Writing an Article for Newbs and Writers
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Congratulations on deciding to read this article!
So... you wanna help out in the Help & Info section to get some nice points or show you exist without stepping into the forums or the storygame creation side? You have come to the right place! Back in the olden' days of CYS, we didn't have this article to guide us through the seas of article creation, so most newbs were left in the dark. You, aspiring article creator, are out in the clear now with this guide to guide you. You're lucky!
So, how do you really make an article?
It's easier than you may think. Unless you expect AI-generation tools to crank out slop here.
A terribly misguided article won't ever see the light of day, mate. So will an article that can't hold its permanent position on the Help & Info section (like warnings. I learned that the hard way). This is why if you want your article to be seen, like, at all, you need to come up with a decent idea (at least). Take a look at all the articles you see (including this one), browse the rest of the site (preferably a lot), then think of something you feel the site needs right now. There! An idea! A half-decent idea you can use to help others! Pat yourself on the back then think if it really deserves an article.
Here are ideas I suggest you run away from if you unfortunately came up with these:
If an article on that topic already exists, it's useless to write about that topic in another article without bringing something fresh to the table. Why would anyone check out your article if there's another article that serves what you wanted to do just fine (maybe even better)? Why would anyone listen to you at all if all you do is spit out someone else's points verbatim and claim they're your own? This is why you need to look for gaps in the Help & Info place of the site instead of looking for something to copy and "be inspired by". Mere suggestions of articles in the Writing Workshop are fair game; I'm talking about ideas too similar to finished articles.
Your short stories should go to the Creative Corner. Your suggestions for the site should be tossed into the Wishing Well. Your unwanted half-Numberblocks fanfiction half-rant made for petty purposes should probably stay private for everyone's sanity. Articles are different from Forum Posts or Storygames in that they're supposed to provide a guide to CYStians who feel kind of stuck and don't know the system, so your approach should be adjusted accordingly. Tutorials, guides, and feature tours over glorified stories on the Help & Info streets. Please help CYStians.
Writing a CYS article for someone looking for help in Twine/Wattpad/intfiction/Scratch/any other site on the web without anything that helps us CYStians is not only very niche, but also very harmful to CYStians, because most of us may not spend equal time in those websites and some of us may not even have a presence in those websites so it's not going to help us while your article is taking up valuable space on the shelf. If you're the minority thinking this is a good contribution to our glorious CYStia in any way, please stop immediately and seriously reconsider your ideas or just help them where they live.
Most ideas won't warrant a big article like this one. One of my unpublished articles certainly didn't have an idea that warranted a spot at all, and that's my thought on why it stays unpublished to this day in the first place. If your idea is too small to carry enough "new" information to teach a newb, easily outdated, or both, you're dealing with an idea so tiny it's way better on the forums and rejected in this section's heart.
How in the world do you know which ideas are tiny and which are article-sized anyway?! Honestly, I'm just as clueless as you probably are, and I don't even approve/accept articles to put on the site (I just make them like you want to do), so here are some basic made-up guidelines to assess the size and value of your ideas:
Now you know what ideas you should not make into articles. So... what is a good idea, anyway? These are all bad ideas, and you now know how to avoid them, but there are no strict good ideas here, especially if you ignore those questions at the top!
There is no reason to worry, however, because here's my collection of "good" ideas you can run for and make (acceptance not guaranteed, and no, I cannot approve your articles myself as of the moment):
Also, make sure you're qualified to give out storywriting advice if you want to give out storywriting advice that isn't harmful, so don't try this if you're an unknown newb.
This should be reasonably self-explanatory. Just find a big gap in the Help & Info section where you want an article to be (and make sure it's enough for an article), then write about what you think will get more people to know that topic. Pretty simple if you know this website way beyond the articles written by other writers, so you can see what gaps are there in the first place. This is a big contribution to make in CYS besides writing amazing storygames that people would discuss positively in the comments, and it's gonna save a lot of clueless newbs who would otherwise be left in the dark, even if you don't know it.
Sadly, as more articles are made, the list of gaps will shrink and shrink, so you need to be fast if you want to snag the spot. Chances are there's almost no competition on the topic you specifically chose, however, and YOU'RE the one to tell your knowledge about the topic to everyone! Now, how does that sound? Great, right? Go ahead now!
Of course, if you find yourself always coming up with ways to fill in the knowledge gaps (which means you're not a newb), maybe you don't need a section telling you how to get great ideas (because you already have great ideas). Great article ideas, however, are nothing if you don't make the article itself. If coming up with an article idea was the whole battle of making articles, we wouldn't need a guide and we wouldn't need to take more than a day to work on an article! There are always extra steps, my friend. Execution is key.
Now, you have an idea, if you're following along and not just reading this to fulfill anything else. Hopefully your idea is clear enough to sustain enough article content to keep you going. You now have to decide if you want to make the article in the first place. If you decided against making the article, leave the rest of the guide for a day where you'll make another article.
It's better not to do every idea that comes up in your head when it comes to article-writing. Articles are not stories. Articles are supposed to be pieces of helpful non-fiction about CYS, so please don't waste too much time on terrible ideas if your aim is to create an article within a year. If your idea falls under the "bad ideas" I listed, my advice is to not continue on them and return to Step 1, because it means your idea needs to be a little more suited to articles.
If your idea is allegedly amazing, well... there are still other things to consider before you invest too much time in your article just to drop it at the last minute. Here are the signs you should probably not make an article:
If you decided to write your article after all, congratulations! We're now at the stage where you can write the articles. After all, an article that isn't written may as well not exist, so you better get those words on the page. Click on some links and start creating your article in those once-empty boxes.
But WAIT! If you have never created an article before, you need to learn all this information to end up with a satisfactory product. All this stuff may save you during the article creation process:
Luckily, there's an article for basic HTML by PerforatedPenguin, so if you don't know HTML basics and how to break up your paragraphs, check out that article and read it. It'll save you a lot before you move to the more "advanced" stuff.
Anyway, here is some stuff beyond the scope of that article that you definitely want to learn in case you want to make articles:
1. Orange
2. Peach
3. Banana
In here, the numbers are manually typed alongside the items and <br> was used in between each item to make sure they don't end up as one ugly line. Not only is this a bit more inefficient (having to type the numbers yourself, having to put space before the list yourself if you want it, more uses of the <br> key), but it also looks a bit worse and stands out less in the sea of the rest of your article. Doesn't help that you can mess up the counting and end up spending a lot of time just making sure the list order is correct.
Instead, try using the <ol></ol> keys to create better-looking lists. Sure, you'll have to wrap your items in <li>s and use </li> to end and separate your items, but the results are amazing, and you don't even have to write the numbers:
If you want your lists to look like bullet points instead of having a Step 1, 2, and 3, you can use <ul> instead:
AS A NOTE: Do you want to put fancy bold text and headings in your lists? It's 100% possible! Just put the tags inside the <li>s and put some text between the opening and closing tags like normal and watch em' go!
Since < and > are symbols that HTML uses and needs, you can't just type them in directly and expect your article to work. To display these symbols as part of your regular article content so they don't run code, use < for < and > for >. They should work when you preview your article (more on previewing later down the line) and you can now display <br> properly. To display an ampersand so you can display entities without forming said entity, write & (but unlike < and >, ampersands can stand alone and display properly.) Displaying < requires you to write &lt;, and displaying &lt; on the screen requires you to write &amp;lt;. No one said it was very easy and no one said it could stop and manage itself.
If you want way more information, there's too much to fit in a section of a mere article. The internet is a fantastic resource if you want to learn more and figure out how to type "½ of a cake, please!"
However, if you want to use headings in your article, you need to know the headings themselves. They're quite simple, I tell ya'. You have access to h1-h6, h1 basically being the equivalent of a title and h6 being tiny. <h3>This is how you format them.</h3> Here's a display for reference of all the options you have when making your articles have headings:
Even with all of that, don't worry: Even if you flunked English class or you just learned the basics two days ago, it's possible to make sure your article is okay in this department. If you know some good English, it's easier for you! Consider fixing your initial mistakes on the go first, then proofreading your whole finished or half-finished article once it's fully-baked and all the words have gone old to find and fix even more mistakes second, even if you find it boring. This helps you catch the most mistakes possible. If you really flunked English class and haven't recovered since, you can get someone else who didn't flunk English class for this, and your article will be better for it.
If you're one of these people who keeps mixing up "You're" and "Your", never using them correctly like thousands of people on the internet who thinks a decent grasp on English is unimportant "because they perfectly understood what I was trying to say", please remember this before writing an article or anything for that matter: "Your" is the possesive form of you, used to mean it belongs to whoever "you" is ("Your blocks" mean the blocks belong to you). "You're" is a contraction of "you are". Sorry if you gained an unwanted English lesson from someone on the internet who's probably younger than you, but there is no excuse for not knowing this when it should be basic knowledge you learn in elementary school. At least mixing up lay and lie is slightly easier to do, but mixing up your and you're HAS NO EXCUSE.
Unless you're demonstrating headings and all that for some reason, it's best to keep headings as a way to separate your article into sections like chapters or, well, literal sections, making it way easier to find one of your points when they return to your article after a good rest. This only works if your sections have enough material and new points to justify being sections. If your sections are short and excessive and you don't give reasons why, I suggest you get rid of sections. Your sections should be longer than the title you give them, please, and you should never use them for mere emphasis. They look better as section titles, when they're not in the middle of a sentence, and when they're in their own sentence isolated in their own line.
Also, if you want your articles to look like mine, use h3 instead of h1 for the most important of headings. h1 looks like a duplicate title and h2 looks like a tiny subtitle. Don't let me stop you from using h1 and h2, however! It's down to preference, after all.
Sure, as this site changes, some of the information you put in your article will inevitably stop working out of your control. It may take decades for the changes to hit your field as this is a slowly-changing CYS website, of course, but it will inevitably stop working and become misinformation. The real problem is when the misinformation takes effect as soon as the words are put down, and you don't even bother fixing it because you think it's just fiction or no one will care. They'll care, because they need the information from your articles (otherwise they have almost no reason to read it). Being gravely misinformed about a fundamental part of the website spreads the misconception faster if you tell it with a straight face and the newbs believe you, and when your tricks don't work, there will be way more questions everyone else has to answer. Soon, you'll look like a fool who lied to everyone. You don't want that.
This is why you need to know your stuff first before you write an article about it, to reduce the amount of misinformation that slips through. Sure, some information is locked away unless you do great tasks like becoming a moderator, and it can feel like a very, very monumental task, but there is no excuse for getting it wrong if it's accessible to commoners like you and me as well. Interact with the community, experiment with the buttons, and make some stories of your own before giving out advice for the community or storygame-making aspects! You can't know what the buttons do if you haven't tried em'. Don't rely too much on guessing games or existing articles to understand how they work.
Seriously, drop your weird internet slang and chatspeak (u, 2, etc.) when writing an article. It makes your article look unprofessional, and it doesn't make you look cool and normal here. You have a lot of time to write your article, and the only way to trim said time is to impose a deadline upon yourself, but no matter the time limit, you should have enough time to write "pisses me off" instead of "pmo".
If you've been too immersed in YouTube Shorts comments, it may be very hard to beat up this habit, but trust me: It's worth it when your reader and article publisher can read your article without having to look up every other word because it's some weird acronym that only exists among brain-rotted young people. It will make your article easier to read and learn from, and people will take you more seriously. Plus, it means you're in tune with our culture and not the brainrot culture that runs rampant on YouTube.
Making an article about scripting? It's going to be mighty useless if you only include one specific script and its most basic function ever, all while making it unbearably vague and using flimsy motivational speeches in place of actual information. That is simply not how articles should be written, and it's going to be hard to learn anything new from that. The problem is there's not enough information and substance to learn anything, and as a result, your article ends up short, flimsy, and incomplete.
If your content is absolutely nothing without another article, it's also incomplete. What's the point of reading your article if almost everything you need to learn is located in that other article? It makes your article useless and it makes your article dependent on another article to survive (meaning it can't stand alone). Of course, other articles are permitted to provide more information to your content, but if you want the "more information is in another article" trick to work, it's best if your article has enough information to stand on its own, which means you kind of need to talk about your own thing and do something other articles haven't covered in-depth. A good idea should give you enough great things to talk about.
Your article is also incomplete if it forgets to deliver on its promises and ends on a cliffhanger, leaving the reader with little information. Please don't do this, no matter how much time you gave yourself. Make sure to promise the reader something, then deliver on all (or at least some) of its promises, leaving the good impression of a finished article. Don't just publish your article as soon as an invisible timer runs out. An article is better if you put enough love and care into it until the very last point you wanted to make. You do not end in the supposed-to-be middle of your article because you got tired, forget to rewrite it, and publish it expecting publishers to think you finished the article just enough to make them accept it. Remember to use the Save Incomplete button if you want to take a break! It's not a crime!
If you can grasp these so-called essentials, you should be able to make some passable articles, provided your idea is good and you know us.
Unless you're a mere hack completely using AI to write your slop, writing does take a while, so you may need this more than you think if you ever hope on releasing it before February, March, or any other deadline.
You know why it's important to be passionate enough to continue writing your article? It won't feel like a soul-sucking chore when you do so, and you'll be more motivated to finish it because you enjoy it. Sure, there will always be other activities you enjoy even more (unless your life is 99% CYS article writing, which can be said about no one ever), but you should be able to set these aside if you're serious about this one.
Please do not force yourself to create an article on one particular topic if you hate that topic or know nothing about that topic. Please make sure you personally want to give advice to people instead of just making an article for 10 commendations and 50 points (although that may be one of your reasons on making your article). You'll have more fun on ideas you really want to do, and you'll overcome the dwindling interest faster if you have a deeper interest in your topic, so love making articles and choose sweet topics you love! Of course, that's not all there is to it, but I trust you to keep on making your article as good as you can.
Try it right now and get a realistic peek into your article as others may view it once it's done and published (minus some content, because you're not finished). You may spot some mistakes in your article you wouldn't notice in a giant wall of formatting, and you can fix them before the public spots them.
Just remember to change https://chooseyourstory.com/help/articles/editArticle.aspx?ArticleId=IDHERE to https://chooseyourstory.com/help/articles/Article.aspx?ArticleId=IDHERE. Nothing more.
If you finished your article (and make sure it IS finished, or it'll show), press Save & Submit to submit your article. There will be a confirmation popup when you do so, allowing you to avoid it if you're unsure. Press "OK" if you really want to submit your article and put it in the waiting list of articles, but there's no guarantee it'll make it out alive and accepted. It's normal, though, and you should not care about that uncertainty. We need to check the quality of our articles, especially here, so you need to learn how to deal with it!
If your article's left in the waiting list for years after this, don't make yourself a hopeless case and quit the website. The fact that you're reading this means I made it, but that doesn't provide certainty that your article will make it too, and it's okay. I don't accept your article; I merely make articles and throw them in the hopes of getting them accepted.
It's not the end of your writing career if you get silently rejected. You can always make another article or make a storygame for once. I wish you good luck on what you decide to do.
I only seldom do this, so I may sound hypocritical, but it's going to make a difference when your article has less mistakes in the final product you show to the community. Your article will look great!
Now that you learned (almost) everything you need to know, I hope you found this article somewhat helpful. It is supposed to help, after all. Sadly, I couldn't fit all advice you could possibly give to someone on this wonderful topic, so if your specific concerns weren't here, ask the forums or figure it out on your own. After all, figuring it out myself was how I kind of learned to make articles. Who knows? Maybe you can make another article on all the missing information?
All anyone can do is shed a light, and you kind of have to do the work. Read what you need, ask some other people, learn to write even better, and give yourself more time. I already spent over 7,700 words on this article, and it may be bigger than most other articles on this website, so if you scrolled down here out of impatience, it's normal. TL;DR: Write an article and maybe try reading small chunks of this one to not be easily overwhelmed.
So... you wanna help out in the Help & Info section to get some nice points or show you exist without stepping into the forums or the storygame creation side? You have come to the right place! Back in the olden' days of CYS, we didn't have this article to guide us through the seas of article creation, so most newbs were left in the dark. You, aspiring article creator, are out in the clear now with this guide to guide you. You're lucky!
So, how do you really make an article?
It's easier than you may think. Unless you expect AI-generation tools to crank out slop here.
1. Get an Idea
A terribly misguided article won't ever see the light of day, mate. So will an article that can't hold its permanent position on the Help & Info section (like warnings. I learned that the hard way). This is why if you want your article to be seen, like, at all, you need to come up with a decent idea (at least). Take a look at all the articles you see (including this one), browse the rest of the site (preferably a lot), then think of something you feel the site needs right now. There! An idea! A half-decent idea you can use to help others! Pat yourself on the back then think if it really deserves an article.
Here are ideas I suggest you run away from if you unfortunately came up with these:
Anything Too Similar to Existing Articles
I recommend looking at other articles before making your own, and this is one of the reasons why. If you are thinking of another article on how to punctuate dialogue, write half-decent comments, write reviews, or earn points, then you better have a secondary topic going for it to hide that first topic, or else your article is pretty much redundant.If an article on that topic already exists, it's useless to write about that topic in another article without bringing something fresh to the table. Why would anyone check out your article if there's another article that serves what you wanted to do just fine (maybe even better)? Why would anyone listen to you at all if all you do is spit out someone else's points verbatim and claim they're your own? This is why you need to look for gaps in the Help & Info place of the site instead of looking for something to copy and "be inspired by". Mere suggestions of articles in the Writing Workshop are fair game; I'm talking about ideas too similar to finished articles.
Anything That Ain't Helping Anybody
Most people aren't going here to sightsee and check what you want to say. If they wanted that, they'll go to the forums or maybe your profile. In a section called Help & Info, your aim should be to help, not entertain.Your short stories should go to the Creative Corner. Your suggestions for the site should be tossed into the Wishing Well. Your unwanted half-Numberblocks fanfiction half-rant made for petty purposes should probably stay private for everyone's sanity. Articles are different from Forum Posts or Storygames in that they're supposed to provide a guide to CYStians who feel kind of stuck and don't know the system, so your approach should be adjusted accordingly. Tutorials, guides, and feature tours over glorified stories on the Help & Info streets. Please help CYStians.
Info For The Outdoors
Since this is CYS, the tips, tricks, and ropes you give should either be very general or very CYS-specific (if you're writing for "The Website", be more CYS-specific because it's in the name). We have no room to help on literally any other website, and if you're looking into our articles because you want specific help in Twine or Wattpad, you're in the wrong place and probably very weird. Know CYS well enough before writing with us.Writing a CYS article for someone looking for help in Twine/Wattpad/intfiction/Scratch/any other site on the web without anything that helps us CYStians is not only very niche, but also very harmful to CYStians, because most of us may not spend equal time in those websites and some of us may not even have a presence in those websites so it's not going to help us while your article is taking up valuable space on the shelf. If you're the minority thinking this is a good contribution to our glorious CYStia in any way, please stop immediately and seriously reconsider your ideas or just help them where they live.
Tiny Ideas
Now, here's the most common trap, because it's easier to come up with.Most ideas won't warrant a big article like this one. One of my unpublished articles certainly didn't have an idea that warranted a spot at all, and that's my thought on why it stays unpublished to this day in the first place. If your idea is too small to carry enough "new" information to teach a newb, easily outdated, or both, you're dealing with an idea so tiny it's way better on the forums and rejected in this section's heart.
How in the world do you know which ideas are tiny and which are article-sized anyway?! Honestly, I'm just as clueless as you probably are, and I don't even approve/accept articles to put on the site (I just make them like you want to do), so here are some basic made-up guidelines to assess the size and value of your ideas:
- Can you provide enough insight so your article destroys (or at the very least reduces) the need for endless questions concerning the topic you're writing about because you can answer some or most of them? (You can never answer all of them.)
- Are you sure your topic has the good possibility to be even remotely relevant in a year? (It's easier to make your articles slightly timeless in CYStia because the site doesn't go through THAT much change, but if your article is about something that'll be irrelevant once months pass, yikes...)
- Do you know just enough to step into the scene and make a halfway-decent article about it? Experience not only gives you more stuff to talk about, but it also makes sure you're the right-ish person for the job. If you feel your prose is absolutely HORRENDOUS, learn how to write halfway-decent prose (we have an article on that) and prove you can write prose before you make an article on any kind of prose. Same goes for dialogue or literally anything. This is why I stick to writing about points, comments, and now articles.
- Do you think it's a contribution to the CYS website?
- Do you want to talk about it, and do you want to write about it, possibly for more than a day? Are you passionate enough to WRITE and not feed the prompt into an AI machine? Do you value this idea, and do you think others will benefit from your ideas?
Now you know what ideas you should not make into articles. So... what is a good idea, anyway? These are all bad ideas, and you now know how to avoid them, but there are no strict good ideas here, especially if you ignore those questions at the top!
There is no reason to worry, however, because here's my collection of "good" ideas you can run for and make (acceptance not guaranteed, and no, I cannot approve your articles myself as of the moment):
Something Like That One Article I Saw, But For Something Else!
You should not try to "improve" articles directly for your own article because all articles need to be useful alongside their neighbors and not be the classic "copy but 'enhanced' in this way and that way and ya-da-ya-da-ya-da" (or else there's no point in reading the original article anymore and it's an insult to the original creator). However, you can get a spark from an existing article, and if you know enough about the site, you can look for another aspect of that topic, and now you can write about that new-ish topic and possibly get accepted and featured alongside your "inspiration" or something (I'm honored to have this article mentioned in that post alongside that one other article I love). Make sure to get another inspiration for this one, like reasonable-ish frustrations on the newbs of the site, or else it's just "Anything Too Similar to Existing Articles". (Writing about reviews specifically is different from writing about... comments that may contain your opinions and nothin' more.)Writing Advice!
To me, this is always an option. In a writing site, it's great to share your writing advice, even though most of your ideas can probably serve as little posts in the Writing Workshop. If you're sure your advice is valuable enough for an article, however, go for it. Just avoid the more general advice stuff and write an advice article on the more specific parts of writing if you want to stand out.Also, make sure you're qualified to give out storywriting advice if you want to give out storywriting advice that isn't harmful, so don't try this if you're an unknown newb.
This Kind of Information That's Useful but IMPOSSIBLE to Find in The Help & Info Section!
If you want true "originality" among the article crowd, try this instead. I think the article you're reading right now is in this category (although I may be biased because I wrote it)!This should be reasonably self-explanatory. Just find a big gap in the Help & Info section where you want an article to be (and make sure it's enough for an article), then write about what you think will get more people to know that topic. Pretty simple if you know this website way beyond the articles written by other writers, so you can see what gaps are there in the first place. This is a big contribution to make in CYS besides writing amazing storygames that people would discuss positively in the comments, and it's gonna save a lot of clueless newbs who would otherwise be left in the dark, even if you don't know it.
Sadly, as more articles are made, the list of gaps will shrink and shrink, so you need to be fast if you want to snag the spot. Chances are there's almost no competition on the topic you specifically chose, however, and YOU'RE the one to tell your knowledge about the topic to everyone! Now, how does that sound? Great, right? Go ahead now!
Of course, if you find yourself always coming up with ways to fill in the knowledge gaps (which means you're not a newb), maybe you don't need a section telling you how to get great ideas (because you already have great ideas). Great article ideas, however, are nothing if you don't make the article itself. If coming up with an article idea was the whole battle of making articles, we wouldn't need a guide and we wouldn't need to take more than a day to work on an article! There are always extra steps, my friend. Execution is key.
2. Decide if You WANT to Continue
Now, you have an idea, if you're following along and not just reading this to fulfill anything else. Hopefully your idea is clear enough to sustain enough article content to keep you going. You now have to decide if you want to make the article in the first place. If you decided against making the article, leave the rest of the guide for a day where you'll make another article.
It's better not to do every idea that comes up in your head when it comes to article-writing. Articles are not stories. Articles are supposed to be pieces of helpful non-fiction about CYS, so please don't waste too much time on terrible ideas if your aim is to create an article within a year. If your idea falls under the "bad ideas" I listed, my advice is to not continue on them and return to Step 1, because it means your idea needs to be a little more suited to articles.
If your idea is allegedly amazing, well... there are still other things to consider before you invest too much time in your article just to drop it at the last minute. Here are the signs you should probably not make an article:
- You seriously do not want to spend more than a day on it and you would dedicate as little time as possible to it (if you want other people to see your article, you should finish it and dedicate time to it if possible).
- You can't be brought to read or write anything more than a few sentences. Like, at all. A few sentences doesn't leave room for digging deeper into the details, and if you can't do the basic task of writing more than one paragraph, you really shouldn't have made a CYS account.
- You find that you do not know how to explain anything in a half-decent way. Make sure you know how to write some... explanations first before you write an article. Articles need to be great enough so we can learn at all.
- You do not know how to motivate yourself to finish articles.
- You loathe your idea. No matter how good it technically is, if you despise your idea, it's better to just let it go. You're not obligated to make that idea a reality, after all!
- You're unironically going to use AI to make it a reality. If you're seriously considering AI with no questions, don't just leave your article dreams behind, but leave our site. We loathe AI slop and we shouldn't let any of it in.
3. Writing the Content
If you decided to write your article after all, congratulations! We're now at the stage where you can write the articles. After all, an article that isn't written may as well not exist, so you better get those words on the page. Click on some links and start creating your article in those once-empty boxes.
But WAIT! If you have never created an article before, you need to learn all this information to end up with a satisfactory product. All this stuff may save you during the article creation process:
What are Those Boxes?
Assuming the layout you see is still the same as mine at the time you're reading this, there should be five boxes: Title, Category, Difficulty, Abstract (two or three sentences), and Body. Category and Difficulty are dropdown boxes, as you can see. The rest are fields where you can type text. Here are some descriptions of those boxes:- Title: Pretty self-explanatory. It's the name of your article.
- Category: Also self-explanatory. It's the section where your article is put in! You can put it in The Website (places for CYS information), Storywriting (places for information about writing stories), Advanced Editor (advanced editor stuff for CYS, make sure you really know your stuff there), Scripting (scripting for CYS and maybe HTML, make sure you really know your stuff there), and the neglected child Interviews (who even puts their articles in that section?! We only have one article there, but if you somehow manage to have another interview with someone, feel free to use that).
- Difficulty: Again, self-explanatory. There are three difficulties: Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert. A general guideline is to use Beginner for the newbs, Intermediate for the less newb-y newbs, and Expert for people looking to learn how to use the Advanced Editor in advanced ways or for advanced topics in general.
- Abstract (two or three sentences): If you have NEVER made an article, you may struggle to see the purpose of this one. Where is it even displayed, after all? Once you know your articles, you'll realize it's not displayed near the title in the Help & Info section and it doesn't appear in the article itself. What is the use of this? Where is it?
If people are looking for your articles on your profile instead of the Help & Info section, whatever you type out in this "abstract section" will display under your article's name, basically giving profile-surfers a slightly better preview of your content. An example so you know what the box is used for: For this article, the text I put in that box is "So you wanna help out in helping all of them out to earn 50 points? Here you go!" (Can you see it?) - Body: This box is larger than all the rest, and you should be able to see that. This is because it's where most of your article goes (the text you're reading right now is in the body). In fact, if you type nothing in the body of it all, your article's basically just a title and barely qualifies as an article. That's why it's big and important. Please note that you can't just type bare text in here without making your article look ugly. You'll see why later.
Making Your Article Look Decent
If you don't put any HTML tags in your work, your article will look like an unformatted text wall nobody wants to read through. I'm sorry but it's true. Just pressing the enter key won't be enough to create spaces between your paragraphs in the world of articles. Utilizing bold and italics for emphasis isn't as simple as a single click as there's no built-in bold or italics button and usual bold/italic shortcuts do not magically work. Don't you dare try fancy quotes, too. LOOK: The "It�s" is messed up here because I used fancy quotes instead of straight ones. You could try memorizing entities to form "It’s" properly, but it's some more keys to type in and your article may become a big mess in the editor if you utilize contractions often. That is why you need to know some HTML and limitations if you want your article to look like mine.Luckily, there's an article for basic HTML by PerforatedPenguin, so if you don't know HTML basics and how to break up your paragraphs, check out that article and read it. It'll save you a lot before you move to the more "advanced" stuff.
Anyway, here is some stuff beyond the scope of that article that you definitely want to learn in case you want to make articles:
A Shortcut For Lists
If you're going to use lists in your article, there is no need to create lists like this:1. Orange
2. Peach
3. Banana
In here, the numbers are manually typed alongside the items and <br> was used in between each item to make sure they don't end up as one ugly line. Not only is this a bit more inefficient (having to type the numbers yourself, having to put space before the list yourself if you want it, more uses of the <br> key), but it also looks a bit worse and stands out less in the sea of the rest of your article. Doesn't help that you can mess up the counting and end up spending a lot of time just making sure the list order is correct.
Instead, try using the <ol></ol> keys to create better-looking lists. Sure, you'll have to wrap your items in <li>s and use </li> to end and separate your items, but the results are amazing, and you don't even have to write the numbers:
- Orange
- Peach
- Banana
If you want your lists to look like bullet points instead of having a Step 1, 2, and 3, you can use <ul> instead:
- Orange
- Peach
- Banana
- Orange
- Peach
- Banana
AS A NOTE: Do you want to put fancy bold text and headings in your lists? It's 100% possible! Just put the tags inside the <li>s and put some text between the opening and closing tags like normal and watch em' go!
Displaying HTML Code Without Messing Up
Not all the entities you can use are absolutely necessary. You can say "It's" just fine without making the quote fancy like in "It’s". If you're going to include HTML in your article, however, you may need to know what character "entities" are so you can display the HTML code you put in without messing up your article. That's the one time it's actually necessary.Since < and > are symbols that HTML uses and needs, you can't just type them in directly and expect your article to work. To display these symbols as part of your regular article content so they don't run code, use < for < and > for >. They should work when you preview your article (more on previewing later down the line) and you can now display <br> properly. To display an ampersand so you can display entities without forming said entity, write & (but unlike < and >, ampersands can stand alone and display properly.) Displaying < requires you to write &lt;, and displaying &lt; on the screen requires you to write &amp;lt;. No one said it was very easy and no one said it could stop and manage itself.
If you want way more information, there's too much to fit in a section of a mere article. The internet is a fantastic resource if you want to learn more and figure out how to type "½ of a cake, please!"
Headings
You can make a decent article without headings, and some of the articles in this website prove that fact.However, if you want to use headings in your article, you need to know the headings themselves. They're quite simple, I tell ya'. You have access to h1-h6, h1 basically being the equivalent of a title and h6 being tiny. <h3>This is how you format them.</h3> Here's a display for reference of all the options you have when making your articles have headings:
Heading 1/h1
Heading 2/h2
Heading 3/h3
Heading 4/h4
Heading 5/h5
Heading 6/h6
Useless Stuff
Now here's the section that contains some cool-looking tricks you can demonstrate in your articles and storygames, although you can very easily do without them. They may make for some nice quirks you have as an article, storygame, or even FORUM POST creator, but in a real article you should use these sparingly if at all:- Colored text isn't as useless as all the other things on this list, but all it does is catch your attention more than a good ol' italic/emphasis text (and hurt your eyes if the color is bad), so you shoukd use it sparingly. Making these isn't exactly rocket science, but it's outside the basic HTML forumla. To make colored text, take the opening tag of your HTML property, then add style="color:(INSERT COLOR HERE);". For a list of colors that are compatible with HTML styling, search it on the internet.
Essentials to Writing the Content
Finally! Equipped with HTML and writing skills, it is possible to write content for your article. In fact, you should write content for your article because writing your article is the same as making it exist, and it is your responsibility to make sure the content is good (or at the very least, passable) if you want your article to have any chance to be accepted. Why should it be good, and why should I care? If you're a minority and seriously have that thought in your head or if you just need a reason, I'm telling you to care because:- Readers don't want to read the unreadable, especially if they want to learn something.
- Good content is easier to accept because the people who have to read and accept your article don't want unreadable cringe as a tutorial. Remember: Unlike storygames, articles have to be selected and accepted by other people to be public on the site and become a permanent member of the Help & Info section. If articles can just be published on a whim by clicking on Save & Submit, we'd be drowning in articles. That is obviously not the case, so passable content is vital to making your article exist to the eyes of others.
Spelling n' Grammar
Unfortunately, no matter how much you delude yourself, a writing site demands that you don't wreck your English anywhere, including in an article. Not only does bad spelling and grammar make it less likely and more difficult for readers to take you seriously, but it also wrecks your chances of getting your article published. A few unknown grammatical mistakes can be forgiven, of course, especially if they're "rules" everyone breaks and no one notices, but it can be very distracting and downright annoying if every other sentence contains a grammatical or spelling error, and the people accepting your article do not want to suffer paragraphs upon paragraphs of bad English. Nothing saves five whole paragraphs of SPAG (I assume it means Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar) issues.Even with all of that, don't worry: Even if you flunked English class or you just learned the basics two days ago, it's possible to make sure your article is okay in this department. If you know some good English, it's easier for you! Consider fixing your initial mistakes on the go first, then proofreading your whole finished or half-finished article once it's fully-baked and all the words have gone old to find and fix even more mistakes second, even if you find it boring. This helps you catch the most mistakes possible. If you really flunked English class and haven't recovered since, you can get someone else who didn't flunk English class for this, and your article will be better for it.
If you're one of these people who keeps mixing up "You're" and "Your", never using them correctly like thousands of people on the internet who thinks a decent grasp on English is unimportant "because they perfectly understood what I was trying to say", please remember this before writing an article or anything for that matter: "Your" is the possesive form of you, used to mean it belongs to whoever "you" is ("Your blocks" mean the blocks belong to you). "You're" is a contraction of "you are". Sorry if you gained an unwanted English lesson from someone on the internet who's probably younger than you, but there is no excuse for not knowing this when it should be basic knowledge you learn in elementary school. At least mixing up lay and lie is slightly easier to do, but mixing up your and you're HAS NO EXCUSE.
Proper Heading Usage (Goes With Making Your Article Look Decent)
Most of you should have a good instinct on when to use headings if you have read literally anything with them. Still, you can abuse headings and ruin your article, so this may be nice information if your instinct still isn't good enough. (Or you can just get rid of headings altogether. Look at all the articles and take note of the ones without headings)Unless you're demonstrating headings and all that for some reason, it's best to keep headings as a way to separate your article into sections like chapters or, well, literal sections, making it way easier to find one of your points when they return to your article after a good rest. This only works if your sections have enough material and new points to justify being sections. If your sections are short and excessive and you don't give reasons why, I suggest you get rid of sections. Your sections should be longer than the title you give them, please, and you should never use them for mere emphasis. They look better as section titles, when they're not in the middle of a sentence, and when they're in their own sentence isolated in their own line.
Also, if you want your articles to look like mine, use h3 instead of h1 for the most important of headings. h1 looks like a duplicate title and h2 looks like a tiny subtitle. Don't let me stop you from using h1 and h2, however! It's down to preference, after all.
Correctness
Articles are non-fiction content, so you can't make up whatever you want about the site, bring in a dude named Basil who feels extra sad and bans you when you insult people, tell all that with a straight, informational face, and expect it to be seriously published like it will help anyone. No, no, no! Articles are not storygames. Articles are supposed to help people, so getting the functions of the various text fields, buttons, and scripting features wrong will damage the reliability of the article. People who need the information can and will be annoyed when half your article's instructions straight-up don't work. Remember that.Sure, as this site changes, some of the information you put in your article will inevitably stop working out of your control. It may take decades for the changes to hit your field as this is a slowly-changing CYS website, of course, but it will inevitably stop working and become misinformation. The real problem is when the misinformation takes effect as soon as the words are put down, and you don't even bother fixing it because you think it's just fiction or no one will care. They'll care, because they need the information from your articles (otherwise they have almost no reason to read it). Being gravely misinformed about a fundamental part of the website spreads the misconception faster if you tell it with a straight face and the newbs believe you, and when your tricks don't work, there will be way more questions everyone else has to answer. Soon, you'll look like a fool who lied to everyone. You don't want that.
This is why you need to know your stuff first before you write an article about it, to reduce the amount of misinformation that slips through. Sure, some information is locked away unless you do great tasks like becoming a moderator, and it can feel like a very, very monumental task, but there is no excuse for getting it wrong if it's accessible to commoners like you and me as well. Interact with the community, experiment with the buttons, and make some stories of your own before giving out advice for the community or storygame-making aspects! You can't know what the buttons do if you haven't tried em'. Don't rely too much on guessing games or existing articles to understand how they work.
Appropriate Length
You don't need to worry too much about this one. There is no hard limit or range on article lengths; you get articles that can fit on the screen, give or take some space, and you get giants like the article right here. Just remember that you must be able to deliver enough information worthy of an article, and not just a forum post. That's really important, and you should aim to talk about your subject in enough detail, making it worthy of its length. Don't make an article that's 10,000 words of the exact same point and don't try to make an article in under 50 words.Proper English Words
Pmo, Sybau, Icl, what in the world are those terms?!Seriously, drop your weird internet slang and chatspeak (u, 2, etc.) when writing an article. It makes your article look unprofessional, and it doesn't make you look cool and normal here. You have a lot of time to write your article, and the only way to trim said time is to impose a deadline upon yourself, but no matter the time limit, you should have enough time to write "pisses me off" instead of "pmo".
If you've been too immersed in YouTube Shorts comments, it may be very hard to beat up this habit, but trust me: It's worth it when your reader and article publisher can read your article without having to look up every other word because it's some weird acronym that only exists among brain-rotted young people. It will make your article easier to read and learn from, and people will take you more seriously. Plus, it means you're in tune with our culture and not the brainrot culture that runs rampant on YouTube.
COMPLETE INFORMATION
Now, this is one of the most important parts of your article, and it's pretty much essential for your article to be a useful article, so pay attention!Making an article about scripting? It's going to be mighty useless if you only include one specific script and its most basic function ever, all while making it unbearably vague and using flimsy motivational speeches in place of actual information. That is simply not how articles should be written, and it's going to be hard to learn anything new from that. The problem is there's not enough information and substance to learn anything, and as a result, your article ends up short, flimsy, and incomplete.
If your content is absolutely nothing without another article, it's also incomplete. What's the point of reading your article if almost everything you need to learn is located in that other article? It makes your article useless and it makes your article dependent on another article to survive (meaning it can't stand alone). Of course, other articles are permitted to provide more information to your content, but if you want the "more information is in another article" trick to work, it's best if your article has enough information to stand on its own, which means you kind of need to talk about your own thing and do something other articles haven't covered in-depth. A good idea should give you enough great things to talk about.
Your article is also incomplete if it forgets to deliver on its promises and ends on a cliffhanger, leaving the reader with little information. Please don't do this, no matter how much time you gave yourself. Make sure to promise the reader something, then deliver on all (or at least some) of its promises, leaving the good impression of a finished article. Don't just publish your article as soon as an invisible timer runs out. An article is better if you put enough love and care into it until the very last point you wanted to make. You do not end in the supposed-to-be middle of your article because you got tired, forget to rewrite it, and publish it expecting publishers to think you finished the article just enough to make them accept it. Remember to use the Save Incomplete button if you want to take a break! It's not a crime!
If you can grasp these so-called essentials, you should be able to make some passable articles, provided your idea is good and you know us.
Actually Writing the Content
Now that you're here, you can approach this how you really want to (I'm not the one accepting your article), but here are some tips for writing and finishing your article, preferably within your lifetime or deadline, assuming you're following the guidelines (which I hope you read) regardless so I don't have to call out plagiarism:Keep Your Idea in Your Head
If you don't know what to write and nothing seems to be working, maybe your idea isn't in your head and you've reached a block. Instead of giving up, have a clearer idea of your entire article and not just your current section. Think of the sections you really want to do and include, and make sure these sections can span a complete article. This can help you make sure you keep adding your desired words, which will eventually lead to completion.Keep it Short
Funny how that works, huh? A very long article telling you to keep your article short. Well, if you have a deadline, a shorter article plan is way more likely to meet that deadline. Extremely short articles are better as forum posts, but extremely long articles like this one take more time, energy, and commitment, which makes it more likely you'll run over your deadline and miss everything. My original intention was to submit this article before January 1st to make it a special beginning-of-the-year article, but when the deadline hit, I wasn't really done! Learn from my mistakes and either keep your article short or keep your deadline realistic and forgive yourself for extending (articles are not contests).Write Every Day
Resist the temptation to take an entire day off unless you really need to in order to finish your article fast enough. Writing every week is a slow pace compared to writing every day, and one day of rest can easily turn into two, three, four, five, seven, or thirty-one. Spending time on your article is an essential part to finishing your article, and you may as well spend significant portions of your day on it, keeping up the pace every day, to finish it on your preferred deadline faster than me.Unless you're a mere hack completely using AI to write your slop, writing does take a while, so you may need this more than you think if you ever hope on releasing it before February, March, or any other deadline.
Have Fun
Please tell me you're feeling even a little bit of fun while writing your article!You know why it's important to be passionate enough to continue writing your article? It won't feel like a soul-sucking chore when you do so, and you'll be more motivated to finish it because you enjoy it. Sure, there will always be other activities you enjoy even more (unless your life is 99% CYS article writing, which can be said about no one ever), but you should be able to set these aside if you're serious about this one.
Please do not force yourself to create an article on one particular topic if you hate that topic or know nothing about that topic. Please make sure you personally want to give advice to people instead of just making an article for 10 commendations and 50 points (although that may be one of your reasons on making your article). You'll have more fun on ideas you really want to do, and you'll overcome the dwindling interest faster if you have a deeper interest in your topic, so love making articles and choose sweet topics you love! Of course, that's not all there is to it, but I trust you to keep on making your article as good as you can.
Previewing Your Hard Work
You wrote your content and want to see it how others see it? Don't fall for the misconception of the lack of a way to preview your work without submitting it. Even though there's no obvious preview button, you can preview your unfinished work by deleting the word "edit" in your article's URL. This will save you from going into the Wishing Well and asking for a preview button for articles, which I did once and learned this trick in the process. (Luckily it isn't rejected, but it's in "New ideas" limbo and there's still no preview button, so maybe it is rejected.)Try it right now and get a realistic peek into your article as others may view it once it's done and published (minus some content, because you're not finished). You may spot some mistakes in your article you wouldn't notice in a giant wall of formatting, and you can fix them before the public spots them.
Just remember to change https://chooseyourstory.com/help/articles/editArticle.aspx?ArticleId=IDHERE to https://chooseyourstory.com/help/articles/Article.aspx?ArticleId=IDHERE. Nothing more.
4. Dealing with Finishing and Publishing Your Article
If you finished your article (and make sure it IS finished, or it'll show), press Save & Submit to submit your article. There will be a confirmation popup when you do so, allowing you to avoid it if you're unsure. Press "OK" if you really want to submit your article and put it in the waiting list of articles, but there's no guarantee it'll make it out alive and accepted. It's normal, though, and you should not care about that uncertainty. We need to check the quality of our articles, especially here, so you need to learn how to deal with it!
It's Okay to Not Make It
You may follow this article with all your heart, making sure your article is shining and perfect to "my" eyes, trying to check everything to "polish" up the "details", and then you submit it and cross your fingers.If your article's left in the waiting list for years after this, don't make yourself a hopeless case and quit the website. The fact that you're reading this means I made it, but that doesn't provide certainty that your article will make it too, and it's okay. I don't accept your article; I merely make articles and throw them in the hopes of getting them accepted.
It's not the end of your writing career if you get silently rejected. You can always make another article or make a storygame for once. I wish you good luck on what you decide to do.
It's Okay to Submit It
Of course, if the fear of not making it (or worse, "getting ridiculed") is holding you back from submitting it or even making your article in the first place, then you should learn that it's okay to submit your work and let other people see it. Not submitting your work in fear of never getting an audience to see it (because you think it IS bad) is just gonna guarantee no one will see your work, and the "ridicule" you'll get probably isn't as extreme in reality. Submit your article. You'll be fine, and rejection isn't the end of the world.You Should Finish It
Before submitting, make sure your article is finished and you're ready to submit it. Read the article, catch those nasty mistakes you didn't catch last time, ensure style consistency, and do all that to make it shine, make it shine, make it shine! It may sound like extra work, but that will ever-so-slightly increase your chances of getting accepted. It's checking your article before others check it, and it will make your article a bit more bearable to read in the future.I only seldom do this, so I may sound hypocritical, but it's going to make a difference when your article has less mistakes in the final product you show to the community. Your article will look great!
The Rest is Up To You!
I cannot answer all the questions I can come up with in this article, especially since I'm running out of time, so use the forums to your advantage.Now that you learned (almost) everything you need to know, I hope you found this article somewhat helpful. It is supposed to help, after all. Sadly, I couldn't fit all advice you could possibly give to someone on this wonderful topic, so if your specific concerns weren't here, ask the forums or figure it out on your own. After all, figuring it out myself was how I kind of learned to make articles. Who knows? Maybe you can make another article on all the missing information?
All anyone can do is shed a light, and you kind of have to do the work. Read what you need, ask some other people, learn to write even better, and give yourself more time. I already spent over 7,700 words on this article, and it may be bigger than most other articles on this website, so if you scrolled down here out of impatience, it's normal. TL;DR: Write an article and maybe try reading small chunks of this one to not be easily overwhelmed.
