Writers Write!

[cedar_grove]

I'd like to take a moment to share a brilliant idea with you all - an idea that mirrani thought of, after she and I have been working on some writing activities for a couple of weeks. She has posted about it on her own journal here, and I would actively encourage everyone to go and take a look at what she's proposing, and then weigh in, in answer to her post. (You could also answer here, I'm sure she'd see it!)

The idea came out of an exchange she proposed where we would each help each other with aspects of our writing. I had stalled working on Use'ara: Thirteen Stars, as my muse seemed tired out, so she offered to give me little prompts to work on every day that were designed to help my creativity, well, THEY HAVE! They have in spades as a matter of fact... so much so that we talked about it, and thought perhaps to extend the prompts and invitation to others to join in. Mir writes this in her original post:

We bounced the idea around that maybe I should be putting this stuff up somewhere else.. maybe on the writing livejournal we started years ago and kind of left for dead as our lives became far too complex to continue it... I'd thought before about maybe letting other friends get the email assignments and it being a correspondence thing, but I think I've decided I might want to do it on here, where responding to individual accomplishments is much easier and won't clutter up people's inboxes.

The question is: "If I do it, will they come?" ;) Would starting something like this actually get people to go to the writer's block and participate in these activities, read other people's work and give real, honest feedback? Would anyone pass the word on to others? We created that place in the hopes that it would catch on as something fun for writers to do... but no one ever really came and it just died away, forgotten. Could it grow now?

No particular prompt would be a requirement, of course, but the way I do things, it certainly helps to do them all in order. The goal each week is to pick out one aspect of a story a day.. a visual element, a physical element, an emotional element, an element of personality, and a final fun element using stickers and randomness. On top of the daily assignment, there is a weekly one, like "find a letter or symbol on a bulletin board that you pass every day, take note of it's form and shape, sketch it if you want, but give it attention when you walk past..." that kind of thing, all intended to give you a chance to include an element observed over time, something to build up on. On the weekend, the task is to take what you have done and create a story around it based on the assignment I've written. The little assignments aren't usually long, so it's easy enough to splice and merge them together in a way.

I can't stress enough how much this has helped me, even after only two weeks I can feel my creativity awakening again, and it's doing so in an interesting and thought provoking way - encouraging things that can make the difference between a good story, and a great story.

Seriously - head on over to her journal... no really - head on over to her journal to read her original post... join in... it really is a lot of fun as well as being worthwhile!