STOIC: Enriching workshop practices of community writing groups

This project aims to enrich the amateur writing community by providing a structured, collaborative process for editing and workshopping fiction, informed by software analysis techniques. We propose to run a one-day public workshop at Crescent Arts Centre to introduce participants to this process and equip them to introduce similar techniques to their wider community of practitioners. In doing so we will also explore preconceptions about traditional and nonlinear narratives and interrogate whether a more structured approach encourages learners to break away from these, and instead, experiment within new guideline delimiters.
Software engineering typically uses logic-based, formalised processes to identify system faults and improvements. One of these techniques is HAZOPs (Hazard and Operability Analysis), a structured collaborative technique used by engineers and practitioners. Likewise, amateur writing groups typically critique fiction using a mixture of “home-grown” processes and those espoused in creative writing manuals to identify improvements in aspects such as plot, characterisation or voice. Our workshop aims to enrich the existing practices of community writing groups by introducing them to our Creative HAZOPs technique, which we have developed to apply the HAZOPs technique to short fiction.
This work draws on existing research [1, 2, 3] as well as the results of a pilot study to be conducted with Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast in August, in collaboration with Queens University Belfast. We will draw on participants from this pilot study as well as other community users of Crescent Arts Centre and our own contacts with community writing organisations such as Spread the Word, the Scottish Book Trust and Word Factory.
The results from this workshop will inform the creation of a publicly accessible webpage providing information, tutorials and guidance on using Creative HAZOPs. Longer term, we intend to establish a collaboration network with community arts centres, arts outreach organisations and software industry professionals to explore the wider questions of which narratives dominate software engineering and creative fields, of how these narratives differ, and the ways in which communities in each can be enriched by borrowing cultures, practices and techniques from the other.