Backwater Sections (Topics).

Taking advantage of Medium Publication’s Sections.

Sections.

Definition: “Medium publication sections are a feature that allows editors to organize their publication’s content into different categories. These categories are known as sections, and they help readers navigate the publication and find the content that interests them the most.”

Story Themes.

Backwater Publications stories must be writer centric. What is your experience? What lessons did you learn and apply? What were your outcomes?

Avoid offering advice to the reader. Without personal knowledge of the reader’s context your well meant advice may cause them harm.

Please review Medium’s guidelines:

Sections in Backwater Publications (see screenshot).

This description of “sections” is a work-in-progress and will be adapted as the publication settles down into a shared understanding and purpose.

I thought to give an initial interpretation for each section (tag or category) to stimulate opinions and discussions.

Wellness

I conceive wellness as a life in harmonious balance. Resilience is the degree to which we can adapt and maintain this balance.

The adaptation process begins when our mind, through cognition, identifies a developing out-of-balance situation. Our mind devises a plan to meet the challenge of change and instructs our body to carry out the plan and ameliorate the effects of change. Healthy mind and body are interdependent and work in harmony.

Mind’s mental health is vital to maintaining wellness. Mental resilience is our ability to consciously adapt psychological traits to understand context of experiences and regain or maintain a healthy mental state during crises without negative consequences.

Again, you must stress your personal involvement. What happened, how did you overcome the problem? What lessons did you learn. You must not use the story to offer advice.

Stories about our impacts on our environment can be included under this section using the wellness metaphor. We are trying to seek a balance by decreasing emissions, ameliorating effects through remediations of soil damage and population controls (at least talking about that). I think this is an opportunity to talk about you can do and have done — the butterfly effect.

Creativity

Creativity is a characteristic of someone or some process that forms something new and valuable. The created item may be intangible (such as an idea, a scientific theory, a musical composition, or a joke) or a physical object (such as an invention, a printed literary work, or a painting).

Creativity requires context to develop an accurate understanding. Consider that you might come up with an an idea that is completely new in the light of your personal experiences. Then, when you research social media you are surprised to find the idea is commonplace and well accepted! Human history is full of times of new inventions that were developed independently in different locations (for example the wheel and the cart). Irrespective of outcome, the creative process has many useful cognitive lessons, particularly the determination to achieve an outcome.

In the context of Bywater Publications, creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development in various literary traditions — prose and poetry.

One thing often overlooked by inexperienced writers is the effect of creative reading when a reader judges the worth of a story. Creative reading is a reading technique that stresses active involvement and interpretation of a text rather than passively absorbing its content. It entails connecting with the material on a deeper level and exploring its themes, ideas, and implications utilizing imagination and critical thinking skills. Simply put, a creative reader will quickly discern the your skill in your writing.

Family

Used a wikipedia definition to avoid any of my multifarious biases:

Family is a group of people related either by birth) or by marriage or other relationship. It forms the basis for social order. Purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its members (and of society). Ideally, families offer predictability, structure and safety as members mature and learn to participate in the community. Historically, most human societies use family as the primary purpose of attachment, nurturance, and socialization.

Community

There are many meanings of “community” so I’ve used a wikipedia definition. Your writing should be concise about what sort of community you are referring too. For example a “student community”.

Community is a social unit (a group of living things) with a shared socially significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighbourhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms.

Relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community, important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions such as family, home, work, government, TV network, society, or humanity at large. “Community” may also refer to large group affiliations such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.

Relationships

This is one of those “grab bag” of meanings and social usage. A relationship may be:

Family relations and relatives.

Interpersonal relationship: strong, deep, or close association or acquaintance between two or more people

Mathematical relationships in mathematics and statistics between two variables or sets of data

Semantic relationships between words, phrases and so on.

Romantic connection between two people driven by love and/or sexual attraction. No, I didn’t mention threesomes or narcissism.

Enjoyment

Enjoyment is the process of taking pleasure in something.

You might be writing about how you enjoy many different pursuits and hobbies. The only commonality being that you enjoy them.

Earnings

“Earnings” was chosen over “money” because it was important to emphasize the person’s involvement (responsibility) in a process of earning some form of benefit.

Commentary

Personal opinions, thoughts, contemplations, and pontifications. The story should not be derogatory or be a “call for action”. The story must highlight personal involvement.

Blessed be.

Poetry

Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretations of words, or to evoke emotive responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and rhythm may convey musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony, and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations.

Similarly, figures of speech such as metaphor, simile, and metonymy establish a resonance between otherwise disparate images — a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.

Some modern poetry can forgo rhyme or set rhythm to create a minimalist for of words relying upon the interplay of word meanings to excite and perhaps baffle the reader.