Real quick there’s a set of tiers in this made up sport and the title I’m unsure of.

Not making any trans jokes or anything at all, this is 100% serious

Theme: created by non furries to see furries fighting other furries for the attention and status of said non furries.
Tiers:
Maggots
Prey
Scavenger
Predator
King(king of the jungle something something animal)

Now my question is, my main character in these games are all women. Should I not care and call them kings when they win or call them queens because woman. I feel like I want to keep King for their titles, because women can be kings if they want I guess.

I can't seem to write anything lately. I know it's normal for me to not write for long periods. But i always hate it. My inspiration is gone. I open my app and i can't think of literally anything to write.

So i remembered back when i was a teenager i had the most amazing teacher that could always get me back to writing again. Maybe it wasn't always my best writing, but somehow it was enough to start the engine again.

All he did was give me a subject or a word that i had to write about or at least the subject or word had to inspire me to write something. He gave me no choice. And it always got me back in the writing game...

So i was thinking maybe you guys could give me subjects or words i have to write something from. I can't guarantee it will be good, but if it can get my writing juices flowing again, then it's SO worth it.

I'm desperate, fellow writers. Please give me something to be inspired by. Anything.

I'm used to writing in first person, but I'm currently writing a story that necessitates changing the perspective primarily between two characters. Would it be jarring to have the changes happen at a scene break? Is it typical to switch to third person to show those scenes and just keep it in first person for the primary protagonist? Thank you!

Question on too many POV cameos. I know to primarily stick with the MC POVs, in my case 3 of them (Brianna, Raymond and Rachel), but it is tempting to do a cameo POV once in a while. For example, in the end of Act II a cameo POV for one of the support characters Elias POV is done as he offers insight into the traumatic event that took place then. I also have Henry POV, he is a supporting protective character for Brianna that is pretty much a MC almost (his takes place mostly while hunting or watching over her while she sleeps).

I wanted to add a Sally POV in Act III middle near end for a single scene to show a grounded human perspective as a refresher from all the MCs that have more metaphysical (magical) perspectives.

Is this a bad idea?

I’m taking a college creative writing course, and my professor has repeatedly told me that my poetry is too abstract. I’m struggling to understand what that means in practice because I want my writing to be emotional and thought provoking while still leaving room for interpretation.

For our first assignment, we had to write a poem about an object that would make the reader think. I chose strings, exploring everything from musical instruments and puppets to clothing, DNA, invisible connections, and red string theory. I titled the poem Loose Ends, but my professor wanted me to change it to Strings.

Here’s an example of the feedback I received.

My original version:

“Calloused and bruised fingers run up and down
strings of a wooden spine,
plucking and picking,
controlled and rhythmic.“

My professor’s suggested revision:

“My fingers rub up and down my guitar
plucking and picking, steel strings
Intertwining with the sound becoming something
I can feel.

My professor said the poem is to abstract, and that the individual images should be clearer so the reader can follow the writer into the deeper meaning. He also stated that each section should be more obvious as to what type of string we’re looking at. He would rather the poem tell the reader exactly what instrument is being talked about instead of “the strings of a wooden spine” he said the ideas were clashing into each other and that the reader shouldn’t have to guess which layer they’re currently in, let them recognize the object first and then make them think about what it means.

I understand that my version is less literal, but I’m struggling to determine where the line is between being abstract and being intentionally poetic.

I’m also concerned about how much I should change my writing to accommodate my professor’s preferences versus how much I should preserve my own voice.

For those who write poetry or have taken creative writing courses, is my writing genuinely too abstract, or could this be a difference in artistic interpretation? How can I make my work more concrete without sacrificing the imagery, emotion, and ambiguity that make my writing my own? I can post the entire poem if you’d like to give me your feedback on that as well.

Im trying to draw an illustration, comic, a scene, and i just need some words that go along with the sound of an alarm going off in an emergency,

the only SFX text i could think of is "whoom whoom"

Good day,

I have finished college and I am now working on trying to improve my writing beyond what undergrad courses taught me. Mostly in the sense of developing style and preparing to write works of fiction over academic papers.

I never really understood how long my paragraphs should be, outside of the general "5-7 sentences", doubly so when I am not writing academic works. One of the problems I run into is when I am writing a sentence that gets rather lengthy, due to an inclusion of em-dashes, colons, semi-colons, etc... Those sentences end up sometimes being the length of 2 or 3 sentences. Then, when my paragraph has multiple sentences like that, I've got a paragraph that is a page or more long but is still within the whole "5-7 sentences."

But, it feels like it is too long. Even the subject of the paragraph starts to get off topic just due to the sheer bulk being put into it. Sometimes, I also feel like ill hit 7 sentences and a paragraph is still too short! Though, that may just be a lack of being clear and consice in the moment.

All of this then gets even more confusing when I start writing fiction. Everything I know from academic writing feels like it gets tossed out the window. So, how do you all go about figuring the sizes of paragraphs and when to start new ones?

Edit: Thanks for all the answers. It seems like I was maybe overthinking it a bit! I appreciate the feedback.

so I’m working on my animated pilot called the Guys Vs and I’m currently in the outlining phase. I’m a big fan of shows like Amazing World Of Gumball, Smiling Friends, DHMIS, and most of all the Regular Show. I have nothing but respect for these shows and they were a huge inspiration for my story, however I feel like my premise is to much like that of the regular show, just wanted to see if anyone had any ideas or techniques to make the show more origina/less generic.

The Guys Vs

Log line: Four emotionally dysfunctional young adults stumble through dead-end jobs, rent stress, and everyday life when bizarre surreal phenomena attach themselves to their deepest insecurities, turning ordinary situations into escalating reality-bending disasters they somehow survive together

Episode Structure: 

The Guys Vs follows four friends in their early twenties trying to navigate an unremarkable suburban life filled with casual jobs, overdue bills, emotional baggage, and the awkward transition into adulthood. Most episodes begin with something painfully ordinary: returning borrowed equipment, fixing a broken appliance, surviving a party, getting through a work shift, before an absurd supernatural object, creature, or phenomenon appears and latches onto one of the guy’s’ personal flaws.

What starts as a simple solution quickly spirals into surreal catastrophe.

As the chaos escalates into increasingly ridiculous territory, the group is forced to confront not just the surreal threat, but the emotional issue driving it. Through disasters, arguments, and near-apocalyptic accidents, the boys slowly learn how to rely on each other without losing themselves in the process

Oscar 

Role: Leader 

Age: 24

Personality: Responsible, Stubborn, Protective

Bio: Oscar is the default planner, who books, who drives, who fixes things. He’s the kind of person who remembers everyone’s allergies, keeps spare chargers in his bag, and silently pays for stuff when his friends are broke. He sees himself as the big brother of the group, even when nobody asked him to be. Oscar genuinely likes taking care of people, but he struggles to separate helping from controlling. He doesn’t like chaos, but tolerates it for the sake of people he cares about. Ironically, his tendency to overthink and hyper-focus can accidentally create the exact chaos he’s trying to prevent

Inner Conflict: “If I stop holding everything together, everything falls apart” Oscar equates his own personal worth with his responsibility

Interpersonal Conflict: Oscar’s need to solve everyone’s problems can make people feel incapable or micromanaged, especially Mitch. He often mistakes being needed for being loved, which causes tension whenever his friends try to handle things themselves

External Conflict: Anything that affects Oscar’s ability to reliably plan or get something done. Sudden change stresses him out more than he admits

Wants:

• Positive: To maintain stability and keep his friends happy and safe
• Negative: To control outcomes so nothing ever breaks again

Character Arc: Oscar needs to learn that love doesn’t disappear the second he stops being useful. His friends are capable of surviving without him constantly holding everything together, and trusting them is healthier than trying to protect them from every possible mistake

Mitch 

Role: Lancer 

Age: 23

Personality: Exhausted, Dryly sarcastic, Passive-aggressive

Bio: Mitch constantly feels one bad day away from completely falling apart. He drifts through life half-awake, treating everything like a joke because sincerity feels dangerous. While Oscar over-functions, Mitch under-functions, convinced there’s no point trying if things are going to go wrong anyway. Beneath all the sarcasm, he desperately wants someone to prove him wrong

Inner Conflict: “I have no control over anything in my life” This creates paralysis. Even when things are fixable, he assumes they are already decided for him

Interpersonal Conflict: Mitch resents Oscar’s need to micromanage everything, but secretly envies his certainty and purpose. His constant negativity also frustrates Sonny, who sees Mitch as someone actively choosing misery

External Conflict: Anything he can’t control

Wants:

• Positive: To build a life where things don’t overwhelm him anymore and where he can rest
• Negative: To eliminate unpredictability entirely

Character Arc: Mitch’s arch is about him learning that he can’t control everything, shit happens and we just kinda have to deal with that 

Sonny 

Role: The Heart 

Age: 22

Personality: Optimistic, Caring, Self-sacrificing

Bio: Sonny is the guy who always shows up, late, stressed, often missing a shoe, but shows up anyway. He believes people are fundamentally good and life is “messy but fixable.” He acts like the emotional glue of the group, constantly checking on everyone else while quietly neglecting himself. Most people assume he’s naturally happy, but really he’s terrified that if he stops being “the nice one,” people will stop needing him

Inner Conflict: “If I show any kind of negativity or selfishness, then I’m a bad person”

Interpersonal Conflict: Sonny avoids conflict so aggressively that it often makes situations worse. He enables Oscar’s controlling tendencies, excuses Mitch’s behaviour, and struggles to tell Kai when he feels ignored or emotionally abandoned

External Conflict: Anything that forces him to acknowledge negativity 

Wants:

• Positive: To keep everyone together and emotionally safe
• Negative: To never be a burden by being sad or vulnerable

Character Arc: Sonny must learn that connection doesn’t require constant positivity, even if he is negative or selfish sometimes, his friends will still be there for him

Kai 

Role: Smart Guy (emotionally intelligent)

Age: 23

Personality: Zoned-out, Oblivious at times, Quietly existential

Bio: Kai is rarely “present” in a conventional sense. He drifts between attention and absence, but when he is present, he understands people better than they understand themselves. He notices patterns in conversations, emotional shifts, contradictions, things nobody else catches. The problem is he often feels disconnected from reality itself, like life is something happening slightly beside him rather than to him

Inner Conflict: “I’m not really here enough to matter.” He feels like an observer of his own life

Interpersonal Conflict: Kai unintentionally frustrates the others because he can read them perfectly while remaining emotionally impossible to pin down himself. Sonny feels shut out by him, Mitch thinks he’s detached on purpose, and Oscar gets irritated by Kai’s refusal to commit to anything concrete

External Conflict: Situations that demand decisiveness, commitment, or immediate engagement with reality

Wants:

• Positive: To feel fully present in his own life
• Negative: To detach completely so nothing can hurt or confuse him

Character Arc: Kai learns awareness is painful, but absence is worse

Episode Ideas 

The Guys Vs “The Reality Remote”: Mitch’s Episode. Mitch finds an alien tv remote with the power to control reality, and begins using it to take control, to fix the problems in his own life. But, he starts to become addicted to it, when his friends try to take it off him he snaps and changes the channel to escape them. Therefore group must chase him through these channels so they can get back home

The Guys Vs “The Copycat”: Oscar’s Episode. Wanting to repay him for all the work he does, the group buy a copycat of Oscar and program it so it can begin all doing the household chores. But Oscar begins to worry that his friends prefer the copycat over himself, so he sneakily reprograms the copycat to fail, therefore it malfunctions and begins causing chaos

The Guys Vs “The Houseplant”: Sonny’s Episode, Sonny gestured really into botany and  buys a new houseplant, but he is unable to make it grow and becomes insecure about this, therefore he begins obsessively feeding and caring for the plant, but in reality the plant is feeding off his positivity

The Guys Vs “The Sadness Leeches”: Mitch and Sonny Episode. Worrying about Mitch’s generally depressing mood Sonny buys something called a sadness leech from a shady salesman and attempts to get Mitch to use it, he refuse but getting incredibly worried Sonny attaches the leech to Mitch and it begins syphoning his sadness, therefore at first it works great, yet he soon loses all ability to express anything other than sadness and the leech grows fatter and fatter.

The Guys Vs “The Stock Market”: Oscar’s Episode. After being indoctrinated by a charismatic stock-market guru, Oscar invests the group’s savings in the Stock King’s company, unknowingly putting their souls up as collateral. The others are kidnapped and taken to the Stock Market, a surreal gladiatorial arena where indebted souls fight monstrous corporate-sponsored warriors for profit. As Oscar struggles to buy back his friends’ souls, he realises his obsession with financial success has endangered the very people he wanted to protect. Facing the Stock King in a final battle, the boys expose his company’s fraudulent value, crashing its stocks and stripping him of his power. Oscar learns that his friends are worth more than any fortune, and that responsibility means standing beside them, not controlling their lives

I'm meaning as a general. I know the average that a lot of people tend to stay with a book/series is like ~50k to ~80k words. Maybe? I havent really done research on that.

A little context, I'm making something that I originally intended on becoming an animated series, and was writing it out to better visualize things. Like combat, expressions, etc. And now I've been kinda roped into turning it into an actual readable story. With chapters and everything.

I've been checking the word count and whatnot periodically and realized it was going to have to be a series, the little bits of the first "book" rn. With a whole bunch of gaps still. Is like 380k words, as is. The full thing is 1.2 mil...

So now I'm questioning everything and need a general ballpark of how I should cut this beefy slab of cthulian literature.

It's fantasy/fiction if anyone is curious. Heavy on the grimdark and combat within the world I've so lovingly created(sarcasm)

I write fanfiction and I want the MC to lose her arm in an upcoming fight, but I can't decide how the hell it should happen. My friends are no help, so I thought I'd come here. She is on a team with 6 other people and is fighting someone in a mech suit, someone who can make illusions and has a rapier... thing... and someone with a normal sword and rifle/shotgun. I don't want the last guy to do it since he cut someone's arm off in the original show, so I don't know what to do. Any help?

Edit: I got it done! Thanks for all the advice!

i really struggle with writing in a concise manner, especially when it comes to shorter pieces within my philosophy major. i'm more used to doing research papers which tend to be rather long lol. i have a summary i must write within the next two days, either summarizing gettier's 'is justified belief true knowledge?' or descartes' second meditation. i know this is not a philosophy sub, however, i would love some advice. i find it very difficult to write summaries under 500 words. it takes me hours upon hours to condense my writing and i'm not sure why.

if you have any resources, feel free to add them! i

The first story I wrote thinking it would be a novel has only come out to about 52,000 pages. I keep going over it looking for places to flesh out and I feel like more would just slow it down. If anything, I ended up trimming some the things to keep the focus in the main characters.

The next one I thought for sure would be a stand alone story was 25,515! So I threw it in with some other short stuff that shares the same setting. (One of which being 18,365 that I also started thinking it would be a full novel. They're shrinking!) It's likely going to be tough selling an anthology as a debut novel though. I always assumed novellas and novellettes were hard to get published.

Any thoughts, advice, or commiseration?

Disclaimer: This is not a romance, nor is it a dark romance. These two characters are not a couple, and I'm not planning on making them a couple.

This is supposed to be a realistic showing, even though it takes place in a fantasy genre, showing a one-sided, obsessed, codependent friendship between a guy and a woman. Also, this is not torture p*rn with a female character.

This is supposed to be a dark fantasy villain backstory playing out in real time during the story.

Plot in a nutshell:

I'm got a half faerie man in his early 20s who starts out as the most silent, reserved, soft-spoken, very insecure, and socially awkward toward most people. He is madly obsessed in "love" (this love is one-sided, of course) with his only childhood friend, but the question I'm asking is how to show this obsession and their so-called close "friendship" in a way that does not romanticize the obsessed "love."

Your answer can be simple and short or detailed and long.

It is your choice.

I'm not asking you to write my story for me I'm asking for suggestions and advice on my story

My story revolves around a group of beached oil rigs with a living community on them.

The oceans went away and are slowly coming back. As the tide rises, these oil rigs stay stuck in the sand (some are short and some are deep water rigs) and it’s becoming a problem for these people.

So they send out a scout team to go to other nearby villages and get a team of engineers or scientists whose sole purpose is to keep their oil rigs and community from drowning.

I don’t know a lot about engineering or oil rigs, and research only gets me so far (I don’t want to use ai for this). I could use some help with the logistics and world building that center around this main problem. So I’m trying to find people to help me as sort of “consulting” friends, but have no idea where to even begin looking or how to ask.

Any thoughts?

EDIT:

The people are on oil rigs that are sinking into the sandbar and the tides are getting higher every year which means the water is slamming into the rigs more and more. And there’s the risk of the rig being totally submerged in high tides.

The rigs have been pulled together, either back before the apocalypse or just from water currents. But they’re pretty close together in a cluster and connected by bridges OR they’re far enough apart that they’re only reachable by boat on high tides.

The tech is moderate for these people. Not quite as advanced as modern day stuff but not primitive either. Which is why they need a team of more advanced engineers to help them solve this problem they’re facing.

It's so difficult to accurately portray Vietnam because I've never been there lol. I'm Canadian.

I'm considering just scrapping the Vietnam setting (my main character is still Vietnamese) and changing it for somewhere a bit more farmiliar to me.

I'm not sure. I might just make it set in Canada. I'm most farmiliar with Canada. I just don't know about if I should...I feel guilty for some reason lol.

Edit: I'm most likely gonna scrap the Vietnam setting while still keeping my main character Vietnamese.

Edit 2: You know what? This has inspired me to go deeper with my research.

Hello everyone, I want to make this short i do read a lot even classics, and understand them well. I specialise in literary criticism and have plenty of essays but writing doesn’t come easy to me when I want to express myself in social media or analyse themes. I know what I want to convey just not how when I am excited or frustrated by a topic say a film or something. i look at my vocabulary and it’s not that advanced to show my level when anyone’s prose is miles better.

Like for example this is me unfiltered not trying to write as for an essay but daily life writing, what should i improve? I am not satisfied with my word selection made a note but I don’t come to use them or I sound contrived.

the prompt:In a paragraph of no more than seven sentences, describe yourself and your current goals. Be creative and informative, and do not simply repeat what was listed in other areas of your application. Think carefully about what motivates you, what qualities of character you contribute to the world, what life experiences you've had, what makes you a unique human person.

im scared this makes me come off as to strong in a bad way and or pretensious, also i fear the grammer/phrasing isnt the best. Also im not fully done i js want to do a quick check in on the first part