What writing sites would you recommend for a writer/editor serious about prose craft?
What writing sites do you avoid?
A few years ago I enjoyed writers.net, but it’s devolved into a social club with an absurdly overcomplicated design.
I’ve seen a few other sites, but posters are mostly high-school kids.
Tips, advice? Thanks–
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
Critters.org is the best critiquing site I’ve found.
Absolute Write is the best for advice on the business of writing.
I’d certainly recommend both sites Chuck mentioned.
It would help if LynnM gave more information. What kind of writing do you do? Romance writers, for example, have a huge help community and the Romance Writers of America, which accepts unpublished writers as members, is structured specifically to help writers learn to be professional. The mainstream fiction world is a very different one. So are the other genres.
In addition, what help are you looking for? Critiques? Tips on character or plot or setting? Short stories or novels? Or are you looking for business info? Agents? Publishers? Self-publishing? When you say writer/editor what do you mean by editor and what info would you want about that? Are you already a professional or still looking to make the breakthrough?
Writing is a gigantic world with lots of nations. Could you narrow your focus at all?
I liked nanowrimo when I was getting started. Changing genres from journalism & short stories to novels meant I needed a major shift in both the method and style I’d been used to.
Nano gave me the discipline of writing every day and at the end of a month I had the basic structure of a novel to work on.
I’m also very fond of Holly Lisle’s site, but it’s changed quite a bit over the years and many of the workshops I did for free are now part of paid courses.
I tried critiquecircle, but it wasn’t a very pleasant experience.
Critiquers would:
[ul]
[li]Incorrectly “correct” my grammar[/li][li]Tell me my story was crap when they admittedly didn’t read it[/li][li]Tell me my story was crap when they admittedly hated the entire genre[/li][li]Take issue with me when I used a word they didn’t know[/li][li]Complain about exposition - they wanted an action scene right at the start or they weren’t interested[/li][li]Condescendingly tell me that if I “wanted to be a good writer” I would do exactly as they said[/li][/ul]
My least favourite critiquers were the grammar unfixers. Some would spend hours chopping up paragraphs, adding apostrophes unnecessarily, inserting weird commas, or telling me that my perfectly correct standard British English was wrong. I wish they had just focused on the plot points or characterisation, but no…
I submitted four stories and critiqued lots of other stories and only received two helpful reviews. It was a waste of time.
I’ve given up on that place and will try critters.
1 Prose craft and technique–applicable to all kinds of nonfiction and fiction.
2 Storytelling craft and technique–narrative nonfiction and fiction.
Thanks for suggestions; don’t care much for the climate at AbsoluteWrite.