Hey everyone, in the spirit of building this community, I've been trying to figure out what we can do to have a regular writing group.

Some ways a regular group can be cool and good:

  • You get feedback from leftists

  • You get to hold yourself to writing obligations

  • We get to know each other better as writers

  • We're basically doing mutual aid by helping each other become better writers

One concern I've had is privacy. Writing is deeply personal work and if we have people collecting info on our userbase, I think we would need to bear that in mind when we show off our writing.

Anyway, I think that's something we can address once we get started. Here are some ideas I've been mulling over:

Using a filesharing to send written work or having a copy available on an active doc (Like Google Docs, but better privacy). If we do a doc, we can add comments/thought directly onto the written work itself and we could leave room at the bottom of the written work.

Maybe having official stickied threads where people can post their thoughts and the author can ask clarifiying questions. With this, I wasn't sure if we should have this happen at the same time as the writing submission or if it should happen before or after.

We could allow a similar space for people working on the early parts of their work. If they're mulling over worldbuilding ideas or character development, they can use their turn to have people work with them on that.

I'm still figuring out other things, but if people are interested in joining this group, you can help by sharing any ideas you might have that could make this writing group work.

Also, if you share what kind of writing (plays, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, other, etc.) we can figure out how many people are interested and how we can accommodate them.

Thanks, everybody!

  • Budwig_v_1337hoven [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    You get to hold yourself to writing obligations

    I've had this tab open for 14h now, hoping to come up with some sort of insight or general idea, even. So far, I have failed, though I still feel like I should say something - because, generally, I think this is a great idea. Knowing myself, I'm not sure how much I would participate in actuality, but I believe building this sort of space for people to share and discuss work is crucial - and might be inspiring in itself.

    All that being said, I'm not sure how necessary relying on some third party site really is - Sure, inline comments aren't possible on this here bear, but maybe we could figure out some alternative ways of doing things directly in the comments or via submissions? I'm really just spitballing here, maybe there is some privacy-friendly text-sharing site with extensive commentary functions out there, but I'm not aware of any, sadly.