So, we had a writing meeting last Tuesday! There were quite a few people there! Gamila, Jakeson, Danke, Travis, Drek, Kaci, Ben (his board name is the same as his real name, believe it or not!), Tom, and Patrick (I think that’s it, but I’m not sure. If I forgot your name, please forgive me!), so altogether there were about ten people! We definitely filled up the small library room, and the discussion was very lively!
We had some excellent stories, and I don’t think there were any stories that were boring or turned everyone off. One story was a little bit edgy, but not unacceptable, and it didn’t cause any schisms or anything. In fact, some of the more conservative members of the group complimented me personally afterwards for how I handled the situation. Quark has been shaken up by some trouble stirrers in the past (you’re welcome for the compliment, Joel), and I’ve been a little bit worried about how to handle controversies in the group on my watch. I’ve been chatting up with Aneeka and Reigheena, two former Quark writing vp’s, on this subject, and I think people from all the different perspectives appreciated how this situation was handled. And really, I did like the story that was submitted. Even though it was edgy for a squeaky clean BYU club, it wasn’t unacceptable at all, and I thought it added to the story rather than weakening it.
A lot of people liked how the meetings went, and found the feedback to be helpful but one of the old timers contacted me on g-chat a couple days later with some possible areas that we need to improve. The areas he suggested had more to do with us as a group than me as a leader, though I’ve definitely got a role to play. Basically, we need to learn some better etiquette, both as writers and as critiquers. His suggestions have spawned off a thread on the Quark forums, so I’ll refer all you quarkies to that for the full discussion on this topic, but I’ll briefly summarize it here. Basically, we need to remember three things:
1) Try to avoid tangents (like anime and star trek)
2) If you’re the writer, don’t argue with the feedback you receive
3) Try to adhere to a sense of order in the way we give feedback: let people with comments on page one go first, on page two second, etc.
To that, I’d add a very helpful fourth guideline that Jakeson suggested:
4) If you’re submitting an excerpt from the novel, give a short synopsis at the beginning of the piece, so we know whether the excerpt is from the beginning, middle, or end, and can give relevant criticism.
Gamila also suggested to me on g-chat that writers should also describe what part of the writing process they’re in; whether this is a rough draft, one of the first revisions, or whether the author is trying to polish up a final draft. That sounds like a good idea to me, though I haven’t yet brought it up with the others. I plan on doing that soon.
There have been some suggestions that we break up the group, since it’s becoming so large. In general, though, I think it’s best to wait that out. I had the idea while g-chatting with Drek of splitting the group into a fantasy section and a sci fi section, where we’d meet every Saturday at the same time and place and alternate between the sections. Under this idea, people would still be free to come to every meeting, but we’d lower the submissions-per-meeting to about four and get someone to moderate the fantasy section (since I already have way too much free time as it is).
Of course, this depends on how many people we retain. I think we should keep things as they are for now, then wait and see how many people are still coming regularly in November and December.
It was a good meeting this week, but I was surprised because it really did leave me exhausted. The closest parallel I can think of is when you’re a missionary and you come out of an intense-but-disorganized lesson with an excited investigator who loves to talk. It left me exhausted like that. It was a good meeting, and I hope that in the future we’ll learn to build off of each other and find our “groove.”
