Publishing Perspectives has an editorial by Chris Vanozzi, co-founder of Quilliant.com—another one of the self-promotion guest pieces that Publishing Perspectives often runs, but at least an interesting one. Quilliant, as Vanozzi explains in the article, is another attempt to “recreate the classic writing group over the web.”
Writers fill out a profile about what kind of writing they do, and they are matched with other writers working in similar areas to work together and trade feedback. The goal, he explains, is to help writers find an audience, to help literary agents find promising writers, and to help publishers back new writing with less risk.
We are not the first and won’t be the last community of this type. But what’s interesting is that ever since we launched the site, writers and those in the publishing industry keep asking us the same question: Will online writing communities such as ours help to make traditional writing groups and university creative programs redundant for the young digerati? The short answer is, that as a writing veteran of both the traditional and the digital, I know that we won’t.
Vanozzi devotes a big chunk of the rest of the article to telling his own writing life story—how he drifted away from and found his way back to creative writing, and his experiences writing and workshopping in creative writing classes. Then he comes back to talking about Quilliant again, pondering how online writing groups will help the current generation of young writers.
He writes that he thinks communities like Quilliant will let writers connect with each other, but that they should still maintain other connections, both real and virtual. And he suspects that people who get to know each other in writing on-line will eventually seek out each other offline.
This is all very interesting stuff, and I have little doubt that this project is going to be successful. But I would like to have seen a little more thought given to other on-line writing communities—not organized ones like Quilliant, or the similar Protagonize (which we covered last year), but the ones that have been springing up out of people with common interests finding each other online ever since college students were first allowed online. The ones like I covered in my “Paleo E-Books” series.
I have little doubt that those writing circles I participated in, the feedback and collaboration I took part in with other authors, helped me immensely as I learned to become a better writer. I only have to look back at some of the stuff I wrote early on to realize just how much better I’ve really gotten. I’ve never taken a creative fiction writing class, but I think I’ve learned a lot over the years. (And some people would say that taking a class in writing fiction is the last thing you should do if you want to learn how to write fiction.)
Regardless, Quilliant looks like it might be fun to try, and if I had more time right now I would probably give it a shot. But there are enough other writing circles that have prior claim on what little time I do have that I’m hesitant to enter another one.
