After talking with janra a bit about the site, I pondered a bit about Write On! and its role as a scoop site on writing. It sits, like a lot of scoop/collaborative sites, at an intersection between resource and community. Having quality articles about the "art and craft of writing" that get linked to by writing classes is acting as a resource. But discussion and contributions by readers is what the "community" side is about.

As people interested in writing, presumably honing our skills in our own creative writing, we have not much to offer but our own experience, both as people who write and people who read. Just because this isn't a forum for critiquing each others' creative writing, doesn't mean that what we bring can't be personal -- in fact, since writing, like any art, is a matter of taste, what we write is bound to be at least somewhat personal.

Here are some ideas for stories "about writing" that I wonder if they would fit into Write On!:

• Stories that ask, "How do you do X?" rather than talking about, "How should you do ..." For example, a twist on the "Rebel without a cause" story calling for writers' experiences creating an antagonist, or trying to make an unsympathetic character well-rounded. Tried and true principles are good to know, but down-to-earth advice "from the trenches" (to steal a catchphrase) can also be welcome.
• Stories that examine published work for what is effective or not effective; not reviews of other books about the process of writing or editing, but examples of what is successful, with room for differences of opinion (I'm thinking in part of David Lodge's The Art of Fiction in which he discusses various aspects of fiction with case studies from well-known works. In a site like this though, readers could provide their own examples and explain what they thought made it remarkable -- this exercises the critical reader side rather than the writer side. It also moves from the abstract to the concrete. Another example, instead of the question posted in the "Awful writing" story: "What do you think makes truly awful writing stand out from the rest?" it could be "What are examples of bad writing you remember and why did it strike you that way?" The first is much harder to formulate and express, while the second is more approachable, but can still be valuable.
• Other starting points such as, "Who's an author who's acknowledged as a master but you just don't see it?" or "What's the greatest challenge you've had in writing, and (how) did you overcome it?" This is tangential to the main mission of the site, but as with the other suggestions the idea is to explicitly encourage input and exchange among readers of the site, rather than put forth a thesis. Hopefully it stimulates dialogue and breaks down the distinction between the authors and readers of articles, and re-enforces the "everybody has an opinion worth sharing" principle.

This doesn't mean relaxing standards completely. There is a distinction between providing a context and inviting comment on it, and throwing out a question with a "what does everyone think?" The latter is lazy, but the former can be an article that asks its readers to re-write (or augment) it given their own thoughts and experiences.

Anyway, as disclaimed above, just some thoughts from a sometime lurker.