Welcome back and thanks for reading, as always. Today’s Shelf Life picks up where last Thursday left off, midway through the topic of writing communities. Myself, I love community. I’m a very social creature, I have lots of friends and friendly acquaintances, and I always love making more. My partner, the most introverted person on the planet, probably wishes I were somewhat less social because he’s always getting dragged to brunches and barbecues and he’d rather be at home.
Writing communities are great, although I have to participate in moderation because I need to reserve some of that writing energy for, you know, writing. And reading about writing, reading fiction to learn new techniques, editing, submitting, and filing all those form rejections. But I must say, writing community has been invaluable in all of these processes. I’ve met critique partners, editors, mentors, and I even got in good with a whole social channel full of people who shout out their manuscript rejections whenever they get one, and that’s the best, because it helps me put everything in perspective.
Anyway, let me tell you about it.
Writing Discords
What is a Discord? I mean you know what discord is but what’s a Discord? It’s like a Slack, but for nerds. What’s a Slack? Oh boy.
Discord is an application for computers and mobile devices that brings users together in a shared environment for voice, video, and text chatting; file and image sharing; and other activities. Slack is a similar program used in many workplaces for coworkers to chat and collaborate; Discord is similar but geared toward social activities. It started out as a community for gamers, where guildmates could voice chat with one another while they did raids and stuff. Discord has expanded its remit quite a bit, especially since COVID.
Discord, the application, allows users to access servers to which they have been invited (or which they’ve joined if the server is public). Servers are divided into categories and categories are divided into channels. To give you an example, my personal discord is separated into categories like “General Chat”; “Writing”; and “Media.” The Media category is divided into channels for chatting about TV shows, movies, music, video games, and so on. Depending on the server, there could be one channel or there could be dozens (or more). Users are assigned (or can self-serve) roles that grant access to different parts of the server or different administrative privileges.
This detailed overview is to give you a sense of what you can expect when you join a writing Discord server. I belong to several, public and private. They’re all divided up different ways and have different purposes and functionality, but they all have the same idea: Bring a community of writers together to support one another.
Discord servers may be public community servers that anyone can join or they may be private servers that require an invitation. I belong to both kinds and I can give you the scoop on how to find them.
Community servers are easy to find if you know how but the process is somewhat opaque, so good thing you have me. If you’ve already created a Discord account, within the desktop application click your “Home” button (upper left corner). At the bottom of the column, beneath the list of servers you belong to, is a button that looks like a compass needle: “Explore Public Servers.” Clicking this brings up a search box; I typed in “writing” and came up with more than 600 servers. “Writer” brought up another 40 or so. Now, not all of these are really “writing” servers—some of them are about writing code, for instance. And not all of them will be a match for the type of writing you do—if you only write original fiction, a fanfiction writing Discord won’t be for you. But there remain tons of options to explore. When you see one that looks like a good fit, jump in and start exploring.
There are also plenty of third-party sites that aggregate Discord servers and help you search and filter them: Top.gg and Disboard are big ones. With Disboard you can find servers that are not “community” (public) servers and you can join or request to join, depending on the server’s security settings.
But now I’m going to give you the real gold nugget of the article, which is this: Lots of writers and other writing-adjacent personnel (like editors) host Patreons, and a number of those Patreons offer, as a reward for supporting, access to a private Discord server for patrons. This means access to the Patreon host and a community of like-minded patrons. This does mean shelling out some money to support the creator but I have found these to be the most helpful and useful communities, hands down.
Surely, there are writers and editors out there hosting Discords without having a Patreon (or a Ko-Fi or similar), and if you dig around I’m sure you can find them. For instance, I work with an editor I met over Twitter and landed a coveted invite to their spec-fic-writing Discord that way. But Patreon is a great source for these.
Start looking up writers, editors, agents, and small publishers to see if they have Discord communities you can join, either as a paying patron or for free. As an example, Clarkesworld Magazine’s Neil Clarke hosts a Patreon for Clarkesworld. You can support that Patreon for a minimum of $2/month and receive Discord benefits, and your $2 goes to supporting the magazine’s operations. But wait, for $2.99/month you get a monthly subscription to Clarkesworld Magazine and Discord benefits? Hey, you know how much a subscription to the mag is on Amazon? $2.99/month.
I enjoy supporting Clarkesworld not only because it’s an incredible magazine, but to demonstrate that I’m not salty about all the rejections I get from there.
Okay seriously, enough about Discord. That’s plenty to send you down a rabbit hole.
Public Online Communities
There’s one more bastion of online writing communities left to cover, and that is—the realm of publicly available online writing communities set up for that purpose, or that have coalesced around a writerly resource, and are out there on the web for you to join.
I’ll start by explaining what I mean when I say “coalesced around a writerly resource.” There are a lot of these on the web: Web-based tools for writers and authors to use for the writerly stuff we have to do all the time. An example is The Submission Grinder, which many short-story writers use to track submissions to magazines. The Grinder doesn’t actually have a community built up around it (no forums, no Discord, etc); but a lot of tools of this nature do have those things.
QueryTracker, for example, is a site similar in purpose to The Grinder; it helps writers of novels select agents to query, track their queries, and access statistical data on agent responses. That’s the tool. But QueryTracker.net also hosts a robust forum system for networking with other writers. That’s what I mean by a community that has grown up around the tool. So that’s one of them, the QueryTracker forums. They’re not as active as they once were but there’s recent activity.
Another example is the NaNoWriMo forums. NaNoWriMo.org is the official site of National Novel Writing Month (it’s November, FYI, although there’s also now Camp NaNo in the summertime). The idea behind NaNoWriMo is everyone sits down in the month of November and writes a 50,000-word novel. Participants cheer one another one and share their progress. It seems really fun, though I’ve never done it. Joining the site also grants access to the NaNoWriMo forums, which are very active, and to NaNoWriMo Groups. You can create a writing group or find one to join. Groups can have up to 20 members and the NaNo site provides a private virtual space to chat about how your NaNo or Camp NaNo is going. The forums have an area to help users find suitable groups, with a filterable tagging function to identify purposes like “writing buddies,” “year round,” “fantasy,” and so on.
Some of these communities are as old as the web and some of them are spring chickens, but the age of the site isn’t what matters—it’s the engagement of the user community. Look for a substantial user base and daily activity. I shared a few already but some others you might want to take a look at include:
AbsoluteWrite, a purpose-made community for writers.
Scribophile, another purpose-made community with free and paid membership tiers.
Reddit has a number of writing-related subreddits, including r/writing, r/PubTips, and r/BetaReaders—to name just a few.
If, between today’s essay and last Thursday’s, you can’t find a writing community that’s a good fit for you (and you want to), let me know and I’ll give you your subscription fee back. Just kidding, Shelf Life is and always will be free.
Coming up this Thursday, if I can get my prep work done in time, a new type of Shelf Life article planned—a book review (of a book on writing craft). If not, then some other garbage I’ll come up with at the last minute. You’ll have to wait and be surprised.
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