Due South Workshop

Hey, hello, it's been a while. Offline commitments have meant that gurrier and I haven't been able to do much with this community for the past...while. But sageness (one of the organizational genii behind such crazy schemes as out_of_con_txt and rat_jam) has come up with an idea for how to wake things up again, and we liked it so much that we're handing her the keys to the comm for a while. (And I'll be sticking around to help out, too, because this sounds like too much fun to miss.)

I'll let her explain...

sageness writes:

New Series!

We are happy to announce a new project here at ds_workshop! We're beginning a CRAFT OF WRITING series to be designed by YOU. Think of it as a "How do I...?" Q&A session in a writer's workshop. Everyone is invited to ask questions so that all of us can learn to write better stories.

Here are some examples:

What goes into writing a good kiss?
How do I use setting in _________ circumstance?
How do I avoid writing generic sex scenes?
How do I organize casefic?

We want to focus on questions that are specific to CRAFT, so it would be better to post things like "How Victorian IS Fraser?" and/or characterization issues in other communities more geared toward fannish meta. A character question that WOULD be appropriate here would be, "How can I show Thatcher's softer side and still keep her in character?"

Once we have some questions to choose from, myself, gurrier, or sprat will post asking for a for a volunteer to ANSWER one of the questions on the list. If you've written a fair bit in DS and you feel like you can answer a question, comment to claim it. Hopefully your post will spur some discussion of different techniques for solving the specific writing problem, given different styles of writing, and we'll all learn something new. :)

The series will be open to all types of writing technique questions: Gen, Het, Slash, Femslash, and OT3 topics are all good. Adventure fic, case fic, crack fic, long and plotty fic, short and drabbly fic, porn fic, romance fic, Dief fic, Dead!Bob fic, Turnbull fic, Stella fic, any kind of DS fic. Ask questions. We'll find answers.

Sound good? Okay! Sage will probably do the first post, and after that, we'll have an Admin post calling for a volunteer to do the next Answer Post, and so on.

What we need NOW is for you to comment with questions below. As time passes and topics are addressed, please continue to add new questions to the comments of this post. :D