6: Repeat several times. 7: Go to workshop, get the same critiques anyway. 10: Rinse and repeat.
Either way the AI is 100% worth the money, I basically can get an extremely valuable critique every two minutes that has actionable content.
Nah, Aslan is the character's name because his culture is inspired by several Central Asian peoples. I could always differentiate it to Ashlan, I guess.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)00:17:25
>>25328155 you probably dont risk data mining with a bunch of irl libtards thoughbeit. especially if you just go by a pen name. also theyre a good sample of the actual "bookreading" audience circa current year. anyways, do you think there are any local AI models I can run on my computer that'll do good for me proofreading, writing notes, etc?
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)00:18:37
>>25328147 I’m confident this can be cut to under 100k
>>25328155 I prefer critiques where you can state what type of analysis you’re looking for rather than just open criticism.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)00:24:48
>>25328169 The first chapter is only 13 pages. I meant the entirety of the story is 140k
>>25328170 Maybe I should rename the main character. Oaklynn is a bit gaudy.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)00:25:03
>>25328143 no more tweaking about word lengths. Best predictor of whether something is going to resonate with literally any audience is : does it hook? Is it good? Not length.
>>25328166 I really don't give a damn about data collection. AI going to scrape the internet unless we Blackwall that shit like Cyberpunk 2077. We lost that battle already. Just publishing your work means your shit is getting scraped, and even if you publish it analogue only (like just on book) you're 1: losing the eBook market share and 2: some nerd will scan & upload it to shadow libraries just to get some street cred.
>also theyre a good sample of the actual "bookreading" audience circa current year.
Hard to say though. I mean, I live in Denver, which is full of liberal cuckolds and progressive retards. I think the bigger problem for me is that the people I'm reading to don't know...are fucking ignorant about certain topics, they don't fucking anything about electronics or cars, which feature as prominent plot devices in the story. Like, the character in my book is a gear head, he likes cars and mechanical shit. I tone it down as much as possible, I'm not geeking out on it, but these retards get hung up on that, and I think that's disrespectful to the end reader who might actually want a book with stuff about cars and computers. It's annoying. I had one lady who read multiple works of mine over several weeks tell me I needed more diverse characters, e.g. I needed to basically put a brown character in there just because.
>do you think there are any local AI models I can run on my computer that'll do good for me proofreading, writing notes, etc? I tried that, doesn't work that well. Right now AI is in the "Muscle car/18-wheeler" stage. We can make a model that delivers results, but we cannot do it efficiently. No matter what the people on /g/ say, locally run LLMs are always slower and produce lower quality work than the latest models running with all the capacity of a data center. Maybe in a few years you can get a decent model running on a desktop once the models are refined and the kinks ironed out. I'd just get Claude or Gemini Pro and be done with it.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)00:36:31
>>25328177 Of course it's not, that's why it's fiction. If it weren't that way we'd call it facttion.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)00:37:59
>>25328072 This is saturated with cliche dialogue, anon. It reads like you gave an AI an outline of a torture-interrogation scene and just said "fill it in with whatever."
You have to seriously ask yourself what your characters want in this scene and what they're willing to do to get it.
Why is Aslan so resistant to questioning? Why does he not value his life/value his integrity more than his life? And if he really thinks Leonard will "get nothing from [him]," why does he proceed to immediately give Leonard any information whatsoever? Does Aslan think he has a chance to survive this ordeal with his pride intact? If so, how does he think he can do it?
And for Leonard, why does he think he'll get anything out of Aslan in the first place, and how does that assumption change with his resistance? Does he care about Aslan or Lucinda's lives outside of getting caught? Is Iovino's presence holding him back? Why and how much is he against torture?
Character intentions are clear in the very beginning and end, but everything in-between feels like an expository rickety bridge.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)00:43:39
>>25328155 >anecdotal writing critique SUCKS! >therefore...throw it into the machine designed to kill learning!!! please stop shilling le heccin science machine on this forum
>>25328173 I agree. You're right. I try that, but the critiques at my workshop basically operate independently of anything you tell them. You can tell them you ONLY want specific critique and even line it out on the fucking document what you are looking for, and inevitably, you'll get half the group being too retarded to follow those instructions, or they feel the need to add their own opinion, and the worst part is the lady running the workshop agrees with that because she insists it encourages growth, which kind of makes sense, because if you are unwilling to hear anything but what you are looking for, you're really just putting blinders on yourself. I guess in the end I would want a hybrid. I only go into workshop asking for three focus points for the members, so I think that gives plenty of room for offering additional information. My problem is people just...ignore what I asked for.
>>25328170 Interesting premise, but Oaklynn is fucking distracting. Also, wayy too much telling, especially in the beginning. Weave the descriptions into the dialogue.
LLMs are *inherently* useless for creative writing, be it feedbacking or just to generate ideas. They're not really smart people. They barely even approximate really smart people. They're engines charged by statistics and programmed to show you the words most likely to go well along with your words. There's no creativity within an LLM. They can only leech off of your creativity, stretch it out, and show it back to you mangled to make it seem like a new thing. But, of course, anyone with any sense who's tried to use AI in a creative capacity already knows this. Just use it for when there's a word you can't remember and shit like that
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)00:46:07
>>25328207 It's about zoomers who end up in a dangerous situation, and instead of cowering in fear and collapsing, they fight back to survive, and actually thrive on violence.
>>25328220 just make sure you're aware of how young people actually act or you'll come across as picrel. THATS the main crux of plausibility IMO.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)01:00:51
>>25328227 I basically am pic related I don't even know any young people
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)01:02:28
>>25328232 hmmm... well fuck. put on your scuba suit youre going to have to go tiktok diving for hours on end nigga. alternatively, just cheat and parse your dialogue through an LLM to make it sound authentic.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)01:06:35
What's a good prompt to ask AI to analyze and critique my story
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)01:07:50
This was the kind of stuff I was talking about, >>25327299
>She looked at the dock workers in their dusty, tattered overalls contrasted so bluntly against the men and women in finery, their suits perfectly cleaned and their dresses a host of vibrant colors that verged on tacky. Ahead stood the textile factory, an eyesore that could be seen from miles away by the massive smog clouds that emanated from its thick chimneys, turning the sky directly above it darker than night with soot as the workers inside dumped coal into the furnaces to keep the machinery humming to the sound of thousands of dollars a shipment.
>>25328147 You open with a paragraph full of "there's this, and there's this, ooh, and this, too!" and when I ask myself, "how do these things impact the story?" I get the answer of
>"Oaklynn stood out like a common barn rat amongst racehorses."
NIGGAAAAAAAAAAAA YOU HAVE ONE PAGE TO HOOK A READER INTO A STORY AND YOU SPEND IT ON DETAILS THAT WILL NEVER COME UP AGAIN
"my quirk chungus village girl doesn't fit in, isn't that crazy?"
NO. I PUNCH YOU IN THE MOUTH I PUNCH YOU I PUNCH YOU IN THE MOUTH I PUNCH YOU I PUNCH YOU IN THE MOUTH I PUNCH YOU I PUNCH YOU
Until she says "The entrance exam is going to be taking place at noon, and I’d like to be there!" nobody has any clue what she even wants. You are wasting the reader's time by withholding the premise for so long.
For everyone on this board, STOP feeling obliged to describe everything. If it doesn't significantly impact the character's choices, CUT IT KILL IT BURN ITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT RAHHHHHHHHHHHH
>>25328240 So honestly, if you have access to a decent AI platform, (I'm using Claude and Gemini), the prompt is half the battle. If you want a decent critique, you need to give it context. Luckily both of these companies offer projects/notebooks. They are basically a folder where you can dump as much or as little as you feel ius necessary. I started by dumping the last ten chapters and some character notes.
Then i describe, briefly, what is happening in the chapter, and that I would like some critique. I usually tell it what I think is working, and ask it to identify what it thinks is not working. I look usually for things like plot, tension, emotion, description, and to check for any areas it can identify as info dumping or show don't tells. Then I give it permission to look back at all the other chapters in the project folder to contextually analyze the chapter to make sure it is in alignment with the rest of the story, that it makes sense for the characters to be doing what they are, and give it the opportunity to add anything it feels is important. From there it will spit out a response, usually as a list of things it found, and you can then spend the next couple of chats discussing what it found and digging deeper to get more context.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)01:19:58
Hi, Reddit! 1/2 > Smoke rises ponderously from a small fire, wafting into heavenly clouds of petals which rise above and cover the earth as a firmament. The ancient City of Washington was alive again as a hundred thousand cherries blossomed for their annual resurrection. Embers flick to the ground and ashes fall beside. George Washington the Great (for whom the City was named) had at the first planted this forest when he was a young man. The second week of Spring, when the blooms are at their peak, is when the American Congress convenes. The burning leaves cause a waxing and waning heat. Numa the Oracle was responsible for christening the city the second time, a full millennium later, and laid afresh ten thousand trees more. Thus Americans revere their First President, Washington, and the cherry tree as proxy, and the late President Numa next in dignity. The smoke intensifies. A mounted man, saber-in-the-scabbard, clothed in a bright silk surcoat sumptuously blue, takes another draw on his cigar. Though the new capital was his normal place of habitation, a yearly pilgrimage to Washington was part of the duties of the President since time immemorial. Following him before and behind was a cavalcade of compatriots: the Honor Guard, who were the chiefest of the President’s Army, as well as several clansmen of his, which would be unusual, if it were not for the centennial celebrations coinciding. One clansmen, whose face bore similar scars as the President, spoke to him thus; “You’re here all the time Isaac. I haven’t been here since I was a kid. Tell me, after all these years, is it as beautiful as it was when we first saw it?”
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)01:21:09
>>25328257 2/2 >Isaac took too long to answer his brother’s question. He thought too hard about it, as though it were another double-sided question-trap from the battlefield of politics. He draws on his cigar again. “Yes. It is just as beautiful, if you understand why.” >John-John easily recalled the stories of America; how it is said that the boy Washington had stolen his father’s ax, and cut down a cherry tree for vainglory. His father spared him for telling the truth, but George resolved to plant as many such trees again, as the span of his life would allow, to revenge himself of all traces of impiety. >“I think get it. Don’t you feel something though? Or are you always on about philosophy?” Asks John-John. >“It is said that this is the American Ethos; to respect one’s father and master, to maintain one’s honor, and to make restitution for transgressions.” A brief pause maintains President Isaac’s stern aloofness, “If you keep such a philosophy in your heart, then this place will be beautiful.” Isaac was older by about six years, and after they were orphaned a natural paternalism brought him closer to, and farther apart from, his brother. >“I’m just fucking with you. I knew you’d go into a ‘sagely’ diatribe. It’s just a bunch of trees.” John-John smiles. The bitter sounding words warm Isaac’s bones, and slowly he, too, smiles. This is how they used to talk, absent the faux-decorum now present. >“How about you run around with ‘polite’ society for ten years? See how you turn out after that? Huh, jackass?” Retorts Isaac, with unfeigned fraternity. Both of them now let go and laugh without dissimulation, and their cousins overhearing snort in solidarity. >“That’s right. Platsians ought to know how to talk, around each other, at least!” chant the crowd of clansmen.
>>25328177 Stories are like turds dude. You can polish them. this has been proven by MythBusters. I personally think it would be funny, but it would not be a timeless story.
>Also, wayy too much telling, especially in the beginning
In the descriptions of surroundings or character appearances?
>>25328211 I mean maybe it could, but there's a couple sections in the first 50% that didn't go anywhere and I'd like to remedy that. They wouldn't be massive, but it wouldn't help the story to cut those parts. Is 140k too long for a story? I thought that was pretty standard for an adventure.
>>25328243 I'll dial the descriptions back. I was always told my descriptions of surroundings was my strength and should lean into it but if it comes on too strong, I'll pull it back.
This story was a slower burn. By that I mean the first half is dedicated to building up Willow and Oaklynn's relationship, second half is a gritty, depressing war drama on the front lines. That's something to keep in mind if you keep reading.
>I was always told my descriptions of surroundings was my strength The problem isn't if the descriptions are good, the problem is how they're applied to the story. They are good descriptions, mind you, but at this early stage, the reader has little to no idea what the protagonist wants of how they intend to get it.
It's like if you started construction on a house and instead of plywood or tools, you hand me a bucket of paint. I don't know what to do with it. And it's 90 degrees outside and there's a million other customers who have their base materials at the ready, even if their blueprints aren't as appealing. I personally don't much patience to wait for you to dig out the wood from the bottom of your truck.
If you give me even a few planks to start, I can install those and even paint it was we go along, but paint alone can't get me anywhere.
>>25328270 >In the descriptions of surroundings or character appearances?
I would say all of it. Your first page is basically a bunch of exposition that goes nowhere. Then you continue doing this with shit like the uniform description.
I think the other issue is that I am having a hard time with engaging myself. The dialogue between Oaklynn and the two officers has potential, but right now it's..i dunno...flat? Since this is third person without omnipotent narration, which is where it should be, we don't know what the officers want or why they are there. It seems like they are recruiters, but the reality is that I can't tell if they are or just two commissioned officers standing around that she randomly approached. This needs to be clearer. I would say maybe outside the garrison/fort she has to walk in past some guards for inspection.
>Oaklynn’s back suddenly stiffened up straight. She wasn’t here to gawk; she had a purpose in mind!
Remove this entire line, it adds NOTHING. You are trying to add tension and plot movement, those should be implied as subtext in the narration. I would say make her look at the town's clock tower or the sun and realize she's running late. Build the tension through implication, not direct slaps in the face.
>>25328290 I'd be grateful if you did. I want to improve this story and I've done as much improvement as I can solo. I need other people to rip into it so I can make it everything I know it can be.
>The problem isn't if the descriptions are good, the problem is how they're applied to the story.
I see what you're saying now. I'll try to tweak it. I'm already working on chapter two so I can work it while the critiques are still fresh in my head.
I do hope you try and stick with me. I know it needs a lot of improvement.
>>25328305 Gotcha. I'll really pull in the descriptions, especially.
The dialogue is a bit trickier because I don't want to just say "I'll spice it up" but I think (since I already know how the entire story will go) I'll try to make the interplay between Harlow and Eve a bit less wooden. Both of them will be a key part of the story so I think I'll pay a bit more mind to how they talk to each other.
>>25328309 You'll notice I'm only focusing on the first part. The reason for this is that your beginning is where you need to put your energy. A bad beginning makes the reader put the book back on the shelf. I would really want something more engaging, frankly, and other readers would most likely agree. Some ideas could be for a beginning story beat:
Oaklynn wanders into town. She is cold, hungry, but nonetheless determined. (we also don't know WHY she is leaving her town of comfort and safety. Don't tell but maybe hint as to why she left. Was she ostracized? To be married to a known abuser? Modern audiences will want something good, yet relatable so "sick of this provincial life" doesn't work. Henry of Skalitz in Kingdom Come Deliverance was sick of his peasant/blacksmith life but stayed until his hometown was raided and sacked and he had no choice. The point is you want to add some mystery and wonder for the reader to stay interested. We know the tropes, but we still read on.) She comes into town, asks for the recruiters, they interrogate her, we are unsure if they will accept her.
OR
You start at the bickering. The two officers are interrogating her and through dialogue, she reveals how she came to be here.
Ultimately I think the first one is stronger and plays off your existing plotline.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)02:28:03
I'm giving myself one more failure and then I can end it all. Huge relief actually
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)02:28:28
>>25328325 >You start at the bickering. The two officers are interrogating her and through dialogue, she reveals how she came to be here.
That feels so blindingly obvious of a better set up that I genuinely feel stupid for not thinking of it. That's why I want critique though. Maybe I just need to completely start chapter one over from scratch. Just gut the whole thing and come back with something better.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)02:29:47
>>25328331 But what if you just need two more failures before your big success?
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)02:31:59
>>25328255 >If you want a decent critique, you need to give it context. Translation: >If you want it to tell you what you want to hear, you need to tell it exactly what you want to hear.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)02:35:09
>>25328335 This. The lines of code don't actually *want* anything. It doesn't have agency. It only has echoes of agency adopted form the industry it was forged in. Aka: It's designed to please, so it will only please. It cannot want anything unprompted, unlike every other living being on earth.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)02:36:17
>>25328338 >every other living being LLMs aren't living beings
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)02:40:22
How do you feel about scene break inside a chapter?
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)02:45:44
So like I was thinking of writing a story about a. Guy who’s so much smarter and better than everyone in his office and he’s tired of this shit so he manipulates situations to cause someone he’s determined to be unstable into getting fired so he comes back and kills everyone except the main guy who predicted when the firing and shooting would happen so he’s out on vacation
>>25328335 I just told you how to use an LLM based AI chatbot correctly, so it doesn't hallucinate a fucking answer. If you don't like it, tough titties, i guess. My prompts are designed to get specific feedback on a specific piece in terms of its quality and its relation to surrounding chapters. Part of that involves targeting specific things to critique, for focus, and the other half involves giving it some agency to have an independent thought so it can push out some unique insight.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)02:49:03
>>25328349 Generally necessary unless you want Goosebumps-length chapters
>>25328354 There is no way to use a chatbot in a creative capacity "correctly" because chatbots cannot be used effectively in a creative capacity. You have to be "specific" with it because it's just bouncing your ideas back at you alongside generic text. That's why it gives you shit feedback when you're not "specific" with it.
Tell me, anon, what is your stance on synths, replicants?
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)03:00:00
>>25328358 Interesting. I usually don't write them, but I think it might be a good practice after all to get the story flowing without lots of mind-numbing transitions.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)03:05:15
>>25328349 It's weird, my novellas have lots of them, but my novel has none.