The topic in general doesn’t have to be tedious. Good writers can make almost any story into a compelling narrative. For me, the prose makes it difficult to get engaged enough to determine if I’m interested in the topic. It’s like a wall of dictionary vomit.
OK, that’s a bit harsh but it’s very difficult to get motivated to read beyond paragraph 2 (of 15). Writing can be at the 3rd grade level and extremely accessible, but still a hodge podge of ill defined concepts and unsupported assumptions.
Maybe next week’s blog entry will be better; we’ll see, but I suspect fewer people will be reading.
Maybe a listicle format would be easier to digest. Like, “Seven Things That Aren’t What I’m Talking About” or “Five Common Qualities That Make My Experience Unique.”
I remember that thread, and I remember at the time thinking that it was an example of someone who wants to waltz into a room and be the star instead of working really, really hard to build up credibility within a network.
AHunter3, that’s still what this looks like to me. I get that you want to talk about your own experiences, but in the end everyone has experiences.
What do people want to read? Interesting stories or stories from interesting perspectives. You seem to be taking the tack that you must have an interesting perspective because it’s not exactly the same perspective as someone else. But everyone has some unique thing about them, and every single person on the planet has a unique viewpoint, just from the fact that their eyes were at a slightly different place. Having a different perspective is not the same as having an interesting perspective.
And, frankly, people can have a sameness in their differences that turns everything into a blur. Imagine meeting 100 new people and everyone introduces themselves with a rant about how much they hate one particular book or movie. Maybe you’d remember a few just because you agree or disagree. But the rest would become a blob of book- or movie-hating folks.
Are you among those hordes of other male people yourself? Just curious, since you describe it as an ordinary experience but you don’t specify whether you’re including yourself in it.
How do those hordes of other male people seek out sexual-romantic relationships with dignity and some measure of success without directly hitting on women? Have they written about it? Have you seen it portrayed in media?
That would certainly fail as an example. Do you see why?
And this is why I’m procrastinating on finishing my first novel. The knowledge that you can pour four years of your soul into something to make it the best it can possibly be and you still have to jump through a bunch of bullshit industry hoops with no guarantee of success. It’s one of those things where you have to be in love with the process, because the process is all you’re likely to ever get.
Yes, and enough other men that I’ve talked to over the years that I consider it completely not noteworthy. 80% of US population over age 25 has been or is married, are you really saying that you think none of them actually want a relationship? Do you seriously think that no other men have ever been uncomfortable hitting on women? There are at least dozens of people who post regularly to just this board who fit one or both of those categories and write about it, it’s really not unusual.
I don’t really see how you can expect any kind of mass-market success when you’re this clueless about other people. When you write like you think that no other guys are hesitant to hit on women, or want relationships and not just hookups, and that everyone else has been in some kind of flirting training class, you convey the idea that you don’t know enough about the ordinary human experience to write how yours is actually different.
And there goes the goalpost shifting. The claim about ‘without directly hitting on women’ was not part of what I claimed was common, and if it’s a restriction then your own experience doesn’t count as an example - you admit in this thread that you have, at some point, directly hit on a woman, so I’m going to disregard it as silly. Of course there are men talking about being insecure directly hitting on women, the entire PUA movement exists because some guys are insecure about directly hitting on women. And yes there are guys who want relationships and not hookups, and yes they write about it too, Nice Guys write about that WAY more than is healthy to read.
Your assertion that it would fail as an example is wrong. Do you see why?
If you want to make an argument, make it, don’t make a claim then ask me to make the argument for your own claim for you. I get that you think you’re handing down wisdom from on high, but you’re actually not Socrates, and I’m not going to play ‘guess what the other person is thinking, then respond to it, then have them claim victory because my guess was wrong’. I can easily think of several ways that you reached your incorrect conclusion, but I’m not going to list them and argue with each one.
I provide a counterexample: I have family members that think my book has too much swearing in it. (There was actually almost no swearing - they’re just Mormons.) One of them stopped reading it cold because of the swearing --and then pressured me into telling her the rest of the story anyway.
Of course, that’s sort of a specialized case. If what’s turning off your readership is your whole writing style, then, well, yeah.
If you’re writing your novel for money or recognition, well, you have my best wishes and my mild pity. If you’re just writing it because you want to write it and/or to be a published author, I’d recommend looking into the print-on-demand service for Amazon.com, called CreateSpace. There are basically no hoops to jump through and no bars for entry. There is also no editing help, no promotion, and if you want a real ISBN you have to provide it yourself. So if you just want to be (technically) published, and don’t mind that nobody ever anywhere will ever buy it or read it (unless you publicize it yourself)…
Many of the men i dated in the past were in fact looking for relationships, and we got together without them directly hitting on me. I hate the idea of the friend zone. I dated guys that probably considered themselves zoned. Things change.
I do seem to have a propensity for feminine men, though.
If we’re giving personal counterexamples to the snowflakeness of it all, I’m a man who can’t flirt for crap. Not only wasn’t I trained, I literally have no idea how one would go about doing it. (All presented examples of it have seemed artificial and creepy as fuck to me.)
Probably as a result, I’m single, see little chance of ever getting a girlfriend, and have only been engaged once.
Some of my experience counts as an example. And the experiences that vary didn’t get me into relationships or enable me to become a nonvirgin, so I think my overall experience kind of does count.
Want to tell me how you handle it?
If this is goalpost shifting, ignore the original goalposts — chalk it up to bad communication on my part if you wish — and make this the goalpost that matters.
Seriously. Let’s talk about how guys who aren’t comfortable directly hitting on women get their connections to happen.
Part of what I’m trying to describe in this thread is the process by which a feminine male finds the women who do have a propensity for us, and interacts with them in a useful and productive manner.
I know what you mean about “artificial and creepy as fuck”. I feel very self-conscious whenever I try to describe it because it ends up sounding that way.
What I do inside my head is not so much “I’m going to do this posture and do this with my eyes”. It’s more like instead of hiding the fact that sexual possibilities are of interest to me and that, yes, they may have passed through my mind, and then at the same time trying to mount some kind of seductive campaign of coming on to her in exactly the perfect way (ugh!), to just let my face do the talking, including the part about being shy and self-conscious about those kinds of feelings.
So in a way it’s mostly about being expressively honest and not trying to do something artificial.
If, on top of that, I’ve learned a lot from other people doing it to me, it mostly has to do with pretending in my head that I know something that actually I don’t —that those same thoughts have been running through her head — and reacting to something that hasn’t necessarily happened yet — that she expressed that. I suppose that qualifies as artificial in a way, but how it feels is like teasing. And if she wasn’t thinking such thoughts she’ll tend to miss it and I will not have been behaving creepy as fuck, and I keep it subtle, and not intrusive. Then I watch to see what happens next and if nothing does, I let it drop.
Well, since you’re asking - as I said I can’t flirt for crap but I was engaged to be married to a woman for two years.
I was making a delivery of something to her parents’ house from my mom (something related to their church, I think). They invited me in to chat (which seemed odd, but I figured I had free time). She was there. We hit it off well enough, I suppose, chatting lightly about I forget what. Movies or something. The whole family was there chatting too (it was a bit odd), but after a while they had to do something else and it was proposed that we go for a walk, to continue our chat. I figured why not, so we went for a walk and chatted. When we returned she proposed that we do it again sometime, and I figured why not, so we did. It became a habit for a little while, walking and chatting. Then one evening she said she was thinking that she wasn’t comfortable walking with me anymore unless we got serious. As in, engaged. I liked her, considered it seriously for a moment, and figured why not. So we were suddenly engaged. I don’t think we had our first kiss right on the spot, but I’m sure it happened not too long after.
So I guess the trick is to just find somebody lonely, desperate, and emotionally fragile enough, and hang around with them a lot while not being an asshole. Or maybe that only worked this one time ever. YMMV.
(For the record, we broke up when she realized that she wanted to be religious again, and because I didn’t want to be religious too that made me the devil, literally. That’s why I stretched out the engagement that long - I saw the religious flip coming from when we first met, and no hitching was going to happen until that hurdle had been cleared.)
I have a buddy who did CreateSpace and others through publishers. Either way you do it, if you’re a new author, you get stuck with marketing the damned thing. I’m trying my hand at classic publishing, starting with finding an agent, and going from there. I know it’s going to be a long, hard road. I have no social media presence and I hate networking. I’m confident that there’s an audience for my work, the question is how to find it and convince those people they’re gonna like it. The majority of my stress is about marketing. I’m probably going to end up hiring a consultant to give me the lay of the land. It’s like any other business venture where you start knowing absolutely nothing.
It’s all based on this theory, If I can get paid to write a book, I’ll have more time to write more books. I’m going to write books no matter what, I might as well get a return on the time investment. So yes, I want money and recognition, with very low expectations for either, and I’m willing to do all the bullshit that goes along with it, I just don’t want to. But I want to be an income-generating author more than I don’t want to do those things.
This is just the way creative endeavors are. To quote one of my favorite books, The War of Art,
I guess the questions I’d ask the OP are: who are your writer connections? Are they within your genre? Are they critiquing your work? Do you regularly critique others? Have you read books on your craft? Do you outline before you write (not required but helpful if you struggle structurally)? Have you spent as much time trying to improve your writing as you are trying to sell it? It’s easy to put the cart before the horse. But I honestly think it takes a boatload of work just to get to the point where you’ve got something worth publishing.
Well, this is all very demoralizing. Back to work.
I once had a guy on a date tell me that I seemed like someone more interested in spending time with my dogs than with other people. The way he said it was like he was revealing some deep, personal insight into my psyche that I was completely unaware of. All I could think was “yeah, well, d’uh.” I get the same feeling reading about the femmy boy guide to flirting.
Isn’t this something covered in just about every issue of Cosmopolitan?
Oh, my friend, you should try poetry. Not only do you have to love the process, you have to love it enough that you can put up with everyone shitting on poetry all the time! It’s fun!
I think that’s wonderful.