I read a recent thread relating to characters going through negative experiences and potential negative effects on readers, the need for trigger warnings for readers and including contact details in the book for anyone affected by the contents. The thread also led onto including trigger warnings in submissions to publishers/editors. I was wondering what the protocol would be on this forum for a reader who believes their work may be questionable in it's content?
We don't have requirements - as such* - though many people do include these things in their posts. We ask that posts with explicit sexual content be posted in the erotica subforum (even if you don't think it's necessarily erotica) simply because that subforum has an age-restricted entry. If you think your story contains something that is worthy of such a warning, just include it prior to the actual text of the work in the original post. * Here's my very unpopular opinion: I'm not on the trigger warning bandwagon. I'm just not. I would never stop anyone from including them, but I'm not going to go down the road of requiring them save for those things that enter into legal issues, like explicit sexual content, etc. Just throwing that out there in case it ever comes up in the future.
So the grim details of murder or military/criminal torture. Or suicide in the state of being mentally tortured by life, (no matter how dark it is for the writer to capture and deal with their own thoughts.) wouldn't then put the piece into the horror catergory. It would still fall under a "normal" genre and add warnings as the writer see's fit. It's jst a lot of my inspiration comes from my dark suey, homy side.
If you want to employ warnings, I'd suggest putting them in a labelled spoiler tag at the top of the post, so that people who don't want to be spoiled on content don't have to see them, but people who are more leery of sensitive content can still check behind the spoiler. I've done that before.
[ spoiler = title for the spoiler ] (content you want under the button) [ / spoiler ] ^ that with no spaces inside the brackets should look like this: Spoiler: title for the spoiler (content you want under the button)
Correct. As shown above you can manually create the BBcode: [spoiler] here are my trigger warning tags.... [/spoiler] Or you can use the button that is at the top of any reply/post box:
