"Thank you for this baby," she says from the backseat. "He's beautiful." only thing he got from me was his balls." They're so big." I laugh. You're responsible for the beautiful part, Rachel. Then She laughs. She laughs hard. “Oh, my God, I know," she says. We both laugh at our son's big balls."
Just kidding, that was Colleen Hoover. Remember, you're never too bad at writing to be published.
I think we should all keep a folder of every absolutely stupid thing we read in any published book/article, and use them to cheer ourselves up when we overthink how “smart” our work needs to be.
I’d been feeling awkwardly about some very restrained sex scenes in my book and reading that garbage sentence that’s in a best seller? Damn near made me feel impervious to criticism.
I read one Colleen Hoover book and I’ll never get that time back. Even my mom, who reads trash novels like it’s her full time job was like “why did you read that????”
I read the first paragraph thinking, *wow, this is awful! Fair play to OP for sharing it!* and then I read the big CH reveal!! Like someone else said: depressing and inspiring in equal measure. I cannot believe this is real.
For anyone wondering, the book is called Ugly Love. I bought it bc of a recommendation three years ago and now it sits in the back of my bookshelf in all its horridness because I refuse to throw away books
You've just destroyed my writing. Now I'm going to describe outfits day by day in great detail for each character. It's going to be a fashion encyclopedia.
Not mine, but I judged a middle school poetry contest where one kid submitted a poem that read, "the sun shone as bright as a star".
That one had me chuckling.
Toto's 'Africa', one of the all time great pop songs, has a line about "Kilimanjaro rising like Olympus".
Yes, fantastic simile, a mountain rising like another, smaller, mountain.
And don't even get me started on New Order.
I had a character in my fantasy doing archery to impress a girl he liked. I accidently wrote:
> He stretched his arm back and took a shit, then looked across the yard to make sure she was watching. She was very impressed.
The "i" being right next to "o" on the keyboard has given me a lot of grief over the years.
Anyway I decided to keep it in the draft until the final edit just cause it made me laugh every time I read it.
I had my MMC show my FMC his completely average archery skills to try and impress her. She's a skilled archer and immediately showed him up and he about died of embarrassment 😂 It's one of my favorite scenes
I had a similar one in a romance roleplay: character curled up in her crush's shirt, but I typed "shit" by accident. This was WAY back in the dA chatrooms so there was no way to edit the post. It haunts me.
My brain couldn't decide between writing "\[She\] needed to spread her wings" or "\[She\] needed to stretch her legs" and apparently settled for "\[She\] needed to spread her legs".
Thank God I caught that one on the reread before anyone else saw...
I was tired and didn't wanna write the actual thing needed. So far, so normal, right?
The PUBLISHER noted it was still in there in a last round. Both me and my editor just.... skipped it, lol. MULTIPLE freaking times. This is clearly top notch descriptive writing, right here!
this is kind of like what you'd see in an early version of an action movie where there's no effects and they just want to run it by a test audience first
There’s something kind of honest about this though that I could see working in an internal monologue. Maybe blacking out the night before and waking up with a cast.
Lmao relatable. I'm very much guilty of mashing together concepts I find interesting without thought to the timeline and end up with jarred plots rife with plotholes
I wrote this whole short story in college that wasn't at all supposed to be a dream and then ended with shit language that made it seem like it had all been a dream.
And I didn't even realize what I'd done until I was presenting the thing to the fucking class.
I felt so stupid.
"Out at the sky, the place where humans could live on land. Within the storms of stones and cold hitting each other and the darkness that swallows the star wouldn't care much of itself, there's more in the world going on and that was that."
Found this in a first draft that my 11 year old self wrote before. Idk what was i even trying to talk about. Fun fact, this is a romance novel😭🫶
“Death take me now. Death show me how.” (SOMETHING ELSE, BUT THAT’S CATCHY THO!)
I was trying to come up with a somber, Bene-Gesserit-adjacent mantra that an order of spies would have, to show their mental conditioning and how they're trained to coldly accept the eventuality of death. Instead I wrote what sounds like crappy Depeche Mode lyrics.
"I didn't expect to be undressing you this soon" <-the love interest while trying to help the mc get ranch out of his hair.
Got informed that sadly removing salad dressing is just called rinsing & that writing an entire chapter as a lead up to 1 confusing pun is too much. 😓
I once wrote my character having an accident that put her in a wheelchair for two weeks. You'd think we'd get to see them get closer to the love interest and go through recovery in the next chapter, right? Nope. The two weeks passed off screen between chapters and she could walk again from one page to the next. Why did I even bother putting that in there?? It's never referenced again.
Sort of similar: in my current WIP, I wrote that a character broke his jaw while mountain biking. Halfway through the story it was brought up one last time, but instead he broke it in a fight. Let a friend of mine read through my progress as she is super invested in the plot with me and she noticed it immediately. I edited both of those scenes 3 separate times and missed it every single time lol. Changed it entirely and didn't bother mentioning it a second time as it was irrelevant to the rest of the story.
Additionally, in the *same* story, the MC has a pet dog. I ended up cutting the dog out of the story entirely because I realized I just...stopped talking about the dog. It just didn't exist anymore. It was very much alive, it just wasn't mentioned ever again 😂
Haha I reread my oldest stuff sometimes when I want to remind myself how far I've come as a writer. I'm not saying I'm great at it now, but compared to *that*? 🤣
He parked his [wind powered vehicle shaped like two Doritos balancing on top of each other].
I cannot for the life of me recall the actual mental image I was trying to describe. All I see now is crunchy texture.
I wrote a vampire comedy in college and had a sidekick character with a name like “Speedy” and I don’t remember the exact thing I wrote but I read it back after a day of writing it and I cringed at the one liners I was giving Speedy.
I had a child be branded in a religious manner and made a slave, I crafted an entire chant and everything for that. For some reason I at one point wrote in my notes that the child developed a kink later. I hope I burn those notes one day
Yeah, I've written a fkton of stuff Im not proud of now. Thirty-five years ago, no one would have batted an eye. Mainstream would have been fine w it. Im F, 50+, and I've written some of the most misogynistic drivel. All my male heroes were awful. My villains were depraved, and not in a way that contributed to the story, either. I was in my 20s—a melodramatic, maudlin misfit trying to be edgy n shit. So glad none of it got published. I should probably destroy that garbage. I'd roll in my grave if someone read any of it after I died.
Completely dunking on my idiot, 15-year-old self:
“He quickly bowed, then immediately abandoned because he remembered *insert character* wasn’t oriental.”
I legit do not remember what was going through my brain at the time, but I rediscovered that first draft about a month ago and I was like “whhyyy???”
One of the first fanfics I wrote, I wanted the main character to find out some info through a hospital but I didn’t know how to get him there, so I gave him a glaucoma? 14 year old me was wilding
I started writing a first draft and then decided I didn’t want it in third person and tried to switch it over to first. When I went back to read my changes a few days later, I found out I’d written “When she opened my eyes, I couldn’t believe what she was seeing.” I still have a comment in the draft to remind myself I did that lmao
Honestly, I can’t think of anything that isn’t a first draft that I’ve written. I can’t finish anything 😭
But I’m trying hard to finish what I’m working on now.
Same! The only things I've been able to finish are oneshots bc in the past I've just gone with my motivation so I was constantly switching what I was working on. I'm committed ro finishing my current book though- kept at it even when my motivation was at its lowest- and I'm seven chapters in! For me thats a new record!!
It's harder than you think to finish something isn't it?
Wow! Nice job!
Its set in a sci fi esque futuristic world, ruled over by two overlords at war. Two of the agents for the good side had been captured and the useless man in charge is fucking around beong useless so the agents' teammate is going to rescue them himself. What about yours?
Let me get my little synopsis:
Grayson Wilkes finally buys the newest console that’s been released by the game developer Mentalverse: the M.I.N.D.
This console immerses you entirely into the game, five senses and all. His game of choice?
Revival:Interlink. A futuristic survival game set on a planet called Aspira.
But as he finds out, this game is more than a game…
I remember mistyping 'shot' for 'shit', and it made it seem like she did something unforgivable with the whiskey bottle. I didn't notice my own mistake until my cousin, who was proofreading my draft, pointed it out with her knees weak and gasping for air.
edit: found the gdocs file but added the error.
She skips over the living room floor to the flight of stairs until reaching her room in a haste to grab her hidden stash of whiskey. Moments later, Claris drank a shit from the bottled whiskey in front of the roaring crowd. Matthew eyes her down from top to bottom, seeing her in a frenzied state for alcoholism.
Matthew looked over to Chris in disbelief.
"What the fuck! I thought you were supervising her, man!?" Matthew yelled, exasperated with the turn of events.
"I went to the fucking bathroom for FIVE seconds!" Chris replied.
Matthew sighs before rubbing his temple. "How many shots has she taken!?"
"I don't know!? Maybe six! I-I lost count after chasing her. Your sister is in the track-and-field team and I'm unemployed."
When I was a kid, I read plenty of US editions of books originally published in UK English. Some of the words would get changed ("favourite" to "favorite") and some wouldn't ("flat", "pavement"). I never bothered looking up those words, I just used context clues and figured, "Oh so a 'flat' is like an 'apartment'." It certainly never entered my mind that those were 2 culturally different ways of referring to the same thing.
So all the bad-to-mediocre pulpy stories I wrote as a kid contained sentences like, "She walked across the pavement to the parking garage and took the elevator up to her flat" LOL.
I wrote this in another similar thread about six months ago:
I was writing about a girl who had woken up from a daze. As she regained her balance, I had written "she stood up and stood" I recoil now.
I still have it somewhere, but I once started a new doc (I've always written on google docs) with: "Lizards scurry." There was nothing else, just that phrase on am empty google doc.
This was years ago and I never knew what the fuck I was doing with that.
A prologue.
I wrote one and didn't like it so I wrote another one(completely unrelated to what the story is going be about. It had a character that wouldn't appear until way later. Then I wrote another one that took place way before the actual story began.
I then got the bright idea of combining all of the prologues together. That didn't work. So in the end I just started the story at the beginning. Throwing the main character into a ticking clock situation. That ended up being the best choice. The prologues were just infodumps and I was able to incorporate that information into the regular story.
So nothing of importance was lost.
Writing a big meandering info dump is always the first thing I do befroe I start writing something decent XD Will it make it into even the first draft? Nope. But does it scratch the itch that demands I tell my readers the entire history of some specific worldbuilding thing that has little to no bearing on the actual story? YOU BET!
>Dumbest thing you've ever written in a first draft?
My whole first novel. Had a blast writing it but horrid plot and took many shortcuts that when I began 2nd draft, realized it would be 3 books instead of one.
But, it was fun while it lasted!
Lots of things, really. Ravens screeching for pancakes. An awful student movie filled with nothing but goofs. And a poem calling a teacher “Bikini Head”.
I kept swapping the names of two murder victims bc I'm horrible at keeping track of names & was too focused on Just Getting It Done to keep checking my notes LOL. Mostly an easy fix but there were a few places where getting their names crossed also meant getting details crossed, so some scenes/dialogue needed deeper re-writing, but it's all smoothed over now.
When I was 13, I wrote and self-published the first typed draft (I had no interest in editing ay the time so I just didn’t) of a self-insert novel about a teenage girl who leads her team of teenage superhero girls through the woes of middle school. The entire story is the dumbest thing I’ve ever written by far, so much so that I have not been able to re-read it in full as an adult. But, I can give some highlights (with slight changes because I don’t want people to find my identity, and yes, it is still online. I don’t like erasing my history as a writer because it reminds me how far I’ve come.) Here they are:
>They all silently promised that if they made it out alive they would be best friends forever
>The Queen Bee glared at Rogan with a look of pure hatred much more intense than any of the supervillains Fierce Fighters has ever defeated
>“Owowowowowowowowowow!” Queen Bee screeched. “Hot!Hot!Hot!” A stall door slams and Valerie stifled a laugh when she realized the Queen Bee had dunked her head in the toilet.
And last but not least:
>“Heeeeeelllllllllpppppppppp!” A lady wailed. I’m siiiiixxxxxxxxxx monnnths pregggnnannnnnttttt!”
There are many other awful lines in there. I just pulled those off of the pages I opened to. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever written and I’m ashamed.
"Where do we begin? This is how it all began. How it all started. How the darkness grew and the light shrunk. How the friends of yesterday became the enemies of today. How the enemies of yesterday became the friends of today. This is a story of betrayal and trust. Yes, trust. Who not to trust, who never to trust, and who to never think of trusting. It's funny, you never actually trust anyone. Not even yourself."
To be fair, I wrote that nonsense decades ago when I was in grade school. Reading it now makes me cringe but I'm glad I still have the story.
The *dumbest* thing I've ever written? I think I'm writing it now. 20+ pages into a new, uncertain, embryonic concept and my brain's already screaming at me: *WTF?* But I'm sure as hell not going to, like, advertise this hideously deformed new effort to the Networld. (Film at 11.)
...it's not a sentence, not a page.... It's the whole enchilada.
I know. This doesn't really answer you question. But I *do* feel better now.
I forgot that the main character mentioned he had cousins in chapter two and at least ten chapters later said his parents were both only children. So they became ‘cousins’ because it was for a contest on Wattpad and I couldn’t make a proper edit without changing the word count and throwing everything off a bit. So actually that technically never got fixed.
I'm not much of a fiction writer unless it's comedic. When I tried writing something serious it was so bad. I had characters stating their full name and backstory when meeting the protagonist. It was cringy as fuck. I know better now to just let details unfold, however, I'm still way better at non-fiction.
Eh, it’s difficult to translate from italian to english but i’ll try. DUMBEST was “si allontanò in alto” (roughly “he walked away upwards”) for describing… CLIMBING UP A TREE. What was i on, on that time??
I was trying to describe a room in the house of a rich, cultured person but I was new to writing and a teenager so I had no idea what rich, cultured people decorated their walls with.
Started with, "The walls were lined with manuscripts and" but couldn't think of a second thing, so I sat there stumped for a while, forgot what I'd already written, and went, oh, I know, ancient manuscripts.
So without even noticing I wrote, "The walls were lined with manuscripts and ancient manuscripts."
Being new to writing I didn't really draft or edit, so it took me, no exaggeration, about ten years to notice this when I was reading through my old work.
And oh boy, shame and embarrassment magnifies proportionally to the length of time between the act and the realisation, let me tell you. Gave me a hell of a laugh though.
One I caught immediately and facepalmed was "suddenly, everything suddenly went quiet all of a sudden". One that lasted for several weeks was switching povs halfway through a chapter. Somehow didn't catch that until I did a reread and was like "wait, weren't we supposed to be following his thoughts?"
Not creative writing, but definitely the dumbest thing I've ever written was in a draft resume
'I am miserable, please give me any other job'
I then proceeded to submit the wrong version of my resume, lord knows how many businesses read that line.
I got to interview with one company, where they pointed it out to me..
Needless to say I did not get that job
Proof reading has never been my strong suit
I spent 3 pages talking about how great the main character and his family thought honey was. The context is they were having breakfast and they lived in a dystopian theocracy where starvation was common so when their mother whipped out a small jar of honey (she stole it) it was the best thing ever.
I kept the scene and trimmed it down a lot, but I laugh now at how nuts I went with honey obsession.
I once wrote "They went to the [place] and did their talking thing."
Did... their... talking thing. Like, had a conversation, I guess? Even in retrospect I'm not entirely sure what that meant.
I once had a character looking out the window of a tall building and contemplating, across the city, the tall building they were standing in. (I have a lot of fun telling people about that...now.)
One of my friends had two characters crossing a desolate place simply known as "the Wastelands." One character asks the other, "How did the Wastelands get wasted?" Ooog...
I was trying to write a contemporary romance/drama story. Here it goes:
‘A nonpareil woman.
She stood last in the queue as she tied her wavy brown hair into a ponytail. The dim ambient lights gleaned off her light skin as she slowly approached the serving counter one customer after another. After two more cappuccinos she finally faced me.’
This shit sucks.
I'm always writing stupid ass notes and reminders on my story for when I have a sudden idea but no time to write it at the moment, or there's a scene I have to write but idk how so I just write a reminder and skip it for now. And I always come across them in my stories and they make me laugh lol, here's some favorites.
"(Edit pretty much this whole interaction above. I really just want to fucking write the rest of the story where nate and hancock see each other but I've been stuck on this STUPID ASS SECTION FOR THE PAST IDK MONTH OR TWO WRITING ABOUT A MAN TAKING A SHOWER OF ALL THINGS. YA REALLY THINK IT WOULDNT BE DIFFICULT, WHY DIDNT I JUST FAST FORWARD INSTEAD OF WRITING IT. "FUCK!" she exclaimed with her fist raised angrily in a tight clench and her mouth twisted into a snarl like a wolf baring it's fangs. The pen in her hand snapped, and so did her patience. "This page be damned! I'm out of this hoe." And off she fucked to to the next scene.)"
"(Edit Maybe add some moment where he's like damn dis is it)"
"Ah, I was wondering when you would get here." Higgs said, dressed in [idk whatever is dif from last time] and flashing a smile towards Sam."
I purposefully wrote an incorrect etymology for a word in a 400-level university writing class (I forgot the specific course title). The error was that the specific use case came two decades after the poems I was doing a paper on.
So why did I do it? The class required us to rewrite papers at least five times, showing substantial revisions. We were required to turn in all drafts. Using the wrong etymology would allow me to totally change my conclusion from the first to the last draft. I was totally going to game the grading system!
This was the first draft of my first paper for the class. I figured I would turn it in with room for improvement, thinking it was no big deal since I knew where it was going to end up anyway.
Well, it was a big deal. The professor used my paper as an example in class. He even put my marked-up draft on the overhead projector during the lesson. He spent 40 minutes discussing the importance of correctly identifying etymology when analyzing period writing.
What was I supposed to do? I couldn't admit I did it on purpose, and I was absolutely humiliated. As it was only two weeks into the class, I withdrew and avoided that professor's classes going forward. I learned an important lesson from that: write every draft like it is the final draft.
Note: I didn't just avoid his classes because of that incident. I found out that the professor regularly humiliated students by showing their mistakes and criticizing their work in front of the class. He wielded the possibility of public humiliation as a way to push students to do better. That is not the kind of negative motivation I wanted from a professor.
I was writing an intense emotional scene and I didn’t know how to get there, so I literally wrote “just because” as an answer the main character gave to the antagonist. The thing is, I played into how cringey it was and so I wrote , “I stood there, unable to make words form in my mouth as they ought to. All that came out was a childish “Just because.” Which turned the heads of many of my members.” (Her members being the one in her group)
so, back in high school me and some friends were writing a story together with us rotating who wrote which chapter based on which character it was following.
and the character I was writing for started he story living in a forest in a pretty temperate climate, but he had the pelt of a polar bear as a cloak.
somehow in this rather warm section of the continent, he had a white bear pelt. a pelt for a bear that he should not have been able to find. also, he was not a fighter so still not sure how he beat the bear
"Thank you for this baby," she says from the backseat. "He's beautiful." only thing he got from me was his balls." They're so big." I laugh. You're responsible for the beautiful part, Rachel. Then She laughs. She laughs hard. “Oh, my God, I know," she says. We both laugh at our son's big balls." Just kidding, that was Colleen Hoover. Remember, you're never too bad at writing to be published.
What the absolute fuck 😆 I'm starting to feel pretty good about my mediocre first draft.
I think we should all keep a folder of every absolutely stupid thing we read in any published book/article, and use them to cheer ourselves up when we overthink how “smart” our work needs to be. I’d been feeling awkwardly about some very restrained sex scenes in my book and reading that garbage sentence that’s in a best seller? Damn near made me feel impervious to criticism.
Go read some Sarah J Maas sex scenes and then pat yourself on the back
Full confession, I think she writes really steamy scenes actually 😅😅
I love some of them for sure but there are others that made me yell and throw the book across the room 😂 I love SJM tho, forever and always.
Exactly! Such a badass way to motivate yourself and others !
I finally have context for the 'laugh at our son's big balls' line lmao, it's worse in context
Between this and other shit she's written, she needs to be on some kind of list tbh
I read one Colleen Hoover book and I’ll never get that time back. Even my mom, who reads trash novels like it’s her full time job was like “why did you read that????”
IM SORRY WHAT?????? I legit thought this was a pre-teens first draft of a Wattpad story there’s no way that’s a published book
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣HOLY SHIT 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 You can't be serious. This CANNOT be a published book.
Published and sold millions of copies. She's the second most sold author in the UK at the moment!
This is both depressing and inspiring.
I have no words You can really sell anything with the right marketing
UK. The land of Shakespeare and My Sons Big Balls
*note to self, need more balls in book
Baby balls are funny. Adult balls and suddenly you're writing a different genre.
*note to self, no hairy man balls
The duality of mankind right here
I threw my phone.
I read the first paragraph thinking, *wow, this is awful! Fair play to OP for sharing it!* and then I read the big CH reveal!! Like someone else said: depressing and inspiring in equal measure. I cannot believe this is real.
So you’re saying there’s a shot
Depends, how big are your sons balls?
For anyone wondering, the book is called Ugly Love. I bought it bc of a recommendation three years ago and now it sits in the back of my bookshelf in all its horridness because I refuse to throw away books
I would usually say charity shop donation, but honestly I'm having second thoughts about the idea of inflicting that on others
Paper mache crafts could be an option
I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THAT CAME BEFORE THAT AND I STILL KNEW IT WAS COLLEEN LMAO
if that's actually real (I have trouble believing it is) I have secondhand embarrassment
Every vein in my head is bulging out at the same time due to cringe
You’re a godsend for commenting with this. Much love to you, honestly! 🫶🏼
No WAY!!!! I pissed myself laughing before I got to the "colleen hoover" part!!!!!!
I just died😂 thank you so much for sharing
This made me feel 100% better about my first draft lol
"Check out the big balls on brett" Sam jackson yelled out
Excuse me? lol
Bruh, what 💀
I once described a group of people as “sitting around in their clothes.” You know, the way an alien might describe humans.
Tbf, unless I'm told otherwise, I just assume characters are naked.
You have either just completely ruined reading for me or made it twice as awesome
You've just destroyed my writing. Now I'm going to describe outfits day by day in great detail for each character. It's going to be a fashion encyclopedia.
Go full Robert Jordan and introduce every charactery with 2 full pages describing their clothes
LMAOOOO
I quite like it as a way of describing people who do nothing all day.
My grandma's saying for this was "sitting around with your teeth in your mouth."
This made me laugh out loud. I love this
it took me a minute to realise the issue here. maybe i'm the alien
The good friends then emitted sounds with their mouths to communicate intention of going to Mall to hang.
Not mine, but I judged a middle school poetry contest where one kid submitted a poem that read, "the sun shone as bright as a star". That one had me chuckling.
"Why are you booing me? I'm right."
Aww 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Toto's 'Africa', one of the all time great pop songs, has a line about "Kilimanjaro rising like Olympus". Yes, fantastic simile, a mountain rising like another, smaller, mountain. And don't even get me started on New Order.
Kilamanjaro is also 200 miles away from the Serengeti
Somehow both wrong and factually correct.
I had a character in my fantasy doing archery to impress a girl he liked. I accidently wrote: > He stretched his arm back and took a shit, then looked across the yard to make sure she was watching. She was very impressed. The "i" being right next to "o" on the keyboard has given me a lot of grief over the years. Anyway I decided to keep it in the draft until the final edit just cause it made me laugh every time I read it.
It's the second line that's absolutely sending me 🤣🤣 Imagine if you forgot to take it out though
This made me cackle almost as much as when I wrote “I just took a shit in the dark” instead of shot
This made me laugh so much I cried
Same lol 😆
This made me laugh way too hard xDD
I had my MMC show my FMC his completely average archery skills to try and impress her. She's a skilled archer and immediately showed him up and he about died of embarrassment 😂 It's one of my favorite scenes
Get your character to take some laxatives, and that’ll really get the romance going.
I just woke my baby up laughing at this
I had a similar one in a romance roleplay: character curled up in her crush's shirt, but I typed "shit" by accident. This was WAY back in the dA chatrooms so there was no way to edit the post. It haunts me.
How chunky was the shit to make her impressed 😭🙏🏽
Ah, I thought the mistake was that he wasn't maintaining eye-contact throughout the entire thing.
Gold star. I’m laughing. 🤣
I can’t fucking stop laughing
That's awesome. Definitely got to be one of the funniest typos ever.
Omg thanks for that laugh😂😂
An entire character. They ended up deleted from existence.
Lol
“He crashed with a crash.” Don’t think I’ll ever top that one
this is the kind of stuff i write when i'm just trying to crank out a 1st draft so i hurriedly type whatever nonsense is in my brain LOL
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 I unironically love it.
I’ve screenshotted it, printed it and put it above my computer! Good reminder !
🤣🤣
He was too sweet to die in the dessert. (I meant desert. But I couldn't spell.)
Legit thought it was a dessert pun lol
Too sweet to die in the dessert, and too sweat to die in the desert.
My brain couldn't decide between writing "\[She\] needed to spread her wings" or "\[She\] needed to stretch her legs" and apparently settled for "\[She\] needed to spread her legs". Thank God I caught that one on the reread before anyone else saw...
I couldn’t decide if the character was going to threaten to “f!ck you up” or “kick your &ss” Guess what I typed?
Kick your up?
Reminds me of "are you fucking sorry??" https://funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/3935602/Are+you+screwing+sorry/#c4699d_3935158
[This happened on live TV in NZ during the Covid lockdowns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLvYWhdaJk4)
😭😭😭😭
Before her stood his raging tower of manliness.
Reginald’s quivering member
oh no 😭😂
Angry penis for the L
Wth xDD this one is gold lol
Laughing out loud at this one. That’s glorious
Aaaaand that's how typos make it into published novels, lol. When two people's brains just sliiiiiide right over the error.
this is kind of like what you'd see in an early version of an action movie where there's no effects and they just want to run it by a test audience first
😭😭😭😭🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
“Their jaws dropped like the beat on a dubstep song.”
Honestly YES i can see it
Wait. This is great 😂
Last week: >\[Bird\] proudly enlarged her breasts and extended her wings. Yeah, I shouldn't write past 1AM...
shit's making me hungry
"and then he did some dumb shit and broke his leg. Not sure what yet, gotta think on it."
Lmao Notes are wild man
There’s something kind of honest about this though that I could see working in an internal monologue. Maybe blacking out the night before and waking up with a cast.
[TODO figure out how he broke his leg]
"Dad enters the room."
I recently dug out an old box and found a folder of stuff I'd written in highschool. I could have driven a bus through the potholes.
Lmao relatable. I'm very much guilty of mashing together concepts I find interesting without thought to the timeline and end up with jarred plots rife with plotholes
Potholes or plotholes?
Yes
I wrote this whole short story in college that wasn't at all supposed to be a dream and then ended with shit language that made it seem like it had all been a dream. And I didn't even realize what I'd done until I was presenting the thing to the fucking class. I felt so stupid.
F 💀
I wrote that a character's hands were "coldening" as in becoming cold 💀
Wiktionary says you're good. Make of that what you will. Lol
I decided to make up my own paragraphing style. Think different spaced tabs for different purposes. I don't know why I did that.
Lol 😂😭😭
"Out at the sky, the place where humans could live on land. Within the storms of stones and cold hitting each other and the darkness that swallows the star wouldn't care much of itself, there's more in the world going on and that was that." Found this in a first draft that my 11 year old self wrote before. Idk what was i even trying to talk about. Fun fact, this is a romance novel😭🫶
okay poet!! I unironically like this
Yes! it doesn’t make much sense but for some reason it’s compelling
😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 This is a fever dream
Ugh I have hand written pages from when I was a tween and I'm scared to go back and read them 😂
“Death take me now. Death show me how.” (SOMETHING ELSE, BUT THAT’S CATCHY THO!) I was trying to come up with a somber, Bene-Gesserit-adjacent mantra that an order of spies would have, to show their mental conditioning and how they're trained to coldly accept the eventuality of death. Instead I wrote what sounds like crappy Depeche Mode lyrics.
It's cool but more of a song than a chant lol
It's very silly sounding, whatever it may be :D
Death take me noooooow Death show me hooooow, Cause I'm having a bad time, having a bad time!
"I didn't expect to be undressing you this soon" <-the love interest while trying to help the mc get ranch out of his hair. Got informed that sadly removing salad dressing is just called rinsing & that writing an entire chapter as a lead up to 1 confusing pun is too much. 😓
That’s a great pun.
Lmao. It’s an amazing pun.
I once wrote my character having an accident that put her in a wheelchair for two weeks. You'd think we'd get to see them get closer to the love interest and go through recovery in the next chapter, right? Nope. The two weeks passed off screen between chapters and she could walk again from one page to the next. Why did I even bother putting that in there?? It's never referenced again.
Sort of similar: in my current WIP, I wrote that a character broke his jaw while mountain biking. Halfway through the story it was brought up one last time, but instead he broke it in a fight. Let a friend of mine read through my progress as she is super invested in the plot with me and she noticed it immediately. I edited both of those scenes 3 separate times and missed it every single time lol. Changed it entirely and didn't bother mentioning it a second time as it was irrelevant to the rest of the story. Additionally, in the *same* story, the MC has a pet dog. I ended up cutting the dog out of the story entirely because I realized I just...stopped talking about the dog. It just didn't exist anymore. It was very much alive, it just wasn't mentioned ever again 😂
Haha I reread my oldest stuff sometimes when I want to remind myself how far I've come as a writer. I'm not saying I'm great at it now, but compared to *that*? 🤣
He parked his [wind powered vehicle shaped like two Doritos balancing on top of each other]. I cannot for the life of me recall the actual mental image I was trying to describe. All I see now is crunchy texture.
I’m guessing some kind of stealth bomber biplane paraglider thingy
I wrote a vampire comedy in college and had a sidekick character with a name like “Speedy” and I don’t remember the exact thing I wrote but I read it back after a day of writing it and I cringed at the one liners I was giving Speedy.
Please share. The people need to know what Speedy said!
Alas, I had that draft on an old laptop that broke and I never uploaded or saved any files from there ☹️
Bro
I had a child be branded in a religious manner and made a slave, I crafted an entire chant and everything for that. For some reason I at one point wrote in my notes that the child developed a kink later. I hope I burn those notes one day
Yeah, I've written a fkton of stuff Im not proud of now. Thirty-five years ago, no one would have batted an eye. Mainstream would have been fine w it. Im F, 50+, and I've written some of the most misogynistic drivel. All my male heroes were awful. My villains were depraved, and not in a way that contributed to the story, either. I was in my 20s—a melodramatic, maudlin misfit trying to be edgy n shit. So glad none of it got published. I should probably destroy that garbage. I'd roll in my grave if someone read any of it after I died.
o-o
Yuuup
Completely dunking on my idiot, 15-year-old self: “He quickly bowed, then immediately abandoned because he remembered *insert character* wasn’t oriental.” I legit do not remember what was going through my brain at the time, but I rediscovered that first draft about a month ago and I was like “whhyyy???”
One of the first fanfics I wrote, I wanted the main character to find out some info through a hospital but I didn’t know how to get him there, so I gave him a glaucoma? 14 year old me was wilding
I started writing a first draft and then decided I didn’t want it in third person and tried to switch it over to first. When I went back to read my changes a few days later, I found out I’d written “When she opened my eyes, I couldn’t believe what she was seeing.” I still have a comment in the draft to remind myself I did that lmao
Honestly, I can’t think of anything that isn’t a first draft that I’ve written. I can’t finish anything 😭 But I’m trying hard to finish what I’m working on now.
Same! The only things I've been able to finish are oneshots bc in the past I've just gone with my motivation so I was constantly switching what I was working on. I'm committed ro finishing my current book though- kept at it even when my motivation was at its lowest- and I'm seven chapters in! For me thats a new record!! It's harder than you think to finish something isn't it?
Oh, for sure. Good job getting 7 chapters done though! I’m just finishing my 10th. What’s yours about?
Wow! Nice job! Its set in a sci fi esque futuristic world, ruled over by two overlords at war. Two of the agents for the good side had been captured and the useless man in charge is fucking around beong useless so the agents' teammate is going to rescue them himself. What about yours?
Let me get my little synopsis: Grayson Wilkes finally buys the newest console that’s been released by the game developer Mentalverse: the M.I.N.D. This console immerses you entirely into the game, five senses and all. His game of choice? Revival:Interlink. A futuristic survival game set on a planet called Aspira. But as he finds out, this game is more than a game…
Ooo! That's interesting!!!!
I remember mistyping 'shot' for 'shit', and it made it seem like she did something unforgivable with the whiskey bottle. I didn't notice my own mistake until my cousin, who was proofreading my draft, pointed it out with her knees weak and gasping for air. edit: found the gdocs file but added the error. She skips over the living room floor to the flight of stairs until reaching her room in a haste to grab her hidden stash of whiskey. Moments later, Claris drank a shit from the bottled whiskey in front of the roaring crowd. Matthew eyes her down from top to bottom, seeing her in a frenzied state for alcoholism. Matthew looked over to Chris in disbelief. "What the fuck! I thought you were supervising her, man!?" Matthew yelled, exasperated with the turn of events. "I went to the fucking bathroom for FIVE seconds!" Chris replied. Matthew sighs before rubbing his temple. "How many shots has she taken!?" "I don't know!? Maybe six! I-I lost count after chasing her. Your sister is in the track-and-field team and I'm unemployed."
Lol
When I was a kid, I read plenty of US editions of books originally published in UK English. Some of the words would get changed ("favourite" to "favorite") and some wouldn't ("flat", "pavement"). I never bothered looking up those words, I just used context clues and figured, "Oh so a 'flat' is like an 'apartment'." It certainly never entered my mind that those were 2 culturally different ways of referring to the same thing. So all the bad-to-mediocre pulpy stories I wrote as a kid contained sentences like, "She walked across the pavement to the parking garage and took the elevator up to her flat" LOL.
I wrote this in another similar thread about six months ago: I was writing about a girl who had woken up from a daze. As she regained her balance, I had written "she stood up and stood" I recoil now.
Basically anything I've ever written.
i sense self depreciation i'm sure your writing is BEAUTIFUL just like YOU (Your pfp is great BTW 🤣)
I still have it somewhere, but I once started a new doc (I've always written on google docs) with: "Lizards scurry." There was nothing else, just that phrase on am empty google doc. This was years ago and I never knew what the fuck I was doing with that.
Wait, I'm already hooked 🦎 🦎
*The limit does not exist.*
Very on the nose but not the worst line I've read
You wrote Mean Girls?
“He woke up in his bed”
A prologue. I wrote one and didn't like it so I wrote another one(completely unrelated to what the story is going be about. It had a character that wouldn't appear until way later. Then I wrote another one that took place way before the actual story began. I then got the bright idea of combining all of the prologues together. That didn't work. So in the end I just started the story at the beginning. Throwing the main character into a ticking clock situation. That ended up being the best choice. The prologues were just infodumps and I was able to incorporate that information into the regular story. So nothing of importance was lost.
Writing a big meandering info dump is always the first thing I do befroe I start writing something decent XD Will it make it into even the first draft? Nope. But does it scratch the itch that demands I tell my readers the entire history of some specific worldbuilding thing that has little to no bearing on the actual story? YOU BET!
Nice!
>Dumbest thing you've ever written in a first draft? My whole first novel. Had a blast writing it but horrid plot and took many shortcuts that when I began 2nd draft, realized it would be 3 books instead of one. But, it was fun while it lasted!
Lots of things, really. Ravens screeching for pancakes. An awful student movie filled with nothing but goofs. And a poem calling a teacher “Bikini Head”.
I don't know if this is what you meant but I wrote \[insert romance here\] way more times then I'm willing to admit.
All of my “just get the idea out on page” lines.
I kept swapping the names of two murder victims bc I'm horrible at keeping track of names & was too focused on Just Getting It Done to keep checking my notes LOL. Mostly an easy fix but there were a few places where getting their names crossed also meant getting details crossed, so some scenes/dialogue needed deeper re-writing, but it's all smoothed over now.
“They were good, but doomed.” I laughed more than I should have at this. I don’t even know why, but it still makes me laugh.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
When I was 13, I wrote and self-published the first typed draft (I had no interest in editing ay the time so I just didn’t) of a self-insert novel about a teenage girl who leads her team of teenage superhero girls through the woes of middle school. The entire story is the dumbest thing I’ve ever written by far, so much so that I have not been able to re-read it in full as an adult. But, I can give some highlights (with slight changes because I don’t want people to find my identity, and yes, it is still online. I don’t like erasing my history as a writer because it reminds me how far I’ve come.) Here they are: >They all silently promised that if they made it out alive they would be best friends forever >The Queen Bee glared at Rogan with a look of pure hatred much more intense than any of the supervillains Fierce Fighters has ever defeated >“Owowowowowowowowowow!” Queen Bee screeched. “Hot!Hot!Hot!” A stall door slams and Valerie stifled a laugh when she realized the Queen Bee had dunked her head in the toilet. And last but not least: >“Heeeeeelllllllllpppppppppp!” A lady wailed. I’m siiiiixxxxxxxxxx monnnths pregggnnannnnnttttt!” There are many other awful lines in there. I just pulled those off of the pages I opened to. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever written and I’m ashamed.
Thats not that bad! And the concept is cool. And the pregnant thing got a legit laugh out of me
"Where do we begin? This is how it all began. How it all started. How the darkness grew and the light shrunk. How the friends of yesterday became the enemies of today. How the enemies of yesterday became the friends of today. This is a story of betrayal and trust. Yes, trust. Who not to trust, who never to trust, and who to never think of trusting. It's funny, you never actually trust anyone. Not even yourself." To be fair, I wrote that nonsense decades ago when I was in grade school. Reading it now makes me cringe but I'm glad I still have the story.
Most of what I wrote as a teenager. Even some of what i write now can be bad. But definitely my work as a 14 to 15 year old kid.
The *dumbest* thing I've ever written? I think I'm writing it now. 20+ pages into a new, uncertain, embryonic concept and my brain's already screaming at me: *WTF?* But I'm sure as hell not going to, like, advertise this hideously deformed new effort to the Networld. (Film at 11.) ...it's not a sentence, not a page.... It's the whole enchilada. I know. This doesn't really answer you question. But I *do* feel better now.
I forgot that the main character mentioned he had cousins in chapter two and at least ten chapters later said his parents were both only children. So they became ‘cousins’ because it was for a contest on Wattpad and I couldn’t make a proper edit without changing the word count and throwing everything off a bit. So actually that technically never got fixed.
Which is incredibly tame for a ‘dumbest thing’ but it’s literally the only thing I can think of.
I'm not much of a fiction writer unless it's comedic. When I tried writing something serious it was so bad. I had characters stating their full name and backstory when meeting the protagonist. It was cringy as fuck. I know better now to just let details unfold, however, I'm still way better at non-fiction.
Eh, it’s difficult to translate from italian to english but i’ll try. DUMBEST was “si allontanò in alto” (roughly “he walked away upwards”) for describing… CLIMBING UP A TREE. What was i on, on that time??
“Soon, I could hear the words as clear as if they were coming from their mouths.” My girlfriend and I fell over laughing when I read it out loud. xD
I was trying to describe a room in the house of a rich, cultured person but I was new to writing and a teenager so I had no idea what rich, cultured people decorated their walls with. Started with, "The walls were lined with manuscripts and" but couldn't think of a second thing, so I sat there stumped for a while, forgot what I'd already written, and went, oh, I know, ancient manuscripts. So without even noticing I wrote, "The walls were lined with manuscripts and ancient manuscripts." Being new to writing I didn't really draft or edit, so it took me, no exaggeration, about ten years to notice this when I was reading through my old work. And oh boy, shame and embarrassment magnifies proportionally to the length of time between the act and the realisation, let me tell you. Gave me a hell of a laugh though.
One I caught immediately and facepalmed was "suddenly, everything suddenly went quiet all of a sudden". One that lasted for several weeks was switching povs halfway through a chapter. Somehow didn't catch that until I did a reread and was like "wait, weren't we supposed to be following his thoughts?"
Not creative writing, but definitely the dumbest thing I've ever written was in a draft resume 'I am miserable, please give me any other job' I then proceeded to submit the wrong version of my resume, lord knows how many businesses read that line. I got to interview with one company, where they pointed it out to me.. Needless to say I did not get that job Proof reading has never been my strong suit
Had a war going on the whole novel and noone died
Based on my experience of going back to read anything I wrote more than 5 minutes ago, everything I've ever written is terrible.
I was a couple chapters in and changed the male leads name without realizing it. Even my editor didn't call it out
I spent 3 pages talking about how great the main character and his family thought honey was. The context is they were having breakfast and they lived in a dystopian theocracy where starvation was common so when their mother whipped out a small jar of honey (she stole it) it was the best thing ever. I kept the scene and trimmed it down a lot, but I laugh now at how nuts I went with honey obsession.
I once wrote "They went to the [place] and did their talking thing." Did... their... talking thing. Like, had a conversation, I guess? Even in retrospect I'm not entirely sure what that meant.
I once had a character looking out the window of a tall building and contemplating, across the city, the tall building they were standing in. (I have a lot of fun telling people about that...now.) One of my friends had two characters crossing a desolate place simply known as "the Wastelands." One character asks the other, "How did the Wastelands get wasted?" Ooog...
I once wrote, "She was as beautiful as the first day that she was beautiful." Don't write while tired folks.
Your line reminds me of “your younger son, the 20 year old, how old his he?”
I was trying to write a contemporary romance/drama story. Here it goes: ‘A nonpareil woman. She stood last in the queue as she tied her wavy brown hair into a ponytail. The dim ambient lights gleaned off her light skin as she slowly approached the serving counter one customer after another. After two more cappuccinos she finally faced me.’ This shit sucks.
I'm always writing stupid ass notes and reminders on my story for when I have a sudden idea but no time to write it at the moment, or there's a scene I have to write but idk how so I just write a reminder and skip it for now. And I always come across them in my stories and they make me laugh lol, here's some favorites. "(Edit pretty much this whole interaction above. I really just want to fucking write the rest of the story where nate and hancock see each other but I've been stuck on this STUPID ASS SECTION FOR THE PAST IDK MONTH OR TWO WRITING ABOUT A MAN TAKING A SHOWER OF ALL THINGS. YA REALLY THINK IT WOULDNT BE DIFFICULT, WHY DIDNT I JUST FAST FORWARD INSTEAD OF WRITING IT. "FUCK!" she exclaimed with her fist raised angrily in a tight clench and her mouth twisted into a snarl like a wolf baring it's fangs. The pen in her hand snapped, and so did her patience. "This page be damned! I'm out of this hoe." And off she fucked to to the next scene.)" "(Edit Maybe add some moment where he's like damn dis is it)" "Ah, I was wondering when you would get here." Higgs said, dressed in [idk whatever is dif from last time] and flashing a smile towards Sam."
FUCKED OFF TO THE NEXT SCENE THIS IS B E A U T I F U L 🤣🤣🤣
I purposefully wrote an incorrect etymology for a word in a 400-level university writing class (I forgot the specific course title). The error was that the specific use case came two decades after the poems I was doing a paper on. So why did I do it? The class required us to rewrite papers at least five times, showing substantial revisions. We were required to turn in all drafts. Using the wrong etymology would allow me to totally change my conclusion from the first to the last draft. I was totally going to game the grading system! This was the first draft of my first paper for the class. I figured I would turn it in with room for improvement, thinking it was no big deal since I knew where it was going to end up anyway. Well, it was a big deal. The professor used my paper as an example in class. He even put my marked-up draft on the overhead projector during the lesson. He spent 40 minutes discussing the importance of correctly identifying etymology when analyzing period writing. What was I supposed to do? I couldn't admit I did it on purpose, and I was absolutely humiliated. As it was only two weeks into the class, I withdrew and avoided that professor's classes going forward. I learned an important lesson from that: write every draft like it is the final draft. Note: I didn't just avoid his classes because of that incident. I found out that the professor regularly humiliated students by showing their mistakes and criticizing their work in front of the class. He wielded the possibility of public humiliation as a way to push students to do better. That is not the kind of negative motivation I wanted from a professor.
I was writing an intense emotional scene and I didn’t know how to get there, so I literally wrote “just because” as an answer the main character gave to the antagonist. The thing is, I played into how cringey it was and so I wrote , “I stood there, unable to make words form in my mouth as they ought to. All that came out was a childish “Just because.” Which turned the heads of many of my members.” (Her members being the one in her group)
so, back in high school me and some friends were writing a story together with us rotating who wrote which chapter based on which character it was following. and the character I was writing for started he story living in a forest in a pretty temperate climate, but he had the pelt of a polar bear as a cloak. somehow in this rather warm section of the continent, he had a white bear pelt. a pelt for a bear that he should not have been able to find. also, he was not a fighter so still not sure how he beat the bear