A Writer's Manifesto
Serve the reader
Love the person who reads your work. Keep your words and sentences simple. Knock your writing back to its essential character.
Once you have a draft (a draft you might think is boring), add the few brushstrokes of color that will increase the reader’s delight rather than show off your cleverness. Find the perfect moment, the crafted vignette, the line of dialog that can up the emotional ante and send the reader home with a deep understanding of your subject.
Focus on the connection
Emmet stories are about important connections between people.
Your goal is to answer two questions: Why was the connection important to each person? Why does it matter in the larger scheme of things?
Connection stories are not biographies. These are stories about how two people connected in life and affected each other. Biographical details are indeed relevant, but as background or to show why the particular connection was important.
Beyond the nuts and bolts of storytelling, the best way to keep your throughline straight in each connection story is to truly care for your subjects. Tell the story as you would want either of them to tell the story of how you connect with your best friend or life partner.
As a quick check, read your piece: Is each person discussed in roughly equal measure?
Be in service to the writer
As an editor, you have no ego. You’ve mastered grammar and voice and pacing only to make writers better, so they can be in service to the reader. You don’t use your own voice in a writer’s piece; you’re a ventriloquist. if your writer writes in a folksy, conversational style (and the subject lends itself to that sort of voice), don’t make corrections or add patches in your own voice. Don’t create Frankenstein.
Editing is not about overwriting, nor is it about rewriting. It’s about guiding the author’s hand, to help her fill in color on the canvas. It’s about helping her think, feel, organize, and express. Would a master grab the brush from her student’s hand and paint for him?
Commit to what you can deliver
Communities ultimately work, and thrive, on trust. If you commit to writing a piece, don’t leave it unfinished, for someone else to figure out and fix. It doesn't need to be long, but if someone else arrives at that story, it should be valuable and understandable.
Before you commit to being a docent or editing a body of work, ask yourself if you truly can get the work done in a reasonable time, or if your schedule will truly allow you time on an ongoing basis. If not, no harm, no foul. The community will eventually conjure up another person to get that work done. But if you do pledge your time and effort to the community, then follow through to completion.
Trust is among the strongest of connections. Some day, an Emmet community member might write about how your commitment inspired him in his career, to finish his novel, or even be a better parent.
Be infectious
Telling stories is as old as humanity; telling stories on the Internet about people connecting to others is new. We believe Emmet is a special place, where the connective power of the Internet allows people to clearly see the impact we have on each others’ lives. It’s the power to bring us closer together, even as we’re spread across time zones and decades.
Find others for whom Emmet can be a refuge and a trout - and infect them. Telling stories is among the healthiest things we do as humans. Get them to tell stories, inspire them get others to tell stories, lead them to infect yet others, and we will tell stories long into the night, as our deepest ancestors did.
Other collaborative sources on the Internet provide a skeleton for knowledge; Emmet puts flesh on the bones of information.
On other sites, dedicated contributors work diligently to help the information Be Right. If something is Not Right, they Correct It. They're motivated to archive facts with precision.
Emmet is about imprecision. It’s about two people who stayed up talking all night and who ran off in the morning to be married. It’s about Branch Rickey fortifying Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier in major-league baseball. It’s about Abbot and Costello, Lerner and Loeb, and Fred and Ginger. It’s about imagination, and dreaming, and bringing to light that which connects us all. It’s not about Being Right; it’s about Being – all those billions of stories of being.
Come tell those stories.