: Re: How to tell if my writing is nonsense? So I am writing a book, the start of the book sounds interesting even to the my "board" of readers. After a while I had 586 words in total SO FAR,I

@Heady158

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I think you have several things going on here:

You are probably overthinking your writing. With less than 600 words
written it is far too soon for you, or anyone else, to know yet if
you are writing nonsense, or even what you are writing at all.
You are exhausting your ‘board of readers’, by getting them to keep rereading re-writes of the first 600 words.

To be realistic, at 600 words you have hardly begun. As an example, to complete the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge you have to write 1,666 words a day. Any advice I give here is on the basis of having done 3 years of Nano, generally averaging no fewer than 2k words per day.

Now, no-one is saying that you have to hit a high daily total, but one thing that many people learn when they do take part in NaNo is that if you try to re-write, edit and polish as you go, you won’t get anywhere. You have to get a body of work down before you can mess with it. So you need to work out what you can change about your approach that will let you get this book out of your head and onto some pages.

So, are you a Discovery writer or a Planner? By which I mean, have you already planned your book out so that you have a good idea of the structure of the story and can use the writing process to fill out the detail, or have you got a burning idea in your head and you want to discover where it takes you if you just start writing?

Of course there is a whole spectrum of approaches, I plan out every significant pivotal or progressive scene and write around those, but I know some people literally don’t know what they are going to write until they set their fingers to the keyboard. No one approach is intrinsically better than another, but it might be that there is an approach that suits you better than the one you are using now.

Whatever approach you settle on, you should accept the fact that you are not going to write a perfect draft straight off the bat. Editing and re-writing are inevitable, everyone does it to a greater or lesser degree. But the key point it you can’t edit until you have written something to edit.

The more you write, the more you discover your own style, which will in turn make editing easier. Worrying at the same couple of pages for five revisions won’t help you learn how you write, it just keeps putting off the moment where you find your flow.

What I would suggest for now is that you, first, thank your ‘board of readers’ for the time and effort they have taken and tell them that you will wait until you have something more substantial before you ask them for opinions again, if they are still willing to do that beta reading.

Next, set yourself some clear goals, they might include:

Reading up a bit on different approaches to writing, there are lots
of resources on the web.
Consider setting aside your current book project for a bit and
doing some other writing, perhaps of short pieces to help you
loosen up your writing muscles. There are lots of websites that
provide writing prompts to help you do just that.
Look into whether anyone runs writing classes in your area. I took
some classes, which I really enjoyed. I found that when you meet with
a group regularly and critique each other it can be an eye opener to
your own bad habits, not just when people critique your work, but
when you can see other people going through the same difficulties. I
would warn though that the shorter cycle of assignments and praise
can be a bit addictive and become an end in itself, stopping you from
getting on with your book, but to help you find your flow, it could
be worthwhile.

For the record, this answer is 687 words long.

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