Admin Post: SWG Challenge: New Directions (June 17-July 15)

[dawn_felagund]

Writing challenges are ostensibly about pushing ourselves to take creative risks that we might not otherwise take. In fan fiction, this includes writing about characters whom we are normally content to forget are even in the book.

This month, we challenge our authors and artists to attempt creating a fanwork about a character they've never written or drawn before, using one of the best resources on the SWG website: our character biography collection. From our list of character biographies, choose someone that you do not know much about or have not written/drawn before. Read the character biography and create a fanwork about that character. (Helpful hint: We have no way of knowing if you read more than one biography before choosing your character!)

While you're exploring the biography collection, we encourage you to let our biography writers know in a comment if you enjoy their work. Biographies take hours to days to research and write and often do not garner the kinds of attention and comments that stories do. So let's show our biography writers some love for the valuable work they do for our group!

Fanworks must be posted by July 15 to be eligible for this month's creator stamp. Review challenges never expire, but if you are commenting on a 2017 story for the Strength and Beauty challenge or earlier, please let me know through a comment here or an email to moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org so that I can give you your stamps.

I will try to update stamp collections within the next week. Also remember that the Hero's Journey challenge deadline has been extended to June 24. Full challenge guidelines can be found on the SWG site.

Comments

[ladybrooke]

I'm going to take this challenge as a sign that I should write about Erellont, since I told Oshun when it was published that her biography made me want to write a story.

(Looking down the list, I'm not sure whether I'm more surprised about the fact that there's this many I haven't written, or that there's that many I have written. :P)

[dawn_felagund]

I should do the same! Often when I'm copyediting Oshun's bios, I think, "Wow, this person would be great in a story!" So I should look back in our monthly bio-related emails and see which ones I said that about. :D

I know I have NOT written most on the list! I'm one of those people who is challenged by a challenge like this.

[ladybrooke]

You should! It would be fun to see which ones caught your eye.

I went ahead and made a spreadsheet (because I'm a geek) and I've written 61 of them, not written 40, and have a question mark of "I think I have written this person but can't remember what the story was and am too lazy to look it up" for 11.

It's weird to me, because I would have sworn I've written like 10 different characters tops before going through the list (and I know I've also written some that aren't on the list, so that's adding more to the list...huh). I will be challenged by this though, because looking through the list there's a reason most of these have not been written by me. :P