I made a post about writing something funny, asking for help. But people said not only was it not funny, the character was unlikable. I never thought that characters being likable really mattered, they just have to be funny. But everyone proved me wrong by saying they hated my main character.
This is really distressing, bercause I wanted to be the next Worm.
My work is a parody/satire. So I wasn't expecting as much popularity, but I thought the depth I would bring to the characters, the funny moments that I thought they would love. And the organic storytelling and hints of the greater plot that would come would get me close to the same readers as Worm. And allow me to create even more stories.
But everytime people talk about it, everyone shits on it. It happened in this Twitter thread. It happened in the Hyun's Dojo discord. And it happened here.
Do you guys think I should keep Ultimate as a narcissist? Do you think I should make him a more relatable teenager? Ot do you think I should just make it more subtle, and make Ultimate lose more often while making him less awful?
Should I give up on making something as good as Worm?
I made a post about writing something funny, asking for help. But people said not only was it not funny, the character was unlikable. I never thought that characters being likable really mattered, they just have to be funny. But everyone proved me wrong by saying they hated my main character.
This is really distressing, bercause I wanted to be the next Worm.
My work is a parody/satire. So I wasn't expecting as much popularity, but I thought the depth I would bring to the characters, the funny moments that I thought they would love. And the organic storytelling and hints of the greater plot that would come would get me close to the same readers as Worm. And allow me to create even more stories.
But everytime people talk about it, everyone shits on it. It happened in this Twitter thread. It happened in the Hyun's Dojo discord. And it happened here.
Do you guys think I should keep Ultimate as a narcissist? Do you think I should make him a more relatable teenager? Ot do you think I should just make it more subtle, and make Ultimate lose more often while making him less awful?
Should I give up on making something as good as Worm?
Wildbow practiced for about 20 years, 12 of those even related to Worm itself, volunteered working with disabled people and abuse victims, was disabled and a victim of abuse himself, and wrote multiple versions of the story from many different perspectives over literally a dozen years of refinement before even coming up with Taylor as a character.
If you wanna make the next Worm, do you have 20 years and are you willing to put a lot of the worst experiences of your live on full display and then write extensively and evocatively on a strict weekly schedule for three years straight, and also you still won't be able to do it because Wildbow did it first and did it really well?
In short, no. I don't think you can, and you shouldn't try. Write for yourself, because you enjoy it and wanna maybe make a career out of it, and improve along the way, not because you want to capture lighting in a bottle that someone else already captured and got badly burnt by anyways.
When it comes to catering to the whims and likes of an audience, what you expect to happen may be wildly different than what will happen. It's a combination of experience, talent, or sheer blind luck. I don't think anyone can really give you an all encompassing answer to making your writing better, or making your main character more palatable.
Do you guys think I should keep Ultimate as a narcissist? Do you think I should make him a more relatable teenager? Ot do you think I should just make it more subtle, and make Ultimate lose more often while making him less awful?
It's ultimately up to you what you do with the response you've gotten. Continue in defiance? Scrape it entirely? Hire an editor to give you more professional tips rather than rely on a semi-anonymous forum to give you a range of answers that ranges from unhelpful to vaguely insightful? I don't think any of us can tell you want to do with your character, unless you're going to throw the character into a quest and let the audience train his personality, or something.
What I can tell you is that if writing is your passion, then write. Practice and hone the craft. Experience stuff, figure out why they work, and make your own way. (Considering that a butterfly can flap its wings and writing can be entirely subjective, you still might not make it because that's just life and it can suck.)
*Not sure if post is attempting to be its own meta-parody/Satire, in some sort of endlessly recursively loop*
EDIT:
On a more serious, less shitposting note: No, you will not Be the next Worm and that's okay.
I remember the best piece of writing advice I ever got was "Writing is easy, its just the first million words which are hard"- which is the equivelent of.... well something about the length of Worm (roughly).
The other thing I think on writing is.... Never do it for the prize. Your chances of getting the prize are very very low. WILDBOW's chances of getting "the prize" were very low- a slight change in readership during chapter three could have scuppered the whole thing. A couple people being busy and talking about it less at some critical juncture. Wildbow got lucky. (He ALSO wrote an amazing story, but my point is, plenty of amazing stories get lost. Oh well).
If you are in it for the prize, guess what, tough shit. You WILL lose.
If you are writing, for the sake of writing, because you WANT to see what these characters do... then maybe you can make a story. It'll still take hours and hours and hours, and watching, and thinking about voice, and putting yourself in the shoes and the head of dozens of different people, and... and it sounds like you are loathed to give up this protagonist you have who isn't vibing with people?
Well... let go. Be prepared to write seventeen different protagonists. Write short stories! These are the BEST way to hone your skills and broaden your voice. Get a dozen different genres and scenes and protagonists and narrators, slow things down. Write a romance, and action scene , a scientific breakthrough.
DON'T fall in love with this one idea you currently have. I'm not saying its bad (I haven't read it), I'm saying that if you are getting started, you are far better off going wide rather than deep.
And only do it if you actually ENJOY the process of writing, not just the results.
I mean, if it is, he wrote a story and made a website to support him screwing with people on some niche sci-fi site. I'm pretty sure he just has no idea what people like about stories or why, and either has no idea why he likes the stories he likes, or has never reflected on the difference between a powerful main character and a power fantasy, and it's screwing up his writing from head to toe.
He needs to either take some classes or reread every story that led him to attempt this, start to finish, and really do some reflecting on what is good about them, talk to other people about why they liked them, read shit the authors of those stories say about why they wrote it and what went into it to get an understanding that becoming the next Worm is at least ten years of hard work away from where he is now, if it's even attainable. People have pie-in-the-sky dreams sometimes without realizing how much work will be needed to make it happen, and other times miss the part about writing where you need to think about the stuff you're communicating (the worst parts of Worm are when Wildbow didn't realize he was wrong about something or unconsciously repeats stereotypes he grew up with and he gets ripped on a LOT for it, and that's WITH his background, his conscious attempts to portray people as people, no matter their background, and his desire to be broadly inclusive. Writing is hard, and even if you succeed massively you might still end up with egg on your face and having pissed thousands of people off because you weren't as clear on them as you thought).
Or he has actual mental health issues and this is all a prank that he went to absurd lengths of effort towards, in which case, good job I guess, you successfully pretended to be an amateur writer with a lot to learn who wants to succeed as hard as the dude who is still making 60 grand a year off a story that concluded a decade ago, but that seems way less likely than being an amateur writer who would like to live comfortably off their writing like the really successful superhero writer guy.
To be clear, there are a number of foundational problems with your first chapter, the one that is what people are going to be reading and going to be judging your entire work on.
The obvious first problem is that your formatting is wrong. You've got a bunch of words missing spaces and you're double- or triple-spaced between paragraphs. This makes it difficult to read, both in terms of understanding the actual words on page - thisismuchhardertoread - and in terms of the amount of scrolling down you need to do to get to the next paragraph.
The second problem is that your grammar is not good. You've got pronoun errors everywhere, lots of missing or overapplied punctuation (including a double full-stop at the end of the chapter), and you haven't attributed your dialogue properly. You can get away with unattributed dialogue between two characters so long as they have distinctive character voices, but you do not have that luxury here; it's made worse by the fact that I can't tell if you've just not attributed two separate lines of dialogue to the same character or not, because your formatting is bad.
The third problem is one that I just mentioned: your character voices are not distinct. You're writing from a first-person perspective, and that means that everything should be from the perspective of your narrator. Every description, every non-dialogue piece of text, should be delivered understanding that it is from the perspective of your narrator. This, in turn, means you want to have a distinctive voice for them, one that you can use to flavour your descriptive text. I understand that Matilda is an AI - is she emulating humanity to make Ultimate more comfortable? Is she a cold unfeeling machine who doesn't care what Ultimate wants or thinks except for what her programming tells her? Is she a 'soft' AI who is basically just a regular human that lives in a computer? These are all things that should come through in her narration.
The fourth issue is one of under-description. This is one that I've struggled with for a long time as a writer, because I know what the scene looks like in my head, and so it's difficult to put it to page in a way that describes it for your audience. At the moment, you suffer from what I've seen called 'floating heads in a blank white room'. Let's look at the opening couple of paragraphs of your work.
The building was on fire, and it wasn't our fault.
Well, it wasn't my fault, I can't speak forJoey.
"Ultimate," I asked. "How'd the building get set on fire?"
"Who cares?" he said. "This is his time to become popular!"
Ultimate was like this often. Always focusing on the big picture. Or rather, wanting the picture to be framed around him, and only him. Hewould do anything to become the greatest superhero of all time.
The news media was already focusing on this. They were on the streets, waiting for the firefighters to arrive.
From this, all we can know is that:
- a building is on fire.
- there's a street with reporters.
We do not know what the scene looks like. Let's do a quick example of what might improve the setting of the scene with an eye to character voice:
The building was on fire and it was not my fault. It may have been Joey's, though.
The air was filled with thick black smoke from the flames that were licking higher up the walls of the mansion that I could see across the street. Joey was on the roof of an expensive office block with a good view of the scene of the incident, and had activated my cameras once he was in position to make his 'dramatic entrance'. Thankfully, the mansion was isolated from other nearby properties due to its extravagant garden, but that just meant the fire was unlikely to spread.
The press had already arrived, due to what I could tell was a slow news day, based on their online activity. They crowded the street outside the mansion, half a dozen camera crews and reporters alongside ten times as many bored civilian onlookers. It was hopefully a big enough crowd that Joey would be willing to take action. he always had to be the centre of attention, and I would not put it past him to simply walk away if there wasn't enough of an audience.
The emergency services, on the other hand, were a good fifteen minutes out. There'd been an arson incident at the other end of the area the local teams covered, so they were busy, and the next-nearest stations were a significant way away.
"Ultimate," I asked, my voice processor simulating exasperation. "Why is the building on fire?"
He beamed into my camera and fussed with his hair, using his reflection in my lens to get every strand positioned just so.
"Who cares?" he said. "It's time for my debut!"
Now obviously this is just a quick go-over as demonstration, but can you see how it situates the scene in a real world? I also didn't include, for example, a description of Ultimate - something you would want to do - or a detailed description of the mansion - something you'd probably put in when Ultimate and Matilda got closer to it so that the layout was fresh in people's minds when it was relevant. I also didn't include a lot of sensory description, as Matilda is (I think?) an AI and so the lack of sensory description can be a character note. If you were writing from the perspective of a character with a full sensorium you'd want to include something for at least three senses for each description. Usually you'll use sight, sound, and smell.
There are a number of other issues, like your dialogue, but honestly a lot of it is just that it's very obvious you haven't had much practise and so you aren't producing a perfectly polished and well-executed piece of writing. As the advice goes, your first million words are garbage, but you do need to write those words.
My biggest advice is to keep reading new things - and re-read old things you liked with an eye to studying how they do things - and keep writing. No-one starts out as a great writer. You're not going to set the world on fire with your fiction until and unless you're a lot more polished; don't fall into the trap of thinking that your favourite published authors just spew out words and everything they write is gold. I can guarantee that for every word you see in a novel, there's at least ten that didn't make the cut.
The reason for that was because Ultimate used to be the narrator. And he does have a distict character voice. But people hated him so much they said I should change it to Matilda. And I haven't been able to make her voice distict without making her unlikable. If it was Ultimate, it would be easy to make the voice dstict, but it would make him even MORE unlikable.
I also watch more than I read so I don't put a lot of descriptions when I should. I also HATED having to edit all my chapters to make Matilda the narrator. so I did minimum effort.
Practise. Practise practise practise. That's the only way to get better; all the writing tips in the world don't help if you can't internalise them and use them naturally. Writing is a skill and an art, and you need to keep constantly doing it and honing it to get it to a high level and keep it there. Wildbow probably did millions of words of practise before he started Worm, for context. That's not a typo - I mean 1000000 plus - that's six zeroes - of words of pure practise.
If you want to write, then you also need to read. You need to read a lot. You need to read broadly. If you want to write, you need to be willing to put in the effort, too. More than anything, you need to have the desire to write, and if changing your viewpoint character is destroying that, then don't do it. Work on other aspects of your writing to improve your chapters.
Hell, just pick one thing and aim to work on it for a month. Work on doing descriptions. Try out a variety of styles. Read your favourite authors and see how they describe scenes and imitate them and see if it feels right. Work on character voice, do the same scene from a number of different perspectives to see how that changes things.
And scale back your ambition. You're not going to be the most popular webfiction author in the world with your first piece (for a start you're not writing in Chinese, so you're already not even in the running). Set yourself realistic goals, if you're writing with the goal of getting an audience. One regular reader, ten regular readers, a hundred regular readers. Be happy if you exceed them, but also be happy if you get any traction, because it's an absolutely glutted market out there and it's very difficult to make an impact. It's not 2011 any more. Webfiction is big business and the people in it are far more polished - and there's a shitload more of them - than they used to be.
Practise. Practise practise practise. That's the only way to get better; all the writing tips in the world don't help if you can't internalise them and use them naturally. Writing is a skill and an art, and you need to keep constantly doing it and honing it to get it to a high level and keep it there. Wildbow probably did millions of words of practise before he started Worm, for context. That's not a typo - I mean 1000000 plus - that's six zeroes - of words of pure practise.
If you want to write, then you also need to read. You need to read a lot. You need to read broadly. If you want to write, you need to be willing to put in the effort, too. More than anything, you need to have the desire to write, and if changing your viewpoint character is destroying that, then don't do it. Work on other aspects of your writing to improve your chapters.
Hell, just pick one thing and aim to work on it for a month. Work on doing descriptions. Try out a variety of styles. Read your favourite authors and see how they describe scenes and imitate them and see if it feels right. Work on character voice, do the same scene from a number of different perspectives to see how that changes things.
And scale back your ambition. You're not going to be the most popular webfiction author in the world with your first piece (for a start you're not writing in Chinese, so you're already not even in the running). Set yourself realistic goals, if you're writing with the goal of getting an audience. One regular reader, ten regular readers, a hundred regular readers. Be happy if you exceed them, but also be happy if you get any traction, because it's an absolutely glutted market out there and it's very difficult to make an impact. It's not 2011 any more. Webfiction is big business and the people in it are far more polished - and there's a shitload more of them - than they used to be.
This is all really, really good advice and I want to loudly second it for anyone reading this who might be at all skeptical. This poster knows what he's talking about here.
I guess all this just means I need multiple drafts fdor Ultimate instead of just one and done, doing minium editing when people complain. And not just making another draft.
And Uploading twice a week is definitely not helping. So I think I'll take longe to upload chapters.
The only thing worse than starting out as a writer with the expectation of dazzling success is starting out as a lawyer with the expectation of dazzling success. And that's just because law school is expensive. The problem with writing is that anyone can (in a sense) do it, and it's very flattering to be thought of as an artist, so there are a billion people out there trying to make it as writers. A lot of them frankly stink, but with a market that flooded, quality becomes almost irrelevant; a mediocre writer with a knack for marketing will go farther than a good writer who doesn't know how to network. But there's no guarantee for either, and chances are you have a day job. If you write, write because it satisfies you to write, and enjoy the happiness you bring to however many people you manage to reach.
It's completely fine and there's no shame in feeling that. It's what everyone goes through.
But if you really want to write, heck, if you really want to do ANYTHING worthwhile in life, then you have to be willing to throw yourself into it despite the likeliness of failure. That's why you have to do it for its own sake.
Matt Groening once reflected that the only reason he became a good cartoonist was the he had a passion for the act of cartooning. He reflected that he would have been happy to work at a tire factory, if it meant he could cartoon in his free time. Not so that he could one day create one of the best known cartoons of all time, the simpsons, but simply so that he could cartoon.
The reality is that you have finite moments on this earth, and you will never experience or do one percent of one percent of all the things you could possibly do, experience, or be. But if you waste your moments pining rather than doing, you'll have far more regrets than if you just buckled down and did your best. Enjoy the ride.
John Green said:
"Don't make stuff because you want to make money — it will never make you enough money. And don't make stuff because you want to get famous — because you will never feel famous enough. Make gifts for people — and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts.
Maybe they will notice how hard you worked, and maybe they won't — and if they don't notice, I know it's frustrating. But, ultimately, that doesn't change anything — because your responsibility is not to the people you're making the gift for, but to the gift itself."
