DesiWritersLounge – a people-powered creative writing support community
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This is a fresh, very interesting activity I just came across thanks to a G&W commenter.
The DesiWritersLounge is an online community of creative writers based primarily in Islamabad that is actively working to help each other improve their work.
The community members range from chemical engineers all the way through Osman Khalid, who runs his own theatrical productions company. They are active in that they are meeting in cafes having their own little coffee sessions (um… they call them readings) and making most of their decisions as a well-formed democratic group.
Whats interesting though is how they work – people submit creative stories and writing to the community, where it is then reviewed, analysed and criticized by the rest of the community – but everyone does this with the intent of improving that piece. After a series of rounds of improvement, that story is "published" in their own e-zine of accepted stories.
From their vision:
It is important that our writers go through an intensive, critical phase where they are consistently challenged in an intense environment. Each member is criticized and criticizes in return, learning to gain the creative maturity to respond to these remarks. This website attempts to appeal to both amateurs and hardcore writers in search of an active community in which to better their creative direction and voice.
As a group, they are then promoting their writers’ work to formal publishing and editing agencies to recruit those participants.
Proofreading and Translation services offered to the world in an Elance model were discussed yesterday at a SI session – maybe you guys can connect with those people from NIIT and implement that within your community – there is some pretty high potential for making income directly from those services rather than waiting for support from publishers.
Good luck!
8:57 pm
beautiful! i was looking for something like this! a creative outlet if you will.
i’m definitely signing up for it!
9:48 pm
food luck:)
we are always looking for good writers at
http://desicritics.org/index.php
those interested may write to me:
temporal3@gmail.com
9:51 pm
Temporal – desi critics still seems to be one of those standard current affairs reporting and opinions places.
The DesiWriters guys are focusing solely on creative writing and storytelling.
10:55 pm
osama:
that and more…:)
we publish fiction and poetry as well
1:49 pm
Hi,
Err…wow! Thanks for the show of support. Actually, we’re not primarily based in Islamabad. The first reading or “coffee session”
, was held here because of structural reasons. We’re hoping to branch out to Lahore and Karachi to incorporate our readings in the future, although for now, we’ll still be sticking to Isloo.
And also, thanks for the publishing related info. Will definitely look into that.
- mp