I have tried one or two writing forums in the past and I have never personally got much out of them. I’m not sure whether I simply haven’t found the best ones, or whether I just prefer reading blogs and interacting with people on those.
But if you Google the term ‘writing forums’ you certainly get a lot of results coming back at you. 77.9 MILLION results to be more precise. I’m sure some of them are very good – particularly for beginning writers who need some support and advice – but I have never had good experiences myself.
I remember one particular forum (I cannot remember the name of it as it was a while back that I joined it) that I only actually contributed to a couple of times. I did the usual thing of going on and reading through some existing posts and threads before adding my own thoughts to the conversation. I wasn’t controversial or negative in any way (let alone promotional) and I got a stinging reply back from another writer (at least I assume the person was a writer) accusing me of spamming the forum.
I never did quite work out how or why they did that, since (a) I only had a perfectly legitimate link to my blog in the forum and (b) I was actually contributing to a section in which you could promote your own work if you wanted to. But regardless of that the reply was nasty. I did email the moderators to discuss the matter but since I never got a reply I never bothered going back to the forum again.
I’ve found this once or twice with other writing forums as well. I haven’t joined any others but occasionally when I consider it and look through a few threads before deciding, I always seem to come across negative posters and abusive links from ‘writers’ who seem to believe they know everything. They have an innate desire to abuse everyone instead of contributing positively to the forum they are a member of.
So have I just gone to the wrong forums or is this a general thing? What are your experiences of writing forums? I refuse to believe all of them are like this – I think I have just been unlucky. What’s your opinion?
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Tags: forums, learning, writing, writing life
That’s the internet for you. A lot of cranks out there. I guess you got to just keep plugging away and as you say, there are lots of sites out there. Far too much to hack through in fact.
You’re totally right Rae. I have taken part in the odd discussion at LinkedIn recently and those seem to be ok for the most part.
ironically, I find early posts on forums the most helpful (the ones from 2009 / 2010). There is only so much you can talk about before it gets repetitive.
That’s a good point. You can always dig a little deeper and find new things to talk about, but most of us have the same old questions and discussions going round in our heads most of the time!