How do you feel about the board as it is right now? For the past year now I have left this board to its own devices. The moderation that moderates least, moderates best, or something like that. I have had some ideas for this board for a while now and let the board grow a little bit and let the posters decide how they want to use it. However, I have always imagined Street Writer to be a small collective of SRK’s literary and lyrical types, showing off our work and fueling each other creatively. I would like to steer the board in this direction and want to find the best ways to go about this. Before going off and making any big decisions, I want to gather everybody’s input.
Street Writer has drawn comparisons to Fan Fiction Library in the past, although they are inherently two different beasts. FFL is a depository for Street Fighter-derived stories in the years past, as well as the one place fighting game continuity could be discussed without fear or interference from the rest of SRK (lol). Street Writer is as of now a board where people come to share their poetry and original fiction. Where FFL has a more specific agenda, Street Writer has a more relaxed modus operandi.
The relationship between these two boards is similar to that of Fan Art Gallery and Image Mishmash. While Fan Art Gallery (lol at that acronym) is a board where more artists post their sketches and illustrations, Image Mishmash is a place where users can create and share avatars and tags, joystick artwork, images of cars, sneakers and girlfriends, and just about anything and everything in between. The result was, Fan Art is where our traditional artists go, while Image Mishmash has our graphic designers and chronic masturbators (of which I am one). Applying this analogy for the two writing boards, Fan Fiction has the fan fic authors and the story scrubs (of which I am also one) while Street Writer has the poets.
As a result, if the people will it, I want to contribute toward the more poetry-tinged direction that this board seems to be going in. I’ll need a little help with this because poetry isn’t exactly my forte. As much as I try to understand, more often than not the true meaning of a poem, its hidden message and its likely beautiful rhythms, are lost to me.
Some ideas I’ve had:
Competitive jams. This has worked to varying degrees of success in Image Mishmash’s avatar competitions. SRKers are innately a competitive people, and what more could spur writers to bring out their A-game than to compare their performances to others? While I have my concerns over subjectively trying to say, “this piece of writing is better than this other piece of writing,” I feel SRKers, fighting gamers by nature, have thicker skins than most people. These could be weekly or bi-monthly, where writers post either poetry or fiction that are based on specific themes or prompts. Similar to the Image Mishmash Avatar Battle Challenges, these jam threads would have small prizes to winning writers (we’re talking, free Premium here. I’m not money).
Collaborative stories. I’ve seen this happen on Fan Fiction Library to great effect, and I might bring it back. This works by posting a story and, in true round-robin style, letting another writer continue it. Now, how it used to work in the fanfic Dan and Skullo was that someone would post a chapter, someone and anyone could add on to that, and so on. For a while, you had people you wouldn’t even associate with fanfics hyping Dan and Skullo up (see: JaHa). There was a very open-source nature to some of the fanfiction that was posted in the early days of FFL and I’m definitely interested in seeing what we can do together again. I’ll get the ball rolling on this if the interest is here.
Literary techniques/proof reading threads. Look, I’m not an English professor. In this post I can think of a few grammatical errors I let slide because I’m too lazy to actually fix the shit. However, just as IMM and Fan Art are places where taggers and artists can get feedback to improve their technique, I think it’d be useful to post up some resources on writing. From learning how to structure deep, emotional stories to writing coherent sentences, I’m thinking of starting up a thread or two that are instructional for writers.
With all that said, I thank you for visiting the board and eagerly await your feedback.
Also, we’re still better than the Street Fighter IV board. 
