✍️ 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've got what I'm told is a kind of weird system halfway between pantsing and outlining. I'll have the idea and get excited about it, start writing bits and pieces as I think of them, usually sentence- to paragraph-length segments, sometimes it's dialogue or setting stuff. I'll usually do this for a few days. Characters usually emerge here. Then I start organizing the pieces into what feels like the right chronological order, and build a sort of outline around it. I'll identify my scenes, sort the pieces into those, then sort them within the scenes. Then I start stitching them together and looking for the big structural stuff, where to thread in themes, which scenes reinforce what, what order is information being presented in (and consolidating or removing stuff if it's redundant). Eventually I get a workable draft and start the real editing.
I try to build plots around the core concept I want to explore with the setting, but that can be a bit "here's an idea the end" depending on the setting stuff. Those tend to go on the back burner.