✍️ 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 drafting I need the word count to motivate me sometimes, weeks on weeks off, it's always been like that. For editing I don't. I think it's a brain chemistry thing. I use the word count motivation when I have issues making progress without it, otherwise I ignore it.
The research can be daunting for progressive topics since people can be slightly unforgiving. It feels like sometimes you get more anger for a not-fully-perfect representation than not attempting one at all. Test readers help but you can't always find the "perfect" test reader to find all parts somebody might find problematic.
I usually write series of a 2-3 books worth of length. I have found that a single book usually barely allows me to set up the setting and characters and a minor villain, and usually the 2nd one is where things really get started. The middle book(s) are the most fun to write for me, everything is established and I can toy around with things for fun chaos, while I don't need to think super hard about a perfectly conclusive satisfying ending yet.