✍️ Writing
A community for writers, like poems, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, long books, all those sorts of things, to discuss writing approaches and what's new in the writing world, and to help each other with writing.
Rules for now:
1. Try to be constructive and nice. When discussing approaches or giving feedback to excerpts, please try to be constructive and to maintain a positive vibe. For example, don't just vaguely say something is bad but try to list and explain downsides, and if you can, also find some upsides. However, this is not to say that you need to pretend you liked something or that you need to hide or embellish what you disliked.
2. Mention own work for purpose and not mainly for promo: Feel free to post asking for feedback on excerpts or worldbuilding advice, but please don't make posts purely for self promo like a released book. If you offer professional services like editing, this is not the community to openly advertise them either. (Mentioning your occupation on the side is okay.) Don't link your excerpts via your website when asking for advice, but e.g. Google Docs or similar is okay. Don't post entire manuscripts, focus on more manageable excerpts for people to give feedback on.
3. What happens in feedback or critique requests posts stays in these posts: Basically, if you encounter someone you gave feedback to on their work in their post, try not to quote and argue against them based on their concrete writing elsewhere in other discussions unless invited. (As an example, if they discuss why they generally enjoy outlining novels, don't quote their excerpts to them to try to prove why their outlining is bad for them as a singled out person.) This is so that people aren't afraid to post things for critique.
4. All writing approaches are valid. If someone prefers outlining over pantsing for example, it's okay to discuss up- and downsides but don't tell someone that their approach is somehow objectively worse. All approaches are on some level subjective anyway.
5. Solarpunk rules still apply. The general rules of solarpunk of course still apply.
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For my update, while I have not got much progress on my actual short story, I did manage to do a good bit of writing. I tried this "morning pages" approach, and was surprised to get a couple of chaotic paragraphs out of it. Anyway, I managed to do that 8 times, and feel really good about it. Feels like I might actually be working the practice of writing back into my daily life.
Here's a link to one of the more voluminous outputs. I wish I could reign in my wordiness somewhat, it's a bit of a shield, and limits the kinds of characters I can portray. Just a matter of practice, I suppose. :)
For my next goal, I think I will continue tugging on this thread of seat-of-the-pants / almost stream-of-consciousness writing. So, since my last update I did 8 "sessions" - so just for fun, I'm going to put a number to my goal: I will complete 10 to 13 similar writing sessions, producing at least... 3 paragraphs each.
I'm glad the sessions approach has been useful for you :)
And i liked the little snippet too. I dont think it feels overly verbose when reading, it more so feels like a stylistic choice. I think it works especially with the frame of being an internal monolog.
Also any tips for using etherpad (the app you used to share your writing)? It looks really cool & I've never used it before.
Thank you! I would still like to get better with other types of voices, but I'm glad this one works for this situation.
I'm still new to etherpad myself, so I'm sure I'm using it pretty bluntly. The documentation online z looks like it was made for a pretty technical audience, so is not super inviting, but for the most part it looks like you use it like a typical text editor, like you'd see when sending an email.
The ability to track revisions does look cool. I think you bookmark a "version" of your text by pressing the star icon. Would be need to see a snippet evolve over time this way, idk.
I like your voice, but i also understand the appeal of having different modes of writing. It's a good way to grow as a writer and explore different ways of communicating. Itll be cool so potentially see you experiment with new voices in the future :))