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| Fiction: Announcing: The Fiction Workshop |
Posted by
Britva on Sunday, March 21, 2004 - 05:07 AM PST
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
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Average Rating : 4.3
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| Announcing: The Fiction Workshop | Login/Create an account | 15 Comments |
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| | Comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content. |
Re: Announcing: The Fiction Workshop
by Anya on Mar 21, 2004 - 06:55 AM
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I love how there's a forum for Fiction Writers now. I've went quite a ways on my writing in general and I think that beginner writers can benefit from the forum. Kudos to the ones who came up with the idea and implemented it!
Blessings,
Anya
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Re: Announcing: The Fiction Workshop
by feralucce (Iwouldliketokillyou@gofuckyourself.com) on Mar 21, 2004 - 11:29 AM
(User info | Send a Message) http://feralucce.webhostingpal.com/ | Actually, your point on reading it out loud may not be clear to most.
Reading in your head actually used a single part of the brain. This part of the brain excells at filling in the blanks and correcting the errors that we make. Basically, it features a filter that makes it easy to miss mistakes.
Reading the piece out loud uses a different part of the brain. You will find that when you read something out loud, this part of the brain will tend to catch the mistakes that the other proof reads missed.
This has been another trivial piece of information from the Patron God of Trivial and Useless information.
Feral |
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Re: Announcing: The Fiction Workshop
by daria_4 (-) on Mar 26, 2004 - 05:40 AM
(User info | Send a Message) | Another thing that helps is to read your story backwards... not completely backwards word for word, but starting with the last sentence and so-on until the beginning. It doesn't help with overall flow and such, but it does help catch the smaller things--grammar or spelling that even the computer doesn't catch (things like using "you're" where you should have used "your" or typos that caused an actual word not picked up as spelled wrong, but making no sense).
Reading it backwards like that forces your brain to look at individual sentences and doesn't let it "fill in the blanks" on poorly worded sections that you may have previously thought were clear and/or concise. |
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Re: Announcing: The Fiction Workshop
by EyeCandyRayce (aesaraymondsdottir@yahoo.com)
on Mar 22, 2004 - 09:02 AM
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http://www.raycedesign.com/eyecandy/
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I have a suggestion / comment. I can tell you now that it won't be long before people start commenting to comments made on their own story. That is going to be a hard rule to enforce or remember as more new members submit work and this information post is lost to the archives.
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Re: Announcing: The Fiction Workshop
by Britva (britva1066@yahoo.com) on Mar 22, 2004 - 10:40 AM
(User info | Send a Message) | | Yes, I can delete the posts, and I will rule over my forum with an iron fist.... mwahahaha. Also, as soon as stuff starts getting posted, I'm going to throw in a link to this article as the first post in the forum. |
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Re: Announcing: The Fiction Workshop
by Comedian (eccentrically_long@yahoo.com)
on Mar 22, 2004 - 11:00 AM
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http://http://www.com.sex
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The light streamed in through the egde of his vision, eyelids awaking him in red, purple-veined orange light, letting him know the time had come to finally roust himself and get to the job. He kept his eyes closed as he intuitively moved from the bedroom of the trailor to the kitchen sink, half a lid open as he reached for the obscenely-detailed shot glass he knew to be in the first shelf of the cupboard, the remnants of some foul whiskey retained, like dry, gold molasses in the bottom ring of the glass. He filled it from the open bottle on the counter, again, the intuition fading momentarily as the rum spalshed the open cut on his hand and he winced, the sharp intake of breath the smell of air from the ashtray on the windowsill above the sink. He let the glass sit for a moment, then opened another cabinet, one eye fully open now, the other nearing its point of splitting to see the grotesque blue-light of early dawn outside. He didn't dare look at any of the clocks in the place; he knew god wasn't awake yet, and neither the birds.
In the cabinet were the pill bottles and pharmaceuticals, multivitamins, spices, and other neccessities of the bland survival of mediocre health-care and unfinished meals. He left all the caps off of the bottles, except for the spices, which were a damn task to clean up when you fumbled and knocked their bottles over, and found three that seemed more palatable that morning. From the edges around the rims he could tell what kind they were, and he systematically emptied parts of the bottles into the shot-glass, watching drops of the rum splash hapahazardly on the fake marble-plastic counter that lined the kitchenette. Two vitamins. Three advil. Half an oxycodone. He looked at the shot, staring up at him, the surface rippling slightly as a car drove by on the dirt road outside, the quivering shapes of the six pills staring up at him, not yet dissolving in the acrid stench of the old rum. He picked it up, murmured a toast that sounded much clearer in his mind, and drained the shot.
See, the problem with that is that it's waaaay too flowery. Stephen King would be proud of the writing, but it's just too wordy. It reads like a Hollywood movie though, which is good, because successful writers only get more successful when books become movies. Because, as we all know, a mjority of the American public is aliterate.
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Re: Announcing: The Fiction Workshop
by chameleon on Mar 28, 2004 - 10:06 AM
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Oh, this is great! What a nice thing to see after I log on for the first time in months! And I was going to post more fiction too... Ah well, I'm sure I'll get over it sooner or later.
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Re: Announcing: The Fiction Workshop
by MystryssRavynDarque (A1Mandi04@aol.com)
on Mar 30, 2004 - 09:30 AM
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http://kauai.vibechild.com/~amanda/
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This is a really good thing to do, but I am feeling a little down about it too. My writing isn't that grand I know, and I don't submit any fiction, but this makes me fear submission of a fiction story more now. People do need criticism on their work so they can improve, I understand that fully, but I feel as though this could possibly make people feel a little inadequate. We don't want garbage submitted, and it usually gets dumped out anyway, but hardcore criticism? Scary.
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Re: Announcing: The Fiction Workshop
by callei on Mar 30, 2004 - 11:11 AM
(User info | Send a Message) http://http:// | | actually we dont get much fiction. most of what we get is autobiographical stuff done in a tabloid style. I call them diary entries because that is fundimentally what they are. we get maybe 6-10 pieces of actual fiction a year (barring porn and virgin porn). |
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Re: Announcing: The Fiction Workshop
by Britva (britva1066@yahoo.com) on Mar 30, 2004 - 04:37 PM
(User info | Send a Message) | | I'm not sure what you mean by "hardcore" criticism, but I assure you, getting a story workshopped is not scary. In fact, I've always enjoyed the process. That said, it's really not for everyone. As callei implies, most of the people sending "fiction" submissions in are mainly looking for sympathy/validation of their personal lives. These are not the kind of people who want to get their work criticized in any respect. However, if you're serious about improving your writing skills and producing some publishable fiction, then you should definitely send something in. Once we have a few examples up, I think you'll see that a fiction workshop is not such a scary thing. |
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Re: Announcing: The Fiction Workshop
by pandoras_choice (-)
on Mar 30, 2004 - 04:38 PM
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This is a wonderful idea, and I know I could benefit from it greatly, but I do not have email. Is there any way for me to get around this issue or shall I watch everyone else's progress and learn from that?
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Re: Announcing: The Fiction Workshop
by Britva (britva1066@yahoo.com) on Mar 30, 2004 - 09:49 PM
(User info | Send a Message) | I suppose that there are a few ways we could get around it, but first let me say this. I'm not sure how you can access this website but not have an email account. Is there a problem with signing up at hotmail or yahoo? Both sites are free and fairly reliable, and getting an account with either of them is just as easy as getting an account here.
If you really can't email, though, I think the best way to do this would be to submit your story to the articles section with a note saying it's for the fiction workshop and Devin or callei can forward it to me. |
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Uh oh.
by Dolorosa (SixOfSwords@IU.zzn.com)
on Apr 13, 2004 - 12:21 AM
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Alright, cool...I can understand the neccessity, and it seems like a really good idea all around. However, I think I'll refrain from sending submissions of my own this way for my own reasons...props for the idea and good luck in the execution.
No genre and no killing gets me a bit raw around the gills, but who am I to disagree with something that will probably work?
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