/r/shutupandwrite

The main forward-facing community of SU&W (and probably the reason you've come to this document).

Rules

We don't have too many general rules right now, and we'd like to keep it that way if at all possible. Most rules are specific to one kind of content or another, which are covered later on in this document.

• Follow the rules of Reddit.
• Be nice to the new folk.
• When in doubt, write it out.
• Don't try and get the community to do your work for you.

Discussion threads

The perfect place to jump in and introduce yourself. JotBot posts these threads weekly and goes into more detail about what is acceptable content in each on the posts themselves. Each post category has its own browseable archive of weeks past linked in the post itself. Here's a brief overview.

• Writing Checkpoint (Mondays): A place to set your writing goals for the week and have a look at how well you did last week.
• Suggestion Box (Wednesdays): Have a suggestion or an idea for the community? Toss it in!
• Story Analysis (Thursdays): A place to talk about what you're reading (or watching, or listening to) and what you're learning from it.
• Stupid Questions (Sundays): A thread for all the questions that don't fit the usual criteria. If you have a small question that you don't think deserves its own thread, ask it here.

Words Imperfect

The official community podcast, in which awk asks the fine folk of SU&W to submit some short (very short) stories for him to read out loud and generally be extremely unfair to. If, for some reason, you'd like one of those stories to be yours, keep your eyes peeled for a Words Imperfect submission thread.

• Words Imperfect on Soundcloud

Reputation

Unlike most Reddit communities, Shut Up & Write features a reputation system. By performing certain actions that are beneficial to the community, you can earn reputation points, which can either be used to ask for feedback or to reward content that you find interesting or helpful.

It is currently not possible to have negative reputation, nor is it possible to "lose" reputation through unfavorable actions. Reputation can only be "spent" on certain actions.

Viewing reputation

Reputation is displayed as your user flair in /r/shutupandwrite. Your most up-to-date flair is always the flair displayed in the sidebar.

If you have no flair, you can safely assume you have no reputation points yet. You must perform an action that would either cost or earn you reputation to get a flair.

Due to processing lag, others' flairs may not always be completely up to date, or may appear different on separate posts and comments. This is normal; eventually, Reddit's page cache will update and the flairs will be consistent again.

Transferring points (also known as "tipping")

If you have rep and would like to thank another user or reward them for posting good content to the community, you can transfer or "tip" some reputation from your account to theirs by replying to their post or comment with the following syntax.

+/u/JotBot 5rep

The above example would transfer 5 reputation points from your account to the account that created the comment or post to which you replied.

Reputation quick reference

This will be expanded for other actions in the future.

Action	Amount
Giving feedback that the author considers helpful	+10 rep
Feedback request	First is free; subsequent, -20 rep

Requesting feedback

All users can post one feedback request for free. Subsequent requests cost 20 rep to post.

Feedback requests must be for a piece or excerpt under 3,500 words. If your submission is part of a longer work, you are welcome to link to that longer work in your request with the understanding that it must not be a requirement to read. You may submit multiple pieces in the same request if the total wordcount does not exceed 3,500.

To request feedback, click the "Request Feedback" button in the sidebar, and fill out the appropriate information. It is very important that you read through these guidelines at least once before submitting your request. There's quite a few of them, but following them will make sure that your feedback request is answered more quickly, and will make the experience generally more pleasant for everyone involved.

Once responses start filtering in, you can decide whether or not they were helpful and reward them accordingly. The integrity of our feedback system is dependent on authors dictating which feedback was genuinely helpful, and is the main source of reputation for the community.

Do's and don'ts for feedback requests

These are mandatory criteria and will result in your post being removed if they are not met.

Do:

• Keep feedback requests under 3,500 words. You may request as many individual pieces of writing within that limit as you like, so long as the total ends up under 3,500 words. This is a hard limit - any requests over 3,500 words will be removed.
• Include [feedback] somewhere in the title. Failure to do so will prevent JotBot from recognizing it as a feedback thread, meaning you won't be able to give points to anyone who responds. Also, requests for feedback are not allowed outside of the official feedback system, so your post will be removed.
• Put your word count in the title. Being up-front about your wordcount will help others match up their current attention span with your work.
• Explain the purpose of the piece. Is it an excerpt? A poem? A stand-alone short story? Something you're planning on submitting to a magazine? Context helps tremendously. A middle chapter from a novel can look like a pointless short story if you don't tell anyone what it is.
• Format your piece sensibly. No one wants to read a giant block of text.
• Leave comments. Even if the responses you received on your feedback post aren't worthy of a (+), please leave a comment acknowledging that you at least read the responses (and, if you like, why you don't feel the response warrants a reward).

Don't:

• DON'T ASK US TO IGNORE ISSUES YOU ALREADY KNOW ARE PRESENT IN YOUR WRITING. If you know you submission has issues, and you can fix them yourself without outside input, fix them. A post asking for readers to ignore blatant errors is unacceptable.
• DON'T SUBMIT NON-WRITING. No outlines, no story ideas. We're here to critique writing, not thoughts.
• DON'T submit a piece over the 3,500 word limit and ask readers to pick a part of it to give feedback on. This is an attempt to circumvent the word limit and will be removed. All feedback given should be for the exact same same piece or excerpt.
• DON'T make a post whose only purpose is to give away reputation points for doing nothing. Having a thread that's not really a feedback thread, but rather an excuse to give out rep points like candy, defeats the whole purpose of a reputation-based system.
• DON'T put pieces > 500 words in the body of a self-post. If your piece is under 500 words and you do include it in a self-post, double-check that you've got the formatting right. If you're linking to your piece, make sure wherever you've put it is somewhere readable and convenient for others to use. Stories hosted on sites with eye-gouging design or that require signups will be removed. When in doubt, use Google Docs (rich text, Microsoft-Word-esque) or Pastebin (plain text only).
• DON'T sockpuppet. Yes, the one-free-post policy means you could theoretically create an infinite number of new accounts and never have to give feedback for the rest of your sorry, miserable life. We're all very proud of you for working that out, but if you're going to try to exploit the reputation system, do it in a more creative way.
• DON'T ask if a piece is "worth continuing," or other questions that serve only to seek validation from others. The only person who can decide if your piece is worth continuing is you. Feedback may be able to help you make the decision, but no individual person can answer that question besides yourself, and if this is the only thing you want feedback on, it's not a worthwhile feedback post.

Not mandatory, but good ideas

• Avoid posting first drafts. If you're posting a piece the same day you've spat it out, or without having at least read through it once or twice, you're asking others to do work that you should have done yourself. The purpose of feedback is to pick up where your own efforts left off. Something hot off the typewriter can almost certainly be improved by a second look before asking others to read it.

Giving feedback

The best feedback is an accurate description of your reading experience. The more specific you can get about your reactions to the piece and why you reacted that way, the better your feedback will be.

General tips for giving feedback:

• If you see something, say something. Keep the poster's specific requests in mind, but don't completely ignore all other problems. If they wanted feedback on pacing but they can't use a semicolon to save their life, mention it. Even if you have a complaint about a tiny detail, don't assume it was intentional on the author's part or that he/she will catch it themselves later. We only ask that you emphasize the kind of feedback that the poster requested, not disregard all other aspects entirely.
• Don't be concerned about being "right." If you can justify why you think something is working or not working, that's good enough, even if you're the only one who thinks so. Most feedback requests will have multiple people expressing their views on it, so don't worry about biasing the author towards something you're afraid is just your personal taste. Remember, the point of feedback is to get a variety of opinions, so don't concern yourself with "accuracy." Just explain your points and you'll be fine.
• Read the majority of the piece before leaving feedback. Unless there is something blatantly wrong, try to make it through at least half of a piece before giving feedback, especially if the request was for general feedback. Giving feedback on only the first line or sentence usually isn't very helpful!

Your feedback may be removed and ineligible for earning rep if it is:

• Low effort. And by this, we don't mean "how dare you not leave a line-by-line critique." General critique and the like is fine, especially if that's what was requested. Sometimes your crit will only be a paragraph or so long, and that's okay! Don't pad your feedback because of this rule. By low effort we mean incredibly low effort, like, a single sentence that says "I didn't read this because it was boring." or "I hate stories about cats." Don't do that.
• A generic "I liked it"/"I didn't like it" comment. You might think you're being nice by telling someone their writing is great, but they're here for data, not validation (hopefully, anyway). Feel free to talk about the specific reasons why you liked or didn't like something, but a general yea/nay on a piece doesn't get anyone anywhere. If you find yourself typing out a comment that doesn't go into any detail or explain the reasons about why you felt the way you felt about a piece, stop and come back to it later when you can look at it more objectively.
• Completely divergent from the poster's request(s). Don't lose sight of what was asked for. Double-check the post and see what the requester wanted feedback on, and make sure you've at least tried to touch on what they requested.
• Only a reference to privately-given feedback. Feedback should be public. Comments to the effect of "check your inbox, I left feedback there" are not eligible for earning reputation.
• A critique of others' subjective feedback. Contradicting others' feedback is expected — encouraged, even, because it gives the requester a greater variety of opinions to work with — but do it in a way that is clearly directed at the requester, not at the person giving feedback. Otherwise, threads can quickly spiral into arguments about which opinion was "right." That said, if there is something objectively wrong with the feedback (for example, if it violates any of these rules) feel free to link the person to this page and/or report the feedback to mods.

Rewarding feedback

If a piece of feedback has been helpful to you, you can reward that feedback by replying to it and including a (+) symbol in your comment. Note that editing (+) into an already existing comment will not work.

Please note that while responding to all feedback is a good idea, you are not required to reward every piece of feedback you get. As a general rule, you should only reward feedback that has been personally helpful for you.

If you do not consider the feedback you receive to be helpful, you may withhold your points for as long as you like. If you have not rewarded anyone in the thread, your first reward will increase in value by 10 rep per day up to a maximum of 50 rep after 5 days. This "bounty" system is meant to incentivize feedback even if the request is particularly difficult to fulfill.

You can reward as many or as few of the responses as you like. Just be aware that one person cannot be rewarded more than once in the same thread. Regardless of whether or not you reward anyone, replying to all the feedback you get is considered the polite thing to do.

Submitting content

What makes a good question?

Any questions related to writing are allowed, so long as they do not fit the topics or categories mentioned in this section. Anything is allowed in the weekly Stupid Questions threads, however!

Topics to avoid

• Motivation. Nothing interesting ever comes of a discussion about motivation, staying motivated, getting motivated, or motivating someone else. Besides, it's barely connected with writing. The question "How can I get motivated to write?" could be answered in much the same way as if you'd asked it with just about any other activity.
• Ideas. This comes in two flavors: "How do you get ideas?" and "What do you guys think of this idea?" The answer to the first one has been answered hundreds of times over by authors all across space and time, so you'd do better looking up their answers than asking us for ours. And for the second, virtually no ideas are good or bad — the goodness or badness comes in the idea's execution. Go write your idea, then come back.
• Brainstorming. Or to put it another way: don't ask us a question that only applies to your specific story. "I don't know what to do with this character, can anyone help?" is not really a question, but a thinly-veiled attempt to get the community to do the work for you.

Kinds of questions to avoid

In addition to those three major topics, please make sure that the question you're asking is about writing, not about yourself. There's a subtle distinction here, but it makes a huge difference in the quality of conversation that follows. Here are some examples of question formats that can sound like they are about writing, but are actually about the poster.

• "Does anyone else...?" The Internet is a big place. The answer will always be yes.
• "Should I...?" It's impossible for anyone to tell you what you should or shouldn't do, especially with something as open-ended as writing. Instead, ask a question that will help you make a more informed decision about whatever you're currently struggling with.
• "Is it okay if...?" Rules are there so that you think about them before you break them. If you want to go against the conventional "rules" of writing, just do it. You don't need permission from the Internet first!

Consider the question "Does anyone else outline before they write?" This is a question to which both "yes" and "no" are valid responses, but a poll doesn't make for very interesting discussion. On the other hand, the question "Should I outline before I write?" is fundamentally unanswerable since it, like so many topics in writing, comes down to personal preference.

Instead, consider the question you actually want an answer to. Using our example, it's possible that the poster came to that question because they wanted to start a discussion on the pros and cons of outlining. Instead of approaching the subject in a roundabout way, just start a thread about outlining! You'll get relevant information much more quickly and make a more interesting thread to boot.

Want to ask your question anyway?

If you want to ask a question that breaks any of these rules, or you're not sure whether or not your question qualifies, the Stupid Questions Thread is your friend. Unlike questions that start a new thread, pretty much anything goes in Stupid Questions. Find the latest Stupid Questions post and knock yourself out.

What makes a good content post?

Unlike every other category of post, content posts are very open-ended, which makes this question difficult to answer. In general you should lurk the community for a while before attempting your first content post to get a handle on what they'll find interesting.

In general, there are two good types of posts: resources and analysis.

A resource post is a post that links or names one or more outside resources having to do with writing. Often, just linking a resource is not enough, which is part of the reason link posts are disabled on this subreddit. You must also give at least a few sentences of reasoning why you think this resource is a good thing to bring to the community's attention.

That's vague, and intentionally so. Given the proper context, a resource could be anything — a word reference, a YouTube video, a webapp, even an entire book. You could reference a single thing or a hundred. Expect to be able to defend its usefulness to the community if it is called into question.

An analysis post is essentially an essay in which the author has chosen to analyze something related to writing or storytelling. That could be a book, a movie, another essay, a trend, a commonly held belief among writers, a trope, a quirk of grammar — nearly anything you can imagine. These are often quite long, but provoke discussion that can go on for some time.

Particularly good content will be featured on the Shut Up & Write Official Blog... once it exists. (I'm working on it - awk)