Monday, May 9, 2016
Welcome everyone to the Beta Test of the Wattpad Writers' Workshop.
First off, I want to make sure that everyone knows what we are striving for. The goal of this workshop test is to find a great system for giving Wattpad writers educated, thoughtful feedback on their writing. The last 75 years of creative writing education has shown that the best way to do this is through workshops where writers can review each other and get the insight of an instructor who is an experienced writer and leader.
My hope is that many of you will become workshop leaders when we open this program up to all of Wattpad.
What you are reading right now is the textbook we will be using during the first week of the workshop. We will quickly go through a series of chapters to make sure that everyone has a good grounding in the most common elements of writing and that we are using the same terminology when we begin workshopping everyone's writing.
As a quick reminder, everyone in this group will be submitting one piece to be workshopped. Please keep it around 1,000 words (between 900 and 1,100 is just fine). You will also be expected to comment on everyone else's writing. That's how workshops work...with everyone critiquing everyone else's work. I expect that we will have about 4 pieces per week, so the reading and critiquing load will not be too strenuous.
But, before we start on the workshop or the textbook, our big job for the first day is to get to know each other!
So, YOUR ASSIGNMENT TODAY is to post a comment where you tell us about yourself. Let everyone know a little bit about what makes you a unique person and about your life as a writer.
Then, after you have commented, put in a reply to everyone else's comment. This is your first bit of practice at the workshopping format using Wattpad (except you aren't going to critique everyone's intro, you're going to say hi and maybe mention something you have in common).
Good luck, and thank you all for joining in this test! And if you have any questions, please just tag @brucerelgin and shout!
YOU ARE READING
The Textbook
RandomHere is the basic textbook. Even if you have an extensive writing background, we are going to go through this very quickly for the beta test so we can all have a common set of terms.
