Anonymous asked "I love diversity and as an admin the bios I've written for some of my POC characters have been some of my favorite and most plot heavy. The issue is I haven't had a single hit of interest for 90% of them. We've revamped and tried other angles and still gotten nothing and then these extremely influential characters go untouched an unused. So frankly I'm tired of people telling rp groups they need to be more diverse. We're trying but we can only do so much with what we are given. "

pretendersrpa:

supernaturalrph-blog:

I understand where you’re coming from, doll. I’m a firm believer in mods and members having to meet in the middle when it comes to this subject. I will admit that some groups truly need to be told they need to be more diverse, but for the ones that are trying, I think it’s only fair to ease up on them and at least give them recognition for trying. You can only work with what you receive applications for.

As an RPH who looks for diversity in games during my reviews, I will tell you I notice how diverse the taken characters are, but my focus is more whether or not there’s diversity offered in a game. What I mean by this is I’m not going to attack a game if all of their taken characters are rich white kids. An admin can only do so much to get people to play POC. What I am going to point out is whether or not there’s diversity in your open characters. What’s the ratio of white to POC? Ethnicity? Disability? etc. I will never tell a game that they need to diversify if they are offering plenty of diverse characters to chose from. I know the reality of the situation is we can’t force people to choose the diverse characters, regardless how amazing the bios are.

However, as admin, here are a couple tips to try and help bring in diversity:

• Play a diverse character yourself. Players follow the leader, if the admin are all playing white characters, then so will most players. If the admin branch out and pick up at least one diverse character, then other players will as well.
• Put the diverse characters on your “Most wanted list”. Make it known that you want these characters in the game, that they weren’t just created as a token to get RPH’s off your back and so you could feel good that you at least posted a bio for a POC.
• Advertise to the diverse character faceclaim tags. Stop trying to get only the popular characters in your game, they will find it. Start posting to just the tags that have POC fc. Instead of posting to “TW RP” try posting to “Sinqua Walls FC” that way if people are looking to play Sinqua/Boyd somewhere they can see that you want him in your game.
• Start posting your game in the new “Safe Place” tag. The tag is “SRPGC” and stands for “Safe Role Playing Game Community.” The tag was born out of a need for LGBTQIA games to have a safe place to post, and would be a great way to let people know you want diversity (and not just POC) in your game. Please note: probably a good idea to not divide your characters into Male or Female categories if you post here, unless you off a “Nonbinary” category as well. The suggestion is to not even divide characters by gender anymore anyway ;)

I’m sorry the anon feels like they’ve been attacked by others, but there is hope. Not all of us are jerks!

Anonymous asked "Do you have tips for when looking back at your own writing for editing? I know that when I peer-graded in school, it was a lot easier to find faults and repetitive things that needed to be fixed, but it's harder to be that objective with my own writing. "

thewritershelpers:

There are a ton of resources out there with tips on self editing. I definitely suggest reviewing some articles if you’re finding it difficult to edit your own work, so you get a broad idea of what works for others and try some yourself. Like most things in writing, it is a bit of trial and error to find what works best for you.

However, here’s a couple basic suggestions:

Don’t edit right after finishing. Let your work sit for a while — a couple days for a shorter work, weeks or months for a novel. You want a fresh mindset when you start editing and you can’t get that if you dive in right after finishing a draft.

Get into reader mindset, not writer mindset. Coupled with taking a break, when you return to your project, try to look at it as you would someone else’s story. This is where a lot of the ‘kill your darlings’ moments can come from — there may be a section that seems precious to you as a writer, but as a reader either doesn’t work or isn’t necessary.

Read it aloud. It sounds silly, but it really helps you catch clunky phrasing, run on sentences, odd punctuation, and sometimes spelling and syntax errors, easily.

Edit in a different format than you wrote in. Did you handwrite your first draft? Type it up verbatim, then edit on the computer. Did you type your first draft? Print it off and edit by hand. It’s another trick for getting a different perspective.

Hope this helps!

- O