Rules for a Writers' Group - Page 2

**AuntieEmma**[$] · #41 02-12-2005, 08:49 PM

Quote:

rmthunter said

I think you need to have a Raymond Carver exorcism.

Heh. That would be helpful.

anderclayton · #42 02-12-2005, 09:07 PM

Two groups = Ferrets and ummmmmmmmmmmmmmm... the other animal one

Ander

anderclayton · #43 02-12-2005, 09:18 PM

To finish my sentence from my cut off post (the library is cool because it has high speed internet but your time is limited there)...

...and Helen_B.

Critters is the other group I was talking about.

I've no problem at all critting nongenre stuff actually. I've more experience at it to be honest. On the other hand, I've no problem with you trying your hand at SF or Fantasy (maybe you could actually do the exorcism of Raymond Carver as a story

).

I've kinda mixed feelings about Scribe so far. For one thing nobody is talking!

For another it seems like kinda a catchall sorta place. A mix between fans and writers.

Ander

rmthunter · #44 02-13-2005, 05:11 AM

Quote:

anderclayton said

I've no problem at all critting nongenre stuff actually. I've more experience at it to be honest. On the other hand, I've no problem with you trying your hand at SF or Fantasy (maybe you could actually do the exorcism of Raymond Carver as a story

).

I love it -- do it, Em!

Quote:

I've kinda mixed feelings about Scribe so far. For one thing nobody is talking!

For another it seems like kinda a catchall sorta place. A mix between fans and writers.

Ander

I think there are a lot of wannabe kids -- I just responded to a post there last night from someone who wants to write a story and is completely clueless. (It also seems like a lot of the influence in the SF forum is from gaming and anime.) There are several people who are still in high school and a number who are in college.

The hard core is in the Private Writing Rooms. Apply for the Ideas forum there. That's where a lot of the nitty-gritty is going on. Also in the Anthology forum, but you can't get in there unless you commit to do a story for the anthology.

anderclayton · #45 02-13-2005, 07:50 AM

Hmm... I gather the six week thing is somewhat negotiable? I notice that you are in there and you haven't been there six weeks yet...

Ander

rmthunter · #46 02-13-2005, 09:54 AM

It's six weeks or thereabouts for critiques. The Ideas forum is more a workshopping kind of thing. I just went to the application window, which is what pops up when you click on the forum title in the index, and asked what the criteria were, and they let me in. (Of course, my sagacious and erudite comments probably helped.)

Can't hurt to ask.

**AuntieEmma**[$] · #47 02-20-2005, 03:15 PM

Hi -- I had periodontal surgery this week (BLECH!!), so haven't been focusing on too much. Now I'm back in the land of the living ... so heading back to the writing mines. Do y'all want to get started with this? Maybe just pick a set of rules (the Critter rules?) and try them out and see how it goes?

I'm still feeling nervous about writing fiction, but if it turns out I'm unable to cough anything up, I have a lot of old stories I could throw into the hopper. I'm also currently churning out odds and ends in non-fiction, mostly crap, done anonymously, for places like writeforcash. Crappy is good enough for what they want, so I don't need to workshop it, but as a learning experience it might be interesting to do so, so that would be something else I could submit.

I guess the biggest question I have about the structure of the group is whether there should be a specific minimum amount of work required (say, something has to be submitted every two weeks or every month), to satisfy those people who want deadlines in order to be motivated to write more, or whether it should be open, to satisfy those who only want to write intermittantly. Also, what the maximum amount should be, so that when wearing our reader hats, we don't get overwhelmed with too many manuscripts.

Oh, I guess actually even before getting to that question, a more basic question is whether the group will be more like a Scribes-type group or a traditional offline group -- by which I mean will the group be (1) Continuously open (perhaps after a waiting period) to anyone who wants to submit and/or critique, so that membership is constantly changing, and where readers pick and choose which stories they want to critique and do so on their own schedule? -- or -- (2) Essentially closed, except by invitation or request, with work submitted and critiqued on a schedule, and all readers reading and commenting on ALL the stories submitted? (One possible difficulty with # 1 is that writers may have to hustle to get people to read their work. That's not a problem with # 2, where everything gets read by everyone. On the other hand, #1 seems particularly well-suited to the online board environment, where people can do things on their own time and not have to worry about "meeting" up simultaneously.)

anderclayton · #48 02-20-2005, 11:00 PM

Ummm... I'd say Ferret rules and one leading into two. I'd go with the more general free-for-all sort of group until we can get it established a bit more.

Ander

rmthunter · #49 02-21-2005, 01:53 PM

I'd say open but not quite free-for-all, i.e., people can join as we go along, but I'd say yes to a waiting period; once a critique has started on a particular piece, it's closed; everyone critiques everything (unless by some odd chance we get so big that it becomes unwieldy), perhaps on a two-week turn-around? and we have some limit on the size of submissions for critique. (Figuring that anything up to a novelette or novella -- 15-30,000 -- words can be certainly be handled within two weeks by us astute critics and scholars, but anything over about 40-50,000 words is going to need special treatment.) (Is that too much time?)

Also, I'd say submissions come as they come -- we're only quasi workshopping, I think: we can start with workshopping ideas for comments and suggestions, and as they develop we can start submitting more-or-less finished pieces for critique.

**AuntieEmma**[$] · #50 02-21-2005, 02:53 PM

Quote:

rmthunter said

I'd say open but not quite free-for-all, i.e., people can join as we go along, but I'd say yes to a waiting period; once a critique has started on a particular piece, it's closed; everyone critiques everything (unless by some odd chance we get so big that it becomes unwieldy), perhaps on a two-week turn-around? and we have some limit on the size of submissions for critique. (Figuring that anything up to a novelette or novella -- 15-30,000 -- words can be certainly be handled within two weeks by us astute critics and scholars, but anything over about 40-50,000 words is going to need special treatment.)

Wow. 30,000 words is a 120-page manuscript!! I think that's a lot more than I bargained for, especially if we're doing more than one person's manuscript at a time. I'm a slow reader in general, and even more so when doing critiques, when I like to read things over several times and do a kind of line edit as I go along. I'd obviously need to change the way I approach critiques, and just read things through quickly -- as quickly as I can, anyway -- and only read them once and try to focus on the big picture and ignore the details -- but even so, it's still a lot of reading, and it's also a lot to print out or to try and read on the screen.

I guess I'm getting cold feet, both because I'm still feeling nervous/apprehensive about writing (though I do like the idea of an "Exorcising Raymond Carver" story! -- thanks, guys!) and also because I don't know if I can keep up with the workload on the reading end. I know I said I was committing to doing this, and I hate to go back on that, but I think I'm going to have to say instead that I'd like to try it, and see how it goes, without necessarily committing up front to sticking with it long-term.

anderclayton · #51 02-21-2005, 06:21 PM

Hmm...

I'd say that might be a bit long. Maybe we could confine it to chapters one at a time? Sure you wouldn't get the whole effect at once but I'd agree that 120 pages is quite a large pill to swallow all at once.

Honestly AuntieEmma I'm a bit apprehensive as well. More about the writing than the reading (but 120 pages times five would be a lot of reading!) but hopefully it will get the juices flowing a bit.

Ander

**AuntieEmma**[$] · #52 02-21-2005, 10:33 PM

Quote:

Honestly AuntieEmma I'm a bit apprehensive as well.

Heh -- Maybe we could call this the Nervous Wreck Writer's Group?

Not quite as catchy as The Six Foot Ferrets (I really like that name), but it does capture my current mood.

Quote:

Maybe we could confine it to chapters one at a time?

Yeah, I could deal with a chapter at a time.

rmthunter · #53 02-22-2005, 05:27 AM

Actually, just checking some of my recent stuff, The Prairie was about 16 pages of double-space typescript and about 5300 words, so 30,000 words would be about 75 pages. In type it would be about 25-35 pages, at most, if it helpls to think of it that way.

I doubt that we'll be dumping short novels on each other right off the bat, unless Ander is hiding something from us -- I certainly don't have anything that substantial. I think the longest chapter of The Book so far is only about 10 or 12,000 words, and that has four or five scenes.

I also like to think about things I'm critiquing, but I'm a fast reader, so two weeks seems reasonable to me. It's still open for discussion, though.