No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
There's a lot of good answers already here, so I will post a few unique things.
I'm writing a novel (a damn good one too). The first thing you want to know is that you need years of experience if the novel's going to be any good. That does not mean you need years of reading and writing experience specifically— you can replace it with other kinds of experience. For one, you'll need some maturity— some understanding of people, some understanding of the world, stuff like that. And then you're going to want to read at least a little about writing, even if it's just TVTropes.
This may not work for you specifically, but it would also help a lot if you— like me— are a huge lover of any of the fictional arts. I don't really read novels anymore, but I am obsessed with the multimedia fiction arts— things like movies, comics, and video games. I read a ton of articles about writing, I watch a ton of multimedia critics and essayists, and I read things like Mythcreants and TVTropes. Unlike most people I know, I hugely value the writing and storytelling in video games, and can get really angry at games that have a ton of writing/dialogue but it's all crap (looking at you, Pokémon and Golden Sun).
I would also like to say that pure "pantsing" is a pretty bad idea, even for pantsers. "Pantsing" means that you just sit down and start writing. Don't do that. At least start planning and writing down things you really want to see happen in your novel, locations, characters, whatever. At best, outline as much as possible before you even start. With that said, having a roadmap is good, but not critical; personally, I think preparing your novel to include scenes you are super excited about is much more important.
Which leads to a very important point: if you don't like writing something, stop writing it. Focus on things you love. If that scene or genre is boring you or is soul-crushing, stop writing it and write a scene you're excited about. If you're excited about something, your readers will be too. They'll feel your energy and love.
Next point. In this day and age, don't write anything too standard or predictable. There are a million and a half generic D&D-feeling fantasy books that don't get published, and they will bore any agent (and reader). Bring something new and exciting to the premise, and make sure people know about it from the first few paragraphs. Intrigue people.
Final point for now: Focus on writing well. Don't focus on what's selling, don't focus on a market, don't try to chase bandwagons. Do not care if you will get published or not. For one, trade publishers are usually awful, don't offer anything of value except a professional editor, and are basically crappy venture-capitalist middlemen. Just focus on writing something you love and which is genuinely good, for now. By the time you're done, the trade publishing landscape will probably have changed anyway.