Monday 21 June 2010

You Write On and A363

I've been playing with the website You Write On, and found it really helpful, as long as you bear in mind the limitations of some of the reviewers. I put two first chapters up in 2007, before I really started studying writing again and had some very helpful reviews. You can use their self-publishing arm (which is just an attempt to improve vanity publishing, I think, as it bypasses all suggestion of peer review) but the main draw is that the best chapters are reviewed by real editors.

Activity 3.7 in A363 quite comically takes a few lines from the opening speech from Under Milkwood: 

It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah...

and translates it into:

The chapel is small and cold and dark, but somehow sounds as if the congregation of women are in there, despite it being night-time. 

The task is to gather some prose, de-dramatise it, then return to it a few days later and re-dramatise it! 


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