Follow TV Tropes

Following

Website / Writing.Com

Go To

Writing.Com is a massive 2000s website dedicated to providing an encouraging environment for aspiring writers and hosts everything from short stories, to poetry, to interactive fiction.

Works with their own pages include:


Tropes that apply to Writing.Com:

  • Bragging Rights Reward: Awards that cost huge amounts of gift points.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory: GP (Gift points, which are like currency.) are easy to gain by doing reviews, adding to certain stories, logging in daily and, of course, being given them as a gift. However, you'll rarely get more than 100-1000 at a time this way. For $10 you can buy 100,000 GP at the store which will allow you to do a lot more a lot quicker than by simply participating with a free account.
    • Also noteworthy is the ten item limit for free users. Once you hit ten you can't add any more work until you delete or transfer your old stuff to someone else (at the cost of 1000 GP). Of course, people who pay for a membership get much more room for their items.
  • Cap: In the interactive stories, the number of continuous chapters is capped at 250.
    • However, in the lowest membership mode for the second and third chapter there are a maximum of five possible choices. The fourth and fifth have a maximum of three choices, and for the remaining chapters a maximum of two possible choices. This means the total number of possible chapters for a given interactive is 5^2*3^2*2^245. Roughly speaking that is about 1.2*10^76 chapters per story.
    • This cap was recently raised for paying members who now have the option of three different choices instead of just two on the later chapters, even if the interactive isn't their own. This was likely to help compensate for the new restrictions placed on interactive stories that greatly restrict their accessibility for free members. (It also makes a good incentive to buy an upgraded membership.) With a new feature of basic membership allowing people to add a third option after the fourth chapter would change the formula to 5^2*3^247, or roughly 1.76*10^119 chapters.
    • With the Upgraded Membership or above, a person's cap is now four possible chapters after the first two. This means the new cap is 5*^2*4^247. This is roughly 1.27*10^150 chapters. That is roughly 10^74note  times more chapters than the lowest possible option.
  • Color-Coded Characters: Gray portfolio icons for non-authors, black for authors, yellow for preferred authors, blue for moderators, purple for senior moderators, red for staff, and white for members who have passed away.
  • Content Warnings: The website mentions that even though the site uses a 'rating system', it's up to the authors themselves to decide the rating of their works. Needless to say, not everyone thinks a violent pornographic story is only for grown-ups and give their own story an 'all-ages' (E) rating. Or worse, a pornographic story involving naked child characters from one of your favorite childhood shows having sex with one of their siblings.note 
  • Cosmetic Award: Merit badges, awardicons, and trophies.
  • Door Stopper: Many interactive stories go on for hundreds or thousands of chapters in less than a few months, some other stories aren't so lucky...
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Is there any writing on this site? Why yes, yes there is!
    • Also, several of the pornographic interactives are, eh, quite... blunt with what the viewer will be reading about...
  • Fan Fiction: You think that FanFiction.Net, Archive of Our Own, and dedicated fan sites are the only ones to get these? Think again.
  • Featureless Protagonist: Many stories, and especially Interactives, have these as your viewpoint character. Partially, this is due to making it easier for the reader to put themselves into the story. The other reason is due to laziness; the writer is likely too lazy to think up of a full character (other than their gender) and maybe a few other features depending on the story. If the piece in question is an Interactive, other writers can add more features to flesh out the characters, as well as add more personality-types.
  • Gamebooks: Interactive stories on this site allow for this. In fact, the interactive stories system gives Writing.com a leg up on other web literature sites such as FanFiction.Net.note 
  • Orphaned Series: Whether it's due to death or the writer in question simply 'losing interest' in writing, this sadly happens often. If the story has only a 'few chapters', it's also a factor.
  • Product Placement: In addition to the various ads that appear for people without a paid membership there are several people who do this with their own stories. There are even interactives that are based around Walmart and McDonald's that have been around for years and have hundreds of chapters.
  • Round Robin: It is called Campfire Creatives, where authors take turns to write an ongoing Story Arc.
  • Rule 34: Oh yes. Though it's properly labeled (and rated) "Erotica."
  • Shout-Out: Countless authors include these... Sometimes way too many.
  • Shameless Self-Promotion: A lot of authors do this to their stories, causing a huge backlog of old stories popping out of nowhere.
    • This is actively encourage to an extent by the website itself. Every time you make a contribution to something on-site, an icon leading to your own portfolio is included. The more you add to other people's stories, the more that people will check out what you've got.
  • Wall of Text: This happens a lot, but most authors (thankfully) know how to properly space out paragraphs.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: A popular theme in the interactive stories section. The are dozens of these (maybe hundreds or even thousands) of varying quality. Some authors put a lot of effort into the story and establish a coherent universe while others put the reader into the role of a mindless zombie slaying action hero. There are also a ton of fanfiction interactives that center around zombie games like Left 4 Dead or Dead Rising.

Top