It’s a balancing act: providing a safe and supportive space to inexperienced and emerging writers, while fostering an environment that values skill and quality. What a beautiful vision!

And what a great way to create friction within the community… A community focused entirely on quality becomes elitist, while a community focused entirely on newbies becomes chaos. It will always be a balancing act, and it will never be quite right. Friction is a necessary part of growth.

What’s The Writ about to you? How do you want us to handle this balance?

Let’s talk about putting up a new issue of WRIToracle this spring. If we can rally up a staff that will take responsibility for the content, I’ll handle the necessary tech stuff to make it work.

I’ve got to admit, though… I haven’t spearheaded an issue of the WRIToracle in about four years (and back then, it was just me and three guys sitting around drinking wine and sorting through fifty poems that were manually submitted via email).

Can you take a moment and get me up to speed on how things work around here for editing staff? What kinds of guidance and support do you need? What tools do you need? How do you want this to work?

Also… writers and readers… what do you love and miss about the issues? What do you want us to make sure we pay attention to?

Alright, so I’ve made a few changes over the last 48 hours (basically, I hit the easy stuff):

• Creating this blog (hey — what do you think of it?)
• Simplifying the homepage
• Removing the Google Ads

Bigger, more system-related things will take a little longer, since there are some things about our content management system that are fundamentally, um, dysfunctional. My working scheme is to migrate the content over to something like Drupal, so it’s connected to a community of developers that is constantly improving the system. But that will take some time and probably cause some hiccups, so I want to make sure we do it right.

Here are some of the things I’m looking at:

• Non-broken email notifications
• The ability to tag/categorize our writing based on what kind of feedback we want on it (via JulieK)
• Sorting tools that reduce workshop clutter and allow readers to focus on the stuff they care about (via JulieK)
• The option to post writing privately so that only a select group of people can see it (because some publishers won’t accept writing that has already been put out there to the public.)
• A branding and design facelift, including the development of a logo

What are your thoughts on these?

What else are you looking at?

Hi! My name’s Sarah. I build websites and I manage projects and I like to write.

A long time ago (four and a half years, actually), I started a website called “The Writ.” Some really nice people pitched in and made it awesome, and it became a beautiful thing.

Then something really unexpected happened: the website became popular. It took on a life of its own with more passion than I ever imagined a website could carry. It was amazing. It was a community. Lots of really, really interesting things happened as the community grew, and I’m honored to have witnessed them. But while all that was happening, my life got complicated, and I couldn’t keep up with the project. Eventually, I had to step away.

Fortunately, my friend and colleague, Julian Esteban Torres had already stepped in by this point to take the reigns, and he did an amazing job. He reinvigorated the community and forced progress on the site development and rallied up support and got the WRIToracle issues publishing again. Let me tell you: the man is a miracle. But then his life got complicated, too, and he had to take a little break.

So I was thinking, since things are quiet around here right now, why don’t we pour ourselves a cup of tea and talk a little about what’s going on? See, I have a little extra time on my hands this year, and I was thinking maybe I’d use it to make the website nicer. But I have to admit, I’ve been kind of out of the loop lately. It’s not my home anymore; it’s your home. And I don’t want to come barging into your home and renovating it without first asking where you want your sofa.

So tell me…

• What do you love about The Writ?
• What do you hate about it?
• What does it mean to you?
• What’s it craving?
• What does it fear?
• What do you want for it?

Please leave a comment below and tell me what you want me to know.

And please also keep an eye on this space. Whenever you leave a comment, you can subscribe to get follow-up comments by email. You can also subscribe to get email updates for new entries.

I want you to know what’s going on. This is for you.