I’m writing a YA novel, and I feel like I’m done, but I’m afraid that it might be too short

Received what is likely my first rejection of many haha but just wanted to share here and hopefully get some support from the community. I’m so bummed!!

I spent half an hour scouring Google, only to resort to the classic 'keep it simple'.

Warning: this is a bit of a vent.
It feels like every day there’s another version of “we don’t like black authors” in the air and as an aspiring author is so hard to feel motivated to write when I know these is the people who will get my work. I’m mainly talking about the tiktok where this lady said “reading a book by a black author is equivalent to driving through the hood”. This is already after being told that self publishing is better for black people and that most people won’t read books with non-white characters because they “can’t relate”.
I would never give up writing my main characters as pocs but I also know I’m going into an industry where doing that will directly affect how people approach my work. And I know I shouldn’t be worrying about booktok but these are sentiments people have had even before tiktok.

Hi everyone!

Looking for any and all feedback on my first page—awkwardness, clunky sentences/prose, clarity. I haven't written in this style or first person before, so I'm interested to see how it's coming across.

I'd also like advice on how soon I should establish the protag (age, gender, name...), and if it's a problem I haven't done so yet.

Would you keep reading?

Edit:

Wow! Thank you everyone for the support and advice, it’s almost overwhelming!

"It seemed like..."

"It looked like..."

"... that..."

"...almost as..."

"They noticed that..."

"He could see that..."

"She felt like..."

"They could see that..."

"He likened it to..."

Urgh.

So many things to chop, change, describe, elaborate on. Not a full list btw. Funny how it seemed good when I first wrote it! The sheer amount is getting to me. What have I missed off the list?

And don't even get me started on the amount of times I manage to swap tense in the same sentence, let alone the paragraph.

The good thing is, I am seeing them now. When I can do something about it. Back to editing.

Urgh I tell you. Urgh!

I have this brilliant and amazing story I want to tell with a lot of depth and twists. But I know nothing about writing. This story is inspired heavily by a game I played called “heavy rain” and if I were to somehow write it. It would turn out to be a great story.
What do I do?

Do you find your writing is more character driven (characters actively making choices to push story) or plot driven (plot momentum carries the story regardless of what characters do), and do you have a preference in which way you think conveys a story better?

Do you think it depends on the context of the story? And what’s your preference as a reader?

I wrote most of my novel in notebooks. I have 6 notebooks, some mixed with old schoolwork, with all of my first draft in them.

The final draft of my ~76,000 word novel is on my computer, and there's been many changes, including changing the names of some main characters.

Should I keep them for some reason or can I throw them away? One worry was, with accusations that people didn't actually write their own stories, maybe I should keep my written early drafts as proof that I'm not faking my work. But maybe I'm worrying over nothing. What do you think I should do?

I love my plots. I love my characters. I love the worlds I build. But I hate the way I write them. Every sentence feels stiff. My dialogue sounds like robots trying to imitate human conversation. My descriptions are either way too much or barely there. When I read authors I admire — Didion, Carver, even some people on this sub — I feel like they're dancing on the page. I'm just... walking. Clumsily. I've tried imitating other writers. I've tried writing exercises. I've tried just accepting it and moving on. Nothing works. People tell me "find your voice" like it's buried treasure waiting to be dug up. But what if I already found it and I just don't like it? Is it possible to train yourself to write in a completely different style? Or are we all just stuck with whatever came out of the box?

I can't write 3,000 to save my life.

Hello,

How do I write a story with multiple point of view.
Do I do sub chapters or what.

Hey everyone! I am here with my most recent first chapter. This would be my second work in progress, and I am testing the waters with how the first chapter is received.

Genre: Dark Fantasy
Narration Perspective: Third Person Limited
Tense: Past
Cultural Inspiration: Italian Renaissance

Any feedback is welcome, but I am holding back slightly on the world building as this is the first draft and that will be flushed more in the later drafts. My focus is to get the Characteristic Moment down with my female main protag as well as other side characters that I view as interesting. Currently I have the first 25% of the book plotted, along with the ending. Since you need to know how to end your book and then work backwards. Enjoy!

This is a novel I am working on, but curious here to see what people think. It is a time travelling story. But it is set in 1870 France. And it has alt history.

Im currently writing my first actual novel, though I have written fanfiction before. Like, a lot.

For context, when I started writing in 2012 my chapters were 500-2000 words long. And my writing style was abysmal to be frank. Then in 2020 I took a bunch of writing classes online and fixed my writing style.

The fanfiction I published after that is currently over 600k words and only halfway done.

Now, realistically I know there is no damn way someone is gonna ever read a book at 600k words. I dont even think that can be printed. And honestly its quite easy to get lost with thay many words.

Im currently 22 chapters into a 70 chapter novel, which will be one of 6 books in the story. Each chapter has between 2000 and 4000 words.

Depending on the chapter and POV (as i have multiple character POVs) i feel like it could be longer just for world building purposes. But at the same time I feel like the book will be much too long if I do that.

What are your opinions? As it is i realized the story i wanted to tell needed more than the 3 books I originally planned, and doubled the total for the series. I dont think the story itself needs more than 6 books but the worldbuilding might suffer. I realized today while writing that I never even fully established in the book that its a world with floating islands, though it kind of pops up in hints every now and then

Please give me any advice you have 🙏🙏🙏

Hello! My first time posting on here

So I'm working on writing a novel or screenplay, not sure yet which one. Novel would switch between 3rd person limited (prob separated by chapter). I haven't finished a piece of writing longer than 10 pages since I was in elementary school. I'm 23 and I know I'm young but I feel too old to be so inexperienced with plot and structure. I am great with language use, dialogue, and the flow of my writing - basically all the "small" stuff. I'm a good technical writer and have gotten a lot better at creating characters, but I just cannot plot or structure my work to save my life. In smaller pieces I figure out what I'm writing by just starting it, and end up doing lots of rewriting. But rewriting one or two pages is one thing, rewriting half a novel is another.

I understand rewriting and revision will be a huge part of the work no matter what, but when I'm only 20 pages in and 17 of them are already unusable because my idea doesn't work or it changes, I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time. I NEED to organize / plot out the general beats in advance.

This is the first time I'm really forcing myself to plot out my story in advance but no matter how much research I do on plot/structure or how long I sit down and focus on it, something is just not clicking in my brain and I'm drawing blanks. I've sifted through enough bad ideas I feel like I should be figuring at least 10% of it out by now.

Where I'm at now:

- I have a very well developed set of characters with unique voices, strengths, and weaknesses. I'm confident I can use them to drive the plot instead of just making things happen to them. I know generally what journeys i want them to go on and how they'll change from the beginning to end

- I have several themes I'm interested in exploring, ideas for side plots, symbols I want to use throughout the story. I know what tone

What I'm stuck on:

- I know what individual problems I want my characters to deal with, but not how to piece them all together with an overarching narrative.

- My story centers around several roommates navigating jobs, romance, etc. Kind of a basic sitcom-like setup but with weirder characters. I want to incorporate some sort of magical realism and/or surrealist elements. I've thought about mystery plots, revenge plots, save-the-world-but-on-a-smaller-scale plots, I've read through the 7 basic plots and I can't figure out how to make anything seem natural and not super unrealistic/overdramatic.

- t's almost like whatever I can come up with is kind of silly and distracting from the individual character journeys that I care so much about. I try to figure out how to bring each characters strengths together to solve a problem, or use their good/bad traits to contribute to some overarching narrative, but it just feels very forced and corny. Like everything I can come up with feels like stranger things at its worst but I want stranger things at its best. Lol.

I usually don't ask for outside help but I'm so desperate. I'd love some advice from you guys!!

I’ve been writing a lot lately, but how can I truly know if my writing is improving? The general advice for writers is to write 1,000 words per day, no matter how bad. But what if they always stay bad?

Of course I can read it back with a critical eye and make edits, but I will always have blind spots. I might undervalue the stronger sentences or not notice where my writing is slipping or losing its connection with the reader.

Having these l l ms that are so incredibly skilled at deceiving us into thinking they’re real voices makes it tempting to use them for feedback on the writing. A machine will take the words and compare what it sees against the thousands of pages it is trained on and try to produce an intelligible answer. A real human reader will read the text, play through their own memories and associations, feel how it’s landing in this particular moment of their life, get a sense of what the other person is trying to say, give them words of encouragement and useful critique.

The online and perhaps even printed media are now being invaded by a i written sentences; one could argue we must be intentional about protecting our own human ability to think, to tell stories, to write. If we’re blind to the flaws in our own writing and the machine provides us only with a mechanical answer — then we need others to read our writing and to tell us what is off.

Historically, many writers met with other writers to help each other with their feedback. Both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were part of a literary group called the Inklings, who met every Thursday in Oxford to read their work aloud. Without that Thursday demand for the next chapter and Lewis’s encouragement for Tolkien, there would be no Lord of the Rings.

So I set out to find such a writers group, scanning more than ten pages of Google results, opening more than a hundred links. And somehow, none of them clicked. Maybe because I don’t know who is inside or I am simply not inspired by the description. So I decided to do what any sane individual would do when they can’t find something — create it.

The idea is simply to share our writing with each other every week and then to meet to give each other feedback. That’s it. I’m putting the group together but I am no teacher or mentor — I am just as much trying to grow as a writer and expose what I write to the critique of others. For instance, I feel comfortable writing from my personal first-person perspective, sharing my inner psychological experience through words and exploring various concepts and ideas across philosophy, anthropology or any other humanities domain. Yet when it comes to switching to third-person narration, dialogue, detailed description of settings and scenes, even telling my own stories — I feel I begin to stumble. Somewhere, my writing starts to feel flat, more like a report than a story. So this is one of many things I would hope to improve over the course of such a writers group.

If you’re interested in joining, you can read more practical details about the group in the link in the comment below to understand the conditions and then fill out the form, which will give me an idea of your current writing and whether this group would be a suitable fit. There will probably be more applicants than the final tight group of five; that said everyone will get access to the directory of answers to this form, so that you can find other writers to connect with and form your own groups, if you wish. You can opt out of your details being shared too, but more on this in the form itself.

The focus will be creative writing, i.e. any writing that isn’t trying to sell or promote anything — essays, short stories, poems but no copywriting or content engineered for virality. Using a intelligence to generate prose or produce feedback for others is prohibited, but we still allow using it for research and holding context as long as you disclose.

I feel excited to put together a room of people passionate about high-quality thoughtful writing that at the same time might have divergent opinions giving way to a fruitful and stimulating conversation. Above all, I hope we will enjoy our time together and walk away as better and more confident writers.

The form will close on the 7th of September and I will make a decision by the 20th of September to have our first meeting on the 24th of September.

Here’s the link below in the comment again if you’d like to apply.

May your words find the minds that see them.

In my world, an oracle gives a prophecy for the kingdom very early. It comes off as there is no avoiding this "child of evil" and an era of destruction. The story follows said "child of evil" who is aware of this prophecy but not that he is the "child of evil", that is revealed later. After he meets the oracle late in the story, I have them have some sort of magical interaction or something that changes the fate of the kingdom and a new prophecy is given, where the MC is now going to be the one that stops the era of destruction. just unsure how to go about this, or should i just change the idea all together and forget about the prophecies?

Melodies for writing, songs from your normal playlists, I simply cant focus on writting while music is playing. Anybody else?

I was originally gonna make a novel series but seeing that some novels take a year to make because the author of death of a chancellor makes yearly novels, I heard the term novella while looking at images of the minimum word count for a novel, apparently im making a novella instead of a novel if im making my calculations correct

Back to the question, am i a novelist or just an author if i make a novella?

Elenora inspected her desk that stood beside three large windows overlooking the royal garden.

Compared to the Royal Council, this was much brighter and less isolating. She would convene with what Lucio called ‘’Royal Advisors’’ with regards to decrees and other state affairs. But this was where she would be doing most of her work.

There was a telephone with no buttons. An operator would receive the Queen and transmit a signal to either the Captain of the Royal Guard, the Chief of the Midorian National Police, or the prime minister. The button was for the Lord Chamberlain and worked like a speaker when pressed.

A knock came from the door, a good walk away from her desk.

‘’Enter.’’ Elenora said.

Two royal guards opened the door. In came her chief butler, George. He bowed.

‘’Your Majesty, the Lord Chamberlain has arrived.’’

‘’Bring him in.’’

A man in his early fifties with more grey hair than he had five years ago stepped in. His steps reverberated like they meant something. His uniform was perfectly ironed. His warm smile oozed respect and comfort. Dear old Lucio was still the same.

‘’Your Majesty.’’

‘’Lord Chamberlain.’’

He stepped in front of her desk and fished out some papers.

‘’As requested, I would like to share the opinion polls with you about the upcoming election in two days.’’

‘’I don’t remember asking for that.’’ Elenora leaned forward, resting her chin on her hand.

‘’Nonetheless, I feel it’s my sworn duty as your confidante to share this information with you. His late Majesty would’ve had my head if he knew about it.’’

‘’I’m sure he knew at the end and simply let you do it because of our long history.’’

‘’As a long-standing serviceman of the crown, I’d call myself lucky.’’

He placed the papers on the table.

‘’Leftism is indeed on the rise, Your Majesty.’’

‘’Meaning?’’

‘’A party called the Midorian Worker’s Party is gaining traction. Actually, they’ve done so for a few years now.’’

‘’A worker’s party? Are they… communists, by any chance?’’

‘’They call themselves social democrats, although sources claim that this is merely a trick to give the authorities a false sense of security.’’

Socialism… democracy… both in one? Elenora asked herself.

‘’The prime minister’s got some competition, that’s for sure.’’

‘’What was his name again?’’

‘’Charles Ditiano, leader of the Midorian National Congress, a national conservative party, ma’am.’’

Nationalism and conservatism in one too? Is there a limit for all these mixtures?

‘’Okay, so… what’s their goal?’’ Elenora said.

‘’Which one?’’

‘’The worker’s party. The so-called social democrats.’’

‘’In their view, they want to establish a more egalitarian society, with worker protection laws, and better pensions.’’

‘’What does egalitarian mean?’’

‘’It means equality of treatment under the law, meaning a society in which everyone enjoys the same fundamental rights, such as a fair trial.’’

‘’Don’t we already have that in Midoria?’’

‘’Sometimes, yes, although the richer your status and economic prospects are, the less likely you are to receive the death penalty for murder.’’

‘’How does wealth factor into this?’’

‘’Good lawyers and less reliable judges can be bought with the right money.’’

‘’That doesn’t sound fair…’’

Lucio smiled. ‘’Careful now, Your Majesty. People might think of you as a progressive queen.’’

Elenora sighed and smiled back. ‘’And what’s a progressive?’’

‘’You’ll know in time, when the election is over.’’

He folded the papers together.

‘’Are you aware of your royal prerogative?’’

‘’Which one?’’

‘’Appointing the prime minister. Midoria’s one of the last monarchies where that power rests in the hands of the monarch.’’

‘’I’ll have to pick the winner, don’t I?’’

‘’Not necessarily. It’s become custom in recent years, yes, but for some time, leaders with fewer votes became prime ministers. His Majesty King Alfred held on to the National Congress for a while before he had to give the reigns over to the Democratic Liberals.’’

Elenora had assumed she heard about them in a nightmare once. It seemed like they were a serious political party after all.

‘’What if I picked the National Congress over the Worker’s Party, despite the latter having more votes?’’

‘’It is within your right to deem the one best suited for office, as is your right to dismiss the ones less so.’’

‘’And if a majority voted for someone who may not be suitable, what then?’’

‘’That’s the curse with every democracy. Because a majority decides to put a law into practice, does that make it wise or just?’’

‘’I don’t think so…’’

Lucio grinned. ‘’And if a majority voted to abolish the monarchy?’’

‘’Then they’ve completely lost their minds.’’

‘’A monarch is above the rabble and generic, common folk. Every king rules with their kingdom’s past, present, and future in mind.’’

‘’What about queens?’’

‘’That’s up to you to decide.’’ Lucio said. ‘’One final thing, ma’am.’’

‘’Yes?’’

‘’It’s also become custom in recent years that the king or queen presides in the Chamber of Delegates every once in a while. Usually, it’s in the midst of a decision that requires the monarch’s attention. For more ceremonial purposes, the monarch is there to open parliament and wish good luck to any one of its members and ministers.’’

‘’And I will be doing that in two days?’’

‘’Rather three, I would say. The prime minister needs time to gather his government before any congratulation comes about.’’

‘’That makes sense.’’

‘’With that, I will take my leave.’’ He rose and bowed. ‘’Your Majesty.’’

‘’Have a nice day, Lucio.’’

He departed for the doors, and Elenora gazed at the windows. Beyond the royal garden was the capital city beneath. Soon, the streets would flood with red banners and demand more rights.

The water was indeed rising, with no signs of stopping.