Just for fun I thought I would pop by and share a little tid-bit of my day with you. Today I had my first hour and twenty-five minutes of Creative Writing from a University's POV. All I can say is.... THANK YOU WRITING FORUMS!! The syllubus for the class is chuck full of workshops where we are required to review our peers' work. Since I've been on here, I've really come to enjoy doing that, so this semester should be a piece of cake (Not to mention a lot of fun ) I might even suggest this website to my professor, see if I can get some extra credit out of it or something :redface: Has anyone else had an experience like this? Where being an active participant on WF.org has helped you later in ways you never would have guessed? Please share!
I"m taking the creative writing elective CRW2100 (P.R./Crim major, but I still take writing classes when I can), same experience!
I don't know how common my experience is, because Writing Forums has helped me develop my views toward writing rather than my writing ability itself. Does that make sense? I've been writing since fifth grade, so I have more than ten years' experience behind me. I have not only written stories and a couple novel attempts, but I have written creative nonfiction, a scientific paper (for a class at MIT, not published in a journal), and numerous reports of the sort where you do research in the library and in books and through your own analysis and then you write it all up. In other words, my writing ability appears to be quite strong, both evaluated on its own and evaluated against most of my college-age peers. But the attitudes and information I see here are great. Seriously. Where else could new want-to-be-writers get advice from folks like mammamaia and Cogito, who've been writing and tutoring fledgling writers for years? Where else can new writers exchange PMs with experienced script and story writers to work out plot snares and ask about formatting? And as for our "General Writing" room... wow. I mean, wow. We have threads asking how to make journeys interesting, how to do research on fighting styles, how to create a plausible future, how to work with faster-than-light tech in such a way that the reader can believe you. How to make a villain complex, how to show a hero gaining experience. And the off-site resources are just as good. Limyaael's rants, for a start. Writer Beware. Duotrope dot com. Deanwesleysmith dot com and the Freelancer's Guide at kriswrites dot com. I mean, if you want to know "How can I make a living as a writer?" you'll find few better sources than the Freelancer's Guide, which goes through everything from how to set a budget and track expenses to how to set a schedule to when to quit your day job, and the Myths of Publishing by Smith, which (among other things) shows how erroneous it is to claim that only a few writers make a living off their work alone. We have a library's worth of knowledge here. That doesn't mean that everything you see here, every opinion, is right, but by reading people's opinions you can get a better understanding of the situation. And by helping other people get a handle on their writing, you get a chance to see how your writing might also be improved in one way or another. So it hasn't helped out with my writing in the conventional sense. But it has given me a lot to think about, and that has made a difference in my writing goals and my own confidence.
Good for you! I have to say, when I'm lost for inspiration, I often come and browse on here, I nearly always find something to get me on the right track again.
