Shall we showcase some of our fiction, poetry, and other work?
You might have noticed the new "categories" feature on this site. I mean this:
What are categories? Categories are types of content -- main Q&A and Meta are the two that all sites share, but the feature allows sites to build other things too -- blogs, question sandboxes, wikis... and even material for critique or just to share. Meta Codidact has a category for site suggestions, for example.
Over on our site on SE, people sometimes posted short stories, excerpts from longer works, and poetry on meta or in chat (sometimes in response to contests or challenges). Neither of those was ideal, but those were the tools we had. I propose that we create a "members' work" category here, where we can post work we'd like to share. If we revive contests, we can tie that in too -- contests entries can be posted in the fiction category and linked from the contest, same as if you were going to post your entry on your personal blog or as a Google doc or whatever.
Two questions:
"Members' work" seems a little clunky as a name. I was originally thinking of "fiction" but that would exclude poetry. Of course it also excludes technical writing, journalism, and other types of writing, but fiction and poetry are the kinds of work people actually posted on the old site. What should we call this category? "Gallery", maybe?
The general license on this site is CC-BY-SA, but authors might want to impose a more-restrictive license for creative works (as opposed to Q&A). We can specify a tighter license for this category if we want. What license would people want to see? It must, of course, permit this site to publish the work. I'm not an expert on licenses. Regardless of license you of course retain the copyright to your work; licenses are about who else can use it and how, not about ownership.
3 answers
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For what purpose would people publish their work here?
If it is for critique, this seems like too public a forum for it. It will look like publication and that will make the work ineligible for publication elsewhere, at least until it is taken down. And if it is taken down, what happens to the comments on it and and reputation gained from the comments?
If it is a form of publication, then this seems like too unregulated a place for it. If there are no gatekeepers, then it would be useless as a publishing credit, while, again, making the work ineligible for publication elswhere.
If is is for vanity, then that seems at odds with the "professional" part of the charter of the group.
Given this, I am not sure I understand the objective.
Speaking of categories, what about a category for Resources. People could suggest books on writing, write reviews on them, and other resourses, and share opinions on their virtues and vices.
Asking general questions about writing is useless if the lessons learned aren't put into practice.
I agree that we need a section for manuscripts. Talking about writing in a hypothetical sense is... talking about writing in a hypothetical sense. Any community of writers that won't critique each others' works will only be so useful.
We definitely need an easily-understood name for these posts. "Words"? "Stories"? "Pages"?
Category Structure
A category for posts that are excerpts from works should be set up in a way that search engines can't see it, so that writers aren't "publishing" in any way. This would make it more like emailing chapters to beta readers than anything else.
I'd also suggest that posts have an expiration date - think Snapchat but for weeks or months - after which the post is deleted.
Targeted Critiques
Asking specific questions about the work will generally get you more useful feedback, and faster. (I'm more likely to answer such a request myself.)
Bringing the Eyeballs to the Text
Posting a bit of text for a critique is useless if nobody sees it. If this is a registered-users-only section, it also makes sense to tie this into reputation. We'd need to discuss how this works.
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