The Draugr can feel like one of the most unappreciated of all the roles in the community. After all, your job description doesn't come with payment, follows, praise, or a lot of appreciation unless you point out you're here and you wrote something.

However, the Draugr provide an invaluable resource. You are teachers, mentors, and those who can inspire people to take their piece of writing to the next level. When you write your article, think of yourself as a guest lecturer who is giving a small speech on a topic to a room full of aspiring writers. It will help remind you that you are noticed and what you do is important.

Draugr used to be assigned topics, but we discovered it works out better if you write about what interests you.

Perhaps you're a grammar expert, you win awards for your dynamic characters, you draw people in with your suspenseful plots, or your descriptive writing is so real it jumps off the page. Whatever your special gift is, help share it with the Community.

Wattpad puts a lot of focus on marketing, awards, communities, and ways to draw attention to what you write. Too many come to Wattpad thinking it's more important to make a popular social media page than to produce quality writing. It's easy to lose sight of what's important. The Draugr help remind people that the purpose of this website is to produce quality writing, no matter what your level of expertise or how many followers you have.

The focus is on what you have to say, not who you are. Quality writing always shines through in the end. It's the job of the Draugr to share knowledge and experience about crafting quality writing.

There are many popular cliches that start writing trends, which people take as factual pieces of advice. Many come out of trends begun by popular and respected writers who write in a certain way, and are pithy sayings that are actually only sometimes true and vary from writer to writer.

"Show, don't tell" is one of the more common ones. As I discussed in a recent article, Margaret Mitchell's epic "Gone With The Wind" is on many lists for the best literature in recent history, especially her famous first line. Yet, the story opens with 5 paragraphs of nothing but an omniscient narrator describing the protagonist. Similarly, F. Scott Fitzgerald, an immensely talented descriptive writer, spends a lot of time "telling" us things.

If the sparse and journalistic Hemingway hadn't had such an intense rivalry with the prosaic and descriptive Fitzgerald, people wouldn't repeat this over and over.

In reality, strong prose has a balance of description vs. action, plot vs. character, active vs. passive voice. Make sure readers know "Show, don't tell" is a piece of advice that came from American literature in the mid-20th century, and it is a wonderful technique--one that doesn't always apply.

The same is true of Stephen King's hatred of adverbs, Ernest Hemingway's death wish to adjectives, and whatever other new "rule" is all the vogue for this time period. These cliches are not hard and fast writing rules. They are different ways of writing that have worked for some authors, and are more suited to some genres. The goal is to help a writer find his or her own personal style, and exposing them to ideas for improvement from all types of writers is wonderful.

Just be certain your reader knows there's no one way to craft good writing, which is why it's an art that takes a lifetime to master.

Many people on Wattpad write poetry and short stories, and they're always well-represented in communities and contests. They are not the refuge of "people who didn't have time to write a novel."

Every now and then, throw in a topic that's especially applicable to the poets and flash-fiction writers in the community. It will widen your reader base and help give some tips and advice to a crowd of writers that can often be marginalised.

There's no reason your well-written tips on writing shouldn't get the attention they deserve. I suggest linking to the articles on your feed, sending links to friends who may benefit, and generally calling attention to what you've written. Not only will it get you followers and readers, it will draw attention to our community and bring us clients and new members.

A writer's own experience will usually be reflected in the topics that he or she chooses to write about.

The community needs articles on things as basic as "Making Verbs More Active" all the way to advanced topics such as "When To Choose 1st Person POV Over 3rd Person Limited." Descriptive writing articles can run the gamut from "Colours" to "Emotions" to "The Role Of World-Building In Genre Fiction." Never think an idea is too simple or too complex.

If you need help coming up with topics, just reach out to the Necro team to say you're a little stuck. We have enough of them to fill many books worth of advice on writing.

We expect one article completed per week for Draugrs.

Unless you're on hiatus, we expect one finished article per week. It should be a minimum of 1000 words (this article, for instance, is just above that!), similar to what's expected of other departments in the community.

On your assigned day of the week, you'll e-mail your article to our email, which is located at the end of our bio. After you've done that, PM the Necro team to let us know you're done on schedule, and what you'll be writing about next week. Easy peasy!