My multimedia problem and a plan May 8, 2008

My multimedia problem is that I have recently started my own Creative Writing Group at National Air Traffic Services (NATS). The aim of the group is to encourage, enthuse, motivate and improve the skills of those of us interested in creative writing.

I have been in other creative writing groups but some are stale and uninspiring, other better ones are a long distance to travel and others more local, take place during the working day so are impossible to take an active part in. I canvassed colleagues through the NATS intranet and got sufficient support to start a group. We meet every two or three weeks at 1700 on site for convenience and to reduce the costs.

We have been incredibly lucky to have a published writer in NATS who has book deals and 3 film deals, 2 in Hollywood. Also he has a current contract to write a book on how to write novels and film scripts. He agreed to give our group a series of free seminars based on his book. His name is David Baboulene and more information about him, his writing and his deals can be found at his website; www.baboulene.com

So the problem was how to best use multimedia to promote our writing club, keep everyone up to date and as we are all writers, or hope to be, how to most effectively display our writing.

I considered a website but felt that was impractical. We have almost 20 members and the problem with a website is how to make it effective for all our needs. We would quickly have a huge number of pages (if our members were contributing writing) and it could get expensive as we would have to pay for them and how would we manage the content? We would need someone full time to add content and manage it. We could have one website per member with links between them all but that was going backwards because there are new multimedia tools that better cater for these needs.

There is the wiki which is a collaborative workspace that everyone could contribute to and in some ways this would provide a lot of powerful extras that could be very interesting like the ability to edit each others work.

However I settled for the blog. I could start a central club blog with news on it and the program etc. Each member could have a personal blog linked to this central one. Thus a member would go on to read minutes of the last session or whatever, then they could go to another members blog, read their work and comment on it. Each member can personalise their own blog page. All members of the group would get an email informing them when new work was posted or a comment was added. A blog is usually free for a limited amount of memory, but as writers use text this is not a problem initially. Blogs are easy to use.

These are reasons enough, but there is one more compelling reason for a writing club to use a blog. Blogs are getting publishing deals. Writers are being discovered by their blogs. I am under no illusions but to be lucky one must create the opportunities for luck to occur so a blog it is.