Some Writing Guidelines

Hey all,

We've been getting a LOT of great responses so far! There are a lot of electronic music fans who are gathering their great rave memories on paper as we speak. However, there have also been a few inquiries about how people should be writing their pieces. While there's no universal answer for that (since every person's story is different), we have come up with a few guidelines that we hope will be helpful.

First, write from the heart when you can. It's important that your passion for this music and scene come through, so that those not in the scene can more easily understand your point of view.

Be clear in your writing, and this actually has a couple of meanings. First of all, remember that you're writing something for a book, not an informal social media post or something like that. So, try to stick to the writing lessons you received when you were in school...in this case, spelling and grammar really do count. Secondly, you're not writing for your friends here--you're writing for the greater public, most of whom don't live near you and aren't familiar with your local scene, your friends, local landmarks, hangouts, etc. So, from time to time in your piece, it could be helpful if you explained a bit about those. For example, instead of writing something like, "We all went down to the Palace to party", change that to something like, "The Palace was one of our favorite hangouts. It was a 100 year-old theatre on the outskirts of town that had a lot of vintage atmosphere". It doesn't take much to make a good sentence into a great one, and your stories will be that much better because of that.

As we've stated in The Rules, please change the names of the people involved, except for the artists. People deserve their privacy and we don't want to invade that. If you can get written permission from the people in your story to use their names, then that's fine.

Write the truth. Don't embellish or exaggerate.

And, it's OK if you want to write about rave busts and the like. All social scenes have their problems, and we would be fundamentally dishonest if we chose to present the rave scene as some sort of perfect utopia. We are confident that the positive stories about the electronic music world will far outweigh the negative ones--after all, why else do the fans keep returning to raves again and again? As the saying goes, "it's all good", and even though technically that's not quite 100% true yet, it's true enough so that our community continues to progress and thrive to this day.

Hope that this helps assist you in producing something really good. Oh, and if you can, try to submit something sooner rather than later...it would make things easier on us here in the office, since we have to go through all of your stories!