It’s a sad but true eventuality.  The project began as a group: a poet, an organizer, a webmistress, and a calming voice.  It grew into a community.  In the beginning, it was an edited online journal overseen by Sarah Dopp.  With the guidance of Jeremiah Gould, it soon evolved into a thriving online workshop.  Under the later leadership of Julian Esteban Torres, The Writ grew to thousands of members from all over the world.  However, it faded with time. With each of the founders and members finding new paths in their lives, the writ was slowly dying.  In November of 2008, I began a blog post:

Despite the best efforts of The Writ’s finest minds, The Writ’s problems have always seemed to outweigh the energy and abilities of those trying to resolve them. From the beginning of the workshop back in 2004, we have struggled with a weak infrastructure and an incomplete site. Over the years, many of us have taken on the challenge of solving this from every angle we could think of. We applied for grants. We tried to go non-profit. We tried to go for-profit. We tried to create a formal organization to gain tax exempt status. But no matter what we do, it always seems like there are more problems than solutions, and that the solutions take more time and energy than anyone who loves the site can commit.

Mine was among the most recent surges to revive the drying dream. All summer I worked on organizational structure and fund raising plans, but continued to hit road blocks. In October, I took a trip to San Francisco and confessed to The Writ’s webmistress that I too had failed, and was ready to give in.

I then went on to talk about new hope.  But again, I was misguided.

Each member of The Writ both old and new hoped to resurrect the site to its former glory and each, in their own way, and not for lack of passion or talent, failed.  No one wanted to pull the plug on the dying site, but no one had the medicine to fix it either.  The cure was passion and cash.  Both were present, but the site needed more of each than any individual could offer, and there was no group to resurrect it.

Finally, this spring, the failing infrastructure gave way and the site crashed beyond repair.  Now The Writ is tenuously held in thousands of pages of raw data, which we have in spreadsheets and word documents on our home computers.  It may not be feasible to send everyone copies of the work they had posted to the site, but we will do our best to return work to the individuals who ask for it.

If you want us to try to return your work, send me an email at writservice@gmail.com, and I will do all I can to get it back to you. If possible, please do this from the email address that your Writ account was associated with.

The Writ was a beautiful dream. Its time had come.

Sincerely,

Timothy Greenlaw
IPoS, TheWrit.org

That hangs down at the back of my throat with no clear next of kin.

You sway a bit, both back and forth, when I breathe in and out,

Kind of like a punching bag before a boxing bout.

You get swept back when I ingest those rich and creamy sauces

And then get tossed the othe rway when I am feeling nauseous.

Despite those minor obstacles I’m envious, no doubt.

Because it seems your only job is simply to “hang out”.

    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.

It may not look like it, but the staff is hard at work behind the scenes on some major changes and updates, both technologically and organizationally!

Stay tuned for a big update in the coming weeks!

The fact that I, a kid from Bakersfield, could make comments to him about his poetry that seemed to him useful and helpful was an enormous event in my life. It was really transformative. There’s immense pleasure in being of use, partly because it says something about one’s own capacities. [italics mine]

I feel the same thing whenever I manage to give really good feedback, especially when I believe the writer to be a stronger writer than me. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy commenting on pieces by all levels of writers, because it’s very rewarding to help beginning writers avoid the common missteps and see them progress in leaps and bound through intermediate skill levels rather than the slower learning curve of trial-and-error.

But the reasons that they are rewarding are different. I feel that one informs the other. By striving to help improve writers that are ahead of my own progress as a writer, I am working harder and thinking more critically, and becoming a better writer for it. And when a writer takes a suggestion to heart, there’s a validation and vindication for me – a sense of, “Hey, I can do this. I know what I’m talking about.” Every time I comment, I feel a little more sure of myself, and I want to do it more.

It’s nice to say nice things, and it’s important to – it’s important to remember that any creative person putting their work forward is brave and vulnerable, and they also are looking for the same sense of validation for encouragement. But doing that alone will not make either of you better writers. As a commenter, don’t be afraid to critically tackle something you think might be better than anything you could ever write, just because you don’t think you should be qualified to do so. If you can say anything about it, you’re qualified. And as a writer, be open to suggestions from readers of all levels. You might find out things you take for granted, and you’ll be better able to put yourself inside the minds of your audiences, whomever they may be.

The answer is, briefly, you can’t. But you can know when it’s almost ready. You can know what external things are in the future that might impose finiteness to something that one could, theoretically, continue writing and rewriting until you drop dead (and some writers do).

You can be writing for a class or a weekly group. In these cases, you might have a page requirement, or not, or you could have a specific assignment, like a theme or setting or structure, or not, but you probably have a deadline. Check, of course, if you got the size right and if you hit the assignment, but get it in on time. The same thing goes for publishing – contests and journals both have specific windows during which they accept submission. Some of them have themes, and if you submit something that doesn’t fit, you’re simply not going to get published. Likewise, almost all of them have length guidelines as well – maximums are the standard, but many have a minimum length as well; very few are open-ended.

However, don’t write with these things in mind. This can only hurt the creative process. Rather, write what you’re going to write, how you want to write it, and then take a look at it and figure out what it is. Once you know what it is, look through all the possible places where it could be sent and see which ones apply to your story. If you have an 8,000-word fantasy satire, don’t rewrite it as a 3,000-word essay simply because the prize is really big and if you hurry and get it in the mail in time, you might just win it.

There are as many contests and publishers out there as there are kinds of stories (or poems, or essays, etc.). Spend a little time, do the research, and you’ll quickly enough find dozens for which your writing will easily fit. Here’s a few resources that I’ve found.

http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines?apage=*

http://www.pw.org/content/deadlines

http://www.writermag.com/wrt/default.aspx?c=wm&id=109

What I’ve started to do with this and other information is to make a list – or, in my case, an Excel spreadsheet where I can change and sort and add things more easily – where I put down all the contests or journals for which I could qualify. That means that even before I write any of them down, I’m eliminating the ones that I don’t fit – for example, no sense in a male fiction writer from New Hampshire taking note of the contest for previously published poetry by women living in Maryland, especially if the deadline was two months ago.

When I see one that might apply to me, though, I take note of the deadline, the maximum and minimum word counts, if they apply, the prize, the entry fee, if there is one, the website or other contact information that will tell me how to submit, and any other miscellaneous notes; for example, some publications will include a subscription with your entry fee. Then, using Excel’s handy dandy sort function, with a few simple clicks I have them all arranged first by deadline, then by biggest prizes, then by lowest entry fees, so that I know which contests are priorities and which ones aren’t a big deal if I miss.

A typical contest for which my material could qualify might have a $1000 top prize and maybe two more runner-up prizes, a $15 entry fee, and a 5000-word cap. A few are longer, a few are shorter; a few have bigger prizes, a few are free to enter but have smaller prizes. But those are what I’m looking at.

So, do you just stick your story in an envelope and stuff it in the mail? No! Not yet! Double-check everything. Again, this goes back to knowing when your story is done.

I thought mine was, and I was wrong. I sent it to a few people to read, and I got some comments back. They were very helpful, and I made some changes that I felt were very good. Then a day or two went by, and I rewrote parts, and then rewrote it some more. When I clicked the word-count button, I found that I had gone up to 5,067 – too high! I needed to get back under 5k, in the butter zone, where I saw so many contests had capped it.

I nearly made the mistake of line-editing to get it to just under that 5,000 level. I fixed a few lines that I found to have a few too many fatty adjectives, and after each one, I recounted the word. 5,051. 5,039. Getting there, but slowly, I thought. Then I realized what I was doing. If I was finding words to cut that easily, then I should probably do this for the entire piece.

And that’s what I did. Line by line, I looked at every single sentence and clause and word and letter, and I fixed what I found that needed fixing. And I did it without recounting each time. Sometimes, I even added a little something where I felt it was needed. In the end, when I was relatively happy with it again, I hit recount, and I came in at 4,967. I got the result I needed, but I did it the right way and I made my story better. And if it had needed to get longer to get better, I would have done that, and I’d have found contests with a 6,000 cap instead.

So, is it ready to go in the mail? Almost. Another important thing to know is the provenance of your submission. Some places will take simultaneous submissions – that is, sending the same piece to different contests or publishers during the same deadline period – and some won’t. If they do, you need to alert them if and when it’s accepted elsewhere, and if they don’t, then you have to wait until you get that rejection letter before sending it somewhere else.

Or, in the case that you get an acceptance letter and a big fat check, there’s sometimes a third option of contests for previously published material. But “previously published” can mean different things to different publishers, so you need to be aware of their definitions. Some places will consider a piece that was previously published in a periodical with a circulation of only, say, 3,000.

Other places won’t take anything that has appeared in public in ANY FORM – and that, unfortunately, includes the internet and places like the Writ Workshop. (I still, of course, advocate posting in the workshop as a great way to improve your writing, but if you have something that you think is really good and you want to use it for as many submissions as you can get, then show it to some readers privately instead. You can even e-mail it to me, if you like.)

Once you’ve got all that covered, and you’re sure that your piece qualifies for the intended submission, check their other guidelines. Do they want the pages stapled or loose? Double-spaced lines? A particular font size? Bear in mind all of these things, and don’t feel that they’re finicky – remember, there’s someone on the other end that’s going to be reading this and hundreds of others. You want your story to stand out on its merits, not because of pink curly bold font. And you don’t want the judge reading it to go blind, either.

Then, before your pages are printed up, see if they want your name, as the submitter, on each page (so they don’t get lost and separated) or nowhere on the piece at all (so the judge can be objective if they may have read other work by that author). Get all the contact information they require, and put it on a cover sheet or whatever they ask for. Write the check for the entry fee, and make sure you have enough postage.

And if this is all an internet submission, take it just as seriously. Don’t assume that just because they have it as a file that your font size doesn’t matter. You want them to take you seriously; you should take them seriously.

Once all that is said and done and the story is in the mail, take a break. Relax a little. Give yourself a pat on the back and cross your fingers. Nothing you can do about it now. You might remember a comma you misplaced. Fix it for the next submission. If you end up winning in spite of that comma, don’t worry, they’ll have proofreaders.

If you’re rejected, don’t be discouraged, because it might be accepted elsewhere. But don’t just sit there waiting for a letter in the mail. Keep writing, either way. If it never gets published, you’ll need something better to submit. And if it does get published, it’s always a good idea to have something else ready to go to keep the ball rolling.

I’m terrified.

Starting today, I absolutely have to treat this as a job: to take it seriously so that others might take me seriously.  I am giving myself a five-day workweek with (hopefully) a fairly regular set of hours, with only myself to be accountable.

I plan to write, to re-write, to research publications and contests and to send stories out to them, to edit, to get in the workshop, occasionally to job-hunt for a juicy publishing gig, and to read voraciously, with a writer’s eye.  I will have a lunch break.  I won’t have a dress code, although I might wear a tie if I decide it helps me write (which it might). 

At some point, if and when I acquire a laptop, I will start bringing the entire operation to the café so as not to become distracted by television, cats, roommates, junk food, or the Internet. (Ok, I might bring my wi-fi card along now and then, but only for submitting things online and working on the Writ.  No lolcats, YouTube, hockey scores, or MySpace.  Srsly.)

Cafés will also have gratuitous amounts of coffee, which I may start needing.  I’m setting my alarm.  I’m getting up early.  I have, at a generous estimate, six months of living expenses saved up, probably more like four or five realistically.  This is not a good plan, this is not enough money.  Vonnegut saved up the equivalent of a year’s salary – from just his story sales, not his regular income – before he quit his day job.  I haven’t made any money on my stories.  And I’m certainly not Vonnegut.  But I can’t keep working crap jobs.  I have to think I can do this, and now seems as good a time as any.

 I’d like to say I’m intellectually amazing all of the time, but the truth is that sometimes I grab a bag of chips and plop down in front of Rock of Love, or Top Chef, or MTV’s True Life. I draw the line at American Idol because that’s just way too much commitment for me. Top Chef has been one show that I continually tune into lately. These people have to be insane to cook gourmet food in a matter of minutes with all the restrictions the show puts on them. If someone gave me 10 minutes in a grocery store and $10 to put together a meal for a family of four I’m pretty sure I’d have a panic attack. The part of the show that I’m always really interested in is when the time is up and everyone mentions various things they would have done differently or tweaked in various ways. Writing is a lot like cooking in that it could always use a dash of salt or a minute more in the oven. There is always something in your writing that can be reexamined and made better with a little more time and effort. Fortunately for most of us, our creative writing is not on a timer and we have the opportunity (if we so choose) to edit our work and edit again and again and again. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve found a crumpled piece of paper or an old notebook with some poetry and thought, “Whoa! I could totally make this piece better!” So the next time you’re thinking about throwing that bit of poem/fiction/manuscript out the window, take a deep breath, pull out the salt, and season that writing!

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.