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Jul 2023

I started thinking about this recently. What do you think are some of the cultural characteristics of the online writers' community? I tend to pay attention to behavior with my ND brain so I know that every platform has its own subculture, but I noticed that a lot of the cultural aspects are the same from platform to platform. *Some of these might not be cultural, but I've seen a lot of people do them and it makes no sense.

Some elements that I've seen between platforms for the community:

  • You are "smarter" if you have complicated worldbuilding. It always seemed like the more "stuff" you added to your universe, the more "real" you became as a writer. The "obsession" with worldbuilding always seemed odd to be because you aren't allowed to infodump to talk about it.

  • Writers "own" their ideas. Now, I am not referring to intellectual property in the sense of physical work that you have actually created. I am talking about the idea that if you "invent" a concept or a story idea, it belongs to you. It doesn't matter what the idea is, the other person is at fault if they want to use it without your permission.

  • Spamming/promo posts. We all know how hard it is to promote your work. I've just seen a lot of people post "new episode alerts". I understand being excited about a new chapter. It just never made sense to me how some people post random excerpts and I am supposed to be drawn in. It's never made sense.

  • Writers are VERY defensive about their genre. I have mostly seen this with romance writers. If you aren't a fan of romance tropes, you are attacking them. They won't discuss it with you, it's just attacks. I will admit, I don't understand this one because of my autism. But I've seen it happen with multiple genres and it confuses me.

If you have any others, feel free to add them.

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    Jul '23
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    Jul '23
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Well the first part is with a lot of online communities, just because you do more doesn't make you always better.

I am a little confused with the second part, if you write something it is your though you can't stop others from being inspired or created fan works.

Promo post are done wrong a lot there is a way to post excerpts to hook people in, which is done with stories like demon slayer throwing you into a sense of what's going on I need to know more. Your first chapter is supposed to ideally hook people.

Again, this is with a lot of things, people become very defensive when they can't accept correction or criticism.

I do have a question though how do you feel about the gap between Hollywood writers and online writers. I support the strike however the large group I know make fun of them and don't say words of encouragement at all. It's as if they don't realize this is for all writers who want to work like them and create. Fair is fair.

I don't know about culture...but story-wise, a web novel/comic will be specifically curated to have episodes. By this, I mean that even if the chapters are not over, every episode has to end on some sort of cliffhanger to get the audience to click to the next episode. This is very much like how music has changed over time for tik tok (most songs will have one really catchy verse that will be promoted on tik tok so people will get drawn in). This makes it so if it were in a physical format, it would be weird to read. There'd be random cliffhangers, yet the next paragraph already resolves the previous cliffhanger.
A lot of media is slowly changing to fit the short attention spans of people (due to dopamine-addicting sites like Tik Tok). It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it would definitely affect the publishability of your novel/comic.

Writers "own" their ideas. Now, I am not referring to intellectual property in the sense of physical work that you have actually created. I am talking about the idea that if you "invent" a concept or a story idea, it belongs to you. It doesn't matter what the idea is, the other person is at fault if they want to use it without your permission.

I feel like if you created your own world (let's say... Goshrinonlia) with its own rules and whatnot, and someone else creates a story set in Goshrinonlia, then yes, they are technically stealing your idea--unless they give credit, of course. But if it's something as simple as a storyline (ie. enemies to lovers) and (we're pretending enemies to lovers isn't already a thing) someone else takes your idea of enemies to lovers, that's more of inspiration than stealing.

Basically in some communities, if you start talking about an idea and I use the idea - I stole your "IP" even though our stories could be completely different. There are also court cases where writers are fighting for ownership of names or even rights to historical figures because they claim the other writer copyrighted them.

I 1000% support the strike. In my head, the gap is another difference between writer cultures? I know a lot of indie writers think they are "more special" because they're doing it completely on their own and trad writers who think we're all a bunch of untrained kids writing online.

You hit the difference IMO.

Sooo this topic just gave me the urge to make a 'writer's personality test' :stuck_out_tongue: The line in the middle is (your perception of) the average in creators' spaces:

I've added a few axes that depict stuff I've observed about the culture of creator spaces (not necessarily negative) :stuck_out_tongue: (I've also changed your 'defensiveness over their own genre' with 'defensiveness over commonly sneered-upon genres' because I feel like that's what's actually happening as soon as you mentioned romance authors :sweat_02: ) Here's where I'd place myself:

Tag yourself, I say. It'll be fun, I say. :smiley:

I notice that writing communities online are often just like... idk way more feely than other groups of people. I don't know if it's because of the nature of the work, but writers online have all these rituals and obsessions with comforts and stuff. Artists I used to know would just draw their shit and not care about how they felt, but with writers it's all about feelings and that's a little weird.