Proposal for a novel-writing community

[emmagrant01]

EDIT: New community! novel_fanfic

Thanks so much for the response on my recent post about writing novel-length fanfic. Based on many of the responses, it seems that there is interest in a community for novel-length fanfic writers. After reading through the comments and thinking about a format that might be useful and supportive, I propose to form a community focused on supporting the writing of novel-length fanfic.

This would not be a place to post novel-length fanfic -- the consensus seems to be that LJ is just not a good forum for that. What it would be instead is a discussion and support forum for this particular genre of fan fiction. If this idea is intriguing, please read on.



First, let me emphasize that the idea here is to facilitate the development of a supportive writing community. I'm volunteering to mod this group, but I don't want this to be MY group. I would appreciate your honest feedback on the ideas below. If you have any additional suggestions or thoughts about ways a community could be supportive that I haven't listed, please leave a comment to suggest them. Also, please take a moment to fill out the poll. For the purpose of discussion, let's define novel-length as longer than 40,000 words. (I understand that's the common definition in most fandoms.)

Proposal:

The purpose of this community is to provide a discussion forum and support network for writers of novel-length fan fiction within the LJ community. It appears that the culture of LJ may not be conducive to the writing and publication of novel-length fan fiction, but the interactive and communicative structure of LJ has advantages over the more traditional mailing list. I'm not sure if this forum should be restricted to the Harry Potter fandom or not; as a writer in two fandoms, I can see arguments for both perspectives.

There are two ways people could be involved in the community: as a member or as an observer (reflecting the fact that you can either join or monitor a community). I'll outline what I see as the possibilities for involvement in either case.

Members
Members of the community would be writers of novel-length fanfic, writers who are interested in trying to write novel-length fanfic, or other folks who find the writing process interesting and would enjoy discussing it. Many of these sorts of posts could be friends-locked to members of the community in order to keep the spam down for non-members. Here are ways in which members could benefit from involvement in the community:
• Weekly writing discussions could focus on "big issues" in writing novel-length fic. As the mod, I could take suggestions for questions and post them once a week, for example. (This could be public or private, depending on the topic.)
• Writers could ask questions in posts, request certain types of resources, look for beta readers, etc. (These entries could be friends-locked to members of the community, if we like.)
• Writers could request specific support related to a fic they're writing. For example, they could ask for suggestions for overcoming writer's block, they could post an outline for their novel and ask for help in hashing out a plot, or ask specific questions about characterization. They could even vent their frustrations and difficulties with the process, with the idea that members of the community could offer encouragement and support. (Again, these sorts of posts could be friends-locked to the community, at the discretion of the poster.)
• Writers could post announcements about new chapters of their fics (posted on their LJ or elsewhere) or of postings of completed fics. (These would be public, unless the poster would rather not have a WIP or rough draft widely read.)
• Writers could recommend novel-length fics or propose to discuss the structure or style of a novel-length fic, from a writing perspective.

Observers
Anyone should feel free to "friend" or "monitor" the community, whether they write novel-length fanfic or not. I'm thinking that the writing-specifc posts could be friends-locked so that the public posts would mostly pertain to announcements of novel-lengths fics or discussion of such fics. (And cut down on the spamming of your flist with stuff you're not interested in.) Thus, the community could serve as a sort of "alert service" (think "chapter owls") for novel-length fic and WIPs that are being written. As the mod, I could maintain a backdated entry which is a list of current WIPs and finished novel-length fics written by members of the community; this could be a useful reference for observers.





Poll

[Poll #364865]



Please feel free to offer any other comments or suggestions as comments on this post. Thank you for your interest! Please feel free to spread the word and direct people to this entry.

Comments

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

Re: Restricting to HP...it seems like it would be good to let anyone talk about any other series, but HP is so incredibly large and unwieldly as it is, that it might just be too much to handle.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

Right -- it might be that we could widen the possibilities for participation by narrowing the scope of the community, if that makes sense.