Hello, everyone out there! I'm Artpen, and this is my first post on the Writing Forums! I just wanted to start out by saying I am a VERY inexperienced writer. I started when I was about nine years old (I'm eighteen now), but still have a long ways to go before I would consider myself a full-on writer. I absolutely love writing, but also haven't been constantly practicing the craft since day one. Definitely not a grammar expert either. I've mostly written fan-fictions, a few short stories, and exactly one book over the years. All were spontaneous with not much planning except for the book. I wanted to join a proper writing community so I can hopefully be a better writer and also because I am starting to write a book series (spanning five books) as a fun side project. I'm mostly writing it for a childhood friend of mine who came up with the story idea with me when we would play around at the park. Maybe one day I could publish this book professionally or start a new writing project later. I'll see where this passion of mine takes me. Anyway, I thought I would introduce myself even though I will mostly lurk about and ask a few writing questions from time to time. Speaking of which, I'm a little lost on how to do that. Is there a forum just for asking writing questions? I don't know how this website works, so I apologize in advance if this post looks odd. Thanks!
Hi! Don't worry about being an amateur, there's plenty of us here! For specific writing questions, you're going to want the 'Creative Writing' subforum, with sections for 'Character Development', 'Plot Development', 'Setting Development' and such. Keep in mind this is only for specific questions, not for posting large excerpts or whole works of a story. For that, you'll want the Workshop. Make sure you read up on the rules for that first (scroll down for 'posting your writing'). FYI
Welcome to the forums Artpen. Don't worry, as everyone starts off not knowing how to write. It is a skill you can practice and learn with some time and effort. Whilst there may be a little bit of "magic" involved in genuinely great writing (say in the case of Shakespeare), everyone can have a go and that's what counts in the end. The important thing is to have fun, so you keep doing it and build up the experience you need to get better at writing each time you try. Best of luck with your writing and I hope you have a great time here.
Hey Artpen, welcome to the forums! A good suggestion I can give would be to use Youtube and look up Brandon Sanderson's creative writing lectures. Considering you sound like that's the area you want to go down, they will give you a lot of good tips that I wish I knew when I started out.
