Mentors and mentoring

Having chatted to the library staff on this topic, I have been asked to canvass other authors on the concept of us providing mentoring services for each other.

The basic idea is that any author who wishes can place, in a special section to be created, a work in progress to invite comment, criticism, recommendations etc prior to it be uploaded as a finished work. After a time, it would disappear from that section, and the author could submit the final piece with or without modification.

I sort of think access to and comments on these "unpublished" works should be limited to authors - but perhaps not.

There are a lot of ways in which this basic idea could be tweaked to make it work for us: but there is not much point in contemplating such tweaks if the concept itself is unappealing. I am told that as a general guideline, if 20 or more of us give a new idea the thumbs up, our admins will start to look at how the notion could be implemented in reality.

Regards

Dave

As a voluntary thing, I could see this as a possibility, especially for someone who has not written before but would like to give it a try. The authors I have read on this website all seem to be good writers. However, I have belonged to groups where people submit things and you wonder why and what grade they made in English class while a student. Perhaps we get good authors because Februs is choosy as to whom he invites or accepts as a writer. We probably have readers in the library who might like to try writing but would like some feedback first. Or we may have authors who decide to try a style of writing outside of their comfort zone. We might have some non-native English speakers who would like help with English grammar and idioms. They might like the idea of getting feedback with a chance to make edits before the stories get published. I just would not like to require authors to submit a piece to the mentoring section before they are allowed to submit it to the library for publication.

As I have said before, I'd be willing to do this, but I do have some opinions about this genre that not all are in agreement with. That said, I'd be happy to help where I could.

guyde, I think it sounds like a great idea if Februs et al believe it's feasible. Just today, I ran a story by another writer whose opinion I value to see what he thought of an ending. If we had a forum like you describe, it could have made that process quite streamlined.

There are (literally) dozens of folks writing here whose opinions would be like gold to me and any criticism from them would be welcome and taken to heart. Without naming names, this list is generally composed of the people to whom I write glowing comments. I expect many of us have such a list. I'd like to see it incorporate a way that each participant can select his/her panel of reviewers, radio-button style.

Relative to new writers, I think such a forum could be very useful as well. There are a lot of talented people reading here who could write good stories of their own if only they could get input and encouragement.

I don't know how Februs does all he does, but if he could work in such a methodology/mechanism, I believe it would be a positive step.

beth83
I agree 100% that submission for mentoring would be totally voluntary, and doing any mentoring is also 100% voluntary.

billboard
I rather like the idea that authors could, in some way, control who could see and/or comment on their work in progress. If it was the author's choice, any member could be invited to give input.

Having said that, I am not sure how easy an option it would be to implement.

rollin
If billboard's idea is workable, any prior differences in points of view could be easily accommodated.

Could this be incorporated into the storyboard that we already have? The concept really isn't all that different.

Guy

I'm down for it. Both to mentor and to be mentored. I'm a mentoring switch.

Just a quick couple of comments from a technical point of view.

Right now I don't have time to build anything bespoke for it so we'd need to make use of the existing facilities which I suppose in this case would be either the forum or the Storyboard software.


An additional forum could be created which was only visible to a selection of people, either authors or a limited group who were interested. It needs to be borne in mind that the forum software I installed on here is particularly minimalistic and that was by choice as I didn't want the site to be dominated by the forum, the library itself being the primary focus. Consequently, changing who can and can't access a particular forum is neither automated nor slick and needs to be done by direct editing of files on the server.

I'm not aware of any forum software that allows individual threads to be viewed by a selection of individuals chosen by the poster at the time of posting or pre-defined. Who can view something is, to the best of my knowledge, defined for the whole forum/board. I think if we were to go down this route I'd need to be assured it was going to be well used as I don't really want to create a new forum with restricted access just for half a dozen people and the occasional post once every other week. The existing (Storyboard) forum, however, could be used to alert others that an item requiring mentoring had been placed on the Storyboard section of the site.

The Storyboard software was originally provided in response to a number of people who had written to us asking for facilities for collaborative writing. Unfortunately, it has never really been used by anyone, maybe I made it too complex or maybe it's something that people asked for but didn't really have the time to participate in. It's not really intended for the mentoring idea but that's not to say it couldn't be used in that way. It does allow individual stories to be viewed only by specified individuals and it does provide a discussion facility (in parallel to the actual story text). In addition, whatever has been entered can easily be removed by whoever 'owns' the entry (i.e. the author) once it has served its purpose.

Wow Februs! Your webmaster skills are beyond my understanding, and your dedication of time and talent to the library is too tremendous for words that I can find.