Slashie posted:

1. Stop seeking critiques of unfinished work. Unless it's a school assignment and you're required to turn in drafts, simply forget about showing the piece you're writing to anybody until it's complete.

2. Don't edit until you've finished the first draft. If you want to be really extreme, don't even correct typos. Write and don't look back.

3. Try writing your first draft in some way that makes it "unsubmittable." Hand write it, don't use punctuation, whatever you want. Give the piece some built-in flaw, so when something else bugs you about your writing you can just go "well, I'll just fix that when I retype the whole thing anyway."

4. Stop being such a drat weenie. Statistically speaking, you probably aren't a very good writer. There's no reason you should be if you're just starting out. In my experience it's kids who always had schoolwork come naturally to them who freak out when they try to write creatively. Just because nothing's ever been as hard as this is doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. If you set out and ran a marathon right this second I imagine you'd fail miserably. Would you crawl home crying about how stupid you are, or just chalk it up to the fact that you haven't done the years and years of training actual marathon runners do?

Writing isn't even a little bit easy. If you're a new writer and are jumping right in with writing novels, that's probably a mistake. You're biting off more than you can chew. You need to work on the elements of narrative writing in beginner-size chunks before you'll get anywhere with a novel. You need to put in years of practice with dialogue, structure, imagery, pacing, style, and all of that other stuff before you'll even have a chance of writing something you think is good. The next time you look at your writing and think "this sucks," instead of beating yourself up about it, work on it. Pick out one sucky thing and work on just that. The dialogue's bad? Write a page or two of nothing but dialogue. Then do it a few dozen more times. Then pick something else you're bad at and repeat.

Impper posted:

Zoetrope.com is the best for this. There are a lot of good reviewers, a lot of good writers, and even better, the editors of Zoetrope All-Story peruse the highly-rated stories. There are also requirements for critiquing (you must critique 5 pieces for every one you submit for criticism). Really, the best part is that not only will your pieces definitely get good critiques, but you can also see the work that your critics are churning out themselves. I've looked at a few of those sites, and they seemed to be pretty particularly bad. Stories that were objectively terrible (it's been a few months since I really looked into the writing forums, so hopefully I'm not trashing the wrong sites) and rife with crippling mechanical errors were getting rave reviews. It seemed like a big ego-rubbing festival... something that Zoetrope definitely is not.

awkward saw posted:

Is there a free (ie non-watermarked trial version) pdf converter out there? I'm helping a friend with a cd cover and the format needs to be pdf or ai, all my stuff is bmps and jpegs. Thanks!

Prolonged Panorama posted: