Announcing: The Fiction Workshop Date Saturday, April 20, 2024 - 02:15 AM PST Topic This Website In response to mounting pressure on the editors, declining quality of submissions, and a lack of critical fiction discussion, Shmeng is happy to announce the creation of a new forum called "The Fiction Workshop" which will be moderated by me, Britva. All members, including you big shots who think you are above such things, and you newbies who have never written a story in your lives, are encouraged to send short stories to me. I will select and post those that I think have potential and other members will then be free to comment on and discuss the stories. After a few days, I will post my own critique of the story (hopefully incorporating some opinions from other users) and then I'll post a new story. How is this different from the current Shmeng article submission process? Will first off, my standards will be lower than the articles section. Also, I have some rules for submissions and for the forum (listed below) that will hopefully take things in a slightly different direction. Submissions can be sent to my email address, britva1066@yahoo.com, but please read this whole article before sending anything. Submission Guidelines for The Writing Workshop: Here are the rules for those of you who wish to submit stories to the writing workshop. After each rule I've tried to give a brief reason for its existence, which I hope that will encourage people to actually follow these rules. Of course you are welcome to ask me in advance if you'd like me to make an exception to one of these guidelines, but if you just send me a story that doesn't conform to these rules, I'm going to delete it. 1. Stories must be less than twenty pages, in twelve point font, double spaced. Also, please include your Shmeng screen name. This rule is purely selfish. I find this format easiest to read, and I don't want to read anything that's too long. 2. Stories must be finished. Please no serials or first chapters of novels. Unfinished stories are immune to criticism. Any issues that a critic has with the beginning may get resolved in later installments. Plus, you can't comment on the plot, themes, or character arcs, if you don't know where the story ends up. 3. No genre fiction. This includes stories that could be classified as fantasy, sci-fi, horror, romance, porn, western, or any other genre. I love genre fiction, but each genre by definition has certain conventions, and these conventions can become a crutch for a beginning writer. 4. Nobody gets killed. This is another crutch that a lot of beginning writers fall back on. It's an easy way to create drama, but it's a pretty cheap trick. It's much more difficult and more satisfying to create drama from human interaction. Also, in the real world, very few people solve their problems by killing someone or killing themselves. Real life is much messier and resists such neat endings. 5. Before you send your story in, run spell check once, and read it out loud once (really, out loud). I think this one is pretty self-explanatory. Rules for the forum: 1. All comments must contain constructive criticism or on topic discussion. Any posts that just say "this is great" or "this sucks" or that go off on a tangent will be deleted. Not only do I want to foster discussion, but I want to create an environment where people are comfortable offering criticism. The comments on stories in the articles section are so universally nice, that I think people are afraid to offer criticism for fear of looking like an asshole. The point of this forum is to help people improve their stories, and I hope we can have fun while sticking to that. 2. Authors are not allowed to post in the thread that contains their story. If you think someone's criticism of your story is off base, ignore it. If you need to explain something about your story, or you feel like there's something people aren't getting, then your story didn't do its job. Once you put your story out there, you just have to keep your mouth shut and accept what people say about it. Same goes for critics. You have to take the story as it is. You don't get to ask the author what they meant by this or that; you have to stick with what's in front of you. Multiple interpretations are not necessarily bad. 3. All stories should be submitted to me, not posted to the forum. I will post the stories that I think are well written, have potential, or that I think will foster the best discussion. After setting down all of these rules, I would also like to point out that this is not a fascist regime. If you have suggestions about the workshop or how you think it should be run, feel free to let me know. This thing is only going to work if people participate, and to that end, I want everyone to feel like they have a stake and a say in this online writing community. I'm looking forward to getting your submissions, Britva This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=667