Once again, I find myself wishing we had another category in the Creative Writing section of the forum. Along with Character Development, Plot Development and Setting Development, we really need one for Style Development. For example, I ran across this thought earlier today and wanted to share it ...but where? The writer then began to discuss ways to circumvent this stylistic problem, in order to avoid saying things like 'he was sad,' or 'I was angry.' I came hareing over here to start a discussion on this thought ...and came to a screeching halt. There really isn't a specific place on the forum to share and discuss these kinds of issues. Issues like the effect of dialogue versus exposition on a piece of writing. Or whether it's best to use short paragraphs, long ones—or a mix. How do you deliberately increase the pace of a story, or deliberately slow it down? When do I 'tell' and when do I 'show?' How do I get readers immersed in my story? Sticking these kinds of questions into Character, Plot or Setting Development isn't quite right—because stylistic issues affect all of these categories. And they're not 'Word Mechanics' questions either. They are questions related to Style. HOW do you effectively present your stories, poems, etc. Stylistic issues are basic writing issues and are important for writers to discuss, but unless they get slotted into 'general writing' which contains all sorts of OTHER stuff as well, they get lost on the forum.
Only Daniel can add new categories actually that's not strictly true... i can, i think, but I'd rather not accidentally blow the site up while our lord and master is away For the moment much as it pains me to say it..put threads like that in General Writing... when i work out how I'll look at creating some prefixes in there for common types of thread so we can easily find and move them later (ETA well what do you know there's already a style prefix in general writing - so just use that)
Yeah, that will do for now. Thanks, Moose. "Accidentally blow the site up" ? I shouldn't laugh, but I just did.
