This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
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Notes -
That reminds me of a time about a decade ago when a friend of mine gave me something to read. Apparently a friend of his was taking a creative writing class at a community college and asked him to read a story she wrote for an assignment, and he had no clue where to even begin so he gave it to me. I think he was expecting that I'd just proofread it or maybe give a few succinct ideas but the thing was so bad that merely marking it with a red pen would have been impossible; the whole thing required an extensive rewrite of the sort that necessitated a serious discussion with the author. I had no desire to get that involved, especially since I have no special qualifications to have such a conversation with a stranger, so I basically passed on the whole thing and never heard about it again. It was the kind of adjective-heavy creative writing that sounded like it was written in a seventh grade English class where they're specifically asked to do things like this.
I often wonder how much the "rules" of writing in an academic setting are actually making people worse writers. It always stuck me as a bit strange that none of the professional writing I read in my spare time followed the rules that English teachers insisted upon, though I never thought to question why. I understand that certain devices are the mark of immature writers, such as children, and that the first thing that needs to be done is to beat these habits out of them to at least create something presentable, but I think the teachers should at least make it clear that at a certain point the student will have a good enough command of the language to use their own judgment about certain things. I remember writing a paper for a music history class in college that was small enough that the professor met each student individually to go over the rough draft, and he asked me several times "What are you trying to say here?", and when I told him, his response was "Why didn't you just say that?"
Strunk & White's Elements of Style gets a very bad rap for this. It's considered the "bible" of proper writing by many English teachers, but they forgot that S&W were addressing college students who were absolutely hopeless at writing essays. So it beats proper grammar, punctuation, and communicative style into you, but it was never meant for creative writing.
(Knowing your S&W is good for fiction writers too, but if you treat it like a bible you'll write correctly but boringly.)
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