Young Writers Society

Welcome to Squills, the official news bulletin of the Young Writers Society!

What will you find here? Tons of interesting news about YWS, including but not limited to: articles about writing, art, and the world of humanities; interviews with YWS members; shameless plugs; link round-ups; and opinionated columns.

And where will all of this come from? Take a look at our fantastic creative staff!





Of course, our content can’t come only from our staff. We also depend on you to help keep Squills successful. You’re all a part of a writing community, after all. If you’re interested in submitting to Squills, pop on over to the Reader’s Corner to find out how you can get involved by contributing an article or participating in other Squills activities. You can also subscribe to the Squills Fan Club , or PM SquillsBot to receive a notification each time a new issue is published!

Well, that’s all I have for now. So, what are you waiting for? Enjoy!

1. Revving Up for Narevwrimo
2. August 2015 Review Day Interview
3. Adventures in Writing
4. Confessions of a People Pleaser
5. New Arrivals
6. Shameless Plugs
7. Subscribers

REVVING UP FOR NAREVWRIMOwritten by BlueAfrica < PM: >

Get ready, Squills fans! In addition to being the day the Hogwarts Express departs from Platform 9 ¾, this September 1st is YWS’ first-ever NaRevWriMo: National Review Writing Month.

Like the well-known NaNoWriMo , RevMo is a month-long challenge based on how many reviews you can complete in the thirty days of September. However, unlike NaNo--a month of literary abandon, wherein wordcount is all that matters--RevMo participants must complete 50 high quality reviews to win. How can you be sure your reviews are high quality?






Winners can sport a special winner’s avatar when the month is over, and their names will be changed to a new color in October. Participants can use the following avatar starting on September 1st to identify themselves to fellow participants.



Further details about the event can be found by clicking the image below.

AUGUST 2015 REVIEW DAY INTERVIEWwritten by Elysium < PM: >

Hello! Elysium your community reporter here and I interviewed YWS users @Tuesday, @Carlito, @TheSilverFox, and @cleverclogs. Let's get started!



Tuesday: What I plan to do before Review Day is practice. I mean, like before hand (if i have the time or whatever), and write reviews. Also I pick music for reviewing; it takes some time to do so but not the point.

Carlito: 1. How do I prepare?
I try to help with organizing the team and getting everyone motivated and pumped up. Personally, I check and see if I owe anyone reviews because those will be at the top of my list come review day. I also look and see what's happening in the green room. I set a goal for myself of how many reviews I'd like to accomplish with the time I will have to devote.
(Making sure my fridge is well-stocked helps too.)

TheSilverFox: I usually make sure to join one of the Review Day teams as soon as I can. It's always fun to form a team and help to develop it, and I try to help as much as possible along the way. For the most part, I like to talk to my fellow teammates and vote on things such as the team's name, captain, and so forth, provide words of encouragement, and generally get everyone excited for Review Day. Other than that, I don't do much; I just wait eagerly for when Review Day arrives, and then do as many reviews as I possibly can when it arrives.

cleverclogs: I don't really do anything to prepare, really. Any preparation I do is mental, so I can get ready to write those reviews.



T: I shall be represent The Philly Phi (not really the name)

C: I am proudly representing the team of Gamma.

TSF: I am representing team Zeta!

cc: Team Phi for the win!



T: Well.. I never truly review anything from the green room FOR SHAME ON ME ahem.. but if it was the last thirty seconds and I was in the mood to review something from the green room, I would try to review poems- as many poems as I could try. No novels since I cannot review those for the life of me no offense cause all of them are lovely

C: If I wasn't too burned out from reviewing yet and if it was a work I thought I could provide some help with (so a short story or novel part), then I would go for it! I know I wouldn't be able to complete the review in time, but at least the green room would be 100% cleared!

TSF: Wow, that's a tough question. On one side, I usually spend far more time doing a review (around 10-15 minutes or so, although I've spent closer to 20-25 minutes on some of my best reviews), so I wouldn't be able to say or cover much in 3 minutes. On the other side, it would be absolutely wonderful to clear out the Green Room entirely (And not just for the glory of reviewing the very last work in there. I guess I would probably try to find some sort of middle ground; for instance, maybe I would do a short review over the general aspects of the work itself during those crucial three minutes, and perhaps come back later on to discuss more specific aspects of the work. Yes, that's probably what I would do.

cc: Leave it be. There's no way I can write a crappy review in that time, much less a good one. Hopefully, someone else is already on it.

Thank you all for your time everyone, and happy review day! That's all for this edition of Squills!

ADVENTURES IN WRITINGwritten by BlueAfrica < PM: >

Fear not, Squills fans! The end is in sight. As the fourth of five parts to my character-relationships series, this week we’re going to talk about the role friends play in the life of your characters.

Support. Where family or romance might be lacking, friends can make up for it by offering your character the support she needs. Friends are frequently the most supportive people in our lives, perhaps because we choose each other rather than being thrown together by shared DNA. There is no obligation; we come to love each other through similar interest and the experiences we forge together. If your character has a difficult, abusive, or absent family, friends may be the only source of love and support the character has. Harry Potter is an obvious example. With his parents dead and the Dursleys generally cruel-slash-neglectful, his friends are the most important people in his life.

Different experiences. While the family first develops your character’s ideals, friends are integral to the overall formation of these ideals. Immediate family tends to share similar experiences (understandably, since parents and siblings face early life experiences alongside the character). Friends, however, can come from all different backgrounds. For example, I am an oldest child, Catholic, from a middle-class background and a family where the parents are still married and all children are a result of that marriage. But I have friends who are middle, youngest, or only children; Protestant, pagan, or atheist; and from families where the parents are divorced or absent. Thus, my friends’ different experiences, different beliefs, and different family situations have given them somewhat different ideals than the ones I grew up with. By interacting with each other, we further inform each other’s ideals, which results in a different worldview—if only slightly—than those of our families, even though our families were our first influence.

Furthermore, friends of different races, genders, and sexual orientations can give your character insight into life experiences he might not get himself. The question then is: Is your character the kind of person to learn from these life experiences or not? The different experiences his friends offer can only inform his worldview if he’s open-minded enough to let them. He might be like Artemis Fowl, starting off a criminal mastermind and becoming the kind of person who does good in the world. Or he might be like Javert, who commits suicide because he simply can’t accept the fact that a man cannot be a thief and a good person.

False friendships. I hate to end on a rotten note, but I want to say a word about false friendships. I don’t mean the “frenemy” kind of relationship that TV shows often like to pretend are the only kind of friendships women, in particular, have.

(I resent this stereotype because my friends are awesome.)

I’m talking about the fact that some so-called friends—just like some families or romantic partners—can be emotionally abusive. In such friendships, one of the people involved mooches off the other, pushes her around, eats away at her self-esteem, or manipulates her into doing things she doesn’t want to do.

(With children, this can take the form of one child threatening, “I won’t be your friend anymore!” if the other will not do as requested.)

Reading this, you might think, “Well, why would you be friends with someone like that?” But abusive friendships are just as hard to break away from as abusive romantic relationships and abusive family situations and are endured for many of the same reasons: a sense of worthlessness, a fear of being alone, and so forth.

That doesn’t mean that every imperfect friend is abusive and horrible. Even a good friend is bound to have some flaws. Case in point: Liv from Bride Wars. While her friend Emma’s fiancé considers her a bad influence and Emma at one point upbraids her for being too controlling, in the end Emma realizes that she can learn something from Liv. Yes, Liv is the take-charge type—to the point of being controlling and selfish. But she stands up for herself (and her friends) in a way that Emma has never been able to. Although Liv makes mistakes, she teaches Emma that it’s okay to be selfish once in a while: do things for herself, turn down requests from other people, and have fun. But I mention abusive friendships because people tend to forget that such “friendships” exist. Hollywood likes to portray two types of friends—the perfect, flawless friend who never wavers in her devotion and support or the “frenemy” who is obviously a huge jerk and not treated like a friend at all (as opposed to an abusive friendship where the victim feels that the abuser really cares about her). While it’s okay to have friends like these for your characters, not all friendships in a story should be this way. Your characters’ friends should be as developed, flawed, and human as the other characters.

Come back next week for the final article in the series: the role of antagonists!

CONFESSIONS OF A PEOPLE PLEASERwritten by Skydreamer < PM: >

Warning: If you are a people pleaser, things are about to get real.

Well, I can't speak for all people pleasers, but I know that for some of us, it's not really as much about "pleasing people" as it is about "protecting ourselves" in a way. We just don't want to get on people's bad side, a lot of us are timid people, we are not ones to start arguments, and especially with outsiders or people we don't know, we dont like conflict. And even with our family members, we may have arguments or even start them, but we don't like the conflict, overall. We're usually the person who is the first to apologize, or the first to admit wrong, or at least we're the first to feel guilt about the situation or conflict. These are some of the personality traits that (some) people pleasers have. I know for me, I have those traits. I don't like conflict, at all. I don't even like to watch shows that have conflict in them, but I still do anyways. However, conflict affects me more so than it would someone else. And that's the problem about people pleasing, it comes at times from your personality type. In my personality type (INFJ) it says I don't like conflict. So I'm going to try to avoid it at all costs.

That said though, there is no excuse for allowing people to trample all over you. One of the most important things I learned during my changing period, is that at the end of the day, it matters who you know you are, and it matters what you think of you, and what your family thinks of you, and how you and your family are. What other people think of you really just doesn't matter. It only matters when you let it affect you. And even when we think it does matter, we're not going to see everyone at the end of our lives, bothering us about how we said something to them, or the fact that we didn't do something for them. We should impact people in a positive way, but not where we are bending our backs for them. I know that sometimes I ended up worrying for hours about things I never had to worry about at all. "Did that person like what I said?" "Did I do this right?" When later on, I find out that it really didn't even matter! I wasted a lot of my time trying to make sure I was on people's good side, while I could've been investing in positive thinking, to better improve how I interact with people in the first place. If you always worry about what you're going to say, or you're on ice with what you do, you tend to be less you. That doesn't mean you should just say whatever or do whatever, but you shouldn't be worried about trivial things. Because, while I was trying to please other people, I was putting myself down more and more, and it caused me to have really bad self-esteem.

I'm also someone who loves people, though, as in it's part of who I am, I love to talk to people, I love to get to know people, be around people, haha. So maybe my love for people has caused me to mistaken loving people with pleasing people. But they are two very different things, when you love someone, you're not always going to please them. For instance parents (they're the best example to use hehe), love their kids but they don't always please them, and let them do whatever they want. We may not like that our parents put boundaries on us, but for the most part (and with good parents) they are for our well-being, or at least they were thought up in our interest. And also, kids love their parents a lot; they don't always do what their parents want them to, but that doesn't mean they don't love their parents. So, it's not for the sake of loving someone, that you would bend over backwards for them, or you would walk on ice with them. And I want to add that a lot of times people think people pleasing is just doing nice things for people, but as I was saying before, with how I worried about what I would say to people, you can also be a people pleaser just by not wanting to ever offend anyone. But, whether or not you want to, at one point you're probably going to offend someone, so why not choose to stand up for something you believe in? (Being informed about it that is.) The restrictions people pleasers put on themselves is just no good.

You can't be a people pleaser and be a leader. Leaders are supposed to respect those they are leading, and respecting someone is not doing everything they want or always siding with them. In fact, that's probably the opposite of respecting someone, respecting someone means telling them when they're wrong and when they're right. Respecting someone means putting them on the same level as you, and if you tell someone that they're right all the time, you're kind of not respecting them, you're patronizing them, because then you're saying they don't need to know when they're wrong, but they should know when they're wrong, just like they should know when they're right. People should know when the clothes they pick don't fit them well, and when the clothes they pick do fit them well. And I found that as a people pleaser, sometimes I would automatically agree with people about things, about what they wore, about what they liked, all these different things. When in reality (and I usually later realize this) I should've disagreed. Now a days, though, thankfully, I've learned to respectfully disagree with people, and say what my opinion on something is, because there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The reality is, it's better to be honest with people about your thoughts. A lot of times though, we confuse honesty with being rude. Good honesty isn't rude, it's straight-forward, but respectful and kind. "Oh, I don't think that's a good color on you, maybe try this?" Or "How about we try this instead, I think this will work really well?" Or "Hmm, I see your point, but I have to disagree, this is my opinion." There's always a way to do the right thing, in a good way.

Now, back to the confessing, I was a people pleaser mainly because I wanted to get people to like me at a point, but that backfires, because people tend to see you as weak when you do that. (Which isn't good, and if they do they aren't nice.That said, it happens.) Now of course I'm not saying you should be over-confident, and not put people's interests into consideration, I'm saying you should always consider yourself and your interests as well, and that we should never ever change our aspirations or what we want to do, or change our mind about something important because of what somebody else thinks. You have to make up your mind on who you want to be. So my biggest confession would be that yes, I was afraid of rejection, I was afraid of being alone, and that's the main reason I was a people pleaser, I just wanted people to accept me. But people should accept you for you being yourself, not you being who you think they want you to be. And, one thing my mom keeps reminding me of that Joel Osteen said, is that, there's going to be 25% of people who may automatically not like you, and nothing you do will change that, but there will be 25% of people who will after time change their mind about you once they get to know you, and 25% of people who will be indifferent and 25% of people who will like you instantly, and nothing you do will make them unlike you. (Something along those lines) and that's quite true (although I like to be positive and believe I can change 50% of people's minds about me). There will always be those people who will love you no matter what, and those people who will love you not for what you do for them, or even how you act around them, but for who you are. People who you don't have to work hard to be with. People who you don't have to please. Hold onto those people, and never ever let them go. Those people are your "tribe" love them, and enjoy your life.

With that said, don't spend too much time with people who make you feel like you have to earn their presence. People who make you feel small, who pull you down. You might have to let go of some friends or people who don't make you feel comfortable or just tell them of this. Because you can't be close with those type of people and not be a people pleaser. Also, even if you're in a work/job situation where your boss or co-workers are giving you extra work to do unfairly unless you absolutely cannot, fight back! And possibly quit, doors will open for you with patience and hope! You cannot allow yourself to be in those negative situations.

I want to end this article with some of my biggest lessons from my time of people pleasing, first, people don't impact you unless you let them, an insult only hurts if you take it personally. Secondly, it's good to remember that we're all human and everyone has problems. And finally, it really doesn't matter what other people think of you. You do you, boo. Keep growing, keep learning, keep being yourself as you figure who that is in your journey. Don't let what other people think hold you back. Help those in need, spread love, shine light, but do that for the right reasons, and not for people's approval. : )

Have a great week! Peace!

NEW ARRIVALS
written by BlueAfrica < PM: >

Take a moment to welcome this week’s newest members to the site!

@ParanormalMyth is ready to make some friends! Head over to the Welcome Mat to say hi .

@Noldor has written a short humorous poem about school. Click here to read it .

@kadeelynwrites has a poem in the Green Room. Oh no! Read it and send her a review .

SHAMELESS PLUGS

written by SquillsBot < PM: >

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