this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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✍️ Writing
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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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Almost a year ago I started trying to write solarpunk fiction and got daunted by the amount of research I needed. Writing scifi had always meant extrapolating current trends and pointing out problems. To do solarpunk I had to be able to offer solutions and that meant lots and lots of reading to learn from the folks who've been talking about and trying out alternative ways of doing things (from agriculture to infrastructure to anarchy) and thinking through their answers.
For awhile I did a worldbuilding art/essay project focusing on very small glimpses of a solarpunk future, trying to emphasize things like creative reuse, industry, and seasons/weather that didn't show up much in solarpunk visual art. The narrow focus helped a lot.
I think I'm finally comfortable trying to write something, though instead of a short story I'm working on a campaign for the solarpunk TTRPG Fully Automated, where the players are on a treasure hunt for tons of industrial waste which were illegally dumped sixty years before. The waste is valuable because it's a useful input in the production of geopolymers, and the stakes are high as the largely-abandoned rural town they're searching is in the process of being deconstructed and rewilded, so nobody else is likely to notice it in the future.
I've had a lot of fun building a wide swath of locations, communities, and means of travel for the players to possibly explore, along with the rough outline of the decades-old conspiracy and coverup murder.
My goal is to build out the characters, build out the past/conspiracy, and to start seeding people and locations in the present with clues for that mystery.
Oh cool! Truly, I can't wait to hear more about this. I'll add a link to your comment in the main post.