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@myclipboardismyviolin Those are really great thoughts!  I definitely appreciate your comments.

@faith_blum I feel like in a way, the guilds are too big. In other words, it’s hard to have a tight-knit community because it’s not small enough to be tight knit. Maybe if guilds were smaller (had less than ten people?), there could be more interaction, although that many groups would be hard to handle. I think one problem specifically is that it’s so easy to be anonymous and “perfect” on the Internet. We don’t want to admit what writing struggles we’re going through (or that we have’t written anything in the past month) because everyone else seems to be doing perfectly fine. I don’t know if this would work, but perhaps it’s possible to share our WIPs with each other, so that specific feedback/encouragement/ideas could be thrown around between everybody?

For me personally, writing is not my main focus in life. It’s something I like to do, but it’s not what I’m going to choose as a career, so I don’t put as much time into writing as I do into college, my job, etc. Thus, while I do want to write, I feel like many of the discussion posts are focused on writing full-time, which is something I suspect many of those on the forums just aren’t ready for. I’ve heard lots of things about writing in the little snatches of free time you have in a day, but for some of us, maybe even those little minutes are full.

In other words, maybe forum participation is down because a) people don’t feel safe to share their writing and b) people feel pressured by the seeming “success” of others. I’m not sure if there is a solution to this, but these are just some ideas.

All those things being said, though, there are many aspects of the guilds/forums that I could use in different ways if I was in a different season of life, which I’m sure are helpful for others. I really like the guild story wars, and the word wars have been fun!