• ✍️ WORDS ✍️

    Welcome Guest!

  • Words Moderators: deficiT

let's have a writing workshop

so you want it open or kept to short stories and personal essays? and if someone is gonna do a chapter or selection, it should of course still be reasonably polished and ready for presentation.

2 to 20 double-spaced pages would be reasonable? don't see myself shooting for such a long piece, but i'd be willing to read and critique one.

so let's say

07/02 - xxxyyy submits his piece in. critiquing goes from then until we feel we are finished or the end of sunday, whichever comes first.
07/09 - Max submits his piece.
and so on.

but it sounds like some people have already started, and might be finished before the first week of july. if anyone has a piece ready by the 25th, it would make sense to start then.


oh, hydro. Have you been drinking again, my dear?
nope. sober saturday.
 
Last edited:
I've actually been to writing workshops in the past. I just went to the first one for shits n giggles but it turns out the instructor (whom is actually really well-published) was an awesome person and really helped everyone break through their problems and by the end everyone had significantly improved. The main way he taught was to give us assignments that forced us out of our comfort zones and evolve by getting critique about where the weak points were. The first post gave me the impression that this was gonna be short stories only but I'm interested in involving poetry too, even though I suck at it, just because I know there's the real potential to learn something from the criticism and get better at it in the process. This sort of thing is the most effective if we all are willing to embarass ourselves a bit by laying ourselves bare as the writers we are.
 
I'm a bit weary but I'm game for writing verse if the consensus is that it will help us hone our 'craft', as it were.
 
okay i think a week is doable. will be around ten pages, and i chose to stick to themes i have a lot of personal experience with, substance abuse and heartbreak.
my ex once said to me (paraphrased): 'you couldn't write a believable love story if your life depended on it." so maybe i should try my hand at that. but first this.
i called it hotel addiction, what do you guys think of the title?
 
Great title. Were I to be thumbing through the latest Harper, I'd read Hotel Addiction.

Harper
not the Bizarre

I have dreams of being published in Harper. I can't commit to the thread. But I'm in the audience.
 
i may be able to finish the story today, it's practically writing itself. what do i do when i'm done, post it here or email it to all participants?
 
what is a scribd? i am not familiar with those newfangled terms.
oh and i won't finish it today, too tired. but probably within the next 2-3 days. do i get bonus points for being so fast? ^^
 
If the stories/poems/etc are only a couple of pages, why not just post them in the workshop thread?

As for the title, Hotel Addiction, it's hard to say if it works without reading the story first. The title comes after the story, for me, in terms of editing.
 
You are more than welcome to critique works without submitting anything. The opposite scenario . . . not so much.

I wasn't thinking in terms of being a critic, or giving out my lame ass advice. I just like the vibe of the thread, the thoughts posts so far, and want to see what comes next.

Maybe I'll write an essay about this thread....
 
well actually i usually name my stuff after songs that set the mood for whatever i'm writing. so it's named after a song by coerce, great band by the way. i'll try to write another page or two, but first i need some food and more caffeine. the benzo/painkiller combo i'm on combined with only four hours of sleep last night sort of took its toll.
 
xxxyyy, I was thinking something along the lines of Scribd?
it seems you still own anything you upload on scribd, but i'd still be more comfortable with a dropbox--like dropbox.com--we all have access to or just using email. maybe. scribd is overwhelming and i can't quite figure out what it is. maybe it's perfect.

quoting a specific passage in the thread during a critique sounds reasonable, but i don't think pasting their entireties into a post is how we want to get the pieces to one another.

edit:
rtf files look weird. there are visible lines going down and across the page to mark the margins that were used. whether or not we use scribd, let's use pdf files. if you have Word, you can just save it as a pdf. i imagine a lot of the other text editors can do the same. if you can't figure out how to make a "print-to-pdf" file, scribd was nice enough provide a link to a free source... pdfforge.

adobereader is free too. you can highlight and copy text using it.
 
Last edited:
Dropbox is a great idea because everyone who you sign up (via referral email) gets an extra half gig of space.



Should be a bit of fun to see each other fighting over potential subscribers.

=D

Side Note:

It's interesting how possessive I immediately became of the rather rough outline I managed to write yesterday. I'm on day three of klonopin withdrawal and using a shit ton of neurontin to cope until Thursday when I start the lengthy taper ahead; I've nothing but time on my hands. Yesterday I used 5 rapid drinks as well and the the thing just danced its way out of the mind through the fingers and onto the screen. Theoretically, I should have been bed-bound, catatonic and nonfunctional. Weird. Hopefully I can milk more out of extreme duress. /tangent. ;)
 
god, i planned on writing something somber and melancholic and it turned darker and darker the more i wrote. now 3/4 done, i'm not even sure if i should post it here. people may think that mandatory shock treatment may be a good thing for me.
depending on my drug intake, will probably finish in the next 1-3 days.

just ingested 10mgs of alprazolam, 100mgs of clorazepate and 45mgs of midazolam. let's see how that affects my creativity.
 
Last edited:
i can play if the submissions aren't too long or are poetry. i am a plus one mace.
 
Top