✍️ 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.

founded 1 year ago

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ellie@slrpnk.net

grrgyle@slrpnk.net

Writing Club - July 2024 (slrpnk.net)

submitted 5 months ago by grrgyle@slrpnk.net to c/writing@slrpnk.net

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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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[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You mentioned art in your last comment too, and from creeping your posts I see that you've got some art chops! Are the art assets a big part of your project, or are they more there to illustrate the writing? I know a lot of writing begins with images and other aesthetic media (like in my case, with maps).

I'm also wondering if you have a kind of "moral" that you want your players to come away with. Even in interactive projects, I usually have some values or concepts I'm trying to get across to the player. Sometimes it's my secret purpose, and other times it's pretty on the nose hehe.

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 4 points 5 months ago

This project has actually been a bit of an extension of my Postcards from a Solarpunk Future project! Building out all the places and options for the players to explore has allowed me to write in way more worldbuilding than I could get away with in a normal fiction project (though the players won't see all of it). Similar to the postcards where each is just a picture and little worldbuilding essay, no plot. It's also let me focus on aspects of solarpunk that I realized really interests me while working on the postcards. Stuff like reuse, rewilding, deconstruction, and generally what rural areas might look like in a solarpunk world, especially current-day bedroom communities.

As for the art, I'd been running out of ideas I was excited about for the postcard series, but since starting in on this, writing all these new locations, I've found a bunch of new scenes I'm really excited to do the art for.

I wouldn't say it's critical to the campaign exactly, but the scenes and maps will be something the GM can put up on screen on Roll20 to set the tone and feel, or to help the players picture their surroundings. Character portraits might help them remember who's who.

As for a moral, I've definitely got things I want to explore: the motives for and consequences of a sort of negative peace, the shifting value of things like industrial waste based on use (and generally the very rare win-win where a waste product from one process becomes a useful input in another), the priorities of society and how it might look when one has very different goals than profits. Generally I want to explore what very rural places like my hometowns might look like when society has moved away from cars. And to generally tout values like thrift and reuse. But I'm not sure if I have a specific moral in mind.