Q: Bart, your personal desire to write in other genres led you to begin a LiveJournal community called Genre Challenge. Could you tell us more about your plans for the community, including ways for fellow Wrimos to get involved?
A: Genre Challenge started when I decided that my 2007 NaNoWriMo project would be in a genre I’d never tried before. I realized how many genres I’d never attempted to write in, and concluded that I should try them all, one at a time.
I know a lot of writers, and I thought that some of them might like to join me in trying to write outside of our “comfort zones.” Each month I pick a new genre, and anyone who wants to can try writing a short story within that genre. It’s a great exercise for stretching creative boundaries. And one of the best ways to improve writing is to receive constructive criticism, something else the GC community is useful for.
Once stories were being submitted regularly and the number of words started to build up, I realized that there would eventually be enough for a collection. So I asked the community what they thought of publishing an anthology of the Genre Challenge’s submissions, and donating any money to charity. NaNoWriMo was the obvious choice for the donations, since NaNo partly inspired CG in the first place.
Except for a few people who decided to develop their submissions into novels, the idea was very well received. As of October we have about 70,000 words towards the first anthology, and the goal is to release it after Genre Challenge’s first anniversary on March 1, 2008.
The GC community has already grown to encompass more than just the short story challenge. We’ve begun to solicit essays … anyone who would like to can share their thoughts on the subject of writing and everything related to writing (editing, getting published, etc.) Reading about what techniques other writers use to improve their work can be a great benefit to anyone still working out their own writing process. Hopefully we’ll eventually be able to release a collection of essays, as with the stories.
Genre Challenge is also going to be posting lists of books that writers have found useful in their own writing education, and building a library of links to online writers’ resources. Everyone is encouraged to participate in every part of the community that they want to—and if you have other ideas of how to build the community and benefit writers, share them! We want to hear!
What I’d really like is for genrechallenge.org to continue to grow into a true resource for writers: that it will be a community as well as a website and challenge, with all its content created by writers, where everyone adds their personal expertise with the goal of helping writers to improve, network and hopefully get published.
And more than that, I hope that GC will help convince some people who have never attempted writing before to give it a try; I’ve long believed that everyone can write, and that everyone has a story worth telling.