Wanted: Your Opinion 1

THIS POST is a bit of a departure from my usual, because I’d like to get your opinion about a future article series.

As you know, since early 2015, in addition to articles on journaling, memoir writing, and general writing craft, I’ve been posting a series titled Word for Writers. I started this series because I observed that quite a few writers I knew weren’t using many of Word’s most powerful features and often struggled with basic formatting issues. My hope was to help readers discover and learn Word’s most essential features for writers, as well as help reduce frustration working with the software.

Though I still have a few articles to post, the Word for Writers series will be winding to a close at the end of this year, and I have an idea for a new series. This is what I’d like to ask you about.

I’m thinking of writing a series focused specifically on memoir, titled “Reading Like a Writer.” The idea is to select 4 books that I would analyze over the course of the year — one per quarter. I will discuss the books’ themes, as well as the writing strengths and weaknesses, tone, pace, organization, characterization, use of conflicts, setting, dialogue, point of view, and so on.

Ideally, this series would be more of a conversation than a series of lectures. I’d read and post my ideas (one article per month, 4 articles per book), and you would also post your ideas and thoughts and responses. Thus, we’d all be engaging and learning together.

To facilitate the conversation, we could either use the comments section at the bottom of the posts, which could become a bit unwieldy, or I could create a discussion forum on my Online Classes site, which is already set up to handle those kinds of discussions.

What do you say? I’d love to hear from you. Would you find such a series engaging and useful? Or do you have a better idea?

Please complete the following survey to let me know what you think. Your voice counts.