: 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

@Sent2472441

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Did your teacher use the word "nonsense"? If so, do you know what he meant by that? The word "nonsense" could mean many different things.

It could mean that the text consists of meaningless random collections of letters, like "miovs coiuerwqlk fgoiasdasd afsd jalkj". Or you have real words but they don't make coherent sense, like "Door running cat orange feeble brightly." I don't think that's what you mean here.

It could mean that you have real words and coherent sentences but the text isn't believable. Like if you wrote an essay explaining why you think serial killers are good for the stock market, I'd probably find it unconvincing and say you were writing nonsense. Or if you wrote a novel where the characters' motivations don't make sense, or where events happen for no apparent reason, I might say you're writing nonsense. Perhaps that's the sort of thing your teacher meant.

Like any criticism of your writing, I would say, If you respect this person at all, consider what they said, but don't necessarily accept everything they said. If someone says that your writing is bad and names flaws in it, it might well do you good to consider if you could not improve your writing by changing the things they complain about. But if someone just says that your writing is nonsense or garbage or whatever and gives no advice on how to improve it, I'd generally ignore them. Don't give up writing because one person said your writing is bad. There are lots of stories about best selling books that were rejected by a dozen publishers before they were finally published.

To be blunt, it may be that you are just not cut out to be a writer and you be better off to give up the idea of writing and try something else. But I wouldn't give up because one person said he doesn't like my writing.

Side note: As others have pointed out, 586 words is not a lot of text. That's like 1 or 2 pages. You are just getting started. Try writing a lot more before you make any decisions about your writing future. And probably you should write a lot more before you ask others to review it. Personally, my practice has been to not show my writing to others until I have what I consider a good first draft of an entire book. That may be waiting too long, but asking others to review your writing one page at a time is just going to cost you friends. :-)

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