The Writing Workshop - OOC Discussion

Hey guys!

It's TGR here, the Minister of Culture and Entertainment. Or the former Minister of Culture and Entertainment - hello to the future, do you have decreasing unemployment rates yet? Anyway, this is the discussion thread for the Stories of TNP: Writing Workshop program here at the Ministry of Culture and Entertainment! Basically, we've come up with an idea to extend the Stories of TNP, while we work on improving and renewing the old format to work better with the style of RP and factbook available to us here and on-game.

The Writing Workshop will be a long-term program - every so often, we'll be putting up a thread with a prompt - a topic, segment of writing, or question. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to respond to that thread with an in-character post. If at all possible, you should make that post relevant to TNP's 'prime canon' - the world that goes with Madjack's map. If you want, you can make it a flash-back, or a flash-forward, or an alternate history, but that's up to you.

This will be the discussion thread for that workshop. You should use this thread to discuss what you want to put in your post, what you've done with your post, and what you think of other posts. At the end of each workshop, we'll be inviting people to vote on the post that they think was most relevant to the prompt. We'll merge these threads into a single gallery, when each prompt is complete, so anyone can go back and read them. The plan is that there'll only be three threads at any time for the Workshop - this one, the active prompt, and a gallery thread.

For now, we're inviting you to make suggestions for our first few prompts. If I think that there aren't too many suggestions coming in just yet, and I want to save up a nice bank, then our first prompt thread will be one that encourages responses to consider war from an average soldier's perspective.

Remember, don't respond to the prompts here - this is the OOC thread.

Ok, can I just ask if we can have Grim as culture minister for the next 2000 years? Ok thanks.

I've always found a soldier's perspective in war to be extremely varied- usually not on personal beliefs but on their associated nation. For example, Syrixia is basically an Indian version of what would've happened if France's constitutional monarchy succeeded. The people and much of the government are highly liberal, but there is a prominent Rakanist clergy and the Emperor presides as a figurehead. I think a Syrixian soldier would have both the zeal of Revolutionary France's soldiers and the nationalism of the conservative constitutional monarchy on his side. He'd be quite proud and valiant, though sometimes a bit too much for other nations' soldiers to handle and/or understand. Meanwhile, another, more conservative nation, say, Vazos, might have soldiers who act and think differently.

I'm looking at having this up for, say, 12 hours before I put up the first prompt thread, by the way, guys. To be honest, I could put it up now, but I want people to be able to actually understand what is going on here, and have at least a short chance to bring up any glaring problems. It's short notice, for a flagship program, but it's something that's been in the works for a little bit, and I'm working around minor RL scheduling inconveniences, for which I apologize.

I'm assuming Syrixia is voting in favour of my suggestion as the first prompt, which works for me

That prompt sounds fine with me.

[me] like prompt

I like the idea, but I would prefer that RPers actually wrote from marginalized perspectives in the actual RPing!

Kannex:

I like the idea, but I would prefer that RPers actually wrote from marginalized perspectives in the actual RPing!

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I mean, yeah, fair enough. That's the goal of the workshop, or one of the two main goals. The other is to use marginalized perspectives to reflect on how the mainstream perspectives are presented - for example, if you think of how commonfolk respond to war, what does it change about your nation's support/opposition to war, etc.

The first few prompts are going to be a lot more simple, just because the prompts that will achieve that second, more complex goal well take a lot more thinking and planning on my part.

But I get you - this isn't a great way to /encourage/ people to take what they're practicing here into general RP. If anyone can think of a better way to encourage people to use perspectives like this in actual RP, instead of just in the Workshop, please tell me - I'll be the first to admit that this format is not perfect by any means. But this is the best way I can think of to do it, at least for now - it's a way to practice, think, and consider, without the time-constraints or posting orders of actual RP threads.

I really like this idea, and might even take part myself if I have time.

C'mon! Participate!

I'd like to write something for it, hopefully tomorrow or the day after.

You guys are no fun.

You can probably count my most recent post in the "Black Isle" thread for this; it's as close as SDKY will get to war unless someone invades.

Piscivore:

You can probably count my most recent post in the "Black Isle" thread for this; it's as close as SDKY will get to war unless someone invades.

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Would you mind cross-posting it, then? The intention is to archive the Writing Workshop threads, so that post would be easier to find if you posted it in the Workshop thread too.

The Grim Reaper:

Piscivore:

You can probably count my most recent post in the "Black Isle" thread for this; it's as close as SDKY will get to war unless someone invades.

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Would you mind cross-posting it, then? The intention is to archive the Writing Workshop threads, so that post would be easier to find if you posted it in the Workshop thread too.

Click to expand...

Done.