Recent content by ChrisLensman

It helps if you know the story's conclusion beforehand. What is your MC trying to accomplish? Once you know that you can start asking the follow-up questions: How are they getting there? What has to happen beforehand? Once you have those questions answered you will know which arcs your story...

As an image I like the second one best but those dark colors don't pop the right way for a piece of cover art. So I would go with the fifth image but please run that through an image editing program and turn up the contrast a little bit. The composition looks too flat for a cover image.

One of my favorite authors, Charles Stross, uses footnotes extensively, both for giving worldbuilding information that would break up the flow of the story and for added jokes, but I've never really felt the need. Not only are they annoying to implement and pull you out of your writing flow but...

I don't think you can ever truly hate a character you created. Even if they're the most heinous villain you have ever thought up, the fact that you made them this way will make you like them. If they're irredeemably evil and all your readers hate them then that's just proof that you've done your...

For me it took months before the story really blew up but I also didn't have a piece of cover art until months after I started so my experiences might not be universal. But for general advice, have patience, use eye-catching chapter titles to grab people off the home page and if your genre has a...

Some image hosting sites are just bad. I like catbox.moe but some ISPs block that site because 4chan uses it as well. Patreon and Discord are out of the question because the links expire. Which I get with Discord but why Patreon does this is a mystery to me. The best image hosting site is...

The prose in Charles Stross novels is always very grounded, with a heaping helping of dry British humor, so it usually only hits you some time later how absolutely insane the plots can get. His Laundry Files series starts out with a secret agent of the British agency dealing with the Lovecraft...

Have patience. Your story probably won't explode in popularity right away. And it doesn't need to. Build your readerbase slowly by posting consistently. That's the general advice. Now for your situation specifically: You're posting too fast. A chapter a day is the absolute maximum, anything...

It started when my story was randomly featured on the front page but it only really picked up steam when I got a piece of cover art.

I reread my old stuff all the time. I also edit my old stuff all the time. The whole reason I started writing my first series Godsforsaken was because there was a specific kind of story I wanted to read and nobody was writing it so I just did it myself. And while it's not quite the story I...

If I'm perfectly honest, it's mostly spite. I grew up on anime and manga and among those were a lot of harem stories. And I mean the Japanese type of harem, ie clueless dork has fifty women around him who want his babies but he doesn't get it. Worst of all is when the story continues to...

If your genre has a big presence on Reddit then promoting it there can help. Just don't be obnoxious about it.

Write something else. Doesn't matter what. Can be something completely hackneyed. Just keep writing that, force it out, a chapter at a time, set yourself a deadline even. By the time you're done writing your burnout book, if you have any ambition whatsoever you'll read over this, think "I can do...

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...

The best advice I've ever heard when it comes to fighting scenes was from a YouTuber called SuperEyepatchWolf. He talks about Shonen Manga a lot so of course he has a lot of things to say about that specific genre , but this advice holds true for all fight scenes: Fight scenes can be broken up...