HackerNews is a community of skilled professionals engaging politely with each other. It’s great for entrepreneurs and technical people.
Is there somewhere similar for writers? Especially fiction writers?
Readit NewsReadit NewsIs there somewhere similar for writers? Especially fiction writers?
I was part of a long creative writing course (about 9 months), and our class of 20 formed a bond of helping each other A LOT. Sharing tips, beta reading, posting about prizes, open calls for literary magazines, etc.
In this class, we decided to start inviting published authors to share tips for beginners. We got mostly positive responses. Professional writers would spend about 2 hours with us (online) sharing tips and answering questions. All of them were very transparent about how they write and gave useful tips on how to get published. They said things that would be impossible to learn without talking to a professional author.
So I call you a cynic, as you asked me to, and a wrong one at that.
One is that while there are a lot of things that people will share with you (they often want to share their expertise/craft and be good humans), there are a number of things they won’t share with you.
Two is that when you are starting out you are in a position where almost all information from an experienced artisan is helpful. That can mean you may easily miss what they are not telling you.
This is not to say they are misleading you or hold ill will because the information they withhold from the conversation would not be useful to you anyway, as you are not in a position to use it or be a threat to them.
What I was referring to specifically was inspiration and knowledge of niche events that become the details that bring prose / art alive. These immediately lose their effect if they are reused which is why my friends who are professional writers dedicate an enormous amount of time to research in the hope that these details may jump out to them.
In a lot of contemporary art, a curator's view of work is often hung around a particular piece of research and that must be unique to warrant the attention of the public - my original point was that that research just can't be shared until the work is revealed.
However, maybe to your point, there is a lot of value in a more technical literary HN which encourages meta discussion on the process of writing rather than the content.
Cynics would rather be wrong.
It sounds like a great project for someone who wants to spend the time and energy moderating a forum, slack, discord or what have you. The issue will be gatekeeping "real" and aspiring authors from people who just want a way to @ their favorite author about something. It would potentially be a great place to get advice if people took the time to direct new writers.
As an aside - the podcast Writing Excuses is a great place for new authors to find hours of advice from established authors in several different genres. The show regularly rotates in new guest authors, keeping the topics fresh despite being on their 15th season. Of course like any entrepreneur they have something to sell - their books and writing workshops - but for all that their advice is sincere and useful. https://writingexcuses.com And there is allegedly a discussion forum somewhere on the site although I've never sought it out.
I think the recipe for a good, interests based community is limited moderation, small scale, and a non-profit orientation. Because even once great communities on reddit have been poisoned by their massive growth and ad driven leadership combined with heavy handed, political moderation.
Oddly enough, I have found /lit/ on 4chan to be one of the best communities for discussing books and writing. They are more grounded and passionate than most of the other Chans and while you'll still find the occasional edgy post or nonsense, the censorship free and open community has some brilliant minds engaging there.
Discord has potential, but the constant flow of information and the reliance on typically heavy handed moderation make it just a faster version of popular writing subreddits.
I wish someone could make a cheap and easy shell to quickly make "hacker news" like clones that people could run for given interests, to create communities like this one geared towards other interests.
I think of HN as standing out for having more comprehensive guidelines than most communities, a user base that respects and voluntarily enforces those guidelines, and formal moderation that allows few exceptions to slip through.
We’re lucky that they’re good guidelines and that we have a community that broadly appreciates them, but “limited” is not a term I’d use for the moderation here.
Dead Comment
or...
https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki
Are you sure about this? One of the biggest publishing houses is being sued by the DOJ to stop a merger. Publishing houses have recently started splitting advances into thirds and quarters over 2-3 years. There's an unprecedented quitting of agents, leaving many authors afloat with no rep. Barnes & Noble recently and suddenly changed how they market hardcover childrens literature which will likely sink debut authors.
This was all subjects within the last 2/3 weeks btw.
And for general use of the English language, there's: https://english.stackexchange.com
A corrollary community of writers would be wonderful, though I do think it would likely require the backing of an institution parallel to Ycombinator.
Fortunately, there are many organizations that offer community for writers; most major cities have writing centers such as Richard Hugo House in Seattle, or The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. If you're looking to connect with such a community, these types of places are wonderful resources, though they tend to be offline focused.
I showed her HN, and the level of discourse that happens here, and she was really surprised at the level of discourse that happens here.
If nothing else, maybe someone with some motivation sees an opportunity to create such a community. May or may not involve cloning dang.
While I would love to join a community (I used to use writing.com a ton) of HN but for fiction writers not startup owners plus us hangers on, I don't know if that can be done without a good moderation team.
I'd invest a few dollars into the "clone dang" kickstarter. At the very least he should consider writing a book on fostering communities through tasteful moderation.