Frequently Asked Questions

All ages are welcome as long as the member knows how to write in complete sentences and paragraphs. We are working towards a class for early elementary students who have just begun to master these abilities, but that work is still in progress. We typically recommend members to have reached around fourth or fifth grade so they can concentrate on learning to write stories rather than basic writing techniques.

On the flip side, there is no upper age boundary. With technology allowing voice dictation of stories, even those who find writing on a keyboard physically challenging can still transcribe their stories. 

If anyone is wondering if it’s too late in life to begin to write stories, note that James Michener, Laura Ingalls Wilder (of Little House on the Prairie), Raymond Chandler (whose mystery stories and novels are remarkable), Anna Sewell (Black Beauty), and Millard Kaufman (co-writer of Mr. McGoo who wrote his first novel at 90 years of age) all started writing in their 40s through their 60s and some beyond.

Any original work that you post on this site is automatically granted copyright protection that belongs to you only.

In the Terms and Conditions, you allow us to use your content without cost so that others can read and review your work. We do not sell, lease, market, or use your work in any other way without your consent. Once you delete any of your stories, we do not retain them other than in archive for 90 days in case you deleted them by accident.

If you have your student’s login information, you can just “borrow” their membership with no condemnation from us! Hey, times are tough and we appreciate that you’re paying for your child to learn to write stories.

However, you may want to take advantage of your own membership for the courses. It’s likely that you’ll want to go through an advanced course with your own completions so there’s no confusion about which lessons have been completed by each one of you. You can also join groups that your student may not be interested in, and vice versa.

Also, we do offer a family membership where up to six people in the same family can have their own distinct memberships, all for the price of three memberships. We designed the family membership package so parents could participate as well as their children. Why let them have all the fun? Isn’t it time you started writing your own stories and sharing them, while giving and receiving feedback as well?

At this time, we do not offer free trial memberships. We do not want people (or bots) to enter into the system and post inappropriate content or derogatory comments. By keeping a small monthly cost, we can assure that anyone who does join and cause problems will at least pay for their behavior.

If you do join and find that the system is just not working for you, fill out our Contact list and we’ll refund your current month’s charge.

Since this site is completely online, we would be taking a risk of losing your story if the internet connection failed at the wrong time.

We also encourage having multiple drafts and revisions while writing your longer stories. Keeping track of these files is relatively easy on local drives or services like Dropbox and Box. For us to manage old versions of stories and possibly managing different branches of the same story would require extensive version control software (and cost!) that goes against our philosophy of keeping the system as affordable as possible.

Our forms allow you to make small adjustments such as bold and italic and alignment easily, but we prefer that all of your original content is written on your local computer.

We have heard the objection that if there is no profanity in a story, then they story doesn’t reflect the reality of how people really speak today. It’s a reasonable objection to which we offer the following reasons:

– If we allow some profanity and sexual content, where do we draw the line? How much is acceptable and where is the point where it’s not allowed? There are plenty of sites that allow these aspects and those sites are frankly cesspools of the worst of humanity. Our members deserve a safe environment to write and learn, so a blanket prohibition is really the only criteria that fits that requirement.

– This site isn’t for publishing but generating story ideas and improving your skills. If you believe your stories need those aspects, you are free to add them in outside the context of this site. Whatever you decide to include is between you and your publisher; it’s just not allowed on this site.

We use a worldwide third party system to control all aspects of privacy and access. It’s literally the most expensive back-end cost of this entire site. That system keeps anyone who is not a member of a private group to see anything posted to the group page.

We actually encourage local groups or groups of friends to form their own private group sub-sites. There is no extra cost to start your own group and the only real requirement is a moderator to manage who’s allowed to be a member. The group moderator has the ability to remove members from the group as well. Once you have a group, any stories or discussions or group blog posts are strictly private.

(An administrator could theoretically access the content, but the number of administrators to this site is Extremely Limited, and those few people do not monitor private group contents. We would only look up a specific piece of content if explicitly asked to do so by the group moderator or if the content was reported as offensive by one of the group members. We absolutely recognize that people in private groups may want to publish their stories in a collection or in a longer novel at some point. It is therefore much safer for us to simply never look at the content.)