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Notes -
After a fairly long stretch of rejections, I just had a piece shortlisted for a fiction anthology. It feels good to have a little success.
It really felt like 2025 was a dead year for hack writers like me, but 2026 might be improving. Any other writers here? How's your luck?
Good on you. I am not a real writer. I've always kind of sort of wished I was better at writing because sometimes I have cool and interesting ideas for stories and then if I start writing my standards are way higher than my talents, I get frustrated, then I get bored and quit a week or two later.
I just started trying again since I had the idea of using AI to critique my work and offer suggestions. Its actual suggests for prose are always garbage, but its critiques of which parts of what I wrote are bad and why help me focus on how to improve beyond my own vague instincts of "this isn't satisfying but I'm not sure why."
I managed to write one chapter in three weeks (as a side project, again, not a real writer). I suspect I need to just write more and edit less until later. At least that's advice I've heard about writing, but I'm not entirely convinced. I don't think my main character has a sufficiently well-developed personality yet but I made a lot of progress on establishing him better by rewriting scenes over and over again until they felt more interesting.
Any advice?
My advice would be to start out doing short stories. They have a couple of advantages.
First, they have a quicker turnaround. You can get a first draft done in a week or less. This means that you have more time on the back end to rework what you have into something that works. A lot of good writing that you see in books is actually rewritten, and often several times. If you have a story that’s ten to fifteen pages, you can easily rewrite the bad prose, or fix the plotting or see where the characters are doing weird things.
Second, the level of detail you need to get started is a bit less. You don’t have the space for a long detailed plot, or fifteen pages worth of world building information. You don’t have the space in the story to worry about what happened to your main character in the fifth grade and all the trauma it caused him. In all of that, you have time to hit the highlights and move on. This removes the temptation to follow Tolkien in the sense of spending large amounts of time building an entire universe and not writing the story.
Third, they’re easy to put out into the world. You can just put it on a blog, or a website. You can submit to short story contests, you can print them at kinkos and hand them out on street corners. Thus the need to worry about gatekeepers is less.
As far as characters, I personally use the type descriptions from personality tests (MBTI or Socionics or Enneagram) simply to get a sense of how the character might think. That helps me because if I don’t make a point of giving each character a different personality, they all end up sounding like me.
I’ll also recommend looking up the Brandon Sanderson lectures on either podcast or YouTube. He’s dealing with a more advanced level of writer, but it’s helpful. You can also find podcasts about the technical skills of writing like characters and descriptions and so on.
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