Not too long ago, I came across a book that changed my life, or at the very least, my writing. While I have some trouble remembering specifics, I do remember it going deep into the world of philosophy and psychology, exploring the intricacies of what makes a book, and what our writing really means. The book analyzed the craft of writing, discussing how humans perceive the differences between good and bad writing, the difference between a good speech and a dull monologue, and how good writing becomes great. This, as well as the nuances of human perception on language in general. Alas, I have since lost the book's title and author, but the captivating writing style and genre remains with me, and I’d really enjoy some recommendations of similar works. I don’t expect to ever find it, as my search has led me to other good books about this sort of writing.

*Please forgive me if this is not the method I should be following when I post, this is my first post here. *

Recently I've been rewatching GIRLS for the umpteenth time. When the series finale originally aired, it was a mini “Game of Thrones finale” situation. Fans were largely disappointed by the final episode, many disliking season 6 in general. It's one of my favorite shows, but usually when I rewatch it I either skip the very last episode, or I skip the entire final season, instead pretending that the season 5 finale was the ending of the show.

The finale of GIRLS hit a lot of marks for controversial finales. A few beloved characters were largely missing from the final episode/season or didn't get closure that people expected. The ending for the main character seemed to come out of nowhere (magically landing a dream job after struggling with employment the whole show,) and her overall arch didn't seem to align with her personality or anything that had happened up to that point. No one really got a happy ending, and the overall message or theme of the show seemed unclear, since many of the characters experienced very little growth over the course of the show, or they did actually experience some growth that was ignored when their conclusions were written.

I thought it might be fun to see if any of you have similar thoughts about any TV shows that didn't end the way you expected, or what you imagine would happen in fantastic shows that never even got an ending due to being canceled early. A few examples that come to mind:

• The obvious - How would you salvage the disaster conclusion of GoT? (I've seen so many takes online that manage to make it more satisfying.)
• I haven't seen Dexter, but I've heard that the ending was unsatisfying and clashed with what people expected from the main character.
• How could HIMYM have ended if the whole show wasn't instantly tranformed into a bait and switch with the finale?
• What would've happened with the characters on Freaks and Geeks, had that amazing show been allowed to continue for another season or two?

I intended to write about how I would want my example show to have ended, but honestly I'm stumped. Writing is hard! Especially if you don't have the luxury of planning the ending ahead of time, which I imagine was the issue for the writers of many of the classic "controversial finales." I'll probably add a comment about it after I come up with something.

I'm slowly picking up writing again, but I've run into an old time-honoured tradition of mine; obsessing over certain characters. To me, my characters are as real as real-life people; they have their own personalities, likes/dislikes, manners of speech, body language and so on. Unfortunately, some of them also tend to get stuck in my mind and I hyper-fixate on them to the point where they overshadow the rest of the cast. To be clear, I'm not imagining myself hanging out with them or anything, just what they do in the plot itself; it's a bit like watching movie clips on re-run but out of order. Sometimes I wish I could just put those characters into a locked box and focus on other parts of the story. I tend to daydream a lot so that doesn't really help the problem.

Any other writers who have or have had issues with characters who won't leave them alone? What would you suggest to someone in a similar predicament?

I'm looking at making a major career change and I'm considering trying out one of our local newspapers to see if I can get into a semi regular gig with them. Is there anything in particular I should know or be looking for?

I'm very interested in the inner-workings of a writer's room. I have seen glimpses in "making of" documentaries, but I don't feel that they show much of the actual process.

I'd love to see more about how the sausage is made. Bonus points if it's a beloved, popular tv show or movie. I feel like I would be most interested in seeing the best of the best at work.

This is quite possibly one of the greatest struggles to writers: choosing a title. You'd think that writing a chapter or story would be the hard part, and to an extent it is, but somehow I almost always draw a blank at the title. Sometimes, I get lucky and a title just comes to me instantly. Usually though, I'm left staring at the top of the page after finishing trying to figure out what to call it. This doesn't just include the overall story, but even the title of individual chapters. Last year when submitting a short story for a contest, I had no clue what the heck to title it and ended up going with something like "Hawksbills and Ospreys" because the deadline was right there.

I know this is a common problem for writers. As someone who's active in the fan fiction sphere, the most common trick I see (and that I've used myself) is to pull a title from song lyrics or poems.

What about you? What are your tricks for trying to get inspiration for titles, and what sorts of "guidelines" do you follow to try to make them stand out?

I have two goals this year. The second is to submit at least one short story to a literary magazine. The first is to write one good short story (just kidding, the first is to write one story a week in the hope that one will be good enough to submit).

Of course the goal in my secret heart is to have my submission accepted but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Walk before you can run, and so on.

So, writers (particularly of fiction), have you ever submitted a short story to a literary magazine? How did it go? Did you learn anything in the process that you wish you’d known before? Any tips for a rookie?

I am trying to find tips on getting back into writing regularly. I wrote for many years (nothing substantial published) and did a lot of roleplay, but when the wheels came off my mental health wagon, all my creative pursuits just kind of withered on the vine. Now I am trying to get back into it to fulfill my dream of finishing a novel (and hopefully a few sequels if I can get the mojo to return). Typically I don't solicit this type of help because I find a lot of the replies are the same, and often are things I've tried in the past that simply don't work for me for whatever reason. My motivation is up and down some days due to severe depression, so I'm looking for simple steps that people in a similar predicament may have used that helped them.

I've been struggling with finding a good workflow for taking notes on the journal articles which I read. I collate articles using Zotero, yet its in-built notetaking features (and comment scraping from PDFs) is quite poor. So, my alternative so far has been to write up notes by hand, but this is pretty cumbersome and makes it take some time to refer to my notes. My approach is clearly not effective!

How do you take notes on the papers which you read? Do you prefer to use written notes, or do you type your notes? In any case, what is your preferred means of storing and categorising your notes? And are there particular software which you use, if you opt for typed notes? (At present, I use an A5 notebook. Yet, this is not alphabetised or organised by topic, which compounds my struggles.)

Hi there,

I enjoy writing! I find all formats fun to play with from short stories to screenplays. One thing I've never really written for is video games. I love the idea though. All the world building, lore notes, dialogue, weapon descriptions, codecs, bestiaries and on and on. There's all sorts of ways to tell a story through a video game and I want to try my hand at it!

Problem being though, I'm not particularly interested in game design. I'm not NOT interested, but it's not where my passion is. I am willing to learn what I need to, so don't shy away from suggestions that would require me to learn some on the design side.

Really the only ideas I've come up with are using the mod creator in Neverwinter Nights 1/2 or something like RPG Maker? Are these overwhelmingly difficult to get started in? Could I write in all the things I mentioned from dialogue to weapon descriptions?

Or perhaps trying to find someone NOT interested in the storytelling side? Someone who wants to focus on design but would love some storytelling in their project and would welcome the addition?

Or even starting with TTRPG modules maybe. Video Games and TTRPG modules seem to have some similar storytelling elements.

Does anyone in the profession have thoughts? Does anyone not in the profession have thoughts?

anyways, bye love you

I'm big into self-hosting and recently getting back into writing as an additional hobby, cuz one can never have too many, right? Anyway, I am looking for a writing organization tool like Manuskript, Dabble, or Scrivener that is both open source and self-hosted.

Essentially, I would just like something that I can organize my thoughts and occasionally write in, but be able to access it from all my devices - desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, etc. It seems like most of the solutions I've looked at are limited to a single device or cloud functionality is locked behind a paywall. Of course, I could just use a self-hosted wiki site for cloud editing/organization, but I'd like something more oriented toward writing if anybody has any ideas. Thanks!

Uneasy. The invite received days ago ye respond today.
Betraying your identity, self…
Click here, add this, add that, oh my, what have ye become?
Continue lurking.
Continue being who you are!
I miss my NSFW days. Never mind!
Hours turn to days, and days to weeks, what have ye become?
From the shadows thy step, and ye become, A POSTER!
Do not judge me.
Do not look upon me.
Do not think of me.
Do not. Do not!
And to the rest of you, a great day.

Hello, long-time lurker here who only recently obtained an account!

I personally like Uniball pens (although annoyingly they do tend to smudge more than I'd like). I'm trying to find a less wasteful option (i.e. a refillable pen) but not really sure which models are good.

I'm looking to obtain a nice notebook, but I do feel that a lot of the popular models (e.g. Moleskine, Leuchturm) are a bit overpriced!

What kind of stationary do you use?

When talking with my therapist, the subject of writing is a constant. My obsessive approach to writing is a source of frustration.

I write well in my first language, and aspire to create short fiction . But I'm an over planner and way too critical of my own writing.

Anything longer than a single page is impossible for me because I'll obsess with editing and some misguided sense of "perfection", cutting paragraph after paragraph until I'm left with a decent micro story that you can read in two and a half minutes. Most of the time I don't even get this far.

So my question is, how can I force myself to be less self critical and obsessive, let things flow, and write longer stories? Are there any advices, books, courses, practices and exercises I can use?

I rarely get ideas for fun writing prompts, but I love reading them and the stories they spark. Since Tildes doesn't have a community for just prompts, I'd like to see if a thread would be a replacement!

Rules:

Every new prompt is to be a top level comment and replies are to be child comments underneath the correct prompt. Mistakes happen, but my little heart can only stand so much messiness!

I've been using Obsidian for notes for a year now and iA Writer for writing prose for a decade (wow!) and love both of them for their simplicity, cloud sync, and most importantly, their innate ability to get out of the way and let me work.

But I'm always interested in other people's workflows! What do you use to write or take notes?

Curious to see and talk with others about using AI to dynamically write personal novels as a hobby, a form of choose-your-own-adventure where you can offload part of the creativity and majority of the grunt-work involved with writing onto the AI.

I started around half a year ago with Novel AI, yet when my stories would reach around the 15,000 word count the context management required due to the 2k token limit caused for a a net negative experience. A few months ago I experimented with ChatGPT at its 4k token limit, but the major cons of the limited ability to edit the content combined with the "always happy" bias hard-wired in made it short lived. That is until I discovered the variant site, Open AI Playground in Chat mode. It isn't free, but the first $5 are free as a trial. (And technically they mention it isn't for entertainment purposes and to use it responsibly)

Using the Playground I've written a 41,000, 23,000, and 21,000 (in-progress, plan is to hit 6 digits) word count personal stories/novels/adventures thus far. Using the co-DM system of bouncing with the AI to suggest creative alternatives (e.g. "List 10 twists that could occur next in the story"), adding creative embellishments (e.g. "Describe the city in detail, using epic high-fantasy influence"), and many other tips it's kept me hooked on some wild adventures across my favorite genre(s), tailored to me.

Edit:
OpenAI just released a GPT 3.5 Turbo 16k model for the Playground, lol. Absolutely obliterating NovelAI's 2k and the previous 4k limits. You could fit a significant portion of an entire novel and it'd take into account every sentence said. It'd probably take a pretty penny to use even half the context window, but could be useful for more critical moments of my novels.

Name a movie or story that should get the Muppet treatment, like the Muppet Christmas Carol.

Name the token human headlining character and justify your Muppet picks. Bonus points for some dialog or song lyrics.

With thanks to @cfabbro, who kindly provided feedback on a previous version of this story.