forum What are some good websites to use for writing?

Started March 22, 2018 by @Celestial-B

tune

I'm thinking about starting my book soon but I don't really know where to start? I've heard wattpad is ok. What do you guys use for writing?

Google, thinking, making a list of random inspiration/stuff I see or hear throughout my day that I like (I have a huge list in my phone now), and talking it out. That's pretty much it. :P

I’m using Wattpad, but if anyone knows about something else, I’d like to know too

There's one that I use from time to time that is pretty useful (and free of distractions). You can set a goal for the number of words, you can change the color of the text (and style), and you can optionally have a typewriter sound effect when you type. No-one can really see what you write or critique it, but it's good if you just want to write for a while but don't want to use word.
Here's the site: www.writer.bighugelabs.com

There's also one called Teen Authors Journal that's pretty cool. You can share stories, get critiques, follow people, learn about writing strategies, get prompts, etc. You can also chat with people, which can be kinda cool.
Here's the site if you're interested: http://www.teenauthorsjournal.com

Oh oh, I remember one now: tapas

https://m.tapas.io/

There's one that a lot of my friends use. You can write stories, read stories, make and do quizzes, do rp's and a lot of other things that you may find. (unfortunately my school BLOCKED IT)

https://www.quotev.com/

Wattpad is the largest writing community. Unfortunately, its main genres are bad boy good girl teen romance or vampire/werewolf love stories and most other things will have difficulty being found and read. You might get noticed if you're active and share your story and it's good, but it's not a guarantee. Readers here are usually silent or only comment things that won't help you improve.

RoyalRoad Legends is a smaller community with a 5 star and detailed 5 star critique system, and I've heard people there give a lot more feedback. You can either give an overall 5 star review or a detailed one where you give a rating of up to 5 stars for plot, grammar, characters, and flow, iirc. They have a discord server that's pretty friendly. If you're a fantasy writer, this is the place to go. There are a lot of portal fantasy and reincarnation stories on RRL.

I don't have too much experience on Penana but I always considered it a smaller Wattpad for a younger audience. On this site you can have cowriters and you can choose to allow readers to proofread your stories. They can suggest edits, the edits go through to you, and you can approve or deny them and the edits will appear in your story immediately. I had a reader fix some of my typos that way. It's pretty nice.

Tablo is a smaller community and almost entirely silent. I'm pretty sure it's more writers than there are readers. You can edit your story on site, but it also allows you to instantly sell your book to ebook stores when you're finished,. There's also an option to download an .epub of your book (divided by your chapters) so you can see how it'll look on ereaders. They don't sell to Amazon anymore, though, due to their treatment of writers.

Scribophile, though not like any of the sites above, is a critique site. You gain karma points by critiquing other people's work, and you spend 5 full karma points to post your own work on the site. You're suggested to limit texts to about 3k words, as most people don't have the time or will to read and critique that much at a time. It's not good for getting it out there, but when you're working on edits it can help a lot. The community is really kind and helpful, and I've never see any douchey or asshole-ish reviews.

There are a couple other sites that I've heard of but don't have much experience with, like Tapas, Inkitt, Figment, Fictionpress, or another one whose name really escapes me for some reason.

There is also NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month) which is an international event where people spend the month of november trying to write 50k words. You "win" by writing the 50k and you can receive discount codes for writing software like Scrivener or coupons for writing related offers like discounted writing classes or getting free copies of your book from Lulu.

Camp NaNoWriMo happens in April and July and is a relaxed version of the main event where you can set your own writing goal of at least 1000 words. You also can opt into a 20 person chat room for the duration of the events.

Both let you win by copy-pasting your entire manuscript into a text box that is on their site. For the month there is a word counter where you put your word count in numbers, in the last week a "validate my word count" button will appear, where you will be shown a text box to paste your entire work in. All this does is count how many words there are based on an algorithm that makes sure it's not just the same word or phrase repeated a bunch of times, but if you're unsure about pasting your work the people who run the event encourage you to go on a site and generate a lorem ipsum text that has the same length as your manuscript to paste into the counter.

It's entirely honor-based, but it's fun and comes with a nice little chart to show you how far you are in your writing and how far you should be every day if you want to reach your goal on time. It helped me back when I couldn't bring myself to so much as start writing.

Wow thanks guys! I didn't even know about like 4/5 of these

Hemingway Editor is very good.

The write the world one in that other post (the "Write the World" one) is pretty cool too.