✍️ 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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@grrgyle@slrpnk.net As promised, here's a poem. It's not the poem I told you about. I'm still... Nervous to share that one. It came from a very authentic place but I just... Don't know. But this one is very personal to me.
Hey, everyone else, though. This poem, while very authentic to me, and very personal, contains EXTREMELY coarse language. It's an accounting of a lived experience I had.
Hatred
spoiler
Whoa. Powerful. Sorry, I would have replied sooner, but I guess my mobile lemmy client doesn't show me @s as notifications.
I'm not super well versed in poetry or its forms, but the tempo as I'm reading it feels oppressive. The "Left foot, right foot" paired with the thoughts that are also doubled feels to me almost like a martial rhythm. And then of course the shock of the ugly slur as the rhythm continues, and the internal monologue (?) also continues on; maintaining composure, doing mental labour...
I know I'm projecting hard onto it, but that's my raw feelings just from a first reading. Thank you for sharing!
This might be a silly question, but what are you writing poetry for? Like, to process personal thoughts, or communicate something to others? I guess that is silly, why does anyone do anything lol, probably always for those reasons and many more. I'm just an overly curious person. :p
Yes. I don't think you can separate the two. I grew up in the United States and the older I get the more I see our atomized nature as a soft form of torture that allows those with power to perform more overt forms of torture. All of our personal thoughts are hidden from each other so we can survive to tomorrow. Meanwhile, we do that and isolate ourselves. Who we isolate ourselves from though are the people who would be most ready to help us because they're going through the exact same thing. I think sharing our pain is a form of culture building, and I don't just mean "this is the pain I feel" but instead realizing its pain we all feel.
I am incredibly blessed to have been gifted a body that was extraordinarily well suited to cross country running and to have found my tribe in college. I'm also grappling with all the other things I've been cursed with that have prevented me from being all that I can, and I've been realizing this is how its always been, what we've always been as a species. There is absolutely nothing stopping us from enjoying the things we love except for an oppressive regime of torture. I want to help others find their tribes the way I did, find the people who love them for who they are and enjoy the things they do and say. At the same time, the tribe I found frequently found itself coming under derision for not fitting in with others. At the time I laughed it off, at least when it was our cohorts doing it. But when it was children... It hurt me.