Book writing thread

I know all all of you are avid readers and maybe some of you like to do a bit of writing.

I definitely want to write a book for the hell of it (getting published would be nice, but it's only a pipe dream)

My perfect life would be writing fiction and living off the income. But that's about as realistic as passing through a wall (which from a physics pov, is theoretically possible.. but highly unlikely)


..So, how's your writing life?

I write casually, and usually try to do an hour or two a day.  Ive been working on the same piece for a few months.  Not sure what its gonna be or if I'll finish it, but I got a lot of material here.  Its mostly just for recreation; like you said, writing fiction professionally would be great, but the industry is so crowded with Starbucks fags that it takes a miracle to get in.

I don't write anymore. :(

Every time I reread the stuff I wrote a few years ago I can only shake my head and groan. It's almost Dan Brown-grade garbage.

On the plus side, it has left me a whole lot more time to read things by people who are masters at their craft. There's no end...

>>3
I've reread old stuff and felt the same, but in a way it's beneficial because you learn from it and refine your writing. I probably wont write great literary works that will be remembered for centuries to come but it's fun improving for the sake of improving!

Being a writer is hard. Becoming one in the eyes of everyone is even harder. But it's the way I choose.
It's a succeed or die trying kind of view, but overall, I'm happy doing this. More than I would never be in any other jobs.
Time will tell.
I must go back now, this forth book won't write itself!

It won't spellcheck itself either.

since I'm french, it won't indeed.

I write sometimes...I don't really want to get published...Perhaps posthumously, after they've discovered the blood-stained scraps of paper I've stuffed into the orifices of my flat.

I'm not actually crazy, though. But whenever I write I get preoccupied with making the paper look interesting...And I'm not really creative enough to write anyway. So now I've just started to 'edit' books...I cut out words from them and rearrange them and add in my own, add illustrations, etc. That wouldn't get published because of copyright issues, but I don't care. I'm going to hide them in the library when I'm done.

I do like to write, but I can't organize worth shit.  I also have trouble getting the right mood without getting into artwank, which I hate (I'm the one who voted Joyce as most overrated author ever).  Good at prose, but don't have much to say prose-wise.  Am a history student and would want to write a history book that Anonymous would want to study from, or something like Horrible Histories, and that's about it for prose.

ATM I'm working on a fantasy novel.  Closest thing I can compare it to is Paula Volsky, but with Rome rather than nineteenth-century France.  One of the main characters is a trap like in Rose of Versailles, for the same reason, but she's actually supposed to assassinate the person she's guarding.  I think this will be the novel that doesn't get published but is practice for the next one.

I had to start re-planning today after having written a very long section involving the trap (pre-trap state) helping another girl in a very flashy, fanservicey fight.  It was like "SHIT SUCKS", because the character development this scene brings out is better for a much later scene, and it was a bad fight.  So, because I'm writing that out, I've got to rewrite an entire chapter.  Which I am not up for.  So I'm back to planning to make things like that not happen again.

So, well-written duels anyone?  Or well-written battles?  I need instruction, because I have a few scenes like this but can't write them properly.  I'm good at emo characters, but we don't really have much in the way of emo here.

>>9
I've tried writing a battle scene before. It takes planning. I took cues from movies and tried to make use of visual imagery. You try to make it cinematic in the reader's imagination.

well-written duels anyone?
Okay, duels are a major pet peeve of mine because far too many fantasy writers use this rather sorry and cliched excuse for excitement. A piece of advice: make it fast and painful for everyone, and do it very rarely.

I see the following mistakes all the time:
* People having grand discussions during a fight. If you've ever been in one you'd know the jitters makes it pretty hard to talk intelligently. People say the most stupid things, if they aren't just swearing or too busy panting.
* Fights lasting more than a few seconds. They don't. Especially not with sharp things. Either someone is hurt badly, dead, or panics and runs for it.
* The protagonist somehow beating more than two people. This only happens on TeeVee, or your nearest shit novel.
* The protagonist has awesome skillz and leaves uninjured. Yeah, right. Unless you're insanely lucky the other person always gets a few blows in (unless it's something like a gunshot to the head or some other insta-kill area, in which case the first person wins). Similar applies for knives: people don't die immediately, and they're still armed. Sometimes they're so pumped up on adrenaline they don't notice they're wounded.
* The protagonist somehow surviving fight after fight as if they had a bad case of IDDQD. It doesn't matter how good you are, your skill only changes the odds, but doesn't eliminate the fact that you might end up dead, dead, dead. The more often you fight, the more certain you are of losing.

One of the best fight scenes I've read was in ASoIF. One of the characters was a veteran of several wars, and really good with his sword. He still almost ended up buried against only two opponents, and only survived because someone else intervened by throwing a pot at one of them (or something equally silly: silly things matter; a slip could kill you). The fight probably lasted less than half a minute, much of which was maneuvering around tables, and he left as a bleeding mess.

I have a few scenes like this
Dear god no.

>>12
I break none of these rules, actually, and I knew not to break them because I have common sense about how a real fight works.
I'm just normally very peaceful so can't get the "I'm going to kick your ass, bitch" vibe going in the style.  That's my problem more than anything.  The "epic" fight I was writing and killed was 2v1, and the one only won because when they got a weapon in a rather creative way, one of the two opponents pussied out.

As to "I have a few of these", there is one 1v1 which is not meant to be duelly, just a quick and dirty fight (I said "duels" as code for 1v1), and one battle which is meant to be epic.  Battle mostly focuses on a two v. God knows how many which are only held off because of magic, and at the end, one of the two is dead and the other has shortcircuited his brain with magic.  I don't have a ton of stupid "I'm so awesome" duels.  You have to be really good to write even one of those right.