The Smog is Smogon's community webzine that covers bases in competitive Pokemon, entertainment, the artistic side of Smogon, and much, much more. This is where the creative minds and free spirits have their time to let loose! The Smog has many contributors that all started in the same place you, dear reader, and in this workshop, you, as an aspiring component to what makes the community's webzine run efficiently, will learn exactly how you can go about coming up with an idea, finding your writing style, writing an article, and creating HTML, the very layout of an article's webpage!
First and foremost, you have to start with your idea, but to write on an idea, you have to know what kind of writing style suits your idea best. There are three primary types of writing styles that are present throughout Smogon Media: expository writing, descriptive writing, and narrative writing. Goddess Briyella has written up a concise description on each of the writing styles and how they apply to the community webzines.
This is generally what Metagame and Battling Strategy themed articles would fall under, as the content being presented is informative and based on facts and logic. Any player who knows the metagame they want to write about well enough will have their content all ready to go here, but they may need help organizing it and knowing what key things to highlight and what less significant things to just give a small mention to. It shouldn't be difficult for mentors who've written competitive articles for The Smog to guide new writers along here; if they didn't know what they were doing with presenting, prioritizing, and organizing their content, their work would not have been released to serve as an example in the first place. This is probably the easiest style of writing to assist a user with, as the content already comes from the metagame(s) itself and only needs direction.
This writing style isn't all about being informative, necessarily, and actually requires a good deal of creative ability (and usually confidence) to pull off. You can't really teach a user how to be creative; that's more something you can only influence and they'll develop their own way of doing it over time. As the name suggests, this entails in-depth descriptions of things and is often presented in a physical, tangible manner that draws attention and provokes flexible thought about something in particular instead of giving fixed and certain information that leaves little room for pondering. The recent Lumiose Tour article is a good example of this. Articles on theories (i.e. topics such as What is the True Origin of Mega Stones? or The Relationship Between Ho-Oh and Lugia in GSC) that leave many potential ends open and many details open to interpretation are good examples of this (this can also be persuasive writing at the same time, obviously), and while pieces of this nature are more rare than that of expository writing, creativity can make these a great success with the appropriate form.
This tells a story from the writer's point of view or from the point of view of a character within the article itself, which the article revolves around. Narrative writing consists of other characters and also can have dialogues, and it also often can be used to portray disputes, conflicts, problems, and their solutions, in a way that puts the reader in the midst of the situation to give them a more advised perspective rather than having it explained to them as in expository or descriptive styles of writing. This style takes practice and usually falls under Entertainment, though it doesn't necessarily have to be a joke article and can maintain a serious mood.
It's important to decide what style of writing best fits the type of article you're writing.
It's your turn to write!
For the sake of kicking off this workshop, we'll be beginning with giving the budding writers of the community their chance to practice. There's two different routes we'll be taking with this workshop. The first is with Pokemon Spotlight articles that are commonly found in The Smog, highlighting a particular Pokemon in a tier/format. We'll be using the following template as a platform for beginning our Spotlights:
HTML:
[TIER NAME HERE] Spotlight: [POKEMON NAME HERE]
Introduction
[INTRODUCTION TEXT]
History of the Pokemon
[Why it went from subpar to viable across generations/as a result of a metagame shift]
How the Pokemon functions
[What makes the Pokemon successful in the current metagame?]
How to play with [POKEMON NAME HERE]
[How to best take advantage of the Pokemon's niche(s) and available options]
Playing against [POKEMON NAME HERE]
[How to best take advantage of the Pokemon's weaknesses and check/counter it]
Conclusion
[CONCLUSION TEXT HERE]Alternatively, if you're not the most competitively-inclined writer, you can take a different direction: entertainment. Entertainment articles have qualities that set them aside from Spotlights in that they are sometimes humorous, depending on the writer, and have some sort of creative basis. The Smog is incredibly open to new ideas, and it's hard to put a template to a creative idea since the field is so great. However, what we have below is a very simple idea that has proved successful in the past that will hopefully get the creative juices flowing:
HTML:
Top [NUMBER] [SUBJECT]
[Choose a particular subject from the Pokemon world (for example: Gym Leaders) and then a select few of whatever subject it might be, and start writing about them. You can write as little as three, or five, or ten - so long as the content is flowing, you've got yourself a winner. Title it appropriately.]
Introduction
[INTRODUCTION TEXT HERE - every good article starts with an introduction that gives the reader insight as to what they're reading. Feel free to be quirky or satirical here to ascertain the reader's interest, and then move into talking about your subject matter in the following points.]
Point #1
[POINT #1 TEXT HERE - this is where the first example of your subject matter would go, if you're writing a list of things. Make sure to thoroughly analyze whatever it is and give your reasoning as to why it's on the list. You can be humorous, or clever, or just write it with intent on being completely serious about whatever you're trying to say (for example: "Gym Leader Roxanne is the worst Rock-type Gym Leader because..."). Whatever you write after that point would be up to you, and it would decide the direction of the article, so think carefully and plan ahead.
Point #2... Point #3... insert however many thereafter.Here's some examples of successful series / one-off articles to draw some inspiration from:
Good luck writing! We'll help you along your way, so don't be shy! :)
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