this post was submitted on 04 Jul 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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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 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

For my part, I set out to draw a fairly detailed map of the part of the fictional world that my story takes place. Here's what I came up with:

A map of two mountain ranges with orange at their tops, paths going into them from the left, and out at the right, leading to an outpost, and further still some buildings labelled "Bunks." (Please DM me if you would like more detail)

I'm pretty happy with it, but it still feels like just an outline/draft/unfinished. But maybe it's enough for now. Does this image make sense to anyone else? I imagine it's pretty vague if your brain isn't loaded up with all the context I've been soaking in for the past year (!!!).

My second goal was to connect two scenes together, which I didn't even start on. But I have a good reason (lol)! Previously, I was working this material into a WIP Twine game, but since reading about the "Snowflake" method of writing, I realised I don't even have an outline - which has been making the writing of these Twine game scenes harder than it has to be (because I essentially have to invent motivations on the spot to puppet my characters around).

So I'm doing a slight pivot. I'm going to write this story as a short story first, then maybe adapt it into a Twine game. I'm hoping to use the Snowflake method to my full advantage this way (yes, you guessed correctly, I do like structure hahaha).

So my goal for this month is to finish my short story outline: characters, plot/events, worldbuilding (enough for the story anyway), beginning, conflict(s), and end.

Good luck, me!

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

I think starting with a short story and potentially building it out sounds like a great approach! Will likely help with ironing out character motivations and will spark ideas for world building :)

The map looks good as an outline that can continue being filled in as your project grows. On a personal note, I like the inclusion of wetlands. I've always thought they're such a cool setting that isn't often included in fiction. Way better than deserts in my opinion lol.

Good luck for the next month! Excited to see your idea continue being brought to life :D

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

Thank you for your feedback! This already feels like a better place to be writing from, so I'm hopeful I can use this new approach to get, yeah, a solid foundation for the characters/world.

While being mindful not to get too trapped in my own infinitely entertaining worldbuilding reverie (not sure how else to put it, but I suspect this is common enough).

Also, having finished reading Dune this year, I agree with your sentiment about deserts! Haha give me moisture, give me teeming verdant buzzing squawking lifeforce, rofl

[–] hazeebabee@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 months ago

Getting stuck in the world building is a classic problem, but not a horribly bad one. I think it can make the process last longer, but once a story starts to form within it I think all that backdrop in the writers mind really adds to the story. World building icons like Tolkien show how powerful that can be.

I think the hard part is not getting lost in the world building & finding characters and interesting plot points within it. Sometimes it's just so fun to create a world it's hard to move on to the writing :p

And nothing can help you get over desert settings like finishing the dune series hahahahaha great books, but they can be as long and dry as the setting in some parts

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 4 points 5 months ago (2 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.

[–] 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.

[–] hazeebabee@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 months ago (1 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@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 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@slrpnk.net 4 points 5 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 :)

[–] hazeebabee@slrpnk.net 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So my goal was to work on actually editing some of the scenes I'd already written for a sci-fi story. I have tons of scenes drafted out, but am a huge slacker when it comes to editing. Unfortunatly, I ended up deciding to move houses & haven't done much writing at all this month.

I'm finally all packed though, and am basically just in waiting for closing dates in my current and future house to arrive. I'm hoping having all my distractions packed up & nothing to do will help make July a much more productive month.

I'm hoping to have my opening chapter edited, maybe write a few more scenes, and tighten up my proposed timeline to match with my outline.

& just for more information: The story centers around a protagonist who creates a way of augmenting the human mind. This opens up many new possibilities for what humans can be, but of course there are those who seek to monitize and control the technology. The story will take place over an extended period of time as humanity is radically changed by technology. Themes include the necessity of understanding and controlling the tech we use, boundries of the self, and what it means to be human.

I have another project that takes place in the same universe but instead centers around a found family of heavily modded space travellars. It's a much more playful series focusing on queerness, counter cultural spaces, & creating meaning in a meaningless universe. I bring it up because the two stories are closely linked & I often jump between the two. The queer space story is one I daydream about more, but the augmented mind story has a stronger plot and is a more traditionally sci fi story.

Heres to hoping this month is one with lots of time spent writing the days away :)

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The story centers around a protagonist who creates a way of augmenting the human mind. This opens up many new possibilities for what humans can be, but of course there are those who seek to monitize and control the technology. The story will take place over an extended period of time as humanity is radically changed by technology. Themes include the necessity of understanding and controlling the tech we use, boundries of the self, and what it means to be human.

Thanks for sharing this high level synopsis. The absolute breadth of this project sounds intense - do you have a length in mind for your book yet?

I love these kinds of stories that take place over a long period of time, since by the time you get to the end you have so much context all loaded up in a kind of emotional tsunami. Anyway, it's really affecting.

Not sure how much detail you can give, but how many time periods are you thinking of writing?

I also love how your queer space story and this "main" one can kind of feed off of each other. IMHO it sounds like a smart way to hijack the "shiny object syndrome" (or SOS, lol) that so many creative folks experience. Actually it kind of reminds me of @JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net's Postcards from a Solarpunk Future in that way! (Here's an example)

Maybe there's a little bit of it in my obsession with maps too, hehe.

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Sorry, I think you replied to the wrong comment. Thanks for the shout-out though!

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

I don't think I did! I was just relating how we each seem to have a main project along with a related side project

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

Whoops, I saw it in my inbox and assumed it was a reply rather than because you tagged me - my bad!

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

My outline would have it be 3 books, or maybe a book in three parts depending on how long things end up.

First one is set in the current-ish era (origins, main conflict is MC vs self), second book set a few decades later (growth, main conflict is with a specific individual), last book set a couple hundred years in the future (redirection, main conflict is with manipulative corporations/governments), epilogue is in the far distant future (transcendence, main conflict is with meaning/the universe in general).

Some of my inspiration for story structuring comes from star maker by olaf Stapleton, where self discovery of an individual leads towards bigger and bigger understandings until it encompasses the universe.

&& I definetly think centering stories and projects within one universe is a great way to handle creative ADD, & it helps with world building & audience retention (if people like one series, they'll probably read a spin off series set in the same universe). Though, I do still fall victim to the shiny object syndrome when I write lol & have a few stories started that are set in entirely different universes.

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

epilogue [...] main conflict is with meaning/the universe in general

Heavy! I love that kind of conflict/theming, when the writer gets philosophical, using the events of the book almost as a classroom, secreted away in a work of fiction. I agree epilogue is a good place for this. I always enjoy these parts of more complex books, because they give you a chance to contextualise what you've read.

Some of my inspiration for story structuring comes from star maker by Olaf Stapleton, where self discovery of an individual leads towards bigger and bigger understandings until it encompasses the universe.

Cool, I have Stapleton's "The Last and First Men" on my to-be-read list! His stories do seem like rich inspo-fuel. I haven't read any of his work myself yet, but the sense I get from hearing about them, yeah; it's really starting to drive home the scale of your book(s).

I'm currently reading Cloud Atlas, which also seems to take place over a large swath of time... Anyway, I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but I think I'm getting a little bit of a similar vibe from it, too.

Pardon me going on about other books. I know some people can find these kinds of comparisons draining, so I'll just put my brakes on here.

[–] hazeebabee@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 months ago

I love philosophical aspects in books too, when done well they can be really powerful & stick with you even when details of the book have faded. It's a real balancing act of not getting too heavy handed in things and bogging down the story. I'm hoping I can do justice to the ideas bouncing around in my head.

& I dont mind the comparisons at all :) I think all writing exists within context & recognizing similarities doesn't diminish the value of an original work.

&& I haven't read cloud atlas, but I'll add it to my list. I love a good scifi epic