General Writer's Block thread

Advice on how to avoid Too Bleak, Stopped Caring with this concept?

Don't make it too bleak.

Well, that was helpful.

You're welcome. After all, nobody's putting a gun against your head and make it bleak at the first place.

I asked "How do i avoid (thing)?", and you said "Just don't do (thing)."

Maybe by adding some characters who add some levity and warmth? Doesn't need to be Comic Relief (though some Black Comedy could lighten the mood) but they can be people who brighten the mood. Their morals don't even have to be out of the Black-and-Gray Morality, but they can be affable, hardworking, loving, etc. I think that characters and their relationships are a great way to make things less depressing on the whole. Even something as simple as a good friendship or sweet romance in an otherwise bad situation can add a touch of lightness and hope.

It's more like asking "how do I avoid being struck by lightning" and being given the answer "don't go outside in a storm".

Clearly you're doing something that makes you worried about it anyway so any answer will require examining what you're worried is "too bleak" about your story.

(Personally, my advice is that you can't guarantee no one will be turned off by your story but the best way to guarantee not everyone will be is by writing something you care about.)

If I had a nickel for every time I had a story idea involving the use of We Can Rule Together as a pickup line, I'd have two nickels.

...which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

Settings with Black-and-Grey Morality can avoid this if you make sure to highlight the redeeming qualities of the grey side, and make it clear there's at least some hope for some people. And adding a touch of comic relief helps a great deal.

I love my never ending conflict of "wanting to torture my characters" and "feeling really bad for torturing my characters". I was planning a scene for ages now but in finally writing it I was so upset lol

(I don't know if this is the right place to share this but I figured that it may be helpful for other writers)

So, basically, Google isn't really good for like detailed research beyond searching up basic facts. Google search has been getting worse in general as Google has been prioritizing advertisers and popular pages, making it more difficult to find useful information from reliable sources. Not only that, because we're so used to getting answers quickly, it's hindering our research abilities. Considering that writers tend to research a lot for their stories, this sounds pretty inconvenient to put it lightly.

However, there are some better alternatives consisting of academic resources, libraries and other websites dedicated to research which I heard about through the internet:

• www.base-search.net (70% of the 100+ million scientific documents it has are free)
• www.bioline.org.br (bioscience journals from developing nations)
• www.JSTOR.org (Big site for primary sources; however, unless you're a researcher or a college student, you can only access 100 articles for free once a month. The count resets by the end of each month and you could just make alt accounts to bypass said count if you sped through your 100 limit)
• https://link.springer.com - (has 10+ million books, articles, and research protocols)
• www.pdfdrive.com (Has loads of free books that can be downloaded in PDF)
• www.refseek.com (Has so many freaking resources; over a billion in fact)
• https://repec.org (Has almost 4 million economic and releted science works)
• www.science.gov (Has 200+ million articles and a search engine focused on scientific websites)
• www.worldcat.org (Lets you search through 20k+ libraries across the world; helpful for finding specific, niche books)

Now, Google is fine if you're doing rather quick research or just searching for basic facts. But, as I explained, it's quite flawed when it comes to doing detailed, extensive research. I'm not sure if other, more mainstream search engines (i.e Bing, Yahoo Search, DuckDuckGo) are any better than Google when it comes to doing loads of research though.

That's a legitimate problem to point out and I agree, at least to some degree.

I've been doing enough research - both for my alternate history webnovel and graduate school (got my Master's degree last year, hell yeah) - throughout my life to look for proper sources...but the same can't be said for everyone.

Personally, one of my preferred method of more in-depth research is starting with references listed in Wikipedia articles. Going further, I check both my local libraries and bookstores to find relevant books, and then use both the books and the references listed in the back.

Yeah that is an issue, though it doesn't help that I don't know where to start at times.

I agree with your take on Wikipedia; I viewed it as a decent jumping point for research while giving you a refresher and/or a basic idea on the topic you're researching. My local libraries are pretty far away from me (I live in the suburbs), but I have Libby, which lets you access your local library's digital collection, at least.

Several of the sites have search engines. For example, if I'm writing a short story featuring Zelda Fitzgerald and need to do research on her to portray her accurately, I can look her up on JSTOR and find numerous articles about her. Searching up the topic you're researching in one of those sites and going through at least a couple of those articles from the search results should hopefully be a fine start. As mentioned earlier, Wikipedia would also be a fine start.

Edited by Cutegirl920fire on Jan 15th 2024 at 6:14:07 AM

Anyone get the feeling sometimes you're less-so planning/writing a story and more-so stringing together a bunch of ideas into something hopefully coherent? Really trying to get back into writing and actually complete some stories this time around and its been popping up in the back of my head.

Should you project onto your writing at all?

While I would rather not go into too much detail about my personal life, I tend to project my experiences, identity, interests, and past trauma on my characters. I suppose that's a coping strategy some way or another. However it's making it more difficult for me to make a villainous character more nuanced because she kinda became a personification of my past trauma and the story she's from calls for more complex characters and flat characters would be incredibly out of place for there. I also projected my gender identity confusion a bit on a different character and tried figuring out how to explain their identity in a historical setting since the specific term for their identity was coined relatively recently, and eventually decided to not make them that specific identity to save me the trouble.

So is projecting onto your story a good thing or not?

Edited by Cutegirl920fire on Jan 26th 2024 at 3:35:16 AM

It can help make your characters and stories feel deeper and more "real", because everyone's personal lived experiences and perspectives are different and drawing on that can help make your writing more distinct and visceral, and your choice of themes can contribute to your personal style. But if it's not handled well, like you get too deep or derail the story for it, it can come across like you're soapboxing or dumping your personal problems on unsuspecting readers in a way that can feel offputting or "TMI". It's like just about everything in art- it can be done well, or poorly.

Just about every artist puts something of themselves into their art. I've noticed myself doing it, too- I created a fantasy race that holds no familial ties beyond childhood, which I based on my own feelings of rootlessness that come with being surrendered anonymously by my birth family in infancy and subsequently foreign adopted. Additionally, some of my old WIP's themes draw from the feelings of frustration and powerlessness I had when I was raring to move out of my parents' house, feelings that I'm not sure I can draw from now that I've been living on my own for over three years and am finalizing a house purchase. With that said, I didn't realize I was putting myself into my work at all, let alone in those ways, until months or even years after I had written those things; it wasn't a conscious decision at any point whatsoever.

Edited by CrystalGlacia on Jan 26th 2024 at 7:20:21 AM

I don't do it very often, mostly because my own life is the thing I find the hardest to write about and I'm inspired more by characters and concepts from other media. That's why I've never really subscribed to "Write What You Know" — because my stories would be rather boring if I didn't branch into the weird stuff I'm actually interested in. The closest I got was writing a story that starred me and my real life friends, but the story never went anywhere after the first few chapters since, well... the friend group fell apart and it became awkward.

I do attribute some things I know on my characters ... but also things I absolutely would not do. For villains, though, I tend to work them out of real life bad people or criminals.

I have used personal feelings and experiences in what I write. Mostly it is some quirks, ideas and beliefs, or, conversely, qualities I wished I had. So my characters are not carbon copies of myself, but they will share some experiences or way of thinking with me, and may react how I would in some situations. I can extend this to villains, since it is just infusing them with some of my traits - and I like imagining myself in various situations, so imagining myself or part of myself as a villain is not that difficult. Then again, I have not written many villains, and especially not particularly vile ones.

I've just noticed that a lot of the characters I've thought of can be summed up in at least one Texts From Last Night post.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Hard to say with zero context.

I have this concept, Cut The Loop where the past is constantly changing and nobody, the main character included, remembers the past versions and from their perspective they're propably doing the things for the first time each iteration, and each scenario is propably explained once the timeline shifts.

Getting the reader to understand that it has reset is the easy part. I've been thinking about implying what originally happened, that Möbius caused the original apocalypse but one or more parties using time travel mixed things up severely and now Möbius is trying to prevent the end of the world (but something else always causes it after Möbius has dealt with or attempted to deal with the previous thing. It's the Cold War). And in every timeline Möbius decides to use the time machine instead of trying something else. I guess that it might come off as sone kind of a purgatory metaphor^note  (a religious reading isn't intentional — it's Terminator i got the idea from). In the end, Möbius sends the whatever things back farther than before, intentionally wiping itself from existence in the hopes of that giving humanity a chance.

But how can i imply anything about anything, when Möbius and whatever few humans (soldiers and scientists?) will appear alive in some iterations, only know their given version of the events?

Maybe Möbius' time travel attempts are moving from recent events to further and further past for some reason, so the drones or whatever it sends from the past might bump into stuff sent into later events? But does that make any sense for those things to still exist there since that moment has been/will be wiped out by the next changes? How can i imply anything about the original version of reality, or the versions between that and the first shown one, withiut starting right from the beginning itself? How do i keep it cpherent when the story basically restarts every time that the time travel is used, and Möbius might not even have a way of knowing what the drones(?) are doing or seeing because that wouldn't really make sense would it? How do i make the time travel itself make as much sense as possible?

Also, what do you think people might believe this whole thing is saying about AI? And what time(s) of the Cold War would make sense for this whole thing? Should Möbius be American or Soviet, the name could maybe work for either since it's after a famous mathematician?

Edited by Nukeli on Jan 28th 2024 at 3:22:56 PM

I really like this title I came up for a story that's basically "Hamlet meets The Great Gatsby''".

It's Down the Road of Sinners and I find it fitting as the Prince Hamlet Expy ends up involved in crime in order to avenge his father with the Jay Gatsby Expy helping him out on his vengeance and enabling him.

I'm slowly, but surely mentally preparing myself to act on at least one of my story ideas.

My search history is about to get very interesting.

I'm glad to read that you're moving towards starting! Good luck with your writing—I hope that it goes well! ^_^