Have you ever wanted to be a successful author.If so share you experience with book writing oh and dont forget to mention your genre.
Anyone with book ideas
- Thread starter Wandering hobo
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Successful author? Nah. I'm a hack, so I just write to entertain myself. Whenever time permits, I write the odd short story. And they ARE generally rather odd.
As for genre, whatever strikes my fancy, really. There's always some element not present in reality, but exactly what it is/how big the difference is can change a lot.
As for genre, whatever strikes my fancy, really. There's always some element not present in reality, but exactly what it is/how big the difference is can change a lot.
It's comical to even think about writing a comical fantasy.icelich said:
You have to be able to strike a good balance between a book that's entertaining, and a book that's good.
For instance, "Blindness" is a good book, but it's not very entertaining.
It's easy, you just write a story for a man (let's call him Ripley).UBERfionn said:
When you're done you just change all the masculin words like "he" with feminine words like "she" and change "Ripley" to a girls name.
So you're working on a book.Yeah i cant get female characters right too.I either make them too feminine or too tough.UBERfionn said:
I've always wanted to write something along the lines of fantasy/horror with some black humor thrown into the mix. Unfortunately my hard drive is littered with unfinished word docs of malformed ideas. I have a tremendous amount of trouble sticking one project out until the end.
I've got the opposite problem. All my male characters either end up sounding like pussies, or they're a badass Gary Stu. Need to find a balance.UBERfionn said:
I answered a similar question a while ago. According to my answer, I write 'unoriginal post-apocalyptic/totalitarian society/oh no we're stuck in Matrix again type science fiction inspired by video games and sci-fi films.' I spend half the 'story' crapping on about weapons and vehicles and ammunition, flesh out the situation/backstory quite extensively, then I chuck some characters in and make them follow a feeble plot, usually involving zombies and gunfights.
This is why I will never get anything published. My experience with writing a book? Well, my first forum was one on this author's website, and she had a special forum for users to write stories, and other users could comment. Sort of like Fictionpress. And yeah, I'd write for that. I wasn't very good. It was useful practice for churning out words, since the users would always request updates. And I did NaNoWriMo for two years. It was...draining.
An entertaining book is a good book, but a good book isn't always entertaining.icelich said:
See? It doesn't work both ways.
Sci-Fi is not a genre whose readers have been spoiled with good female characters.UBERfionn said:
The only ones who spring to mind (right now) are a few Iain (M.) Banks characters (who barely count, since they can and do switch genders at the drop of a hat), obviously Ripley from Alien...that's all I can think of.
This is a genre that includes such gender-illiterati as Heinlein (genuinely sickening gender politics) and Asimov (who got better towards the end of his career - he freely admitted he had little experience with women for his first attempts).
Honestly, if writing female characters is your main problem in sci-fi, you can still probably get a good or at least influential sci-fi book out. If you cut the cast down to mostly men, and make it relatively subtle that that's what you've done, there's no problem at all.
OT: I'm currently writing a novel - it's a sort of re-telling of an old old epic, set in the modern world, and it fits roughly in the fantasy/magical realism genre. I hope it comes out readable, it's very pretentious in places at this stage.
And since everyone's doing the self-flagellating thing, MY main problem is purple prose. It's because I mostly write poetry. Oh - and because I liked Anne Rice. I'm not sure if I still do.
Subzerowings said:
Haha I see what you did there.
Yes but what im aiming for is an entertaining book.Yes but you do make a valid pointSubzerowings said:
Yaoi fanfics.
no, i'm joking but as a writer i would love to write for Dungeons or Dragon magazine.
Yeah im a huge DND nerd.
Otherwise i would say i'm good at writing surreal, modern-world fantasy short stories. I have some of them under my belt, but most of them are more for the humor of the surreal but i've always wanted to try a serious book longer than 30 pages (which all of my other amateur work have been under 30 pages. the longest being 19 pages)
no, i'm joking but as a writer i would love to write for Dungeons or Dragon magazine.
Yeah im a huge DND nerd.
Otherwise i would say i'm good at writing surreal, modern-world fantasy short stories. I have some of them under my belt, but most of them are more for the humor of the surreal but i've always wanted to try a serious book longer than 30 pages (which all of my other amateur work have been under 30 pages. the longest being 19 pages)
i originally wanted to ask for your ideas on the books but then i thought that you would think that i would want to steal them.roostuf said:
My longest attempt at fiction came out of deciding to write a backstory for my D&D character (a neutral drow warlock on the run for multiple crimes). It turned out as the first chapter of a book, but I didn't write more because I realized I would never in a million years get the rights to publish it.
Other than that, just weird short stories.
Other than that, just weird short stories.
than i would suggest reading the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchet, the best in that genre.icelich said: