Jesus Christ, lady, I hope your book has paragraphs!

Let's chop this up a bit.

...it's in a fantasy setting, it also has a coming of age aspect to it and takes place over about 6 years, and they age from 12-18. im thinking hard about how to write them right in their early ages, like 12-14, and i feel like i'm doing it wrong. i'm putting more focus on their character and specific personalities but i'm wondering if, as a girl, maybe i'm accidentally making them too “girly” and “soft.”

i like to make them enjoy the simple things in life, like exploring and enjoying nature, and they also like to talk about their feelings and their hurts. but is that a thing boys do? im trying to make them realistic but sometimes i forget that i was never a boy and i'll never know what it is like to be a boy. and to top it all off, it's a gay romance (it takes awhile though, so they're just friends in the beginning). it just happened to be that way, i wanted a romance that wasn't straight and i felt my story didn't fit two girls (again, there's a difference but idk what it is!)

... i just want these characters to feel real and not how i “think” they're supposed to be. i can't decide if gender is just a construct and it doesn't matter if they're a boy or a girl, or if their outlook on life IS different and they should be written differently. both? what mistakes should i avoid in writing male leads when i'm not a male?

"Have you tried adding reason and accountability?"

Nah, it's a good question. Writing any type of romance you haven't been in is obviously challenging. Writing the opposite s*x requires observation skills, reading and engaging with their work (a bitter pill for moids), and a healthy imagination. You also have to be able to set aside your preconceptions about how people should work, and your desire to fix them. For example, in this case it's not just that men usually don't talk about our feelings, or that we feel uncomfortable doing so. Often, we don't want to. How do these sorts of things affect a developing gay relationship?

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But as usual, /r/writing offers reassurance instead of seriously engaging with an OP who wants real answers. Many also get bogged down making very important points about gender.

It being a fantasy setting changes the answer. Boys/girls/men/women tend to be different but a lot of that is a result of the cultural environment in which they were raised. The jury is still out in exactly what elements are genetic vs environmental. But that largely doesn't matter because environment shapes how behavioural genetics do or do not manifest anyway.

Since this is your setting, gender roles and attitudes can realistically be whatever you want. If you even wanted to aim for realism in the first place. If you want boys to be soft in your setting then they are.

It's MY SETTING, and I get to pick the gender roles!!

If you were writing about two average adolescent boys growing up in Anywhere, USA, I'd say it's pretty unlikely they'd talk deeply about their feelings. Many of us aren't even taught to be aware of our feelings. There are exceptions, of course. But typically, they'd probably mull things over in the privacy of their own heads while doing some other shared activity, like dropping bigger and bigger rocks into a lake, throwing dirt clods at a hornet's nest, or building the coolest tree fort ever.

But this is learned behavior, and gender totally is a social construct. You get to decide what being "male" means in your fantasy world, and whether or not you want to make it analogous to modern western, Judeo-Christian culture.

Actual good advice to tell a story about boys erased in real time by genderslop.

Depends on what your fictional society expects of them and if your fictional society has gender roles they are expected to conform to.

In my fictional society, sexy women with big tits are expected to throw themselves at members of !bookworms and !writecel

Of course you can write a world with different social "rules." But the farther it diverges, the less it has to say about real people in our own world, and the more it has to say about the author's own desires and hangups. Might as well say some coomer's monster girl erotica is commentary about female gender roles.

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Given your inspiration, I recommend you research homosexuality and pedecrasty in Sparta and Thebes. I'd also suggest looking at Afghan's Bacha Posh to explore the notion of gender vs construct.

This isn't actually out of nowhere because the full OP mentioned "The Song of Achilles," but lmao

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... When writing either gender, it's easy to make characters unbelievably confident or strong in their emotions, knowledge, or physical abilities. Making a teen male emotionally literate stops you having a weakness to their character that would otherwise ring true.

Differentiate your characters from each other. Give them flaws. Let their differences and flaws produce tension. Two guys who are just soft and sensitive and slowly start touching peepees isn't a story. Even a hack writer would make one of them the emotional one and the other the moody, silent one or whatever.

A couple more people actually gave decent advice, like here, but of course low effort "You're perfect just the way you are!" advice is upvoted while interesting stuff is near the bottom.

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As a straight man, I'll never understand this trend. If the men in your gay romance act like women, why make them men at all? Reading gay erotica should be a form of escapism where you can imagine loving relationships without having to deal with women. At least, that's why I read it.

!bookworms !kino

https://lithub.com/how-did-reactionary-french-novelist-michel-houellebecq-end-up-in-a-dutch-arthouse-porn/

>“His wife spent a month arranging the prostitutes in advance”

>“Who will lay with the famous writer out of curiosity”

Some screen caps, is cuckshit @BWC @houellebecq @manysuchcases

Nothing that is better appreciated by actually reading. Light nonsense, preferably fantasy/Sci-fi, but more ideally something that benefits by having great readers.

Already have a bunch of discworld audios, so none of those.

Bottom text

Okay sirs of !writecel it is time to shine shit in the streets

Our guru sir @Downie has allowed me to make the first short story prompt for this group of rdrama brahmin . If you haven't seen this thread https://rdrama.net/h/bharat/post/206128/i-found-peak-midwit-foid-fiction

Please be obliged to peruse it, sirs.

You have two weeks and a day to submit a piece of 800 to 1k word flash fic based around the prompt Indian Sci Fi

It has to actually be a story with a beginning, middle and end. There is no consequence for submiting vignettes or similar, I just personally won't read them as they are clearly written by and for dalit.

Sirs, post the submissions in this thread and please do not redeem.

!bookworms, I'm supposed to pick the top 5, however we have a few titles tied in 5th place with 3 votes each so I just posted them all. We'll just keep eliminating until reaching a winner. 2 will be out after today's thread.

Cormac Mccarthy

Kazuo Ishiguro

Philip K. Peepee

F. Gardner

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Bret Easton Ellis

J.D. Salinger

Helmer: You are talking like a child. You understand nothing about the society you live in.

Nora: No I don't... I must try to discover who is right, society or me.

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Off the top of my head, there's Ted's favorite book, Conrad's The Secret Agent (which gets my vote, because he makes fun of Twitter anarchists for larping). There's all the angsty shit Dostoevsky wrote. There's Roth's American Pastoral, which, if anything, is anti-. Then of course there's blue-pilled 1880s Norwegian feminism, or old-timey female Joker lit: Ibsen.

But what really is the angstiest piece of literature for edgy anarchists to read that's not shit? 1984 doesn't count, because Orwell was a boring socialist and it's peachy and redditty, unlike Brave New World. What Is to Be Done? doesn't count, because Nabokov and I say it's dreadful.

What would the gigabrained Joker actually carry under his arm as he assassinates John Lennon?

So you can discuss your favorite Fantasy and Horror books. As well as trash talk about the authors and books of those genres you hate the most.

Truth be told, outside a few movies and shows I’m pretty much clueless about fantasy lit and still a novice on horror. So I’ll just and enjoy the comments.

Have fun!

Bibliophile dramanauts, I was thinking about having a few recommendation threads according to genre, this one is Sci-fi but then we could go into horror, fantasy, realism, math textbooks, etc.

Here’s mine, or at least the few one’s I read.

HG Wells

“War of the Worlds”

Isaac Asimov

I robot

Foundation Trilogy

Frank Herbert

Dune

Dune messiah

Andy Weir

The Martian

Edit: I forgot about Robert Henlein, in his case “Starship Troopers”

I'm beating the jannies to the punch for that sweet, sweet dramacoin

I'm reading This Kind of War a history of the Korean War recommended by Mattis. It's an older book so has some very dated terminology, and an older way of thinking. But pretty solid so far, very play by play.

I've been on a huge non-fiction kick recently reading Rampage (about Japan in the Philippines.) A book about the fall of Japan whose name I don't remember

and before that The Franco Prussian War by Wawro. I've liked all of them with Rampage being the hardest to read due to crazy Japanese crimes. I think the last fiction book I read was Medicus a Roman murder mystery that was really enjoyable.

Dramatards what y'all reading?

!bookworms I decided to post the thread for once as @pbj has been busy hopefully touching grass

What are your thoughts?

What's the worst book you've ever read, discounting self published crap?

I bought my mom Jo Watson's Among Others half a decade ago for mother's day.

I didn't know much about the industry so I thought that it winning the Hugo meant it had to be at least of decent quality. It was so bad that she said it had to read it too

300 pages of the most pretentious precious child crap

>1984

!macacos