4chan archive /lit/ (index)
2012-09-23 07:46 3002243 Anonymous (businessdog.jpg 500x660 95kB)
>aspiring author who has finished a novel already and has yet to publish it >insurmountable writer's constipation >not sure what to write about next My main question is this: What genres/plots/novels appeal to you most? I'm currently toying with the idea of several supernatural teens/young adults having to live in the real world and hide their identities, kind of like a Supernatural-X Men-Teen Wolf-Harry Potter kind of mash-up thing. Has this genre been beaten to death or is this general idea worth pursuing?

3 min later 3002251 Anonymous
Bad idea.

8 min later 3002264 Anonymous
bump

33 min later 3002316 Anonymous
You sound like me. You Sound Like Me. In my humble and unsolicited opinion, it's fruitless to "make art by committee." Sure, you can crank something out, something along the lines of what's hot right now, but unless you've managed to erect a Chinese wall between the innate satisfaction of creating something that is an extension of "you" and the profit motive, you're going to run into serious roadblocks. Me: Finished manuscript, no takers. Read Hunger Games..."This genre {young protagonists, strong female characters, lives somehow at stake due to machinations of a world barely understood} is hot." Get 5K words down of an ethnic teen female who will discover her "powers." Indefinitely shelved. Lesson learned. Write from the gut, not the head.

1 hours later 3002405 Anonymous
How about a story all about how, one black teenagers life got turned upside down, and you'll have to take a minute to explain to the reader that he have to sit right there and read about how the protagonist became the fresh prince of a town called Bell air?

1 hours later 3002419 Anonymous
Don't publish your first novel. Trust me, bro.

1 hours later 3002460 Anonymous
I have a small question. How did you find the willpower to write a book? I'm not saying I want to write long novels and all that. But I really need to become better at keeping up my writing. I usually just start writing a page or two of something and then never continuing. Did you do a lot of planning and research or did you just jump straight into it with only an idea

1 hours later 3002479 Anonymous
>>3002316 Do you know what an intransitive verb is?

2 hours later 3002757 Anonymous
>>3002460 OP here. I've been writing "books" (so basically like you said, the first few pages of a rough draft) since I was about 10, and I'm 20 now. Only in the past two years have I actually made progress. I used to jump right into ideas but then I found plot holes or complete lack of plots, dull characters, etc. Now I follow the snowflake method: >Write one sentence summarizing the whole book, like a tagline or something. >Summarize your book in one paragraph with each sentence devoted to a major plot point. >Write a one to two-page summary fleshing out each sentence of the paragraph into its own paragraph. >Plan out each chapter's events. >Write. Sometimes I use that method and I still can't find the motivation to finish a book, but that's what helped me finish my first one and that's what I plan to use. It's more time consuming and often without instant gratification, but it's a lot cleaner and more likely to produce good results. JK Rowling, for example, planned out all of the Harry Potter books before she wrote any of them. Hope this helps.

4 hours later 3003038 Anonymous
You should publish your finished novel onto a blog or something, advertise it, and let people read it and give you feedback. If enough people like it, you could try publishing it as a 99 cent ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, while the blog alone might attract a following which could motivate and energize your writing efforts. Regardless of that, though, the reader feedback may help steer you in the right direction for your next piece.

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