Working on It Suggestion Thread: Creative Writing Group

Hey!

After participating in NAON... or something like that (That writing group where you have to write a certain amount of words a day, with a goal, and get a novel done by November), I thought of this idea and I wanna run by KHVs.

I was wondering if we could make a Discord/KHVs group of writers who just like to write about anything. It'll be casual, no deadlines, no goals to meet (unless the writers want to make one for themselves), and no real person to run the thing. We need a mod to moderate rules/guidelines, yes, but not someone to tell us to write on a daily basis or that we have to keep up with goals and whatnot. It's just a casual writing group.

This is to work with those who have a busy schedule to more of a lay back schedule. Anyone could be writing about anything (fanfiction, original story, essays, etc) and ask for help/pointers, or a review. We can also help each other around writer blocks, give helpful advice to find motivation to write, writer prompts, have voice chats to get to know each other and help one another, read our work outloud, etc.

I am aware that a thread has been made for those who wanna keep writing after Nanao (whatever that was)... But people on KHVs seems more active on Discord. Maybe this will open up doors to help people not be so shy and actually post some of their casual work on the forum to get the writing corner more active.

 

There used to be a writing group here that Chev, Star, Claw, and I ran for a while, but it kinda died off due to difficulty in keeping up with it & it using the old Social Groups add-on (which is unmaintained by the developer)

It is something that I would like to bring back at some point though, and something I've been tossing around some ideas how to bring back. There's nothing concrete yet, but I'm just gonna mark this as "Working On," and I'll try to get a more fleshed out idea in the upcoming months to get some feedback on from other staff and especially y'all, so it's not too ambitious & fits within the scope of what you guys can/want to do :]

 

Ah. But what about a discord group as well on the KHVs server since most of the active members hang out there anyways? I mean, we can post there to get it active, but Discord seems to invite and unite more activity out of people.

Thanks Plums! Lemme know what I can do as a member to help out more.

 

Hey Maka! Thanks for the suggestion. The writings group idea and the specific things you mentioned (like asking for advice etc( was kinda what this thread was supposed to be. Maybe it should have a better title and description so it fits the bill more with what you suggested, (which is open to people who did NaNo and otherwise btw), but I tried to keep it as simple as possible so not to scare off any new comers to WN.

For the thread portion of your suggestion, I can easily edit that a bit so it's clearer what the purpose is XD if you want to give me some pointers I'm all ears (not gonna lie but I only cried a little seeing this pop up since my thread had gotten no replies lol). We can revamp it and fix the wording so it's clear



As for the discord group, NaNoWriMo chat was actually going to become the counterpart chat for that thread I mentioned above, but I changed my mind on doing that because I've been trying to get events (you may have noticed with KN) back on the site.

I also changed my mind on doing that because if people need help with large pieces of writing, the chat is going to be super flooded and someone who is busy may not be able to keep track of the chat and the advice they were getting could quickly get lost, while the thread posts are pretty much forever and they catch up easily.

I wouldn't want someone to feel excluded because they can't keep track of the chat, or because discussion is being split from the chat to the forum etc, and a social group like this would want to make people as welcomed as possible.

I think that a course we could take is fixing the thread, gain interest and if the group is going well, ask the people who join if they would like a chat or not. Because right now as I said, no ones replied at my (possibly bad lol) attempt to group up.

 

In order:

Getting events on the site has nothing to do with an informal and quicker discussion being offsite. On site events: yes. Do them. But make the site environment ENCOURAGE that, not provide a less effective manner. Which you seem to think is the case soo..

Why does everyone seem to think it's going to be large portions and not like... paragraphs? Because the entire time I've been getting the idea of like "Hey guys, I dropped my chapter in the WN- can you help?" and then the quick discussion happens. They complement each other. These two platforms take a dead environment and make it active. That's what happened with the games like mafia and the RPA revival while the spamzone GAINED quality in threads. Before Discord, there was a userbase that wasn't actually talking a lot. Now we have a userbase with a lot of investment in one another and they're rebuilding the supports. LET THEM. ENCOURAGE. YOU NEED THESE SUPPORTS REBUILT because they were all abandoned years ago.

Exclusion will happen if you don't partner the chat environment with the site environment though. Someone will make their own group chat but it won't be talked about or people will be left out on purpose and they'll have to do things the harder way or won't improve as fast.

No one's replied to your attempt at the group up but they replied to this: answer because this catering to what they want.

Embrace your tools, zip-zoom.

 

Okay, so a couple of things I have to say on this;

Threads are great, threads are wonderful. But people seem to be more attracted to active social groups than someone posting in a thread.

And it seemed like when I was in that writing group, I was left out constantly cause how fast the chat went. I was too busy to keep up sometimes. And sometimes it was dead. So people are going to be left out anyways unless people get tagged to check stuff out or update them.

Lemme make this clear; THIS DISCORD GROUP I'M SUGGESTING IS NOT GOING TO REPLACE ANYTHING IN THE WRITER'S NOOK. NOT THE THREAD YOU CREATED, NOT THE CASUAL/RECREATIONAL AREA. IT'S GOING TO REFER MORE PEOPLE TO IT TO ACTUALLY POST IN IT AND HAVE A LOOK.

If people need MORE help to their story then just a quick suggestion, then a thread would be recommended to have posted for everyone to analyze and post their input. However, most writers just want a quick suggestion and sometimes making a thread for those is kind of clutter some and people don't usually look at them

This Discord server suggestion was made with the idea in mind to bring fellow creative writer's together to goof, hang out, link other writers to their stories, be free to get to know so they can get comfortable to critique one another, give suggestions WITHOUT spamming on KHVs, meet each other, and talk more freely.

I mean, when I came back to KHVs, I didn't know who to talk to. The activity was kind of dead anyways EVERYWHERE. Someone referred me to discord, and I made so many friends and rekindled a lot of old friends.

From an RPA standpoint, we're getting a lot more out of our Welcome to Death RP with quality posts and character development by just hanging out, talking, and having fun with the occasional serious discussion of our RP on the discord chat than we would posting in the OOC section. And we still post on KHVs

It's just nice to have a casual place to hang out just for creative writers on KHVs, or anyone who even has a little bit of interest in writing.

And if one mod is busy trying to get something off the ground, choose someone else who wants to write and have time to be in the same group.

 

AYYY ZIP ZOOM

whenichangemyavatarnoneofthesezipzoomswillmakeanysense

 

The answer is never to change it, zip zoom!

I can the point @Calxiyn is trying to make, she tried to breathe live back into a dead section. That is good attempt on her part. However, I largely agree with @Flapjak /Djay on this. You can't disregard Maka's initial idea on the basis it'll further decrease activity on the forum. From the sound of it, the Discord branch would be for informal/quick feedback. I think it'll help build relationships, which is needed imo, keeps the thread less cluttered from unnecessary chit chat.

I like the idea of having an relaxed creative writing group. So this +1 from me.

 

The things is, and a few people have made this point but I want to expand on it, is that there's a major difference between a casual chat and even a casual thread. There are still post guidelines and standards to follow in threads, and as Gabi mentions in her post above, she's gotten into trouble before for posting casual chat in an RP's OOC thread. If people started treating Cal's thread the same way people treat the Discord chats, they'd get into trouble for it. Maka isn't saying she wants to have a discord chat instead of the help-with-writing thread, they're different ideas.

If there were a Discord Writing channel, I could imagine a member who uses mostly Discord (let's say, me, for example, since I only even heard of any of these ideas or threads from Discord lol) joins this writing channel, and, during a casual conversation about some character I made that I like, I mention that I'm having trouble writing a section of story. Then say that Maka links me Cal's thread, and then I'd be like "Oh, neat, I think I'll post there and see what people have to say." This would not take activity away from Cal's thread, it would bring activity to it. Because I don't frequent the WN, because it's mostly dead, so I don't even realize when new things even happen. If there were a writer's channel on Discord, which I frequent, I would not only be more likely to hear about things in the WN, I would be more likely to post there myself, and also more likely to read other people's stories.

And as for the argument that if I want activity, I should post, I'd just like to say that I'm not in the habit of obsessively checking each individual section and subsection of the forum for new things that might interest me. Unless someone I'm friends with tells me of something going on I might like to be a part of (usually telling me on Discord, for the record) I usually only even log on to KHV every couple of days, check my alerts, scroll through the spamzone, and leave. Because I'm not about to spend my time scrolling through sections I don't frequent, just in case something new has happened. A discord channel would be the thing that connects me to the WN; it wouldn't pull me away from it because you can't pull someone away from something they're not a part of in the first place, lol.

It's also been mentioned that the NaNoWriMo chat was also originally supposed to be a lasting thing, which would have worked as Maka's idea, but that it was elected to not keep on this path for the reasons given in Cal's post. However, I think that there's been a major misunderstanding of Maka's idea if people think the NaNoWriMo chat was the same thing. The NaNoWriMo chat was specifically set up to be an accountability system, where deadlines are set and met, word counts are done, there are hardcore planning sessions, people talk details and shop, in order to get projects completed. This is the exact opposite of Maka's idea for a casual, deadline-free, pressure-free, group of friends hanging out and linking their works to each other and spitballing occasionally for ideas. Both of the two pre-existing things that are being held up to Maka's ideas as "we already tried that" are fundemantally different from Maka's idea, and I don't understand how anyone who actually read her OP could confuse it with the help thread or the NaNoWriMo channel.

But anyway, I have to go to work now, and that's a wall post anyway. XD Sorry everyone!

tl;dr

Maka's idea is different from both of the other things it's being compared to, a discord channel would bring activity to the WN and not take activity from it, and if we tried to treat the help thread the way we would treat a Discord thread, we'd actually be in violation of KHV's post standards and would probably get in trouble. Therefore, my vote goes for a discord channel.