Dopp Juice Archive

This is the first in (what I hope will become) a series of video blogs about this year’s revitalization of TheWrit.org. In this five minute video, I give a brief overview of the tumultuous history of the site and its vision to be a resource for emerging writers.

WRITvlog1: Beginnings and Vision from Sarah Dopp on Vimeo.

(Sidenote: This is my first ever video production project. My biggest complaint is the quality of the audio, and I think I need to go buy an external microphone. Other tips welcome.)

I wrote a few weeks ago about The Writ — my baby project that turned into a teenager and ran away from home. It’s had more than few near-death experiences out there in the big scary world, but it has relentlessly refused to die. At the time of this writing, The Writ has been alive for four and a half year and has 5,783 member accounts. People contribute to its workshop and use it to support each others’ writing every day. I haven’t touched the site in two years.

It hasn’t been without leadership, though. Julián Esteban Torres did an exceptional job of organizing an editorial staff, keeping promises, cranking out journal issues, and trudging through a hacked-together half-broken content management system on a mission to do something beautiful.

He and I have been passing the baton back and forth for the life of The Writ. He organizes people and I organize systems. I think our tandem leadership is the reason The Writ has survived. Both of us have invested our time, energy, and personal money into The Writ to the point of burnout more than once, and neither of us has ever made a dime.

The baton is back at my feet now, and I think I’m ready to pick it up again.

I don’t usually write publicly about my projects while they’re in their early stages; critique can kill a dream. But this one’s been already through the firing range and it ain’t dying anytime soon. Moreover, this isn’t about a website; it’s about a community. The only way I can do it justice is by listening and being transparent.

I want the community to have something more stable to stand on. They are a passionate group and they’ve proven they can take care of themselves if they have the tools to do so. I want to open up a line of communication for group discussion, self-organization, and collaborate planning (I’m still trying to figure out the best way to do this). I want to migrate the site to a stable and widely-used open-source CMS so it has a chance at evolving as technology changes. I want to make the website pretty again. I want to add features that put more control in the hands of each individual user. I want to honor the community’s organic growth over the last four and a half years and let whatever passion has fueled that growth to guide this process.

And I think that if the community also wants these things to happen, these things will happen.

Four years ago, on a hot summer day, I was bored and decided to start a new website. This particular website was intended to be a community space and publishing venue for writers. I gathered up a few friends to help me sculpt it and get the word out, and together, we named it The Writ.

The Writ had massive ambitions and zero budget. For the first four months, it survived entirely on coffee, cigarettes, insomnia, optimism, and keg party marketing. When its membership jumped from 4 to 100, we were beside ourselves with shock. When we secured a $1200 grant to help with the web programming, we felt like we’d won the lottery. When we found a guy in Romania who promised to build us every web feature we ever dreamed of for $1200, we were certain that literary world domination was well within reach.

And then, when we all burned out from volunteer hours and discovered that Mr. Romania wasn’t the programmer of our dreams, we quietly admitted failure, gave up on the project, and moved on. It would die, we figured, without us — but hey, it was fun while it lasted.

So when the damned thing refused to die, we didn’t quite know what to do about it. There it was, living on without leadership or maintenance, with broken features and mysterious glitches, with ugly designs and spam-bloated forums, and with a passion and force that made absolutely no sense to us at all. New members were signing up. People were posting writing. People were commenting on each others’ work. People were creating community.

And that’s how I know I didn’t get it. In all my pride and ambition, I had missed the point entirely. It wasn’t about making things bigger and better. It wasn’t about creating a sustainable revenue model, or establishing a fancy brand, or extending deeper into the community. And it most certainly wasn’t about us.

The Writ now has over 5,500 members. People post new writing every day, and most pieces receive constructive feedback from readers. Over the last four years, several people have stepped up to take the leadership reigns and in doing so sparked new life into the community. But that role is too taxing to sustain long-term as a volunteer without a programming staff, and its presence is usually short-lived.

Does that matter? Not as much as we thought it would. The community members don’t really care if they have a leader or not. All they care about is being able to show up, share their stuff, and connect.

That’s it.