Creole Ned
05-04-2009, 10:25 PM
For whatever reason the last few exercises have drawn little attention, whether it's due to people being distracted by warmer weather, online dating (ho ho), other writing or just general disinterest in the exercises themselves. This got me to thinking about how to make the exercises more interesting and productive for those that participate.
When jackrabbit (RIP -- actually, the jerk just won't visit the forum anymore) and I started this, it was with a simple goal: to prompt us to keep writing, to instill a sense of discipline, and for me it certainly worked. While not everything I've written for these exercises has been a gem, I have produced more fiction than in many years and it's definitely gotten me to shake the rust off. The feedback has helped me to see flaws and room for improvement. For jackrabbit, the exercises became more like work and he found them distracting him from his own projects, mainly a novel.
Earlier this year we started a side exercise -- to complete a short novel by July 1st. So far I have been able to juggle the exercises with my novel and enjoy switching gears from a long form project to a much shorter one that may be completely different in tone.
Now my proposal and it comes in the form of a question: Would people be interested in switching to a different format, where we each work on a novel and submit parts of the novel for feedback or alternately, the whole thing when a first draft is done? The biweekly exercises would be done away with or possibly made even less frequent (maybe once a month?) so they don't pull focus from the main project.
The idea of doing this is to allow people to truly write what they want without constraint (assuming they have a novel they've been itching to work on) while still having others handy for feedback as they progress along. If we switched to this format I would likely restrict viewing of the forum again, so "outsiders" couldn't snatch up big chunks of works-in-progress.
Feedback on this is appreciated!
When jackrabbit (RIP -- actually, the jerk just won't visit the forum anymore) and I started this, it was with a simple goal: to prompt us to keep writing, to instill a sense of discipline, and for me it certainly worked. While not everything I've written for these exercises has been a gem, I have produced more fiction than in many years and it's definitely gotten me to shake the rust off. The feedback has helped me to see flaws and room for improvement. For jackrabbit, the exercises became more like work and he found them distracting him from his own projects, mainly a novel.
Earlier this year we started a side exercise -- to complete a short novel by July 1st. So far I have been able to juggle the exercises with my novel and enjoy switching gears from a long form project to a much shorter one that may be completely different in tone.
Now my proposal and it comes in the form of a question: Would people be interested in switching to a different format, where we each work on a novel and submit parts of the novel for feedback or alternately, the whole thing when a first draft is done? The biweekly exercises would be done away with or possibly made even less frequent (maybe once a month?) so they don't pull focus from the main project.
The idea of doing this is to allow people to truly write what they want without constraint (assuming they have a novel they've been itching to work on) while still having others handy for feedback as they progress along. If we switched to this format I would likely restrict viewing of the forum again, so "outsiders" couldn't snatch up big chunks of works-in-progress.
Feedback on this is appreciated!