Putting the ‘Social’ in Anti-Social
Wanda Wilcox: “I can’t stand people. I hate them.”
Chinaski: “Oh, yeah?”
Wanda: “You hate them?”
Chinaski: “No, but I seem to feel better when they’re not around.”– Charles Bukowski via Barfly
It has been said that writing is a solitary endeavor, but very few writers work in total isolation in our connected age. Many writers meet in local critique groups. Others split the difference between being cloistered and interacting with actual people at a fixed time and place by joining online writers’ groups.
My Raether’s Enzyme screenplay was lightly workshopped at the defunct Helium Exchange website*. The novel was written in isolation. For The Gray God, I resolved to experiment with my writing processes. I moved from Word to Scrivener. I employed additional editing tools. And I resolved to join a writing group.
Actually meeting people seemed a bit much and I wasn’t optimistic about the odds of finding a local group that was a good impedance match for my strange signals. I set off in search of an online community to commune with aspiring authors. As you might well guess, the /r/writing subreddit has a great many people to connect with. Oh so very many. Over one million. The signal-to-noise ratio is less than one. Much less. Moving on. WritersCafe has fewer people and a better s/n. It’s free to join, and that may be part of the problem. It attracts all levels of interest and engagement. Its commitment to openness leads to a wild proliferation of ad hoc groups. Finding people with something interesting to say seems to be a matter of luck. Moving on.
Scribophile filters for commitment by operating on a karma economy. To get feedback on your work, you must first provide quality critiques of other writers’ submissions. To keep things flowing and manageable, the text is limited to a few thousand words at a time. The site is well-designed with good tools for inline feedback. There are still myriad groups and plenty of discussion forums to wander around in when you should be writing, but Scribophile offered enough structure and support for me to give it a try.
Editorial Pachinko
The population of Scribophile is self-selecting. The site is open to all experience levels and ambitions. Sign up and you’re welcome to participate. Contrast this to a Masters of Fine Arts program and, as you might expect, you get a wider variation in skill levels and ambitions. We can look at the population in various ways, but let’s look at experience and ambition.
Two ways to dice-and-slice Scribbers
On the horizontal axis, we have ambition. Hobbyists are writing primarily because it is something they want or need to do. They have no expectation of publication but they do enjoy being read and sharing in the writing life. Aspiring Professionals have publication as a goal. Participation in the community is a means to that end. If you asked the population, many or most would describe themselves as aspiring professionals. If you asked us to list the steps we have taken to reach professional status, many or most would have a short list indicative of being closer to the hobbyist end of the spectrum than we’d like to admit.
On the vertical axis, we have experience. Neophytes are new to the craft and are there to learn. Old Oaks have been writing for years, have mastered many aspects of the craft, but since they’re here, they probably haven’t broken through in the publishing world. Neophytes benefit from the oaks’ feedback. Oaks help each other refine their craft and have opportunities to learn from teaching the neophytes. There is virtue in paying forward the efforts of earlier oaks.
Absent access to user surveys and data analytics for the site, I’m going to guess that users are scattered up and down both axes and that the distribution is not a nice bell curve centered in the middle. More likely, it is multimodal.
Scribophile’s karma economy and primary workflow are such that you earn your karma and then launch a piece of your novel into the reviewing spotlight. The reviewers that critique your work (to earn their own karma) can come from anywhere on the graph. It’s like pachinko. You might get lucky. Three karama-hungry old oaks might be looking for work to review when your piece enters the spotlight. Or three (other) hobbyist neophytes might jump on it and give it their best. As with pachinko, success is subject to a complex array of variables that you might hope to control, but chances are it’s really a matter of chance. To get a polished manuscript out of this process, you must either be incredibly lucky or be willing to resubmit every piece of your story through this process enough times to accumulate the experienced critiques and edits they need.
Are you saying Scribophile is foolishness?
No. Pachinko is a multibillion-dollar industry that’s bigger than Las Vegas. As with Vegas, Pachinko and Scribophile provide entertainment to most of their customers. For a minority, pulling the handle or working the karma become addictive goals of their own. Know yourself and know your budget and you’ll be fine.
And the payout on Scribophile’s editorial pachinko is not bad. It’s good. Every story benefits from reader feedback. Learning to weigh and incorporate feedback is a valuable skill for a writer to develop and maintain. Keep your goals in mind, periodically evaluate the effort vs. reward, and Scribophile can be a productive part of your writing process and evolution.
I intend to continue my Scribophile experiment for a while yet. I’ll go back, Jack, do it again…
- If you browse to www.heliumexchange.com you will discover that garish animated GIF banner ads are alive and well. If that’s your thing, go ahead and click the link.