Ficlatté Community Guidelines

Ficlatté is a different sort of community site. While there is social components to our site, we’re not a social network like Facebook. We’re all about fiction and storytelling, which means we’re all about imagination and creativity. We don’t care who you are outside of this site. As such, we're all about persona and encourage the use of pseudonyms (though you are in no way obligated to do so ) – because we find they allow a level of anonymity and privacy to create things that we might not otherwise feel free to do in a place where everyone knows your real name.

That said, just because we’re creative and encourage creativity doesn’t mean we don’t have rules. We’ve found constraints to be oddly freeing. Here are the Ficlatté community standards:

  • Be awesome and have fun. We assume that if you’re joining the community, you aspire to awesomeness. You don’t have to think you’re awesome yet, you have to believe that you can be awesome.
  • Be creative. One of the great things about this community is that you can help others develop their stories or take them in totally new directions. Write sequels and prequels to other peoples’ stories and help develop a communal narrative. It’s a great way to try out a new style or write something without starting from scratch.
  • Be free, supportive, courteous and constructive with your criticism. We’re all here to become better writers and get feedback on our work. Don’t post a comment on someone else’s story, prompt, or challenge you wouldn’t want to see on one of yours. Also, the more feedback you give others, the more likely they’ll be to provide feedback on your work. There are also a lot of young writers on the site. Please don’t say anything in your comments on others’ stories that you wouldn’t say in front of a kid or your mom.
  • Respect each other. We are a community that writes stories, and stories are what unite us and excite us. Remember that we're all at different places in our writing journey. As such, some of our stories are better than others, and it's our job to help each other get better. It is fine to give a story a low rating, if you do, be sure to leave a polite, constructive comment about why you feel that it deserves that rating. Critique the writing; don't criticize the writer.
  • No hate. If you can’t create an imaginary group to funnel your hate into, we don’t want it.
  • Be original. We recognize that fan fiction is fun and writing in another copyrighted author's world can be fun. However, we prefer that your work here be from your own imagination or built on existing fiction on Ficlatté. Collaborative worldbuilding with other Ficlatté members has its own kind of joy and excitement, and we'd prefer to avoid legal entanglements with published authors.

Ficlatté has the concept of “mature” stories. If you have any doubts, here are the guidelines for when you should check the “mature” box:

  • Language: If you wouldn’t hear it on a primetime drama on network TV.
  • Sexuality: If you wouldn’t see it in a PG-13 movie.
  • Violence or Gore: Descriptions of fight scenes are fine. Descriptions of rending flesh and gore? You should probably make it mature.

Now, a couple words for the kids out there. Because we don’t care who you really are, you should do everything you can to protect your real identity. Don’t tell people where you live, how old you are, what your real e-mail address is or your real name, especially if you’re a kid. We really don’t want to show up on the evening news, and we don’t want anyone to get hurt. So, have fun, but be careful.

If you have any questions or concerns about the community standards, please let us know. This is a community – if the rules don’t work for us, we can change them.

In conclusion

Go out there and be awesome.