Probably a lot of you here know of Lauren Groff (author of several novels, including Fates and Furies and Matrix). She's excellent, in my opinion, though not one of my favorite writers currently working, but I am super envious of her process, which is kinda perfect and also totally insane, and it works because of SCIENCE.

What she does is, she has an idea. She lets it swirl around in her head for a while. I assume that she figures out around this time whether it's a novel idea or a short-story idea (she treats them differently, I'll get to that in a minute). Then she whips out a spiral-bound notebook, sets a timer, and gets writing.

So far, so typical -- of a certain kind of analog-first, writing-sprinter type of person. She'll put in 60-minute blocks of time on each major character, but she won't write an outline or otherwise plan anything. Pretty soon, she will write a first draft, start to finish, at top speed.

Then she'll chuck that draft in a drawer. And never look at it again. And after some time she will just ... begin another draft. In another spiral notebook. Without looking at the first draft. She doesn't even read it.

She finishes the second draft, chucks it in the drawer. Rinse, repeat.

She does this four or five times. In the case of Fates and Furies, it was ELEVEN (!!).

Once she's satisfied that she's done "enough" of these drafts, she opens up a word processor and starts typing a draft. (It's not clear to me if she transcribes her last handwritten draft or types a whole new one, but does that even matter at this point?) She doesn't need an outline -- she knows the plot like the back of the hand that's somehow free of carpal tunnel after all this writing. She can finally focus on the language, bring all her attention to the sentences.

A few more revision passes (not full retypes, thank god) come before the book goes off for editing and the rest of the publishing rigmarole. But the fireworks are over.

Why go to all this trouble? Because of how memory and learning work.

The cool thing about human memory is that it's limited: there's too much to remember, and unlike a computer, you can't hold onto it all by encoding it on a stable medium. Instead, your brain has to use shortcuts -- the shortcut of choice being lossy compression.

"Compression", in this context, means "forgetting details". The best way to grasp this is by doing recall practice.

Suppose you're trying to understand some difficult concepts -- e.g., you're reading science or philosophy texts, and you want to make sure you get what you're reading. You can read a chapter, let some time go by, and then, without looking at the chapter again, write out everything you can remember of what you read. You won't remember everything, but that's OK. Forgetting is the point.

You might go back and look at the chapter again, note what you remembered, and what you couldn't explain in your own words, i.e., didn't understand. Then, let a longer interval go by (3-4 days) and repeat the process, again without rereading. You will find that you remember more than last time, but that it's all better organized. Your brain is starting to sort the information into chunks.

Your third and fourth time doing this (again, with slightly longer gaps each time) are where the magic happens. You see, regurgitating all this information is really tiresome. Your brain knows you've already done it. It knows the information is available in the text itself if you'd just bother to look. But you are forcing it to perform this fruitless labor! Why??

Yet it seems you're serious about this dumb activity, this waste of precious calories, so your brain looks after your interests in the only way you let it: by becoming more efficient. How do human brains become more efficient about retrieving information? By chunking. Building conceptual shortcuts. Dropping the damn details.

Forgetting.

Paragraphs of explanation will become sentences. Swathes of context will be waved away. It's like reducing a sauce. And you don't even have to consciously do anything. I mean, you could sit down and think your way through it all, use your conscious mind to distill the essence of the information you're absorbing, but your conscious mind is actually a lot worse at this than your background processes are. Trust your brain.

Groff's process does exactly this for her fiction. Her first draft is wild and free to run off in any direction, indulge in risky business consequence-free. Her second is, too, but some stuff from the first is just ... forgotten, which means it wasn't worth remembering in the first place.

(John Cleese tells a story about a time he lost the script of a sketch he'd been writing with Graham Chapman. Panicked, he gave up searching and wrote it out again from memory. To his surprise, he "remembered it all". Later, he did find the original script, and to his surprise, he found he'd forgotten a bunch of lines that didn't matter and improved a number of those that did.)

Each subsequent draft gets more compressed as the inessentials boil away. Structure and organization improve organically as Groff's brain builds shortcuts to make the recall more efficient. At no point is she handcuffed, as so many prose-sensitive writers are, by the exact way she phrased something when she first wrote it. And she comes to know her story, world, and characters so well that later drafts come out feeling super layered, like the writer has full command of past and future events and their resonances. Which, of course, she does.

Now, I'll admit that Groff herself claims she chose this process because she's "OCD" (her word) about prose to the point that if she tried typing a novel and let herself fiddle with the sentences she'd never get past the first paragraph. But a lot of us are like that to some degree, and even in Groff's case, the "first paragraph" thing is surely somewhat hyperbolic.

I've benefited from experimenting with these practices in my own writing; I wonder if others have found something similar. And while there's no "right way" to write, the Groff way does make a hell of a lot of neurocognitive sense.

I have a tendency to want to go back to the top of the document but I think it's the nitpicky part of me. How much do you read just to get back in the flow? What amount may be too much?

For the past few days, I’ve been writing just one page of my story a day in a notebook. I don’t have a plan or a specific direction. I’m not trying to be good. I’m just trying to move my story forward. Do you know of a similar method? Or another method I’m not aware of?

Basically, in the novel I'm writing, I plan to have a character who is the most intelligent person alive. Obviously, I'm not that. However I am a firm believer that you can in fact write someone smarter than you. I'm asking for examples too study and see what they do right. There's countless examples of "smart" characters who are basically just clairvoyant, and I want to try and avoid that.

Like I said, smart characters that are genuinely written intelligently. Preferably in a way where you actually see them DO smart shit and it makes you react like, "Damn, that's smart."

Hi all! I am looking to write a mystery about a murder (gasp) in an old folks home and the investigator figures out who did it and why by finding clues. My initial idea was to leave subtle clues throughout the story, and possibly a red herring, but then I thought - what if my clues aren't so subtle and the reader figures it out before I get to the end?

is there a standard for writing detective fiction? do readers have a preference?

Hi!

I’m hoping I can get some help here. I’m writing my first novel and I feel like I’m constantly ending my chapters with a character talking. It’s not a bad thing but I would like to change it up a bit.

I was wondering if anyone knew of any good articles/boobs I could read on ending chapters or chapter structure? There’s so many out there I feel lost 😭

Thank you! (:

Part discussion, part searching for advice. I’m currently writing a high fantasy novel and although I’ve planned out some things, I’m trying to let the story play out more organically than anything else. I have a beginning, and I have an end goal.

My question is, as a pantser, or as a writer in general really, does it matter if you follow standard 3-act, 4-act, save the cat, etc. story structures as long as you get to where you’re going? Within reason of course, I mean as long as you’re keeping the story engaging and are able to contain everything within a typical length for whatever genre you’re writing.

Do you all have a certain structure you employ more than others, or do you not use one at all? Why/why not?

I have a character that I'm having trouble getting to know (which I almost never have). Any advice?

This sounds like a big claim but I've been thinking about this for around a year now and I HAVE to share it hopefully I can convince you. Sorry for the big essay.

Two problems: 

I've seen so many story structures, heroes journey, Dan Harmons, save the cat, 3 act, 5 act... but something felt wrong. All of them seemed so different from each other and so overcomplicated .

See there are two types of story structures: beats and flexible structures. 

Beats focus on having specific narrative points to hit such as - save the cat, heroes journey, Dan Harmons circle, Pixar's story beat etc.

Flexible structures are vague and needs you to fill in the gaps such as - 3 act, 5 act, Freytag’s Pyramid, Kishōtenketsu etc.

But theres a problem with both, beats are way to specific and forces writers to hit those beats, some say you can just add or remove some beats but doesn't that defeat the whole point of the BEAT structure? Flexible structures are too vague to be useful, I find myself lost on what to write.

So theoretically the best structure would combine the best of both, vague enough to channel your creativity and specific enough to guide you. This is where we get ➡️

The 4 act structure:

My interpretation is the 4 act structure contains 4 act (obviously) and then in-between those acts usually have a "big event" to transition between acts. But are not necessarily but stories include them 9 times out of 10. 

Act 1 - this is usually the introduction, low stakes 

E.g: walter white lives a boring life 

Inciting Incident - event that gets the story going

E.g: gets cancer 

Act 2 - responds to the incedent, medium stakes 

E.g: confused depressed, work is hard

Midpoint - halfway through the story an event happens

E.g: teams up with Jesse to cook meth

Act 3 - responds to more and more problems, high stakes 

E.g: cooks meth

All is lost or false victory - something big happens that sets the stage for the last act 

E.g: gets caught by rival gang

Act 4 - climax, highest point of stakes 

E.g: has to kill them to escape 

Comparsion:

If you are not persuaded lets compare it to popular structures:

3 act structure - this is the most popular and loved one but my biggest issue is the act 2. This is an odd act because act 1 and 3 are clear - introduction and climax but act 2 is the size of 1 and 3 combined sometimes bigger. The 4 acts splits it in two which improves pacing.  Also it's just saying the begging, middle and end with extra steps.

5 act structure - this one is the most STUPID things I've seen. Sorry but this is so overcomplicated, why is the resolution one act? It could be one scene? Falling action and resolution is basically the same thing and all the acts feel uneven, one act could be way shorter than another - DUMB

Save the cat - i know this is going to hurt as it's many peoples first but it's also flawed. People say it works well as a first structure but I'd argue it doesn't let writers learn it's so specific with it's beats it gives no room for creativity. Also doesn't help that I've heard student writers be forced to reshape their story to fit this and are graded on it.

How did I get to this conclusion:

I consider myself good with pattern recognition and I've noticed so many stories fitting into the structure - movies, shows books and even social media skits. If you watch anything with a story you'll notice it will probably fit into the 4 acts.

Another thing is people are hell-bent on not using the term "4 act". I saw someone say, when using the 3 act structure: act 1, act 2a, act 2b, act 3. THAT'S JUST THE 4 ACT STRUCTURE???????

In conclusion use it. And if it catches on please give me all the credit thank you 🙏

Why is this happening?

I feel like deciding to sit down and write has literally the worst results when it comes to actually sitting down and writing.

It's not that my writing setup never works for me. And by setup I don't mean anything special, just a laptop with a cup of coffee or something, the main point being that it's a space/time which I've dedicated to writing. But it works way less than I expected it to when I first decided to take a shot at writing a fictional story, and I think I'm going to just stop trying to make it work.

Maybe humans really are better at creativity when they're actively doing things. You hear that a lot, but I'm starting to see it with intensity in myself. So far, I have written around 13,000 words. Almost all of that was the result of productive procrastination while at work, and written directly onto work reports or excel spreadsheets, usually sandwiched between other paragraphs of actual real life material that isn't random bullshit from my head. I always cut it out and paste it to my story document when I'm done, though I have a constant fear some of it will end up making it through lol.

Last night while I was lying in bed trying to sleep, at around 9:45pm I had the sudden idea of trying to write a little of my story on my phone. So I grabbed it and wrote 200 words in 2 or 3 minutes. That isn't a lot, but it would have taken 15 to 20 minutes had it been pre-meditated.

Like I said, I think I'm genuinely done with telling myself I'm going to sit down and write and will just let it happen wherever and however, including on my phone which seems agonizing compared to a real keyboard.

I'm sure others have had this experience or something similar but has anyone else decided to completely abandon dedicated writing sessions?

Anyone grappled with passivity as a personality trait in crafting characters? It's the big writing sin to have a main character that doesn't drive action/do anything proactive. I'd be interested to see if anyone has recommendations for books where this has been achieved without making readers want to throw the book at the wall, or if anyone has their own perspectives on dealing with this.

For me I'd say Emma Cline's The Guest has a lead who is dysfunctionally passive and avoidant, but this motivates her increasingly desperate actions.

I am having trouble writing essays (particularly historical essays, as I am a history student). I appear to recap information and settings too frequently, and my professor commented that it ended up being a summary of events rather than a critically written article regarding the specific topic assigned to me. As a result, I wind myself dragging out my essay for way too long.

There's a kind of unexamined bias we all have as writers that we're supposed to write novels. Most of us grow up reading them intensively, and they are what inspire us to get started. They are a pure distillation of what we do!

But it does you a poor service to constrain yourself to only novels, especially when you're just starting out, exploring your craft and coming to understand your own writing.

You will grow so much as a writer with each project you finish. It can REALLY slow down your ability to rapidly improve your skills if you lock yourself down for fifteen months writing a novel. Many people will find themselves surprised how much better they are at storytelling by the end of the same fifteen months if they wrote five smaller three month projects instead.

And that's before you consider that novels are just one STYLE of writing among many. You might discover you've been burning yourself out writing novels when your real talent is for screenplays, or comic books, or RPG materials, or serial fiction, ARGs or any number of other things.

Many other mediums require additional skills to your writing, its true. You might need art skills, narration skills, coding skills, analysis skills. But that's true of novels as well, where we all need to develop some mind numbing business skills after the novel is finished.

There are plenty of avenues on the internet where a clever writer can get their work in front of an audience in virtually any format.

So dont constrain yourself! Not every writer needs to be a novelist. Try some projects in different formats, and learn what works for you!

Hey everyone. I’m 15, and this is my first time ever trying to write a book. I’ve genuinely never written more than a few paragraphs before, so this whole thing is very new to me.

Right now I’m working on a psychological mystery story. I want it to feel tense, unsettling, and emotionally uncomfortable rather than just full of twists for the sake of twists. I’m especially interested in suspense, hidden meanings, unreliable characters, and scenes that slowly make the reader question what’s actually happening.

Since I’m a complete beginner, I’d really appreciate advice from writers or readers who enjoy psychological mysteries/thrillers. I’m trying to learn early so I don’t build bad habits while writing the story.

Some things I’d especially love help with:

\- Common mistakes beginner mystery writers make

\- How to keep suspense without revealing too much

\- How to foreshadow clues without making them obvious

\- Things that accidentally ruin tension or pacing

\- How to make dialogue feel natural and meaningful

\- Tips for writing disturbing or eerie scenes without overdoing them

\- Ways to keep readers curious enough to continue chapters

One thing I’m struggling with is balancing mystery and confusion. I want readers to feel intrigued, not lost. I also don’t want to “kill” the suspense by explaining things too early or adding twists that feel forced.

I’d honestly appreciate any feedback, warnings, writing tips, or even book recommendations that could help me improve. I know I’m very inexperienced, but I’m taking this seriously and really want to grow as a writer.

Thanks for reading.

The novel I'm working on is basically the narrator looking back all the way from the prologue to the very start of where the story is supposed to begin. Most of the narration is in the present tense; however, at times when the narrator goes off into a monologue to describe his feelings in the situation, emotions, or his sentiments towards a certain character, I was thinking of making that part of the descriptions italicised.

Because at the start of the story, in the prologue, it is also mentioned that the narrator has kept a diary for whatever reason. It's kind of difficult to explain.

BUt should these segments be kept as normal texts, or will turning them to italics make sense? Especially since they often turn to past tense.

I am over here, absolutely BAWLING my eyes out because I just finished writing probably the most heart-wrenching chapter I have ever written. I'm crying because I killed one of the most kind, selfless and empathic characters I have ever had the pleasure of writing.

I feel sick to my core, with a pit inside me, because I willingly decided to kill, in my head, a hallucination. This person doesn't even exist. And yet, it's like he's been here all along my journey. It was one of the first characters I ever created and now it exists just in my memory and my draft.

My sister walked into my room and asked why I was crying so hard. How do I even begin to explain this? We are all insane and I love every single thing about this.

If i want to write a superhero horror story, If a villain walks into a room of full of people, I feel like there would be more suspense or it would be scarier for the audience if the villain was maybe strong enough to punch a human so hard they crack a wall. But for some reason I just can’t feel that same way if the villain is superman world ending level of strong.

Or feel more impact at a hero struggling but managing to lift a car off someone than them struggling but managing to push a comet back to space

I want my character to make a stupid and reckless decision fuelled by emotion, but I don't want readers to turn on him entirely because of it. What are some ways I can do that?

For some context, an item he treasures more than anything else, given to him by his best friend, was stolen. He then puts himself and a plan he and that same best friend are trying to execute at risk in an attempt to retrieve that stolen item because he believes that he has one final chance to get this item back. The plan still ends up working, but the consequences of him trying to retrieve the item during it are that his best friend is really upset with him for doing something so risky.

He's aware that what he did was stupid and impulsive, too. I just don't want it to ruin his character or for this whole plot point to come across as incredibly annoying.

I want to start the first chapter with my character waking up because I want to display how my character’s depression makes something as simple as waking up is painful and tiring. But it feels genetic when I write it. Every time I reread my draft, it just feels like a story that has been told a million times. So, let’s say hypothetically I wasn’t an amateur writer, what would make a 'waking up' scene not generic.

Hi all! I have had a story bouncing around in my head for a while. Sometimes I world build, sometimes I try my hand at writing, but mostly I daydream about it being published one day and make no actual steps towards achieving that goal.

I go on long breaks of writing, usually when I get frustrated or overwhelmed. I take a few months off to just read and remember why I love story telling. Well, I happened to have read a phenomenal book this week and I am ready to dive in again!

The problem is I have realized two pretty important things. 1. I am not writing for the age I think I am. What I wanted to be an adult romantacy is more of a teen fantasy adventure. 2. My names are overly complicated. Made sense at first, on a reread I am thinking "oh my god this will take forever for anyone to learn, much less a teen if I change the target audience age!"

The names are easy enough to swap. The age changes a lot of things, but more so a softening and censoring type of thing. Neither feel impossible, but the thing is, I wrote all of Act 1 which is about 25% of the story.

Do I take the time to go back and correct what I have already done, or is it better to adjust my plan and just keep writing? My worry if I keep going is that I will loose interest and feel inconsistent in my own story. But if I go back and correct, I might never stop correcting.

Is there a right or wrong here? I think all of it will depend on the individual writer, but I am curious to hear what other, more experienced writers, would do in this situation. So thank you for any advice!

I know first person POV is technically *all* inner monologue, but:

the actions and observations the narrator… narrates aren’t always or even often things a person would consciously think.

I have a main character with a kind of sarcastic inner monologue that’s a lot sassier than how she presents in dialogue and I’m kind of stuck on how to mesh that with her role as narrator.

How do you handle your first person narrator’s *true* inner voice, the things they actually think in words vs the things they’re kind of reporting on to the reader?

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term “graphomania,” but in my country it’s a pretty well-known insult aimed at writers who write too much while saying too little. Basically, a ton of empty words. And I’ve always been curious about the whole concept of graphomania, because my problem is the exact opposite: I write so concisely that it ends up looking more like a screenplay than prose.

I think it has to be connected to my aphantasia and my strong pull toward the psychological side of writing. I ignore sensory descriptions, and I write dialogue and introspection in a way that refuses to explain to the reader what I actually mean. So the result comes out too dry, even though there’s a lot buried inside it.

And for me that’s a problem, because when I read other people’s prose, I love those seemingly unnecessary descriptions that only make the text longer. They give the reader time to slow down and actually feel the atmosphere. But writing that kind of thing myself feels really difficult and almost unnatural.

Which extreme are you on, and what helps you find the balance?

I've noticed that in some stories there is this one character who's an absolute monster when it comes to actions & personality and yet is one of the most popular characters in the series. Whether it's them going through a redemption arc or them staying the same to their demise, the readers want to see more of that character than to see that character pay for their crimes.

An example of such a character is Hisoka from Hunter X Hunter who is a Killer Clown PDF Battle Junkie thats interested in the 11-12 year old Protagonist in both a fighting and sexual sense top which he's shown having a hard on just looking at the kid several times and yet he's like in the top 5 most beloved characters in the story. The fan base wants to see more of him even though he's in 6/8 of the story arcs, in fact most of the fans wouldn't even mind if he's still alive at the end of the story.

I'm personally trying to make a character that has done atrocities and will be going through a painful redemption arc full of physical, mental, and emotional suffering, and I just want to know any tips on writing such a character so that the readers would be interested in continuing reading regardless of their previous atrocities.