✍️ 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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I worked on the piece of microfiction I said I would, so while that isn't a lot of content it's still more actual polished output than I've managed for a while, so I'm happy about that. I just finished reading Fahrenheit 451, and something about Bradbury's dreamy character driven style and crunchy concepts motivated me set my own snippet around a "fire" as well. This is a slice of the larger world from the rest of my project.
Here's an Etherpad link to the short snippet I wrote. Any critique very welcome. Feel free to edit that document too, if you feel so moved. :)
Further inspo: Whale Snows Down by Kim Bo-Young, for choosing an unusual protagonist.
I love the snippet, it's definetly and interesting introduction to the setting :) Is it a stylistic choice to not use quotations around speech? I've seen it done in a few books and it always give the writing a kind of mystical or folksy vibe.
I'm glad you were able to get something finished, it might not be alot of content but it is content lol
I hope November is productive for you as well. Do you have any specific goals, or just trying to keep writing for the month?
Oh and the short story you linked to is really interesting, thanks for sharing :)
Thanks for your feedback! I'm not sure why I went without quotations other than I've always wanted to try it. It feels a bit disorienting, which I like. If I end up having lots of back-and-forth dialogue, I might just add them back in though.
Thanks for the goal reminder! For my November goal (which is almost half over - eek!) I'm going to continue on my short story (set in the same world). I think I'll continue with the seat-of-my-pants writing for now, since outlining seems to be a bit of a procrastination trap for me.
So yeah, I'm going to try to write more, and messier, haha
Outlining can be a real time suck. Sometimes it also takes away my energy to actually write, like i already figured out what happens so writing it doesnt feel as good.
I think figure it out as you go can produce some amazing stories and concepts-- so if it works for you then you should go for it :) Stephen King for example never outlines & it's worked for his career lol
Good luck with the rest of this month! I look forward to reading more of your work :D