JasonLee

[gammacat]

One of the things that motivates me to keep writing is the slim chance that someday I might open this app and see fanart featuring my characters.

I can't wait.

[ellipsus-writes]

Right y’all 😮‍💨—we worked our way though over 5,000 responses for our survey on writing in the age of AI. We crunched the numbers, made some lovely infographics, gathered a ton of phenomenal quotes, data’d the data—and shared the results over on our blog.

Who’s ready for some pie charts?!🧵🧵

First thing’s first… AI generated content is remarkably unpopular.

Almost all of you believe that human provenance is a must. (And we couldn’t agree more.)

This one came as a bit of a shock: nearly half of all respondents felt their work could be mistaken for AI.

And almost all of you (99.5%) think AI content should be clearly labeled.

Thank you to the thousands of writers who took the time to complete the survey. Together, you wrote over 500,000 words—that’s a heck of a mighty tome! You can read the full report over on our blog.

We’ll be breaking down more of our findings throughout this week, as well as sharing more of the fantastic text responses we received! - the Ellipsus Team xo

[gammacat]

It's good to know I'm not alone at least.

[anarchist-art]

[gammacat]

My life's work, actually

[gammacat]

If the number of people willing to buy my novel is anywhere close to the number of accounts on this app offering to beta-read it, I'll have a bestseller on my hands.

[gammacat]

Occasionally I write something really good and think that I'm a good writer.

Then I remember that other people will read it eventually and that it doesn't matter what I think.

[gammacat]

Going to to the bookstore and browsing for comps absolutely counts as working on your novel.

[gammacat]

Writing prompt:

Promptly get off Tumblr and go write something.

[gammacat]

World-building tip for writing realistic geography: find a suitable place on Google Earth and just change all the names. Even many of the roads, since if there's a road there in the real world it's likely that's because the terrain there is good for making a road.

I know how long it takes to walk between villages in my world because I can just get directions from Google.

[orangelizardtattoo]

Today's Hype Post!

Hype people up for your original writing project (no fanfiction please- it's a wonderful medium but not the focus of this blog post) or work in progress by giving us some juicy details!

WELCOME TO MARKETING MONTH

Hi everyone, it's time to crack this case.... together. Please feel free to do submissions of questions for this event! Seriously! It's gonna be an entire month of us answering marketing questions and trying to figure out what to do about this conundrum.

TODAY'S QUESTION:

"I can't even keep a beta reader! How am I going to market!" Those might actually be the same issue! The key in both cases is to find someone who's enjoying the cake YOU baked, not someone who generally likes SOME cakes. How do we find those people?

[gammacat]

Critique and beta reading require a lot of work. You're dealing with something that the author might consider finished, but the author is, of course, unaware of their own blind spots. So you have to power through despite the aspects of it that suck, and try to identify why they suck in a constructive way.

That's a lot to ask of someone, and if it's just not the kind of story that they are usually interested in, they may not be able to finish. If you can at least find out how far they got in the story, that's helpful even if they don't provide any other feedback.

[gammacat]

World-building is hard. I've spent hours detailing the geographies and histories and theologies and currencies, only to realize that I've included exactly one dog.

[luna-azzurra]

I think we write because we are trying to make meaning out of things that didn't come with any. something happened and it was just an event, just a sequence of cause and effect with no theme and no lesson, and that's unbearable so we make it into a story where it means something. and then someone reads it and it means something to them too, something completely different, something we didn't put there. and for a moment two people are in the same room with the same feeling even though they've never met and never will. that's why. that's the whole reason. i don't know what else writing could possibly be for.

[gammacat]

It is possible to finish writing a novel? Or is finished just something that one approaches asymptotically?

[nondelphic]

i don’t want to write realism. i want to write a story where someone cries over a chair and it’s the emotional climax. i want symbolism so thick it needs subtitles

[gammacat]

This made me think of The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss. An unusual little book, and probably unintelligible if you haven't read The Name of the Wind, but one of my all time favorites.

The emotional climax is making soap.

[byoldervine]

The first draft is like scaffolding. You can’t get to a finished product without it, and it bridges the gap between planning and progressing, but you can’t just finish the scaffolding and call it a building. You can’t look at a bunch of scaffolding and say “My building’s shit, there’s so many other nice finished buildings around here and my scaffolding is just not on the same level, and it’s not even meeting building regulations”

Scaffolding is not a finished building. A first draft is not a finished product. Holding it to the same standards is not only unhelpful, but it’s objectively incorrect

[gammacat]

Totally agree. It's helpful to approach writing a story like making an oil painting: in layers. My early drafts read like news articles, just who what when why how. Everything else gets built on top of that.

[orangelizardtattoo]

A reminder about Marketing Month

This isn't me helping you. It's us all helping each other. We all want marketing help. Let's all share with each other our best advice as much as we ask each other what to do.

[ladyignatius4]

It doesn't matter if you wrote 5,000 or 50 words today.

It doesn't matter if all you did was day-dream about your characters while staring at the ceiling.

You are still a writer and your progress is valid.

[fellshish]

a lot of writing is sort of watching the film in your head like oh sorry can’t write the chapter yet i have to repeat hallucinate the dialogue first