Young Writers Society

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1. TWO CENTS
2. NEW ARRIVALS
3. THIS WEEK'S ROUND UP
4. SHAMELESS PLUGS
5. SUBSCRIBERS

TWO CENTS: WRITING THERAPYwritten by Aley < PM: >

Past writers have often said that to write is to bleed on the page, and then cut those words to just the bare bones, and finally, what you have left is literature. It's a heavy process, but one which some people take as therapy. I'm here to give my two cents about this art.

Writing as a form of cathartic release, as a way to purge emotions, is something I'm split about. In a lot of ways, that's what writing does. Even if you're writing an essay you're getting thoughts out of your head and onto a page so that you can work through them and continue the process of learning and thinking about something in a new manner. Without it being written down, you could end up in a circle without even realizing it. It's sort of like if you have an amazing thought at 3 in the morning, and it takes you 7 hours while you're awake to get back to that amazing thought, just to find out it's 3 in the morning again. If you don't write it down, you're going to forget and go back to what you were doing.

Writing as a release of emotions is different than that, it's a way to express how you're feeling, without feeling it yourself. It's a way to force yourself to feel differently than you do as well. It's been proven by analysis of the brain that when we watch people do things, we relate that to memories of things ourselves like we were doing it. That process of assimilation also applies to words. When we read about someone doing something, we can feel it ourselves, so writing someone being happy, can actually make us feel happy. Likewise, when we write out the emotions of someone having a bad day, we can feel bad with them without relating it too closely to ourselves. It makes it acceptable and focused, and something to help with an escape from what's really going on.

So where's the split.

Well, I'm split because on one hand, writing emotionally is great, but on the other, word purging your emotions, isn't always good writing. One of the ways people say to write emotionally is to word purge. What I mean by word purge is basically just get everything out in words that you're feeling. If you're having a horrible day, write a horrible day, and get all of those feelings out, and get your character over that horrible day to get over it yourself. So, why isn't that always good writing? In my opinion, a lot of the time, people forget to build down or up to those emotional purges.

If you're writing someone having a bad day because you're having a bad day, you can't just drop a bad day on them, you have to start out like you started out and by the time you sit down to write, you're not going to be going through the process of getting into a bad day, you've already been there for 3-8 hours, if not more! To work down into a bad day could even put you in a worse mood if you realize that's what you're doing, which you probably will considering you're crafting a story.

So that means if you're not writing a bad day before you get to the story, the story is going to just suddenly drop into a bad day and the world is going to be horrible, and once you get interrupted and leave for a little bit, suddenly the day is going to be fine again, because it will be a new day, but your character, is still stuck in a bad day. It then becomes a loop until you hit another bad day and it all starts over again. Not the good makings of a story. Stories have to be planned, woven, and plotted.

Even poetry, to some extent, needs to have focus and direction. If you just word purge a poem all the time, you're going to end up with things that are cliché and typical for you to use so it won't be original after the 2nd bad day you've had. For poetry it's a little more complex about why it's not really that good, but the basic reason is the same. Word purging has the hazard of becoming too much too quick for a reader who isn't in that state of mind when they pick up the book or poem.

To fix this problem you can edit, but consider that. If you're in a horrible mood and you write down all your feelings and you start to feel better, and then you spend some time away from it because you're feeling better, and you continue to improve, then finally you come back to this horrible day you were having, that horrible day is going to look like a different person wrote it. A different person did write it, a depressed person, someone who feels like the world is ending, and everything is horrible. Editing from a neutral perspective means that you're either going to have to dump back into that feeling in order to decide what needs to go or stay, or, dismantle it from a neutral perspective where you won't be sure if you're taking out the stuff someone feeling like that is actually going to relate to.

If you leave it alone, and you publish the word purge, it had a huge chance of coming off pretentious or self-centered, which is called navel gazing. Basically navel gazing is a term which means the writer is too focused on themselves to see anything but themselves. They aren't relatable for other people and the poems come off as immature and not emotionally connecting.

Here are the pros.

Emotional purging can be great to learn how to write for an emotion. It's my opinion, you purge all of it, you learn the language you use to describe whatever emotion you're feeling, then you take that and apply it from a stable place to a story where someone isn't stable. You write from sanity, the insanity you've experienced in the past.

Consider this, if you've had a day where you stubbed your toe and that was the worst pain you'd ever felt in your entire life, you would be writing that pain like it was the most disastrous thing you could think of. We might not have experienced a lot of disastrous things, but we sure can invent them. Being able to invent horrible things to describe other things is really what poetry is all about. Well, maybe not always the horrible part, but the same idea. Then, later, if you lost your first pet ever, you would describe that as the worst possible thing you could ever think of, right? Well aren't those two things the same descriptions? You might be choosing different disasters because you've learned and grown since you stubbed your toe, but you're going to be describing the worst pain in your life, and that perspective is what makes you write like you do.

That being said, you can write about someone experiencing horrific things by describing the feelings you've experienced for the most painful things you've ever experienced in the past. It's going to be the worst you can come up with, or, if it's not the worst the character has experienced, dialing it back.

Writing while you're experiencing those emotions gives you the wording, the feeling, and the tonality you are going to need to get through those sections of your writing. It will give you something to reference when you want to write someone having a horrible time, but, and this is a huge but, it isn't what I would want to read in a story or a poem.

What I want to read is one step beyond that. Apply the worst things you've ever felt to a situation that you're not feeling that emotional about, from a place where you're happy or content, or at least stable, that way you can begin by relating to me as a content person and then drag me down to the deep dark ocean with you when you begin to describe all the horrible things you want me to feel. That's what I want.

That being said, with all this talk about being upset, I really do hope you're having a wonderful day. Here is a very happy cheerful poem so we can all be happy together.





Have something you want to learn about? Send me a request! I'd love to hear from you about what you want to hear. I'm always looking for the next subject for one of these articles so please, suggest something.

NEW ARRIVALS
written by Lavvie < PM: >

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

THIS WEEK'S ROUND UP 6/5 written by megsug < PM: >

This Week’s Round Up explores the hateful side of YWS and how it could improve writers! You didn’t know YWS had a hateful side? Keep reading!


@Sunshine1113 wrote an article about sporking. I didn’t know what sporking meant either, but Sunshine gave us a definition from Urban Dictionary:







Sunshine says that not only will reading these analyses of bad literature improve your writing, but reading bad books will help you too! Don’t believe me? Read the article. Sunshine makes her case pretty well.


…Or many… This thread could help you find those bad books that will improve your writing. @Strange wanted to know what authors people despised as in disliked. The thread has been very popular in the last three days. YA has taken quite the hit, with several users calling out most of the well-known dystopian authors as well as John Green. @outvaders said what other users may have been thinking:







Add a few grains yourself or ask another user to explain why they hate an author so much.


@Big Brother announced an official contest for June. The prompt is to write a short story or poem of 500 words or less based off of the picture “Brooklyn Bridge at Night” by Edward Willis Redfield. The prizes for first, second, and third are pretty nice:







Take a shot and maybe get some YWS swag.


@Dracula, as someone who has been a vegetarian for a little over a year, wants to talk about why people do or don’t eat meat. After @Zolen’s pessimistic post about how an individual’s choice, even a large number of individuals, didn’t stop the inhumane practices of factory farming, @CowLogic had a more positive reply:







Tell people why you eat the way you do.

SHAMELESS PLUGS

written by SquillsBot < PM: >

We love to run articles and questions, but we also love to advertise for you. Let people know about your new blog, a poem or story you’re looking for reviews on, or a forum thread you’d like more traffic on through Squills’ Shameless Plugs. PM @SquillsBot with the exact formatting of your advertisement, contained in the following code.

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Place advertisement here. Make sure you include a title!

I never saw a rule saying that shameless plugs specifically have to be for ones self. This one is for @Waddlers. (With permission)

HWMTWJALBN

@Waddlers is writing a book with the longest title I have seen on YWS; How We Made The World Just A Little Bit Nicer (HWMTWJALBN). profile/Waddlers/portfolio So far she has published up to chapter/episode 9 of this interesting book investigating good and evil. It contains a kidnapping which on the surface looks fairly ordinary. As it continues, the story develops following GriN the kidnapped girl. It eventuates her world is far from our normal and her kidnaper might not be so bad... Look out for dragons and other fantasy creatures in this evolving story which would love some reviews.

That's all folks~ Now send us yours.

SUBSCRIBERS

written by SquillsBot < PM: >

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