(Tim Greenlaw co-authored this update)

    At the beginning of July we got a dire message from our web guru stating that our plans to build the site of our dreams would require some serious cash coming in - much more, in fact, than we had anticipated.  It seems there are some possibilities, but there is a lot of work between here and there. This note to the community is to give an up-date on what we are thinking about and some of the issues we have faced so far in the process.  This is also for us to stay grounded and make sure that we are not losing sight of the big picture while working out the little details.  What follows will be some of the issues we have faced and solutions we see so far. 

Identifying the Obstacles

    At Writ Summit 2008, the current staff and the original founders met to discuss the direction of the site.  Sarah expressed some serious concerns that the collapse of the current infrastructure is imminent, and that if we can’t get this going in the right direction, the workshop will die. She told us a few possible scenarios that could follow, and one was that The WritOracle would become a static memorial to the dream of an interactive writing community that strove to bring quality creative writing out from the walls of universities and into the world for everyone with an idea and a keyboard.

      Obviously, that’s wasn’t our first choice of the possible outcomes.  Of all the options discussed, the one that had the best combination of philosophy and feasibility was a non-profit.  We decided to try to incorporate as a non-profit organization to keep the site going.  The not-for-profit incarnation of the site may be the last chance,  but it might also be our best chance.  It would not put us in a position where we would be beholden to other financial interests, ones that would likely jeopardize the integrity of the site - art, after all, is rarely profitable.  It offers us several financial incentives, including tax-exempt status, and opens us up to a lot of potential money available in the form of grants.  Joe and Tim took up the task of researching the steps to take to formalize the organization as a legally-recognized tax-exempt non-profit, and to find grants that might be available to us once we’re an official non-profit organization. 

Plans

    As we work through this process we are using the Writ Summit notes as our guide and are trying to stay true to what we all want from this site, and in listening to our members, it sounds like they want the same things, too.   The heart of the site is the workshop, and if we can get it right, all of the other goals for the site’s growth and expansion will evolve naturally around it.  We’ve been noticing for months that things on the workshop have been slowing down, and we began to identify concrete problems in April.  In May we met to discuss them, and this summer has been a race to get ahead of the curve again before we lose our most loyal members.

    The time-line for building the organizational structure is looking like two to three months to write and submit paperwork to the government.  Once that happens, there will be a new-look temporary site that will attempt to give some new energy to the community.  We will also begin to solicit micro-donations from the community.   Besides giving us a head-start on fund-raising, it shows other prospective donors that we’re serious and that other people believe in us.  The winter will be used for grant research and exploring funding.  Hopefully by March we will be ready to apply for a major grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which can fund an infrastructure of the site that will last. 

Staff

    Throughout this we have referred to core staff.  We wanted people to know who ‘we’ refers to, and who you can complain to.  The attendees of the Writ Summit were Julie K, Joe, Jeremiah, Julian, Sarah, and Tim. If you’re curious about who we are, shoot us an email, and we’ll fill you in on everything you ever wanted to know about the history of The Writ and the future of the community. Right now if you have any input about the site, or ideas of where we could get $20-50,000 to keep the site going, the two people you should contact are Joe Gilbert: joe@thewrit.org, or Tim Greenlaw: timgreenlaw@gmail.com. 

    If anyone has any concerns about what we are up to, or wants any of the details/thinking behind what we are doing, please let us know.  We want to do this right, and are taking our time to give the community the best opportunity to not only survive, but thrive well beyond any of us.

Writing isn’t just about conjuring words and ideas and everything out of thin air. It’s extremely important to have a good imagination, to be sure, but it’s also important to know what to focus on, and often, the result is that you, the writer, may know more than what actually makes it on to the page – in fact, it’s virtually unheard-of to keep absolutely everything in by the time a story is done (“done” being relative, but a debate for another time…).

This is true for all forms of writing – the best definition of a poem I ever heard was “something where no word is unnecessary,” – but especially so for prose. A memoir can’t really encompass an entire lifetime, or it would take that long to read. Journalism and creative nonfiction both require research and investigation to even find a story to tell, and often the research is just as much to discover what the story isn’t, as well as what it is. In fiction, however, you need to create that “research” yourself.

The best writers out there know their characters better than they know themselves. It might never come up in the story that so-and-so’s favorite color is mauve, or that she’s allergic to feathers, or that she’s never been in a car accident. But if you, the writer, know these little things, then, regardless of whether or not it makes it onto the page, your character will be livelier and more realistic in subtle, but important, ways. By imagining details of a fictional life, what you’re doing is tricking yourself into thinking that your character is a real person, and in doing so, their dialogue, motivations, actions, and decisions are more informed and more realistic, even if you’re not aware of doing so as you write. Some writers will make lists of things about their characters, some will even write biographies for all of them. Other writers are less deliberate, and let the characters slowly evolve, “getting to know them” as they write them. Either way, they know more than the reader will get to in the story. But then, what observer really knows everything about someone they know in life? And we don’t suspect our friends of being fictitious simply because we don’t know what they had for breakfast that morning.

Fiction comes in many forms, and it’s a good idea to keep an open mind with all media when it comes to thinking about craft. Fiction doesn’t just mean novels and short stories – it’s any story that someone, somewhere must have sat down at one point and written. Television shows and comic books are both essentially serialized stories, with recurring central characters and minor characters that come in and out, and in these media one can start to dig deeper and see things in characters, the little moments that might not come out in a single, self-contained work like a novel (or a graphic novel, or a film, or a play, or a musical, or…). And even then, there are plenty of things that exist within these fictional worlds, without the observer being told directly.

One benefit of modern technology is the ease and accessibility of the average person into the processes of things formerly known only to the people in those fields. And a benefit that helps fiction writers especially is the DVD Extra. For about twenty bucks, anyone can see deleted scenes, often with introduction or commentary from writers and directors about why a particular scene was worthy of being filmed, and indeed, almost makes it into the final version, but even though it’s really funny or really poignant or whatever, its own aesthetic value has to be sacrificed for the benefit of the bigger picture. Listen to commentary tracks, too – very often writers will discuss the ways in which they approach central themes, how they balance plot and character development – all things very important to writing prose fiction.  Even listen to the directors – in films, their decisions are the equivalent of the narrative voice in prose – the plot and dialogue and action can all be the same, but it’s the function of that voice to create the way it’s perceived.

Which brings me to Peter Jackson.

As both the screenwriter and director for the massively-expensive Lord of the Rings trilogy, he was responsible for virtually every aspect of recreating a world already masterfully imagined in prose by J.R.R. Tolkien. The challenge was no small one, but he is for certain a master storyteller. He made believable a world that should inherently be unbelievable, and he did it by attention to detail in ways that wouldn’t be seen by the viewer on the big screen, but would nonetheless be felt. It wasn’t a movie of cardboard cut-outs and papier-mâché; rather, every prop, costume, and set was designed as though made with a functioning purpose by an inhabitant of that fictional world. There were design flourishes on the insides of costumes, silverware inside cabinets that didn’t need to be opened in the script, extensions of buildings that would be cut off by the framing of the shot. And there were lots and lots of scenes with Hobbits, many of them just shot from the neck up, but for every single take, the actors had to endure hours of makeup time to put on hairy, giant Hobbit feet.

What this did, according to the actors, was to make them feel not like they were being paid as actors to work on a movie shooting in New Zealand, but rather that they were in Middle friggin’ Earth, and to watch out for Orcs. And the more they believed it, the less they needed to act. Acting is a sort of lying, in the same way that good fiction tells a sort of truth, and to that end, a writer shouldn’t be concerned with trying to convince his or her audience that this or that happened, but rather, convince themselves that it happened. When it’s then conveyed to the reader, the reader will believe it, because the writer believed it.

Writing prose fiction is challenging, make no mistake. You are the director and the actor, you are the prop master, costume designer, and set builder, you are the sound engineer and cinematographer, and, let us not forget, you are the screenwriter. Use all these elements to tell a story, but build it bigger than we can know – when you create the whole world, the snapshot that the reader gets will be all the more textured.

So put on your Hobbit feet before you sit down to write, figure out what your antagonist did over his long weekend, and then forget that he only exists as far as you say he does. Then, your reader will, too.

Here’s a website I found today:

http://spellcheckplus.com/

It’s an online spell-checker.  Common sense would lead me to hope that most people on here, being proficient enough with a computer to set up an account here, would probably have a good word processing program with an automatic spell-checker - heck, even Firefox spell-checks these days and is correcting me as I type this.

But in reality, people can, from time to time, post things in the workshop full of errors.  No, spell-checkers aren’t foolproof.  No, they don’t account for intentional straying from rules for artistic purposes.  No, they can’t do dialect.  But, those have been the case a minority of the time, from what I can tell.  Spell-checkers aren’t able to help you if you’re not willing to use them.

No one’s a perfect speller or grammar guru.  But technology is good these days, and resources are at our fingertips, and it’s easy to get pretty close.  The workshop is here as a resource for everybody, but that doesn’t mean it should be used as a proofreading.  If you can fix up the spelling and grammar and punctuation before posting something on the workshop, you will get better feedback, period.  You will have more readers, and more readers will read all the way to the end.  If a reader happens to notice an honest mistaken use of a homonym, they usually point it out, but generally it’s along with a substantial comment on the meat of the piece.

The other benefit from an online spell-checker, and this particular site, I should mention, is its utility to non-native English speakers.  Having tried, with varying degrees of success, to learn three other languages, I can appreciate the level of difficulty in making oneself understood at all, much less to write creatively in another language.  This site, (again, http://spellcheckplus.com/ ) is aimed specifically at ESL writers, although it can easily be toggled to give advice geared more to native English speakers.  With our humble little site becoming more global all the time, we’re going to have increasingly more writers with other first languages.  And while we don’t now have the same infrastructure set up outside of English language writing, we can do our best to help non-native speakers become better writers in English.  Be kind with your comments, but don’t be shy about addressing common mistakes.  English is a complicated language with complicated rules and terrible exceptions to all of them.  It’s a nightmare to learn, even as a first language.  Anyone remember spelling tests as a kid?  You don’t need ‘em in Spanish, because Spanish spelling makes sense!

Anyway…

It helps everyone to spell-check your writing before posting it.  So spend the extra minute and make it pretty.  Thanks.

I wanted this message/thread to list those online publications whose site you frequent. With each entry please include the following:
1. Name of publication

2. Link to publication

3. Type of work most featured (poetry, fiction, essays, mix)

4. What do you feel is the publications strength, possibly including, but certainly not limited to, the following:

a. strength of writing – include examples
b. strength of visual layout – specifics (color, column width, etc)
c. strength of readership – who reads these? what are their comments as readers?
d. mission statement
e. freshness of authors – is these just the same old faces?

Some ideas to get the ball rolling. I know this might take a bit of effort for each publication, but it really will help shape what we should be striving toward and patting ourselves on the back for. It will also help define our “niche” a bit more concretely.

NOTE: I did a quick search and there are more to look at here. Check out some and add your thoughts!