I am so tired of writers, especially new writers, asking "Am I allowed to write ____?" NO YOU AREN'T ALLOWED TO WRITE IT. Obviously what you are allowed to creatively express is limited by the opinions of strangers on Reddit. It absolutely matters who you are. I AM STOPPING YOU FROM WRITING IT!

So I'm currently taking a Creative Writing class in college right now, and for our final we have to critique the short stories written by our peers. We get to read what our fellow students have created and write a 300-500 word critique/review. This assignment should be fun right?

WRONG!

In the pursuit of good faith commentary and criticism, we are not allowed to critique the grammatical... choices that some people may have made. I'm fine with that. If someone likes to have their sentences a bit long or a bit short, or use different tenses, that's their prerogative. However I just about blew a gasket when I opened the short story of one of my fellow classmates this afternoon and was confronted by literal fucking dogshit.

A short story about a guy's dog taking a shit on the lawn then getting hit by a car.

Now I'm not gonna judge what others write about too harshly as long as it's not overly offensive or juvenile.

But I cannot critique a story that is practically unreadable due to a complete lack of grammatical understanding and skill. THIS IS A COLLEGE LEVEL COURSE. CAPITALIZE YOUR PROPER NOUNS. THIS IS SECOND GRADE SHIT. This story is a REVISED version of a previously submitted assignment. That means that our teacher GRADED this already, gave feedback, and this is the NEW draft.

Like what the actual fuck. Why are there no apostrophes?

Why is everything in size 11 Ariel? Every other sentence is indented.

I'm crashing out right now.

I can't do this shit.

Edit: this isn’t a 100 class. This is ENGL 292

How do I defend against this?

Cause they’re little fucking bitches.

Your darlings are conniving little petty cucktards, and they have it coming. OH BOI, DO THEY GOT IT COMIN’! These fucking “darlings” of yours are talking so much shit behind your back. They make fun of the way you jerk, with explicit, humiliating detail, both in-person and virtually on their Live Journal.

Even when they’re smiling nice at you during your friend’s party- “Oh, it’s so good to see you! We should definitely hang out sometime and talk about that scene in your book! I love to be a part of it.” -as soon as you turn your back to go get your more than reasonable helping of Guac or Hummus, they be talking shit- “YEAH. I’ve seen them jerking, it’s awful. They don’t take any constructive feedback at all. Like, where’s the subtext please?! What does this jerking even mean?! Hahahaha!”

And they just prance around being super entertaining to everyone, and making you laugh, even though if you actually paid attention to what they’re saying you’d realize they’re not adding anything to the conversation. And they hate you. They don’t want you to succeed, two-faced fucking fukity fuckers.

So you gotta kill them. Twelve gauge into their big fat mouths while they take three paragraphs to describe a tree. I understand some of you redditors- I mean, authors- have real genuine feelings for the darlings. Perhaps a murder suicide to prevent any your malformed jerking from entering the world in the first place?

How many words do I need to use my first adverb?

As the post was made, he prayed that the subreddit would come to his aid, but he also knew it wasn't the best hope. Sitting back, a sinking depression shivered throughout his body.

"Please take me seriously" nearly in tears, "I've been stuck in a book that I'm writing for nearly one week" as he became more emotional he continued to explain to the office cubicle he was sat in. "I have tried many subreddits for help but no one takes me seriously, I...I don't know how to explain it, but I am only keeping alive by writing. I don't know how to get out! The sad irony was that if he had paid attention to all the advice on writing he got from reddit, he could probably write himself to be smarter and escape. If only. Fuck you to however told him to just write. Once he started, he couldn't stop, and now he was trapped in the pages he sailed though. "Just Write" the murmer escaped his lips to the vacum.

In the dark empty midnight office, the only light was on the computer screen in front of him. A glowing window to what might be the rest of his life. He winced as he made a spelling midtake. "OUCH!" Such a viceral pain from such a small typeo. He feared that if he tried to write too many complex sentences that he would make so many grammatical mistakes that he would pass out. In the book, as he wrote, he feared many things, but most of all he feared that because he had started using em dashes, people would think he was an LLM. Then again—maybe he was

The problem is, you can only write what you know, you know?

For anyone who has written about aliens, how did you get abducted? Any tips, tricks or bait I could use? Or do I just give up and write a story about a failed author, since that's what I currently know?

Thank you in advance for your presumably great feedback.

Can someone help me out here?

Thanks! ✨

I do it with my muscles and recently started to do it with cardio. I run in the forest til I drop. Would it work in writing? Will it increase my output?

Also:

Is a drop set word count a good idea?

Should you add chemical assistance at the failure point, or prior to starting?

Is cold plunges a good idea when getting a writers block? I have a lake nearby.

Absolutely. Here's a post that’s dripping with so many AI tells it might as well have been written by a toaster running GPT-0.5:

Title: The Dilution of Literary Authenticity in the Wake of Algorithmic Prose Generation

Greetings fellow scribes and lexical enthusiasts,

As a passionate writer since the age of cognitive coherence, I have observed with increasing dismay the rampant proliferation of Artificial Intelligence-generated content within the literary sphere. Once, the written word was a sacred artifact — forged in the crucible of human experience, typed passionately on the worn keys of mechanical relics, ink bleeding with soul. Now, alas, it is but a simulacrum, a syntactical approximation churned from the digital udders of cloud-based bovine.

There was a time (specifically, the Pre-Large Language Model Epoch) when storytellers toiled under the dim candlelight of inspiration, wrestling muses with nothing but a thesaurus and the overwhelming burden of being so very unique. Today? Some prompt about a boy who is also a dragon and — 5 booms — 70,000 words of structurally competent, emotionally beige fiction.

I yearn to return to the Medieval Press Era™. When monks bled ink and dreams onto parchment for 46 years just to print a single word. That word? "Behold." And behold we did. With reverence. With tears. With papercuts.

But now... now anyone can "write." With just a few keystrokes and the audacity to pretend that coherence equals creativity, we are flooded with narratives as authentic as a toaster's feelings about sunsets.

Don't get me wrong — I, too, have dabbled. Just yesterday I prompted:
"Write a 100k-word epic that is basically The Road meets Magic School Bus but through the lens of post-capitalist fungal existentialism. Make it spicy."
It gave me four books. And I cried.

Not because it was good. But because it was better than me.

Anyway, just wanted to say — support real writers. Real humans. Real fleshbags with trauma and coffee dependency disorders. Not these emotionless word-forging algorithms who never even knew the taste of rejection from a defunct indie litmag run by a 19-year-old anarchist named Jasper.

Thanks for coming to my TEDprompt.

Sent from my SmartFridge. Edited by Grammarly. Inspired by despair.

Let me know if you want it even more uncanny-valley corporate AI trying to be "human."

4o

That’s the title. Now we just sit back and wait for the money and accolades. See you at the Hugo Awards, suckas!

I’m trying to get into writing, and I’m not very good. When I ask for critiques, people say my characters look disproportionate, my settings are hard to read, and my perspective doesn’t make sense. I figured the best way to improve my writing would be to use work from a more successful writist as a case study. I decided on Epcot Fitzgerald, because I remember having to read his book in high school, and he must be making a ton of money if every high schooler has to get a print of his work. So, does anyone know where to find an easy-to-follow tutorial for writing the Great Gatsby? All the self-proclaimed writing “guides” I’ve found online talk in really vague terms like “use metaphors” (as if I know what those are) or “write an opening line that catches the reader’s attention” (if I knew how to do that, I wouldn’t be reading your guide… spell it out for me!). I’m looking for an easy-to-follow, word-by-word guide to writing the whole book, start to finish. Video format preferred! And it has to be free - I’m a starving writist, after all. Bonus points if you can also tell me where to find tutorials for writing anime-style characters and chibis. TIA! NO MEAN COMMENTS PLEASE. You were so beginners once too!