✍️ 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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grrgyle

Writing Club - July 2024 (self.writing)

submitted 4 months ago by grrgyle to c/writing

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Welcome to the inaugural writing club update! This is a brand new writing club, first proposed here. I have some ideas about what I want from this club, but where we go from here is open ended.

So feel free to start new posts or spinoffs in between my monthly posts, as long as they jive with the rules in our gracious host community's sidebar, you have my full support. :)

On to the whole point of this club! The following brave things set to text concrete goals for themselves (linked beside their names, just below). If you'd like to join their number, simply say so in the comments, along with your goal for this month. Okay, here are the stars of our show: 👏👏👏👏

Participants

You don't have to share any of the actual material you've worked on unless you want to (you could even use our local Etherpad to share writing stuff - for example).

Here are some questions to start you off. I'm genuinely interested in your answers, but don't feel you need to follow my script. This is just a prompt:

How do you think you did on your goal(s)?
What would you like to accomplish for our next check-in in August?
Is there a part of your project that you'd especially like feedback on?
Is there anything about this writing club you'd like us to do differently?

No stress if you didn't accomplish everything you set out to (I fell short and I'm still here hehe). I would love to hear your updates no matter how things went!

I'll share my own progress in a comment below. What I'm hoping from this step is that we treat this as part check-in, and part conversation. This is your chance to really dig into each others' projects (and if someone has done so for you, maybe it would be nice to return the favour and take an interest in their own project? ;))

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[–] JacobCoffinWrites 4 points 4 months ago (5 children)

I think I made some good progress on the campaign I'm writing for the Fully Automated TTRPG. I've built up some of the history around the mystery the players will be investigating, some of the characters and their interconnections, and places where the players will be able to access that information. I've also built out the locations a good bit more, most of which aren't directly related to the plot, but at least it means there'll be answers ready for any GM who has to field questions about how the community handles this or that aspect of life. I've started gathering up all the characters I've mentioned in various sections so far and organizing them in the characters section of the doc, and have started building out details for them.

At this point, my goals are to build out the mystery further, to add more slip-ups and connections to the cold case murder mystery, more ways for the players to find the long-forgotten toxic waste dumping. I've done a lot of work on the nearby modern village where they start off, but the abandoned town itself is still light on landmarks so I need to build those out. I also have a lot more characters to describe and eventually stat out.

Eventually I want to polish up the feel of it, to give it a bit of an adventure-movie feel, full of exploring lost ruins and wild forests, unraveling a mystery and searching for buried treasure. But the treasure is illegally-dumped industrial waste, the ruins and forests are in the Northeast United States. Building out the art assets included with the module book should help with that a bit.

[–] hazeebabee 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Whoa! Your project and world sounds super interesting :) sounds like you made really good progress this month too!

Is the setting part of the mystery? Like as the game goes on little hints are given as to the setting?

Looking forward to seeing more of your project! Sounds like the type of thing my sister's and I would play together :)

[–] JacobCoffinWrites 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

In that case I'll try to answer without giving too much away! The campaign uses the setting from the game Fully Automated! but is set in a region of the former United States which the rulebook largely overlooks. So general stuff like the history of the world still applies, and the players are free to read up on it, but I'm writing my own historical events when it comes this specific fictional, abandoned town and the area around it.

The players are on a quest to find a forgotten buried treasure (several tons of illegally-dumped industrial waste now useful in the production of geopolymers) in a mostly abandoned town currently undergoing deconstruction and rewilding. Their search will unearth many forgotten details of the region's chaotic history from during the setting's Global Climate War 60 years before.

[–] hazeebabee 4 points 4 months ago

Don't worry about giving plot away, I like spoilers lol

& thats a cool way of building out the pre existing lore & relating it to your own home area. Id never heard of fully automated before this and it looks like fun. I like the setting of a rewilding town with a complicated history too :)

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