Please come and talk to me. Just for some general writing chat and support...

[BiglyBadgers]

I am about a third of the way through editing my stupidly long book (this'll teach me for writing epic fantasy) and need some chat!

I really loved the chat and support on the nano thread, but now novel writing month is long gone and I am alone! There must be other people out there bumbling along needing a friend to chat to...surely....I can provide coffee, cake and excellent free WiFi

Oh Honeybooboo123, lots of virtual hugs from over here.

I'm sure your writing is fine and that you're just in the awful halfway through, can't see the wood for the trees place.

FWIW when I get stuck and I'm feeling that I'll never finish something I skip on to one of the passages that I'm more enthusiastic about and then go back. I usually have to massively rewrite the one I jumped ahead to but it's a good way of getting my head back in the story. And go back and look at some of the earlier chapters that you haven't seen for a couple of weeks or so and you'll be amazed by how they're so much better than you thought.

Chin up and keep going x

Sympathies honeyboo. Keep going. Write it for yourself and no one else. Funnily I've been tempted to ask on here if anyone else gets The Fear and how you cope with it. Any time I think about a published author's work I realise I'm not fit to lick their boots, I'm just wasting time on these stupid self-indulgent vanity projects, I'd be better off spending my time doing voluntary work, every good line I've ever written is probably accidentally plagiarised, and every profound thought I've had is dumb and cliched. Oh and I can't spell. And I know nothing about grammar. And I don't research my books properly. And the ideas are unsellable anyway.

Yet I've been doing this for at least 15 years, which is a special sort of madness I think.

Everyone needs a hobby and as far as self indulgence goes there are a lot worse things you could be doing with your time. There is a lot of really amazingly bad published work out there. I assure you nothing you write will be the most terrible thing on the market. It's not plagerism, it's homage, and as for grammer, I plan on paying Queen's sister to sort all that out for me.

The fear is what stopped me writing a novel for 35 years Tippity. In fact I was too terrified to write any fiction at all until a few years ago. I have a bit of a background in academia and could happily write academic essays and stuff until your mind exploded, but even though I secretly wanted to write fiction I just couldn't get past my subconscious critic. In retrospect studying literature to post-grad level probably didn't help. Nothing like spending your time over analysing works of fiction to make you your harshest critic.

I don't really know how to help. From what I know of writers every single one of them feels exactly as you describe much of the time. Interestingly (or probably not, but I ramble too much on this thread to worry about it now), I suffered from crippling social anxiety a couple of years ago. I ended up having quite a lot of therapy because I became very isolated. Along with being able to go to the supermarket again without having a panic attack, I seem to have learnt to get past my fear of writing as a pleasing side effect of the CBT. It's been a very slow and careful process, but I think I'm getting there. I'm still far to terrified to join an actual group where I have to meet with people and share work face to face. That is like my worst nightmare!

Bigly, I have had social anxiety as well in my early 20's and remember all of the panic attacks in supermarkets, the not being able to eat out alone in cafes and I felt like I didn't deserve my place at university. I have always enjoyed reading and writing but never really acted upon it. Then I went through a particularly horrible patch in life a couple of years ago and coming through the other end of it decided it was about time I had a hobby so embarked on a part-time creative writing course. Whilst there, I enjoyed listening to other peoples contributions but I hated being put on the spot and having to read out my own work. In all honesty, I think I only produced one good piece of work whilst there - a poem which after I read it aloud you could have heard a pin drop followed by please could I have a copy of your poem to pass to x. This inspired me to write more on this particular subject and I can honestly say it has been immensely cathartic. I write for myself primarily but I'm hoping that it may help others who are facing this type of issue (it is a novel that flips between history and the now but essentially tackles the same theme). When I first set out to write it, I had no idea it would actually turn into something of novel length and now I am quite happy to spend my time sitting in a café or at home writing than having general chatter with friends...so, I have probably become more isolated than is healthy but I feel compelled to get this book out of my system first!

It's the pits isn't it user. It sneaks up on you without you noticing until one day you have a freak out because you are incapable of choosing the right toothpaste. I'm very impressed at you going to a real life writing class. Just being there and doing it is an amazing feat! It is a very cathartic process to write. I think it is keeping me sane right now to be honest.

Saying that, I think I need to step away from Scrib for a bit. It really has been helpful to my writing, and I don't want to be negative about it but I just got another rather thoughtless review that just annoyed me far more than it should. She suggested I do something which would clearly go against all the characters involved and completely change the whole dynamic of the chapter. I need to go back to writing for me again and forgetting about what anyone else might think for a bit. I can clearly only deal with so much exposure in one go

Here's what I've learnt:

1. You are your own worst critic. Listen to yourself when your thoughts turn negative, would you criticise others work like that? Hopefully the answer is no so stop doing it to yourself. Try and detach from your work and criticise it as if it is someone else's. No one else will judge you as harshly as yourself they are too busy criticising themselves.

1. No one shits out great work. First drafts are meant to be terrible and just sort of in the ballpark. Think of it like sculpture, you throw down a heap of clay, get it sort of in the right shape then add some more form and structure. When it looks sort of right then you start carving in the detail. Good work takes time and effort.

1. Good work takes time and effort! Those writers you're comparing yourself to have been honing their skills for years and their work has likely been edited a whole bunch of times. It's a collective effort by that point and when someone is pointing you in the right direction you learn and improve. They have practice and resources on you, I expect you'd be doing a similar job with that help.

1. Terrible work does still make it through publishing pick up anything ghost written for Katie price in a charity shop. But just because I don't like it doesn't mean someone else won't. There is value in all types of writing. I like in depth complicated twisty novels and I like easy reading. I don't think less of one type over the other, it all has it's place. Maybe your writing is a different type to what you're comparing to.

I sometimes have the waver over published works being worlds better, then I realise that what I'm reading is not what I'm trying to write so it's silly to compare them if your things are comparable then you've got it easy. There's a proven work in your area right in front of you so what is it doing right and how can you incorporate that?

thanks all, I'm trying to write alternating third person POV with their thoughts and struggling for it not to just being a long lot of sentences of She thought, he thought... blah blah. It's just fanfic but I'm trying to find a style for a novel and usually write first person for ease.
Anyway, I know I should be showing, not telling, but it's HARD, especially in a short piece.

Interesting thoughts everyone and very good advice queen.

Another one with social anxiety here. Sensing a pattern... I think writers must often be the kind of person who's happier observing the world than participating in it.

Bigly, that would be my worry with something like scribophile too. I've found the only way I finish a first draft is to keep ploughing on and never look back. I sometimes read what I've written every 30k words or so, like standing back from a sculpture to get a sense of the whole, but I try to do it without my editing hat on. I'm planning to use scribophile (or equivalent) when the first draft is done and I've done my first edit. I'm more interested in readers' responses to character, pace etc than line edits. Not sure the best place to get that feedback given like you I'd be too nervous to go to a real live group.

Ah yes, I know what you mean. I always write third person (first freaks me out a bit for some reason), but still have that problem. I find had, was, could, would get repeated a lot as well. I treated myself to a subscription for prowritingaid as it was relatively cheap and the most useful tool I found was where it highlights all the words you repeat loads. It allows you to focus on them one by one rather than getting bogged down in the whole chapter at once. Maybe worth a look.

ok, you poor sods. Here's a first couple of paragraphs. I don't have enough karma to post on scibophile yet!!!

So, it's fanfic, star wars, and it's romance. Well, it will be.

--
She’d never meant to kiss him. Well, that wasn’t entirely true; She’d thought about kissing him quite a lot, just not like that. Officer Lora Pace had walked down a corridor after the end of her shift and found him half-slumped against the black wall, face bleeding and his breathing ragged. His red hair falling uncharacteristically forward over his downturned face, mussed from where his fingers must have run through it. It was a shock to see him like that, he was usually so immaculate, well groomed, the model of a ideal First Order leader. Lora stood as others walked quickly past almost trying not to see their General so distressed. But Pace stood there, awkwardly, unable to walk past.
Broken, he simply looked broken. A trickle of bright red blood, stark against his pale skin, meandered from his bottom lip down his chin. Fumbling in her uniform pocket she found a tissue and held it out like an offering to him. It seemed like such an inadequate gesture for her commanding officer, Lora berated herself, but at least it was clean.
As the white square of tissue reached his line of sight, Hux raised his head and his gaze met hers; Green eyes flaming with pain and anger. Fighting down panic, Lora fought an instinctual urge to run. He was intimidating at a distance, but up close he was captivating, even when bruised and bleeding. She knew the contour of his face almost as well as her own having spent each shift on the Finalizer’s bridge, trying not to look at him and failing. His footsteps had a distinctive sound as he walked down the runway towards the gentle curve of the bridge where she was stationed. When on occasion his green eyes had met hers she’d glanced away instantly, his expression impenetrable as ever.
Lora had struggled to keep calm when Snoke had used the Force to smash Hux to the polished black floor and drag his body like a doll. Her colleague to her left had sensed her panic and laid her hand hers as Pace had moved to turn and stare at Snoke’s huge image that had hung suspended above the bridge and Hux who lay under it. Don’t, was the implied message. Don’t look, don’t see, don’t be seen. Pace had yet to master her First Order colleague’s ability to squash their emotional responses to such brutality, even after six months of being onboard the ship. Nothing in her academy training had prepared her; This wasn’t the Order she thought she had joined.
“For your lip,” Pace stammered as his gaze silently bore into her. Wordlessly she leant forward and wiped the line of blood with the cloth, leaving a red shadow behind.

I write in the same sort of way Tippity and am only putting my...oh about 5 draft of each chapter through scrib. You do get some line by line edits, but most of the useful stuff has been on more general character and plot stuff, so I stopped asking for grammer comments. They have a bit for putting a whole novel up to share, but it doesn't go in the spotlight, so you have to really have made some friends first who would be happy to read the whole thing in one go.

As I said, I don't want to paint a negative picture of scrib. I have genuinely learnt loads being on there already and massively improved my writing and work thanks to some really great crits. I would absolutely recommend it. I just think I am maybe pushing my own comfort zone a bit too hard, too fast and losing perspective on some of the recent ones. I just need to step back and take a break for a few days. I still plan on putting up future chapters as I edit.

I confess I have never read any fanfic (I know! How have I managed?) Though I have a friend who reads a lot of Starwars fanfic and loves it. I also don't read romance , so I am clearly not the intended audience. However, as far as writing style goes I think it's perfectly enjoyable. It's a first draft, so I would expect some bits you will tidy up later. There's some nice imagery and a good sense of the awful awkwardness of a work crush on the boss.

How long is the piece going to be? This bit seems a bit crowded with a lot of back story and character building in a very small space, but as I'm currently in epic series mode this might be more about me adjusting to a shorter story than anything you need to think about.

If you want me to read more and give more detailed feedback feel free to PM me and I can give you my email. I can't promise a quick turnaround as I have uni tomorrow and Friday, but happy to look over the weekend if you just need a second eye on it.

That's interesting bigly. It does sound useful. Still in writing mode not reviewing so it'll be a while before I use it but it'll hopefully be helpful in lieu of proper beta readers. Have you finished your fantasy novel? How many words? I used to write epic fantasy and got about 150k words in to my first before realising I had way too much plot. Then I started again with a different idea and got 20k in before realising I didn't have enough plot. Planning is not my strong point. That was all years ago and now I'm writing what I think is called contemporary women's fiction although I hate the term because I've yet to see something called contemporary men's fiction, unless I'm missing something. Maybe Nick Hornby or David Nicholls...?

honeyboo well done for sharing :) My thoughts are almost identical to bigly's. It reads well. Definitely no need to be so hard on yourself! I felt there's a lot of backstory too. I was told to look out for use of the word 'had' because it implies you're not in the action, if that makes sense. E.g. The part with Snoke. Sorry toddler is demanding I draw a train so got to go!

Can you get too much plot in epic fantasy tippety? Surely you just chuck another book in the series. My first draft was 95k and I'd like to keep it around the 100k. It is most definitely just the first book though and is still mid quest at the end, but finishes after a nice battle. So far, I think if I do the whole series it will be about 4 books, but I don't really plan so this is just a hunch.

Thank you for your comments. Fan fic is an interesting beast, it's a short story format where you often assume knowledge with most of the characters and environment but if you introduce someone new then you either ignore their back story entirely or whack it in. I need to get more skilled at weaving it through rather than chucking it so upfront. This was going to be only a few thousand in total but I'm struggling to get the romance to be believable without more. The male character in star wars is a bit of a sh*t so trying to make it work that she loves him and he can actually love her...but all writing challenges are useful exercises i hope.

A lot of fanfic is two lines of plot and then smut...

Anyway, I seem to use quite an awkward sentence construction and i read published work and realise how i over complicate things where they go simple.

Can you get too much plot in epic fantasy

I think that's how you end up with books that have beginnings too far away from the ends please do be picky with your plot, lest you end up with three ginormous books about walking

The writing is good honey, you're worrying too much. I did keep expecting it to burst into smut though

I think that's how you end up with books that have beginnings too far away from the ends please do be picky with your plot, lest you end up with three ginormous books about walking

I wouldn't class that as too much plot. That's too much non-plot detail. LOTR is way heavy on the overly detailed descriptions and backstory imho (really, there is only so much I need to know about the inside of a cave or the multiple generations of someone's family). I think of plot as stuff that is moving the story forward. The joy of epic fantasy is that you can have lots of strands and lots of plot over lots of books. If you don't than its not epic fantasy really.

Fair point however someone thought that was driving the story at some point. I'm not sure I've read much epic fantasy so I'm not sure what would count as too much in that case. When writing I do try to only include things that have a direct impact on the story being told. If something is mentioned then it has a consequence later on. That tends to keep it reasonable for me but likely I'm not dealing with as complicated works. I am a bit worried I wrote in an entirely unnecessary character and scene in my last writing frenzy so might not be qualified to comment

I reviewed a couple of things on scrib, hope I didn't offend the author, but as a reader I didn't need to know the main character's entire outfit right at the beginning because it didn't help the plot then.

They also had 'she said, she pondered, she muttered' for every piece of dialogue which I found annoying and unnecessary. I do love reading other people's work, but seem to the ability to write well myself!

Oh well, I've given up thinking my fanfic thing is going to be short, I quite like writing about my evil Space Ginger, and might try and make the woman a bit like the woman I want for my novel in terms of personality.

I do belong to a fanfiction facebook group but the standard there is ...variable. And some of them write fics about the strangest things. (um, says the woman writing romantic smutty Space Ginger stories)

As for novels - can there be too much plot? Yes, I almost think my preferred is you know there is more plot around what you are reading and more details, but you are only focusing on a few threads of it. So you know the author has it completely sorted but you only get a hint of the complexity. I don't like books where you need a white board and post its to keep track of what is going on with who.

Then again, too little and you lose the will to live and read on, even if the characters are appealing.

I don't like books where you need a white board and post its to keep track of what is going on with who.

I love books like that! I do think this is a bit of a genre thing though. Take a classic epic fantasy series, The Wheel of Time series. The series is 11 books if you only count the core books (14 if you could the prequel, companion and one written after Robert Jordon died). These books weigh in from around 250k to 400k in size. The Song of Ice and Fire (game of thrones) series is already 5 books and still going, again around 300k-400k word count each.

This is what epic fantasy is. If you are writing one book with a clear single strand of focused plot with one or two POV you aren't writing epic fantasy. High fantasy, yes if it is set in a different world, but not epic. My fist book at 100k is pretty tame to be honest.

Wikipedia says high fantasy is the official term for epic fantasy? It still did not really explain what makes something epic or not. I can't work out what counts

i've read a few game of thrones, until it got so depressing I lost the will to live... and I wouldn't say that he had too much plot. Lots of characters, yes, but it didn't overwhelm. It wasn't confusing or difficult to follow. I will try to think of a white board example book...

I grew up reading the Belgariad by david eddings, so a fantasy lover, but have fallen out with it lately. Also read LoTR.
Are they high or epic, or highly epic?

Is it as slow as GoT? I can't handle all the broken promises of dragons and zombies and fear it will be worse in the books

Is it as slow as GoT? I can't handle all the broken promises of dragons and zombies and fear it will be worse in the books

Maybe I meant too much plot for me to handle in my first book. Five POV characters, three with huge back stories (relevant ones), set in several locations in several countries and a world history at least 500 years long etc etc... Bit much when I was still struggling to write a decent sentence. It's one of those stories that won't die though. Does anyone else have one like that? I've come back to it a few times over the years and keep thinking I've cracked the plot structure only to get bogged down again. And I find epic fantasy is complicated by world building. I want to do it justice without going overboard. Like, my degree is in ecology and at one point I was getting worried that my vegetation biomes weren't correct for the described geology... um. What would the pH of this soil be?? Now that's the kind of detail that doesn't propel the story! But I do love the characters. I think maybe in a few decades when I retire I'll sit down and have another go.

Queen I heard that revelance thing described as the gun on the mantelpiece: if the reader's told there's a gun on the mantelpiece in chapter one, they're going to expect it to go off sooner or later. I try to make my scenes do at least two things. Normally they have to move the plot on and reveal character and possibly foreshadow or set something up. Ideally, anyway! I have a habit of getting carried away writing dialogue just because I'm enjoying the conversation then having to cut most of it out.