Today was my last writing meeting as Quark writing vp. :'(
It’s been a good run, two years as leader of the Quark Writing Group at BYU. I remember how it was when I started–I was still just a hobby writer, with a nebulous interest in getting published someday but without any real goals or plans. I heard about the group from some friends, but didn’t really start going until winter of ’07, as Reigheena and Aneeka were graduating. One day, I showed up after the meeting was finished (but everyone was still hanging around chatting) and Reigheena was like “so, you want to be writing vp next year?”
I was kind of nervous but really excited that first semester, with lots of ideas to try out. We posted our fliers around all the freshman dorms the first couple days of class (most of the members were graduating and/or moving on), and we got quite a few new members, as well as curious English majors who came for a couple of times before moving on.
Those first days, meetings were two hours long, the submissions were up to 4,500 words, and we did four of them every meeting. We met in the basement of the BYU library, in one of the study rooms, and we crammed between ten and fifteen people down there each meeting. Pretty intense! Two hours was not enough time to comfortably cover everyone’s story, and we always felt rushed. We held meetings every other week (or, more accurately, every 1.5 weeks) on a weird schedule that only I really had figured out.
Well, after that first semester, we made a few changes. Reduced the submissions length to 2,500 words, the number of submissions to 3, and the length of the meetings to one hour instead of two. I think we also started meeting weekly, instead of the weird Tuesday–Saturday–Tuesday schedule. We also got a real room, over in the Talmadge building.
Things have definitely changed. This past year, we didn’t really do much to get new members, but we have started to bring in people from the other sections of Quark. A lot of other old timers have moved on–Drek moved up to Draper, so I doubt we’ll see much of him, and Jakeson and Gamila have been coming less and less as they move on to the next stage of their lives. Still, it’s been fun, holding our weekly writing meetings each Saturday.
While I always tried to encourage everyone to be frank and honest with their criticism, we’ve also done a good job diffusing that tension with humor. Here are some of my favorite quotes from my time as writing vp:
“He has two guns in the office and he wants to give Autumn a talking-too for having a knife in her boots?”
“She’s an intern.”
“Other than that, I thought it was just good ol’ fashioned fantasy violence.”
“I don’t remember anything about your characters right now, but I remember when I was reading your story that they were very distinct and I knew who they were.”
“I’m trying to think of something I can say that doesn’t sound like a critique.”
“Your writing is…legible”
“I have a friend that had a way to hide a knife in her hair.”
“I want a wife like that!”
“Some books don’t have chapters, they have acts.”
“We have a name for those. We call them… ‘plays’.”
“As always, your writing was legible.”
“No, wait, it wasn’t! It was courier!”
“If this was meant as a short story and not the beginning of a novel, “defenestration” will suddenly become a useful word in your vocabulary.”
“Maybe I should write a prologue about a writer who’s writing a prologue and realizes that nobody ever reads them.”
“It doesn’t have to be functional, it can just be like ‘hey, we make gears.'”
“The love in Twilight is all based on scent: he smells nice and she smells delicious.”
“The goatee gives me programming x2.”
“Missions…”
“The first six months…”
“The first two years…”
“I like getting to the exciting event within a page of the story.”
“Frodo, see this ring? Destroy it!”
“I loved how flat your characters were!”
“You’re so good at poor writing!”
“Maybe ‘MacBeth’ could be a title. Like, the leader is known as ‘The Macbeth.'”
“Yeah! And all the lower downs would be ‘the Duncans.'”
“Wait… I did write something good… at the very end!”
“Like, ‘Oh good, it ended!”
“You are putting words into my criticism!”
“Then I thought, what would my characters be like if they were alive? And then I was afraid.”
Ah, the good times. It’s so sad to log onto the Quark forums now and not have moderator privileges, to know that I won’t be sending out those weekly emails, moderating things, doing all that other stuff. It’s the end of an era for me. My duties as writing vp for Quark have been a major part of my college experience here at BYU, and I won’t forget it.
