Forum Posting Guidelines
The ST team is very, very happy with people’s recent interest in the Tales and Tribulations section of the Forum. Many players are posting inner thoughts, character driven journals or fiction and so on. I am delighted people are using the forum as an outlet for creativity and to earn prestige.
That said, there are a number of things writers and artists can do to make their work as friendly as possible for their readers:
1. Try to write your post, if text based, in a word processing program rather than on the forum itself. This prevents potential loss of work by becoming logged out of the forum while posting. It also allows writers to save their work, rather than having to complete it in a single sitting. An important note: anything other than a single space does NOT translate to the forum. Multiple spaces, tabs, etc. only appear as a single space. Please keep this in mind when composing your submission.
2. Another important reason to use a word processing program is that many of them have features that will flag common spelling and grammatical errors for you. I cannot stress how important it is to edit your work before posting. Save it, walk away from it for at least 5 minutes, then return to it and read it aloud to yourself, SLOWLY. Don’t read ahead or look away from your work. Do not assume you have written what you were thinking – writers often think much faster than they can effectively type and key ideas, words, or punctuation can get lost. Edit your work…please. This includes spelling, grammar, punctuation, paragraphing, tense agreement, format, etc. If you’re able to post online, you’re able to consult a website or book to use as a resource for anything you’re unsure of. Some of us have offered to help people with the editing process. It defeats the purpose of crafting a story or poetry if your audience cannot understand what you’re trying to say because you have too many typos.
3. Don’t be afraid to break grammar or spelling rules to achieve a certain tone or mood for your writing. A good example would be using a certain dialect for dialogue or even throughout the entire piece. If you do “break” a rule, make sure you do it consistently and make sure that the same effect cannot be achieved by something easier for your audience to understand.
4. Write enough. If you’re interested in developing reader interest, give them enough to get them hooked. In prose this is difficult to do with less than 400 words. Likewise, if you find yourself approaching the 2500 word mark, make sure your story is dynamic enough to maintain interest for that length of a post. Shorter and longer posts are possible, but need to be crafted carefully. Please do not compose a story and then hack it into pieces to garner more prestige – the point of ‘Tales and Tribulations’ is creative output rather than bean-counting.
5. Give your audience something fabulous. Hah! I got to use the word fabulous! But seriously, give players, readers, fans, whatever something more than a simple report of your character’s/characters’ actions. For example, if you give a personal reflection of a covenant meeting, make it personal. Don’t just recite what was decided – this will make your story seem like a collection of minutes. Insert observations, snide internal(hopefully) side comments, back story, flashbacks, heavy character perception filters, whatever. Just make it fabulous {giggle, I used it again}.
Thanks for taking the time to read this before your next post.
Sun May 27, 2007 3:15 pm
