To celebrate 13 weeks of winter, Winterviews is conducting interviews with various book and author communities across the internet. Once a week, we’ll interview a new community to find out what makes that community great.
Join us on the hashtag #13Winterviews, or join in the fun with tonight’s community spotlight, #WriterInMotion! Without further ado, lets get down to the interview!
Can you tell us a little bit about #WriterInMotion?
Writer In Motion is collaborative writing and revising project that shows how a writer moves through the drafting, feedback and editing process to create a polished work. The blog event is a week-by-week process where writers draft a short story, revise, rewrite, digest feedback, and blog about their process as they move from start to finish.
We completed two rounds of the blog event in 2019 and have more planned for 2020. The writers involved have created a lovely community that supports each other even after the event is over.
What prompted the idea to start #WriterInMotion?
Writer-In-Motion came about in my slack group, Writers’ Craft Room. It started with author J.M. Jinks saying she wanted to post the first draft and then the final draft of her manuscript to show how the revision process makes a huge difference to a gem in the rough. Then author K. J. Harrowick, in one of her many moments of brilliance, said it would make a great blog series.
And so the idea was born.
Why not show writers the big changes that can occur over the course of revisions, just on a scale much more manageable than a hundred-thousand-word manuscript?
What is unique about #WriterInMotion?
It focuses on the writing and revising process, not on the outcome. It really helps writers see that everything is normal in writing and that there is no one right way to approach a writing process.
Who are some of your biggest/most positive influences in the community or in general?
When we decided to host a second round of the blog project, we wanted to create a website just for WriterInMotion where we could share links to all the participants’ individual blogs. It was a monumental undertaking, and we asked for volunteers to help. Those authors went above and beyond to get everything up and running in time, and their efforts really came together in such a beautiful way. So big shout out to Stephanie Whitaker, Thuy Nguyen, Sheri MacIntyre, J. M. Jinks, and of course K. J. Harrowick.
Any advice or quote that you live by?
Well, the #WriterInMotion team likes this one, and it’s sort of at the center of the project. I said it, I think in that initial conversation in my slack group.
“When you’re drafting, the only comparison you have to your writing is a published book. And that’s such an unfair comparison. Those books have been through multiple rounds of self-editing by the writer and received feedback from many people—editors at the least but often also agents, beta readers, and critique partners. It’s not unusual for ten or more people to provide feedback to an author on any one manuscript by the time it’s published. When you make the comparison between a first draft and a published book, it’s like comparing an acorn to an oak tree—all the raw materials are there, but it’s going to take time and a lot of work to get it to grow that much.”
