Activity

I’m honestly confused as to what the question is asking. The chief asset of the guilds, from what I’ve seen, is that work we post here isn’t visible to the broader internet. (That’s why I’ve been skittish about posting my poetry on here because then it would be considered “published” and thus unavailable to submit to journals. Just a thought. Although that could be circumvented by using Google Docs, but that’s beside the point.)

Also, the writing prompt wars.

The obvious problem is that most of us don’t care WHO we get help from, as long as the writing help is good. From that vantage point, the bigger audience that you can “pitch” problems with your writing to, the bigger chance of you getting actual help, and the more eyeballs you get, the better your odds of getting feedback that is good. It’s Clay Shirky’s inverse power curve – the large amount of low-invested people is what makes social media work. What you’ve done is artificially limit the number of people whom I can ask for writing help and work with. And I hate to inform you of this, but 95% of us come here because we need help with our writing in some form. We’re not here to chat or socialize in “tight-knit” form. Think of this forum more as a workplace than anything else. We learn from each other.

In addition, writing is a tool for expression of interests that we have – it’s not an interest of itself. It’s a tool, not an intuitive investment. For example, fantasy is an interest, because there is a body of knowledge there that isn’t a tool. A tool is how you do something. Web design is a tool for marketing, which is a tool for expression – what do you market? What do you write? We’re learning how to express our interests and our relationship to God. Ultimately, I have a relationship to God that is different than yours, and I am learning how to express and explain that relationship to you in a way that you can understand…a tiny piece of it, anyway. Writing is simply a tool to do that, just like art is. Writing is also not a function of my relationship to God…it’s just how I express it. I could express it using other tools, and I could have an unbelieving relationship to God and still write.

Treating writing any other way is treating it as an idol, which some secular publications do. What I’ve found is that the writing topics tended to approach the writing like the secularists, without addressing the problem I came to this forum to solve – how to express my relationship to God in writing in a way that other people can understand. Now my background makes that difficult because I’ve gone through a lot of things that other people don’t understand, so I’m not blaming the forum for not giving me instant answers. Not only that, but I have unfortunately done a lot of secular writing, too, and the bad forms of “idol-writing” no doubt have hung on somewhere. I came here to try to work on fixing that gap.

I mean, Christ is our mutual interest and the relationship we are trying to express in all of its fullness, despite the fact that it can be difficult to understand. If you wanted to do the “tight-knit community” thing, you’d have to focus on that relationship and get all detailed, and that’s basically a church. I don’t recommend that. I think you guys really really need to let that go – we all have churches at home, folks – and allow this forum to actually work as a writing help/feedback forum, which is what we all came here for, I think. Maybe some of us came to hang out…but that doesn’t seem reflected in most of the general forum content, which seems be mostly introduction threads and “help please”. We’re looking for opportunities and help, not socialization. At least, I was – maybe that’s a bit of projection, but like…yeah. I’ve found people like me.

As for writing questions, don’t we already have that with the emails from Hope Ann? So making a form for it doesn’t seem to make sense. What the guilds seem to be best for is team effort, i.e. the writing prompt wars, obviously. We need things to do as a team. It seems to work best for writing practice to get us going. How about turning the tables and asking each of the guilds how we would handle a particular writing problem? For example, throwing us a story with problems in it and asking how we would fix it? Or asking us how we would critique a particular story. Then we get to compare our answer, and the answers from the other guilds, against the expert opinion. That’s my Number #1 suggestion. 

My #2 suggestion is that we have a critiques forum for stories and poetry that is visible to all registered users – but not the rest of the Internet. That way we get more eyeballs and more feedback on people’s stories. It also helps people who do have shared interests get help from people who are interested. That way we make guild participation more fun and less of an obligation. Clean the guilds down to a focus on team effort and getting us more interaction, more opportunities to write and solve writing problems, and the helping each other out part WILL happen. But ya’ll need to recognize what we came here for – help, practice, learning – and deliver on that. Let’s get some feedback from some experts on some actual writing, and let the community deliver the economy of scale.

Now obviously if the Story Embers staff just wants to hang out with talented Christian writers, that’s great, but ya’know, we got some real problems that we need help with and Christian writing is actually pretty hard. It’s hard to wanna hang out when you’re stuck on your story, and we need to be able to help out with that. In my experience, you hang out after the problems are solved and you’ve found out that you both like writing stories about the secret life of teddy bears. So I think we could go for a bit more emphasis on problem-solving and interactivity within the guilds and else where.