Not Without Ambition -- Summer Plans take shape

It has been a very productive last two weeks. Since my last blog post, I've curated a book (put all the pages together in the right order, bound and covered the whole thing) typed my last essay for my Writing Essays course, have almost finished my portfolio for Writing Essays, sent a belated birthday package half-way around the world, and helped work a triathalon. I've sent in  all my paperwork for one summer job (camp counselor's assist at my local Park District) sent an email asking for another job (summer term rush at the bookstore) and am now planning another caper.

I'm going to try and host a writing workshop this summer.
 

Yeah, I know, ambitious. I haven't really got any credentials to be doing this kind of thing, but I figure three years as a literature/education student and seven years as a participant in online communities should be to my advantage. Where did I get this crazy idea? Well, the dinner we hold for the English majors every year brings one of our alumni back as a guest speaker, and this year's was a woman who since graduation from Saint Ben's has worked on a children's lit mag, New Moon Girls, become a freelance copy editor and is now working as a young adult librarian.

Basically, she's where I want to be in ten years.

So after this, as well as the extended study of the Percy Jackson fanfiction, I thought it would be really cool to get together a group of beginning fanfic writers and talk to them, face to face, about how to create better stories online. Online critique is some of the worst to write and to read, and most of the time it's the hardest to get anything helpful out of, too. Beginning writers are either good from the get-go or really downhearted that the only thing people are saying about their stories is "This sucks; go do something else for a hobby, you loony." It doesn't have to start like that, but the advice given to these beginning writers is all the same, and it doesn't mean a terrible lot unless someone in real life affirms that yes, this would make the story easier to read or more interesting or what have you.

And I'd like that affirming person to be me. Now I realize I can't get a group of fanfictioneers exclusively, so I've expanded my criteria to beginning writers (6th through 12th graders) of varying ages to impart some lessons I've learned over the years. I began drafting a one day workshop.

After talking to several people (two professors included) it's morphed into a four session seminar. Here are the basic topics we'll be covering at each meeting.


Week One -- I'm a Writer: Who are You?( And what are you writing about my story?) -- introductions, goals,  and how to leave good reviews
Week Two -- Before the Pen Hits the Page: Prewriting your Way to Good Product -- timelining, research, narrative decision-making
Week Three -- Creatures of Habit: Developing a Writing Process and a Revision Process
Week Four -- So, What Happens Now?  On getting published, online communities to join before that happens,  and how to get more help doing what you love

Thoughts, suggestions... strong hints I go get a new hobby? I'm open to anything.

Make New Friends, and Keep the Old?

The fact that several people I don't know and have no prior connection to have started subscribing to this blog (and the resulting guilt that I haven't actually posted anything here for a while) has made me start thinking a lot about the still-evolving issues of identity and the Internet. Over the past semester, as I've used Skype to talk face à face with my family six time zones away and used a blog to share my day to day ramblings with a lot more people than I expected, I've realized, as I often do, that the Internet is making the world either a much smaller place by bringing people together or a much larger place because the possibilities open to exploration are so much nearer. And this larger or smaller world is filled with lots of people who, for whatever reason, come to this blog and meet what amounts to an electronic version of me.



My literary theory classes have made me face a lot of questions about identity, society and how literature can be used as a tool to enforce or establish identity, but I think that the question of new literacies, like the Internet and its associated tools like blogs and web forums, has never really come up. I would argue that in the age where anyone can say anything anywhere in the world the written word is loosing its power -- because so many people are 'speaking' at the same time, does anyone bother to listen to what anyone else is saying? Obviously I've been using this blog as a force to establish my identity as a writer -- or rather, using this blog as a force to project that I want to be seen as a writer -- and some people are apparently interested in what I have to say.



This boggles my mind, as I seem to lack the authorial legitimacy to be considered a blogger worth listening to. (As one of them is, in fact, a published writer according to his own blog, I think this legitimacy question kind of answers itself.) They are in fact buying into the projection facilitated by the mask of the Internet and assuming I have legitimacy to make statements about how to write or craft characters or even make comments about whether a book is good or not. (I'm sure at least one of the people who chimes in on my comment box from time to time will have a field day with this legitimacy thing, but I think it's true, even if he doesn't.)



I have a running inside joke with the members of one of my online social groups about my age -- for at least one year when I was actually in my final year of middle school and part of my first year of high school I had them all convinced I was in college. It was a great compliment for me and a bit of a joke for them that a fourteen year old middle schooler managed to make several grown men and women think she was four or five years older than she was, but the story brings up a great point about the masking power of the Internet. Behind the veil of webservers, proxies and computer screens, legitimacy actually becomes easier to attain, so much so that a third year college student from a small suburb of Chicago who can't even get up the nerve to submit her poetry to the school literary magazine can wax theoretic (okay, partially theoretic) from her soapbox and actually have people who have published books and written masters theses on this stuff listen. Or read. Or...well, whatever verb you want to use with that, actually.

And I'm wondering if this supposed legitimacy is a good thing. Like the effusion of the written word the Internet has facilitated, can we not also say that this over-application of legitimacy to Internet-based communication is in fact diluting what legitimacy actually means? Take Twitter, for example. Putting the power of the microblog literally in the hands of everyone with a BlackBerry is diluting what it means to make something worthy of reading. Do we need to follow everything Perez Hilton or Ashton Kutcher tweets? Some people might say that Kutcher's 4 million followers bestow on him some kind of legitimacy credentials. What makes their lives worthy of listening to? What makes everyone else's stream of consciousness, 140-characters-or- less Tweets a worthy use of our time and space in my feedreader? (The reason this blogger doesn't have a Twitter is because a) she knows no one would read hers and it is therefore a waster of server space and b) she can't make a coherent point in 140 characters or less.)

I'm not saying that you, wonderful readers, are following my every word with baited breath. I know that this blog is simply not that interesting (or frequently updated) to merit that kind of following. But the fact that I'm on your blog rolls and feedreaders astonishes me. And I'm touched. Really, I am.

So, as we near the last days of an old year and begin a new one, let's raise a glass to old friends we haven't seen in a while, new friends we haven't met and probably never will and the socially fascinating power of the Internet.