The Writing Thread

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Pomniman said:
No but it functionally doesn't matter because if you need a machine to suck you your penis about how goodly yuor writing is in the first place the core problem is you have no confidence in your abilities and there's no quick or easy fix for that.
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That's actually not a problem that's exclusive to AI. If you ask a real person for their feedback, they're more inclined to be nice even if they're actively trying not to let human socialization get into their criticism.

I've seen people glaze their friends' creative endeavors, in one case the writing was "steinbeck-esque" and as soon as they stopped being friends they were like "I was just being nice" even though the person who was sharing was not the sort of person who would appreciate or want someone's empty praise.

In inverse, something that was realistic and handled with the care it requires becomes gratuitous and self-indulgent to the point of depravity as soon as the relationship becomes sour.

If you're paying someone, that comes with it's own set of biases as well. If the person is not established enough to be a "known" editor, their work will bias to the conservative side, not wanting to piss off their client. If they're established they can afford to cut the fat more ruthlessly and if they're known for their no-holds barred feedback they're more prone to create problems to fix where there aren't any.

Probably the best advice I can give is to diversify your feedback, even from AI you can just hit retry and see if it agrees with itself. Is there something that comes up every generation? If you get feedback from different models is there something they all agree on? Specify if you want the feedback to be concrete and actionable (in-line edits) or more nebulous and aesthetical (mood, pacing, tone, structure). Hell, go recursive and get feedback on feedback, if you're paying for a subscription you might as well use all of your allotted tokens.

And most importantly, do you agree? Brainlessly applying every single suggestion is just going to cause too many cooks syndrome or creativity via committee. Ultimately, a creative project is directed by you, only you can steer that ship.
 
Shaneequa said:
That's actually not a problem that's exclusive to AI. If you ask a real person for their feedback, they're more inclined to be nice even if they're actively trying not to let human socialization get into their criticism.

I've seen people glaze their friends' creative endeavors, in one case the writing was "steinbeck-esque" and as soon as they stopped being friends they were like "I was just being nice" even though the person who was sharing was not the sort of person who would appreciate or want someone's empty praise.

In inverse, something that was realistic and handled with the care it requires becomes gratuitous and self-indulgent to the point of depravity as soon as the relationship becomes sour.

If you're paying someone, that comes with it's own set of biases as well. If the person is not established enough to be a "known" editor, their work will bias to the conservative side, not wanting to piss off their client. If they're established they can afford to cut the fat more ruthlessly and if they're known for their no-holds barred feedback they're more prone to create problems to fix where there aren't any.

Probably the best advice I can give is to diversify your feedback, even from AI you can just hit retry and see if it agrees with itself. Is there something that comes up every generation? If you get feedback from different models is there something they all agree on? Specify if you want the feedback to be concrete and actionable (in-line edits) or more nebulous and aesthetical (mood, pacing, tone, structure). Hell, go recursive and get feedback on feedback, if you're paying for a subscription you might as well use all of your allotted tokens.

And most importantly, do you agree? Brainlessly applying every single suggestion is just going to cause too many cooks syndrome or creativity via committee. Ultimately, a creative project is directed by you, only you can steer that ship.
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Yeah, there's also something I'd call "creative writing workshop syndrome" where all attempts at "constructive" critique take on this masturbatory yet cucked self-effacing quality that makes those who abide by it write the blandest most insipid shit possible. If there's anything that so-called "creatives" as a collective have lost in the social media era it's the will to be as abrasive and disagreeable as possible rather than jacking themselves and anyone who'll give them the time of day off for approval, not even financial gain most of the time but the shittiest, most useless type of social validation. Everyone's caught in a cuck spiral of being captive to social/political/"community" pressure to the point where nothing genuinely outré or even slightly less banal than all the usual homogenous glop is really allowed to exist.

And on that note, I'm going to shitpost something aggressively NSFL I've been sitting on for about a year that everyone's going to hate if only because I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't sooner or later.
 
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I've recently gotten myself into a sort of an absurd conundrum, but that of course is a bit hyperbolic. I'm not really a writer, nonetheless, I've been committed to work on one project for quite a long time, but I didn't manage to harvest its fruits in any form yet, since I crashed into the proverbial wall and I need to reorganize. It seems like my creative reserves mostly dried up with time, my mind is not as sharp to cut through a monolith of possibilities as easily as it did in the past, and functioning in a state of fatigue that follows with mental void in which my thinking is painfully straightforward and shallow definitely isn't helpful at all.

I've come to a decision to oil my cognitive cogs a bit and to hold the first project down for a while. I'm working on a second one that sails in a different direction in order to diversify my currents of creative thought; however, it didn't work out as I thought it would - it seems like I got stranded again and for one reason or the other, I'm being tormented by something akin to an authorial remorse that I left the first creation to rot and didn't succeed at all with nurturing the alternate bastard. Of course, I feel like I should strive to crawl through that sewage of mediocrity like a filthy dilettante grub, because it can't last for an eternity, but if I'm being honest, when I read it I feel like I'm being possessed by a phantom of frustration urging me to simply delete fucking everything.
 
In short - It indeed seems to be the case, I should've worded it differently. I apologize for that spastic, vague message.

In a bit longer response - it truly seems like I regressed in that craft, it doesn't flow that smoothly. I wouldn't say that the present effects are necessarily bad per se, but the fall of quality, especially in comparison with the excerpts that I'm honestly content with, is rather noticeable and it stings for a bit, especially the unhealthy perfectionist approach. It is rather obvious that I got myself on a bad streak and if I decide to wait it out I will degrade even further, but that feeling of working on something that might simply be subpar is sucking any satisfaction I felt while doing it. I wonder if there is a way to silence that insidious critic for a bit?
 
Unmistakenly Psychotic said:
In short - It indeed seems to be the case, I should've worded it differently. I apologize for that spastic, vague message.

In a bit longer response - it truly seems like I regressed in that craft, it doesn't flow that smoothly. I wouldn't say that the present effects are necessarily bad per se, but the fall of quality, especially in comparison with the excerpts that I'm honestly content with, is rather noticeable and it stings for a bit, especially the unhealthy perfectionist approach. It is rather obvious that I got myself on a bad streak and if I decide to wait it out I will degrade even further, but that feeling of working on something that might simply be subpar is sucking any satisfaction I felt while doing it. I wonder if there is a way to silence that insidious critic for a bit?
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Why the fuck is this so goddamn melodramatic? Communicate like a normal person holy shit.
 
Unmistakenly Psychotic said:
In short - It indeed seems to be the case, I should've worded it differently. I apologize for that spastic, vague message.

In a bit longer response - it truly seems like I regressed in that craft, it doesn't flow that smoothly. I wouldn't say that the present effects are necessarily bad per se, but the fall of quality, especially in comparison with the excerpts that I'm honestly content with, is rather noticeable and it stings for a bit, especially the unhealthy perfectionist approach. It is rather obvious that I got myself on a bad streak and if I decide to wait it out I will degrade even further, but that feeling of working on something that might simply be subpar is sucking any satisfaction I felt while doing it. I wonder if there is a way to silence that insidious critic for a bit?
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It seems like you take the idea of writing too seriously. Shedding some of your reverence for the act would help you actually do it instead of only talking about it.
 
I got a bit shit-faced yesterday and not only decided that it is a good idea to try to communicate incoherently with strangers on a gossip forum, but it also seems that the ethanol in my veins has led to the activation of a little bitch syndrome and I decided to whine about a trivial issue. After sobering up I have no idea what I even wanted to achieve with that approach.

Pomniman said:
It seems like you take the idea of writing too seriously. Shedding some of your reverence for the act would help you actually do it instead of only talking about it.
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The mindset of "Just put the words on the page bro" might work. Over a decade ago I had zero sense of quality and wrote complete fucking dogshit, but I was having fun with it. I still do, but only when I have the subjective feeling of it being worth reading. And that doesn't happen very often as of late. Maybe simply not caring as much is the key, after all.

I'm gonna pick it up again in a second, maybe something will come off it.
 
Unmistakenly Psychotic said:
The mindset of "Just put the words on the page bro" might work. Over a decade ago I had zero sense of quality and wrote complete fucking dogshit, but I was having fun with it. I still do, but only when I have the subjective feeling of it being worth reading. And that doesn't happen very often as of late. Maybe simply not caring as much is the key, after all.

I'm gonna pick it up again in a second, maybe something will come off it.
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I wouldn't say it's as facile as that even though that's the general direction I'm telling you to go in. You don't necessarily have to compromise on your standards but constantly agonizing over how you don't live up to them is like whacking yourself in the balls over and over again, which only makes you more impotent than you're already worried about being. You have to get out of your own head and just move your hands until you have at least 40-80 thousand more words on a page/screen, then you can look at what you have and torture yourself again if that's how you get your rocks off.
 
Pomniman said:
I wouldn't say it's as facile as that even though that's the general direction I'm telling you to go in. You don't necessarily have to compromise on your standards but constantly agonizing over how you don't live up to them is like whacking yourself in the balls over and over again, which only makes you more impotent than you're already worried about being. You have to get out of your own head and just move your hands until you have at least 40-80 thousand more words on a page/screen, then you can look at what you have and torture yourself again if that's how you get your rocks off.
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Which is basically just having your first draft done, the point at which you're supposed to be ripping yourself a new asshole and revising the fucking thing anyway. Preferably with at least one other set of eyeballs reading it as well.
 
A Hot Potato said:
Which is basically just having your first draft done, the point at which you're supposed to be ripping yourself a new asshole and revising the fucking thing anyway. Preferably with at least one other set of eyeballs reading it as well.
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Kind of, but I'd push back on the conventional "wisdom" that you "have to" prolapse yourself every time you edit because knowing what to leave intact without overcorrecting is actually much harder to learn when looking at your own work than getting caught up in a self-consciousness spiral and ruining things that were effective. This goes back to what I was getting at before with self-consciousness being too strictly imposed on writers by other writers in that it's much less useful than it seems to be. The idea of being harsh on yourself to improve your work sounds cool and edgy and right if you don't think about it too hard, but in present day reality it's just bending yourself out of shape to live up to the expectations of a phantom audience (in that no one even reads anymore) that'll only ever drag you down if you let it.
 
Unmistakenly Psychotic said:
I got a bit shit-faced yesterday and not only decided that it is a good idea to try to communicate incoherently with strangers on a gossip forum, but it also seems that the ethanol in my veins has led to the activation of a little bitch syndrome and I decided to whine about a trivial issue. After sobering up I have no idea what I even wanted to achieve with that approach.


The mindset of "Just put the words on the page bro" might work. Over a decade ago I had zero sense of quality and wrote complete fucking dogshit, but I was having fun with it. I still do, but only when I have the subjective feeling of it being worth reading. And that doesn't happen very often as of late. Maybe simply not caring as much is the key, after all.

I'm gonna pick it up again in a second, maybe something will come off it.
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Just put the fries in the bag.

Don’t be gay about it, shut your cockhole and do it.
 
Humble Architect said:
Just put the fries in the bag.

Don’t be gay about it, shut your cockhole and do it.
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Or really, if you're going to be a stereotypical alcoholic writer at least do it with something that doesn't turn you into some wine-swilling Frenchman (gayass prolapse having motherfucker). Put some hair on your chest, not a hairy cock in your ass.
 
How do you get over the anxiety of when you've planned a story out for years and revised the plot, but find actually writing it down totally daunting and worried I'll just mess it up if I do attempt it? At present I've got a detailed plot and worldbuilding down to pat, but actual execution puts me off. I'm not too bad of a writer, and I know this is just self esteem but idk how to get over it (working on a fantasy novel if anyone's interested).
 
Broadside said:
How do you get over the anxiety of when you've planned a story out for years and revised the plot, but find actually writing it down totally daunting and worried I'll just mess it up if I do attempt it? At present I've got a detailed plot and worldbuilding down to pat, but actual execution puts me off. I'm not too bad of a writer, and I know this is just self esteem but idk how to get over it (working on a fantasy novel if anyone's interested).
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Scroll two posts up and there’s a humble, voluptuous woman-enjoying, architectural major who has some words for another person who was being this way.

If forty-something cougars can shit out fifty books about how they want their self-insert to get porked by a centaur then you have no fucking excuse, none.
 
Scream Aim Fire said:
Way I see it, the biggest hurdle to being a good writer is confidence; indecisiveness is a killer
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The biggest hurdle is that you yourself need to have something worthwhile to say; to wit, you must have either experienced and grown past a variety of physically and emotionally challenging situations, or spontaneously thought of some incredibly novel and timely ideas to communicate to others. Without this component, regardless of skill level, one will never produce anything more than pulp literature.
 
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