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I'm sure you could. My inspirations have made me as much as the food I've eaten (as Emerson says, kinda). But I think there's a pretty clear difference between using genre conventions and writing fanfiction, which is typically bound to another author's interpretation of those conventions. For...

Your pacing is the number one issue here. I understand your desire to outline a growing, worldwide tension by touching a little bit on numerous rulers and nobles from around your world, but I think there are better ways to achieve that. As it is, you move too quickly from one character to the...

These days, to prevent burnout and to declutter my mind, I’ll write one story I'm especially invested in and do my best to make it something I’m proud of, and when the effort involved in that makes me struggle to stay motivated, I’ll spend a few days writing junk.

Finish the novel first. Then you'll know who deserves to own it.

Finding meaning in a fleeting life and embracing the change that comes with the death of the old.

I've previously aimed for upwards of 3k/chapter, but more recently, I've been putting aside the word count. If a chapter's fewer than 1500 words, I'll go back and see if I've moved to quickly, but even if I have, I'm unlikely to stretch it all the way to 3000. I might not even touch it at all...

I've never really been able to get into fanfiction, for some reason. Even about stories I really enjoy and want more of. Maybe I just haven't read the right fanfiction yet. Either way, I've always been more interested in writing my own stories than expanding someone else's. I take plenty of...

All the time. Whether or not I actually go back and rewrite it depends on when I have the idea. If it's while I'm still writing the chapter, absolutely. If it's while I'm working on the chapter that comes next, or even the one after that, I'll probably still go back. If it's a much larger idea...

Your sentences aren’t necessarily too long-winded (they’re maybe half the length of mine on average), it’s that you use the same structure too frequently. Variation is a better solution than cutting down your sentences.

There's some good advice here regarding how to structure a synopsis, but not a lot about how to write one. Something that I think is important that I find a lot of folks overlook is the specific language you use. Write your synopsis as though you yourself care about the story. This means giving...

On a micro-level, you start a lot of your sentences with participle phrases. While not the worst thing in the world, I'd go back and see where it would be possible to change up your sentence structure a bit. You also occasionally talk to your reader, reciting cliches and asking rhetorical...

There's not a lot of meat here. Your chapter is almost exclusively dialogue, with bits of really bare prose here and there. On top of that, most of the dialogue is observational--where characters observe the obvious around them. The result is that there's not a lot going on. It's hard to tell...

First person can be really tough, especially for new writers. There's a tendency to be very...quipy? I suppose? Meta? Often, I find first person narrators remove a lot of the weight a story has by making light of everything around them. It's a desire to be very interpersonal...

Congrats! It's always a great feeling when you actually start to get somewhere with your ideas. It makes the whole thing feel more real.

Some of the best literature in the world is about characters who get worse. Sometimes, by the end of a story, they realize who've they become and try to get better. Sometimes they don't. Ultimately, we are all writing about the human condition, and that includes aspects of ourselves that are...

I've only ever written for other people. Writing is a destructive process--you can't ever fully take what's in your mind and put it into someone else's. When you write down your ideas, they, by necessity, become flawed in some way. If it were all about me, I'd keep my ideas in my head where...

Certainly not unique to the genre, but unique to me: I've really been trying to work on Le Guin's 'elfland accdent' and to experiment with sentence length and composition. How much information can I fit into a single sentence before it's way too unwieldy? Is there a way I can write a sentence...

It takes a lot of work to put together worthwhile feedback. Why put in all that effort if the author themselves won't put in the same amount to create the text to begin with?

Can I ask why you're so invested in using first person if you're interested in going beyond the limited point of view it offers? The strength of utilizing a tool like first person (as opposed to third person limited) is to convey a particular perspective, with all the incorrect, biased, and...

I can't say I've ever forgotten fundamental details, but I constantly forget when a character is injured (or how). More than once, my rough drafts have skipped over a broken bone or a stab wound written about just a few chapters beforehand.