Young Writers Society

For some odd reason, there are a ridiculous number of attempted novels on YWS. I'm not really quite sure why this is, although I do have a few ideas. No matter the cause though, this scourge of unfinished novels must be vanquished.

I know I'm not the only one too. After all, no one likes to read only a small portion of the entire story. You end up reading a work never to find out how it ends.

But before the crusade can begin, ideas to go about it are necessary. Here's a few of my own:

1. Dedicated Novels forum: One forum for all novels. Keep them away from the short stories.

2. More short story contests. The YWS Writing Olympics will be coming up soon (like we did for the Summer Olympics in 2008), and I plan on having at least 3 of the 10 events revolve around short stories.

I think in one of the forums I was at, we could post novels and stuff sequentially, but we would have to post two threads. One of our threads was dedicated solely to our novel, the other thread was a comments thread. I really liked that format. Plus! Less clutter.

I really like Snoink's idea. The only problem is, you ask somebody to comment on your novel, they might end up nit-picking the whole thing. I know I've told authors to post each part individually to make it easier on critics (I was getting a lot of novel requests)

How about splitting each forum? Like, a Fantasy Short Story forum and a Fantasy Novel forum. I'm not fond of just one forum for novels; one might end up looking at a romance when they don't like the genre. (Sorry if that's what you meant by "a forum just for novels")

Rosey ->> I like that idea a lot. Plus that way, if we decide it's a failure, it's easy to go back.

Snoink ->> There will soon be an option to comment on the novel as a whole. My only problem with having two threads like that is it gets kinda complicated. Plus, we've been doing it the current way for five years and that's not something that's easy to turn back.

I love the idea of more short stories. The separate forum idea seems great too, although sometimes I find it kind of hard to categorise short stories. Generally most of them go in Other Fiction.

Yes!

The problem with the novels is that you get "My Novel Part Six" that no one's going to review because they haven't read the previous parts. It just doesn't work. Plus, I love short stories, even if they're in parts themselves.

Maybe encourage people to use Advanced Critiques more often for novels? And I like the short stories/novels forum idea too.

(But, of course, many of them never get past Chapter One anyway...)

I really like the idea of splitting short stories and novels into separate forums. :D A Novels forum would take the place of Advanced Critiques, I would think, and be used much more often.

I'd suggest having a rule against posting incomplete WIPs, but that would be difficult to enforce. Perhaps spliting the Novels forum into two subforums, Complete and Works in Progress, would work. Also, making the cost of all posts in the Novels forum the same regardless of length (I'm thinking something along the line of 1000 points) would act as an incentive to post complete works rather than individual chapters. It'd also get people reviewing more since they'd need the points to post.

I like the thought of being able to keep all the chapters of a novel together. I think a big problem with works in progress getting abandoned (at least when it comes to posting on YWS) is that when you get to the higher chapters you see a drop off in reviewers because no one wants to go hunt down seven chapters in the forums.

I like splitting into things like Fantasy Novels and Fantasy Short Stories.

I've noticed this too. At my school we're doing a Battle of the Bands, and in order to get bands to commit, we have to get them to put in a certain amount of money that they get back once they participate, even if they don't win.

We could do a similar thing. Perhaps have a high point limit in the Novel section. Paying 2000 points to start a story wouldnt be worth it unless you were planning on sticking with it, that way we only get those that are dedicated to being finished and each story is confined to one place, and not spread throughout a forum. 2,000 may be a little high for a cost, but you get the idea.

A downfall of this is that people wouldn't post the novel as much, and it might even become non existant

I just had another idea for the Novels forum that would carry over from the Advanced Critiques: rather than copy-paste entire chapters into the post area, I think it would make more sense to have individual chapters attached as separate files. This way, rather than having a novels being posted with separate topics per chapter, there could be just one topic for all the chapters and critiques. Every time the author wants to post up a new chapter in a current WIP, they simply edit the first post and attach the next chapter, altering the topic's title to announce the update.

I also think having attachments would make it easier for reviewers to review longer works, especially if completed works are posted chapter-by-chapter.

Attaching files would also save authors the hassle of having to go through their work and manually reformat things.

/caffeine-induced rambling

Whatever we do, it has to be simple. Otherwise, it won't work.

I think what I'm going to do is just create separate forums for novels. And to take Rosey's idea, make the novel forums as subforums of the current fiction categories.

But what I really need help with is just teaching younger writers how to write a short story. After looking through the comments over in the fiction discussion thread, it's pretty clear that for whatever reason, kids these days just don't know how to write a short story. They've grown up having Harry Potter read to them at night.

So please, random threads in random places about short stories would be awesome! It could be a listing of your favorites (remember, YWS has a short story database), or some tips on how to write one.

Nate wrote:I think what I'm going to do is just create separate forums for novels. And to take Rosey's idea, make the novel forums as subforums of the current fiction categories.

I like that idea. A lot. I was thinking maybe... Hmm.

This is hard to explain. What if there was filter on the genre forums? Take, for instance, there is a fantasy novel and a fantasy short story in the Fantasy forum. Could there be a way that we click "See Only Novels" or "See Only Short Stories" or even "See All"? Because then, if you don't really care what to read/review, you could see everything, short stories and novels all put together. I think this could work? When one is posting a short/story or novel, there could be a choice by the title or something that says, "Short Story" or "Novel" and you would click whichever it is that you're posting. Then, somehow the magical computer would know to filter or unfilter that piece if someone clicks Filter.

I don't know. Then you wouldn't nessesarily have to have subforums. It could be complicated, though.

-Jared

Complicated is the key word, there. Simplicity is the key for stuff like this. If this isn't simple, not only will it be a pain to code, but it might push people away. Keeping subforums keeps it simple and makes it easy to reverse if it doesn't work.

Rosey Unicorn wrote:Complicated is the key word, there. Simplicity is the key for stuff like this. If this isn't simple, not only will it be a pain to code, but it might push people away. Keeping subforums keeps it simple and makes it easy to reverse if it doesn't work.

+1

Advanced Critiques? I find that, when I'm allowed to download files, this forum is very useful. It may not be a solution, but surely it's a start?