What are some general tips on how to write good original fiction?

Ai-chan

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Sorry for being a bother, but I need guidance. I want to write at least one story in my life that can earn, in an honest way, 200 watchers on it and some comments. So far, no matter how hard I try, nothing works out in this direction, and each of my works is worse than the last. It feels awful, and I want to change it, but I don't know how to tackle this problem. What can I do to improve?
Just write for yourself and learn to love what you write. If at start you get a good number of reads and then nobody reads in the following chapters, that simply means your content didn't appeal to your target audience.

Here's how it goes: the opening chapters set what kind of readers you will get and the following chapters will determine how many of these readers stay with you.

If you promise one thing in the opening chapters, and then deliver something else completely in the following chapters, the readers you hooked in the opening chapters will leave. And since other potential readers aren't interested in your opening chapters (of course new readers would read from the start), then you're not going to do well.

It could also be the quality of your composition. If your opening chapters aren't all that good, a lot of readers would still give it a go if the premise interests them, for like 3 chapters maybe. But after that, quality matters.

tl:dr
Don't bait and switch.
Create quality content.
 

Succubiome

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Sorry for being a bother, but I need guidance. I want to write at least one story in my life that can earn, in an honest way, 200 watchers on it and some comments. So far, no matter how hard I try, nothing works out in this direction, and each of my works is worse than the last. It feels awful, and I want to change it, but I don't know how to tackle this problem. What can I do to improve?
It's more likely that you aren't getting worse, and rather, that your taste in writing is outpacing your skill in writing.

This is a normal -- if painful -- part of getting better at writing.

Only way I know of is to go through it and keep writing.

Maybe try out writing short stories with focuses on particular things you wanna get better at. You want to get better at describing emotions? Write that? Fighting? Write that! Etc.

That might help you feel like you're progressing quicker, and give you more specific goals to aim for.
 

placeintime

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So I glanced through your newest one, (Bare in mind, I just skimmed) but I realized you write a lot. That's not a bad thing, writing a lot is amazing but writing too much is also an issue where sometimes there's fluff which are things that don't need to be written. In your case ,your overwriting on details and descriptions. Your descriptions are amazing, but you sometimes go over the top where you don't need to incorporate so much.

The second thing I think you should think about is the paragraph structure. You have large chunks of text next to one another which have a lot of detail and descriptions. Readers need to digest the information. You could separate them; an example would be I see you have two quotations from two different speakers together, you could separate them.

I hope this helps. ^^
 

CharlesEBrown

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Don't worry about it. Write something that just feels "Fun" to you - fun to read and write. Maybe you'll find an audience, maybe not. So far, I had one title (Strange Awakening) do moderately well here, two (Diamond in the Rough, True Blue) absolutely bottom out on Royal Road, and one (Digital Cowboy Dane - just Digital Cowboy here) do reasonably well on PocketFM (but not so much here).
 

Rookieqw

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Thank you all for the advice! (and apologies for sparking such a heated argument. You are all wonderful people). So, the general idea is to check out the popular series (currently I am reading War Queen, Hohenfels, and Epilogue on RR. No idea if they count as popular, but I like them) to try and emulate them and to understand what works. Cut down on the descriptions and make paragraphs smaller. That and enjoying my writing (I am). is that correct?
 
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Golden_Hyde

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to those who share numbers on the earnings of their original story:
1000007473.jpg

jokes aside, just write what you like. If there's an input from readers in the form of comments and reviews, best to listen to them.
 

ChrisLensman

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Alright, I'll do this in two parts. First off I'll give some general advice on writing and then I'll talk about your specific situation. Because those two are definitely different conversations.



First, for the general advice. Ironically, the first step to writing something original is to read a ton of stuff from other authors.

What genres are you interested in? Which do you like reading and which do you like writing? Pick one and immerse yourself in it. Fifty to a hundred novels should be enough to "get" a genre.

Why does that matter? Because your ideas can only be novel when you know what has already been done. The worst example of what can happen if you don't do that is the game Tales of Zestiria, which had the bold idea of "What if Hero versus Dark Lord BUT WITH A TWIST" without realizing that even the deconstruction of "Hero versus Dark Lord" has been done to death already, so all their thrilling new ideas had also been done before.

Also, don't force it out. Read, read and read some more, until your own story starts crystallizing in your mind. And once you can no longer enjoy other people's work without thinking about your own story, then you should start writing.



There, that was the general advice. Now for your case specifically.

Stop spamming chapters. Building a readerbase takes time. Like, that story you're still updating, Duty, Empty Dreams and Trying Not to Become a Monster.

8.6k views and you've only been properly publishing that for a month. That's amazing. Now, what drove you to spam chapters at that speed? Pace them out so that people actually have a chance to read it. Having an "upload day" every week gives both you and your readers something to look forward to.

It feels like your problem isn't so much that you don't have ideas but that you want instant gratification and feedback and writing is an absolutely terrible hobby for that. Reading takes time. Reading the literal novel (77k words) that you've chucked out within a month takes a lot of time. And until people have properly digested that you can't expect them to click that little "Read" button.

And also, if your story isn't extremely light novel-esque and filled with smut you will never see the kind of ludicrously fast reader gain that you seem to be wanting so manage your expectations.



tl;dr: Stop being so hard on yourself, you're doing great. You only need to give it time.
 

RepresentingWrath

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Thank you all for the advice! (and apologies for sparking such a heated argument. You are all wonderful people). So, the general idea is to check out the popular series (currently I am reading War Queen, Hohenfels, and Epilogue on RR. No idea if they count as popular, but I like them) to try and emulate them and to understand what works. Cut down on the descriptions and make paragraphs smaller. That and enjoying my writing (I am). is that correct?
No.
 

RepresentingWrath

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Read comments of the readers based on the trending novels and try to imagine and write a story based on their preferences then?
No. Brotherman, I gave an exhaustive reply, so I don't know how the first part of your summarised reply morphed so much. Can you please reread my serious reply, and reread envy's serious replies?
 

Rookieqw

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No. Brotherman, I gave an exhaustive reply, so I don't know how the first part of your summarised reply morphed so much. Can you please reread my serious reply, and reread envy's serious replies?
Apologies. I am not very bright. I'll re-read it at home and will try to apply the advice.

That's amazing. Now, what drove you to spam chapters at that speed?

The story is already completed (it's around a million words long; it took me six months to write). I am currently doing the fourth or the fifth (I lost count) draft. Basically I open a chapter and rewrite it by hand, removing mistakes and varying the words (in addition to fixing motivations, choosing correct words, and such). It's not very hard.

As for speed, I simply looked at other authors and tried to do what they do. Take RepresentingEnvy as an example: https://www.scribblehub.com/series/1419179/frozen-vampire-queen/ . Often two chapters per day. I can't maintain such an incredible speed, so I try to post three chapters per week.
 
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Rezcore

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Respect the Original, don't power fantasy, don't use a fucking system, and make the changes fit and have reasonable causes.
 

Rookieqw

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Respect the Original, don't power fantasy, don't use a fucking system, and make the changes fit and have reasonable causes.
One of the main recomdation given to me initially (in another thread) was to write a story that involves a system. I am of the opinion that it is possible to create an engaging OF using it. I can't do it, because my head begins to hurt when I lay all characters' interractions and then sit and prepare the stats sheets for them in addition to fevereshly trying to explain why won't other characters in the story won't level as fast as the MC if the system is a thing.

It's hard and confusing and I am not that good at math or balancing when it comes to pure numbers. It took me two months to research and write a chapter which involved a near nuclear explosion. I had find the right words to describe the calamity and put it to text. It's just not my strongest point.

LITrpg works; they can be interesting (I've done around 40 review swaps on RR that involved just them).
 
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Edenc2708

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Sorry for being a bother, but I need guidance. I want to write at least one story in my life that can earn, in an honest way, 200 watchers on it and some comments. So far, no matter how hard I try, nothing works out in this direction, and each of my works is worse than the last. It feels awful, and I want to change it, but I don't know how to tackle this problem. What can I do to improve?
Determine your genre first, find those great novels that fit your genre, learn from them
for example you're writing fantasy magic, then harry potter might be your best shot.

after you find it, read them, but dont read from reader eyes, read from author perspective, how did the book build the character, build the plot and etc
 

Kalliel

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Been saying this like three times now, but the trending on this site is weird. Once you're on it once and you keep going, you'll continue to appear on there a lot until you get past 2000 readers, after which you'll never be in the top 9 anymore. I know the 2000 mark because I have four stories with over 2000 readers, three of which got on trending multiple times. Weirdly enough, my most popular story never got on there once, but let's put that aside.

A story being on the trending page doesn't necessarily mean that a lot of people read it. Look at the top view weekly/monthly instead. That's what I'm going to say regarding what kind of story is popular.
 

RepresentingWrath

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Been saying this like three times now, but the trending on this site is weird. Once you're on it once and you keep going, you'll continue to appear on there a lot until you get past 2000 readers, after which you'll never be in the top 9 anymore. I know the 2000 mark because I have four stories with over 2000 readers, three of which got on trending multiple times. Weirdly enough, my most popular story never got on there once, but let's put that aside.

A story being on the trending page doesn't necessarily mean that a lot of people read it. Look at the top view weekly/monthly instead. That's what I'm going to say regarding what kind of story is popular.
If trending were to count the biggest numbers without any restrictions it would be occupied by old and big stories. Period. You can argue Corty is a relatively fresh face here or Envy, but the two would never get as big because they would never get on trending to begin with. All while trending boosts novels a lot. And I personally don't think it's a good idea to copy people like Kuropon, Akaichi, etc. They all started long ago, the market has changed.

A circumstational evidence of the market change would be BL novels. Almost every popular novel of BL genre was written way back. Nowadays BL novels struggle to get past 10k views.

Trending is a source of what is popular right now.
 
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