I’ve officially given up trying to help most people with writing because they don’t want any help. They just want comforting platitudes and I’m not going to blow smoke up anyone’s skirt.
So, effective immediately, I’m retiring from online writing forums. It’s just not worth my time.
You’ll notice that I haven’t written a lot about my writing this year. I’ve talked about the writing community and how disappointed I am in it, but my own work, not so much.
Mostly, that’s because I haven’t been doing it much this year. I have gotten 3 books written, which is a massive step down from the 8 that I completed last year, and I haven’t even completed 3 to be honest.
That’s changing though and this is how I did it.
This is not going to go well.
In my apparently ongoing attempt to explain why amateur writers get it all so terribly wrong, we take a look at why so many go so completely wrong because they don’t have the slightest clue what they’re writing or why.
It really brings us to a dichotomy. Do you want to write to entertain yourself or do you want to write to entertain an audience?
Pick one!
I just ran into this, so let me know what you think. Someone just got on a Facebook group, specifically for publishing, and got pissed off because someone else dared to suggest that people who can’t write a coherent book, they need help in the form of an editor.
And this crazy person started yelling that it was somehow an attack on the disabled. The amount of stupidity in this is just ridiculous, but what else is new?
This is going to be a quick one, I’m dealing with a lot of real-life problems at the moment and have very little time for blogging, but here we go anyhow because this comes up a lot. I’m talking about it in reference to writing, but it comes up in other things as well. Apply what I say as you will.
I’m really upset right now, not at anyone else but at myself. I screwed up. Now I have to try to fix it. It happens to the best of us but this is the first time that I remember doing it this badly when I should have known better, at least not in a very long time.
It’s all my fault. I just want to vent.
I’m really starting to ask that question a lot lately. This isn’t just a matter of writing forums but a lot of things. We will focus on writing forums this time out and I could venture into other things later though. So what is the point of having any of these forums at all?
I don’t know, you tell me!
Now this isn’t just writers, I want to make it clear up front, but they’re the people I’m talking to and therefore, they’re going to get called out for it.
Recently, there was a thread on a writing forum about sex scenes. One person was asserting that there were no sex scenes in sci-fi and fantasy and others were telling them that they were wrong.
I threw my hat in the ring and said that, in my very subjective, personal opinion, graphic sex scenes in sci-fi and fantasy were largely unnecessary and done for titillation, not telling a good story.
Then everyone shit themselves.
This kind of thing happens far more often than you might expect, but this was a perfect example. Over on a writing forum, someone asked a question about the really tired, obnoxious trope, the fact that a lot of conflicts, especially relationship drama, wouldn’t exist if the two characters would just carry on a decent, adult conversation. This goes on in TV dramas all the time, where the writers are seeking a 45-minute plot that could, and should, go away in 5 minutes if the characters involved would just open their mouths.
And this is when someone I’m well acquainted with opened his mouth.
