*spins around on Words Alike CEO chair* Hello there member, this is Quinn speaking. :)
Anyway, this post is here to explain why we have some of the things we do in Words Alike. Yes, it does help to actually use what we have, but understanding why we do things can often give us a deeper understanding and help us even more! Let's get right into it.
The Newsboard
So if you're here, you either clicked it from my website, or from the newsboard channel. This newsboard has three main purposes outlined. The first being the most common is the quick challenges.
Quick Challenges
These little activities are ways to encourage you guys to write short bits about a theme, or to share parts of your writing. We often have little snippets we really like and this is a good opportunity to remind yourself of those little things. We get caught up in the big "novel" picture sometimes that we forget the small writings we do that are beautiful.
Published Authors
I'm hoping big time that a lot of us here get to publish one day! And with that thought, when the announcement arrives from you guys either popping into the chatroom or one of the writers chatrooms, I would love to share the news with everyone! Publishing is a huge accomplishment and knowing you will get some recognition, at least in the community you were in throughout your writing process is a little heart warming in my opinion. But that's just me. Just remember that we at Words Alike want to support all writers and publishing is a huge step in your writing life. Acknowledgement of achievements helps us stay motivated.
Calls for Submissions
Now, I already wrote a whole post about this, but I'll say it again. Answering a call for submissions can bring you experience, motivation and recognition. Writers often want opportunities like this to take, but they don't know where to find them. That's why this channel is here to announce these calls. You can... also get money from these :eyes:
Bookshelf, Snippets and Critiques
One of the key parts to a writing community is the ability to share your work and get feedback on it. We provide two channels for posting work being the bookshelf for longer writing and snippets for shorter writing that can fit in one Discord message.
Bookshelf work typically gets deeper feedback and more direct edits whilst snippets get comments on if they're liked and general opinions.
At this time, we haven't achieved it fully yet, but we wish to establish a strong critiquing network in Words Alike so everyone gets something back to learn from and we can learn from each other. So keep at it with those critiques and also seek feedback as well to improve yourself.
Topic of the Day. Aka TOTD
This channel comes from both the original "question of the day" and normal writers-chatroom discussions. We wanted a channel to provoke deep thinking and discussions that have long, well thought-out answers that others could reply to.
We believe that having deeper discussions around a topic that could also expand into other smaller topics is useful for a writer. It provides, for one, a sense of community and a network. And two, you can learn new perspectives that can help in your own writing.
In conclusion
We are constantly taking suggestions and brainstorming more writing related things we can add to the server to help you guys out. In the end, the server is a resource. We hope you are benefiting from these server features and keep writing!
