Now that I have my official Helper badge, I'd like to find out what everyone here would like to see in this forum. Please let me know which of these you'd be interested in, and please add any ideas you have as well: *Writing workshops (One writer at a time gets their submission worked over, submitting new drafts over a time frame, say a month.) *Contests (I can't guarantee huge prizes.) *Writing tips *Short critiques on stories *Writing exercises (Practice on a particular aspect of writing, such as description, dialogue, characterization, etc.) *Editing exercises (Take a deliberately rough draft and find ways to improve it.)

All of the above sound good to me. Please excuse the stupid question of the day but what do you mean by Description, dialogue, characterisation in the Writing exercises comment? I know I should know what you mean but I seem to be having a block at the moment :( All of the above is new to me as I have never participated in anything like this before so my apologies for not suggesting anything.

Description would be something like posting a picture and having people describe the scene. Dialogue could be setting a scenario and having people try writing dialogue for it. Characterization might include writing a paragraph or two from first person point of view to practice showing personalities. My idea is to give people opportunities to concentrate on different aspects of writing and for them to see how other people would handle the same set-up as well. It's easier to try new things when it's an experiment, not a treasured story that's been struggling to emerge.

Cool. Thanks for explaining :)

That sounds great. I'd like to also have exercises on how to critique other people's work. If everyone knew what to expect we could each give 'real' feedback without the fear of hurting feelings. From your input in previous posts you seem to have had experience with critiques.

I could do a critiquing exercise as well. Come on y'all! There's more than three of us in here! ;-)

On the learning to write aspect, there is a book that I use constantly that in the first chapter there are exercises. These exercises are probably the most used by me of the whole book. If you are interested, I could post some of those exercises here for everyone to try.

If you took the general concepts and created your own exercises and shared them, that's fine. Posting the actual exercises is a copyright violation. What is the book that you're using? I'm always looking for more reference material.

DUH!!! Of course. Sorry for the suggestion. Mind you I was doing one exercise before I even got the book. It's fun LOL The book is "The Writing Book - A workbook for Fiction Writers" by Kate Grenville with a fourth impression date of 1991. This book is always with me ever since I got it :)

Chapter 1 deals with ways to get around writers block so that at the end of it you should have a pile of bits and pieces of writing. (this is where the word games and some exercises are) Chapter 2 gets you to sort out what you did in chapter 1. Chapters 3 to 8 help you "to explore and refine this material.". you also get to expand on it and cover: Character, Point of view, Voice, Dialogue, Description and Design. Chapter 9 covers Revision and re-writing and Chapter 10 covers "some guidelines for submitting your piece to a publisher.".

Is this forum mostly for fiction type writing, or will it also cover technical type writing? (tutorials, articles and such)

I like all the ideas above... And I'm going to like this forum... The only problem I have: I'm not an English speaker (Italy here)... But I'll be glad to follow how things develops, and maybe I'll partecipate with something simple... (a way to learn after all)... But truly I think I'm going to love this forum!

BellaMorte - I'll have to take a look at the book. Thanks! Writer's block is the one thing I've never had, but the restof the book deals with things I still need practice with. Lyrra - I can do both. I was thinking of setting up a FAQ with common grammar mistakes, among other things. (And everyone is welcome to submit for that!) I'm trying to see what people want from this forum so everyone feels welcome. jgeorge - the one problem with this forum is that it is geared more towards English language writers. If you put a disclaimer on your story submissions that English isn't your first language, I'm sure that everyone would be glad to focus on other issues. If you post in Italian, we'll do our best, but don't be surprised if you get strange feedback. ;-)

LOL you are lucky Crescent. I have to admit that I suffer writers block before I start a piece, so I get my husband to help me at the very beginning and I take the rest from there. Although, I have to say that I have written one piece without anyones help at all :)

I'm really looking for first-hand experiences of people who've been published. All this other stuff is really "prep work." Prep work is great by itself. I don't need much help there. "Getting published" is my goal in this process. I started a dialog in a previous thread, but that died on the vine. Maybe we have many writers, but not many have actually been published?

That's pretty much it crisjon. I have never been published. I actually haven't tried to get anything published. Too scared to LOL

If you ever think of trying to get poetry published, send me an IM. I can save you some grief. I've "been published," but it has left a sour taste in my mouth. I don't want to detract from this thread, so I won't say more.

I have done 2 poems. One is on the Phenominal Women of the Web site and the other I haven't tried to get published even though it is my first real piece.

I've written an entire book of Children's Poetry that I am convinced would be worthy of being published. Let's just say I started with poetry.com, and got pretty disillusioned (spelling?) from the experience.

Mercedes Lackey, in her novel "Jinx High" has a character that is an author, or romance serials ( like Harlequin). she had the character state: there is no such thing as writers block, I can't afford to have it. I put 8 hours a day into work, no matter what is happening in the story. if I am stumped, I plot out other stories until I get a spark to finish the one working on. but I work 8 hours a day, every day. this seems to me to be the best way to break writers block myself, continue writing, but on a different story, sooner or later the inspiration to get the other story will come to you.

OH!! Thanks Jaqui. I too love Mercedes Lackeys' Valdemar (sp?) series. :)

Jinx High isn't a Valdemar book. ~g~ but I have read all but Kerowyn's Tale of the Valdemar series. the frustration level of hitting a block and trying to continue on same project gets extremely high, switching to a different project keeps that down, and by not conciously thinking about it you can often get the next piece inspired quicker, the concentration on the blocked project actually can interfere with the inspiration needed getting through. I do tend to have a lot of projects on the works at any one time. get blocked on one switch to another. ~L~ and writing a complete graphics suite for the linux os is a huge project that often has me blocked. oohhh, programming is a form of creative writing, and some of the broblems in creating the final script are completely transferable. ~l~ I should know, one project is a novel also.

Oh... I know Jinx High isn't a Valdemar book :). It was you mantioning the author lol. There is still quite a few of the Valdemar series I haven't read. An accident my huband and I were in left us rather broke. I only got to buy Keeper of the King by Nigel Bennet and P.N. Elrod because it was a hard cover selling for $3.95 :D

gee that kind of like me buying borlands builder for 2.56 thousand dollar development environment that was in a thrift store. ~g~ my wife Stormrage flipped, she couldn't beleive I got that good a deal.

Lyrra's suggestion/question (#11) is a good one.

I've had to do technical manuals for GE locomotives (talk about dull!) and we were told to write for an eighth grade level of comprehension. I sometimes carry that mentality over when writing tutorials (it's always difficult how much to cover and how much to assume the reader knows).

As for the "fiction" side, I could really us help with dialogue. My problem seems to come about when I have to switch between characters. I can do all the dialogue for one character but when I have to shift and think like the other character I break my rhythm.

@Jaqui, LOL, writing program code is very much like writing a novel, you need to know how it ends before you write the beginning! (Or else you end up with spaghetti!)

:)
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