It’s worth you knowing a bit more about how we work so we use this section to give some more details on the overall team writing process.
Production is split into phrases: on the first day the writers work in one team. Using profiles produced in audience focus groups, they plan out a narrative at increasing levels of detail throughout the day. A key part of this is that the characters driving the narrative are identified early. After characters are identified they are assigned to writers (normally one per writer, but some writers have other jobs and some writers take on a minor character in addition to the main character).
Once characters are assigned writers only work on content that involves that character, and trust that other writers are making sure that other characters are engaging and consistent and that other team members will keep a wider-eye view of the narrative. This ensures that characters are consistent, that plot holes are prevented, and that writers are particularly motivated.
By the end of day one the writers should have completely storyboarded the novel as a team.
During days two and three writers draft the content: when two or more characters are in a scene the scene is written iteratively (one writer will outline, another will draft, another will redraft) so that there is never a time when one writer is watching another writer write. This constant redrafting provides a balance between a consistent style and an overly consistent merging of character identities.
From day four writers are rewriting, copyediting and proofreading, focusing on their own character but acting as sounding boards and second opinions for other writers so that themes can be reinforced and other aspects of style can be made rigorous.
It takes five days. On day one they repeatedly plan a narrative at increasing detail. The characters that drive the narrative are identified early and then assigned to writers (normally one per writer).
From then on, writers only work on content that involves their character. They have to trust that other writers are making their own characters engaging and consistent. This ensures consistent characterisation, no plot holes, and high levels of motivation.
By the end of day one the writers should have completely storyboarded the novel as a team. Writers draft prose on days two and three. (when multiple characters are in a scene one writer will outline, another will draft, another will redraft). This constant redrafting balances consistent style and character voice.
For days four and five the writers rewrite, copyedit and proofread. They focus on their own character but acting as sounding boards for other writers so that themes can be reinforced and other aspects of style can be made rigorous.
Everything below this line involves our professional writers project.
Too Many Cooks Creative Scotland Professional_Writers
We will recruit and fairly pay two groups of ten talented writers. Each group will produce a complete novel after a week of working with us.
This is a research and development project to develop our collaborative writing techniques. We have a method that helps young people, prisoners, and university students work as teams to write amazing novels in intense sprints. Now we want to find out how high-quality writers strain our process, so we can ensure that the results can be used artistically at the highest level.
Too Many Cooks Creative Scotland Professional_Writers Our aims are:
We’re applying for £ 35,359.41
12 months
Glasgow
We will recruit and fairly pay two groups of ten talented writers. Each group will produce a complete novel after a week of working with us.
This is a research and development project to develop our collaborative writing techniques. We have a method that helps young people, prisoners, and university students work as teams to write amazing novels in intense sprints. Now we want to find out how high quality writers strain our process so we can ensure that the results can be used artistically at the highest level. For us, that means ‘producing novels that mainstream publishers judge worthy of pursuing’.
Our driving belief is that the publishing world would be better with team-written novels as part of the system. Team-written novels can better capture a moment in the zeitgeist (publishing has been unable to reflect the public’s fears and hopes during the COVID pandemic) and are better at giving diverse voices (because you can, and we will, have a diverse set of writers).
Each of the two books will go through five stages:
There is a clear and present need to improve diversity in publishing and, at the same time, our organisation has now reached the right size to deliver the project and the right level of expertise to make it really stand out.
Our table of SMART goals can be seen here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lXRScTV0et2V0aSRv-9e-2Yw9NjdJi5oJgtXeY-Qsqw/edit?usp=sharing
A major aim of this project is a development one. We will work in new ways by taking a process that has been successful with amateur writers and make it successful with professional ones. We’ll reach new audiences by using focus groups to precisely target our work.
At the organisation level, this project requires us to get better at the following three things.
Although we’ve hired staff on an ad-hoc basis, we need to build much stronger systems for recruitment and HR. to help us grow as an organisation.
It also will be our first time running focus groups (to discover the sort of narratives that our target readers want). Those research skills are something we need to learn about.
The end phases of the project will be our first time contacting and pitching publishing professionals. Part of this project will focus on making sure that those partnerships and networks form.
This project will make our team writing process work better with high quality and experienced writers. We’ll also have built a set of partnerships, got good at finding out What Readers Want and built up our ability to manage staff. We will be in a position to bring team-written novels into the bookshops, bringing real diversity and freshness with them.
Our team writing process is famous for developing the writers that take part. That is why schools, prisons and universities pay us to work with their writers and why academics study it. But we’ve never worked with writers of this standard before and “Do we still raise the skills of these already skillful people?” will be a key part of the evaluation.
We believe that the answer will be yes. The writers will be working in a way that is new to them, with group structures in place to help them focus their creativity onto their work. It is a structured, intense, and collaborative environment: the writers work with very short feedback loops, more rapid changes in story, and clearer guidance about direction. It is hard to imagine that there won’t be at least some influences between writers, or rough edges smoothed away.
We are keen to develop the writers we work with because the great tragedy of publishing is that the modern commercial environment accepts only the ‘complete package’: there are writers who craft breathtaking narratives but get ruined by their dialogue; writers who can give a world utter realism, but who have underdeveloped characterization. Our process gives writers the space to show their skills and specialties as well as the experience to strengthen their weaker areas and become more acceptable to publishers.
The three relevant goals from our aims and objectives are:
This project will improve our team writing process by ‘stressing’ it with extremely high quality writers. The lessons learned in this project will have knock on effects all the way through our work, from our projects in prisons and universities down to our school-aged writers.
In addition to improving the team writing process in it’s own right, this project will allow us to show a clear step by step progression between large-scale grassroots work in schools and high-level professional writing. That strengthens our case with funders, schools and organisations, who can be nervous about how well our educational writing work will work in their context.
Outside of our targeted development goals, we look forward to the following ‘incidental’ benefits:
Although we’ve hired staff on an ad-hoc basis, we need to build much stronger systems for recruitment and HR. to help us grow as an organisation.
It also will be our first time running focus groups (to discover the sort of narratives that our target readers want). Those research skills are something we need to learn about.
The end phases of the project will be our first time contacting and pitching publishing professionals. Part of this project will focus on making sure that those partnerships and networks form.
This project will make our team writing process work better with high quality and experienced writers. We’ll also have built a set of partnerships, got good at finding out What Readers Want and built up our ability to manage staff. We will be in a position to bring team-written novels into the bookshops, bringing real diversity and freshness with them.
Our work has been building towards this project for a long time.
Over the last ten years we’ve produced over 200 novels with schoolchildren, prison inmates and university students and in the process, we created ‘IMPS’, the bespoke software that allows the writers to collaborate effectively around the creative process.
The key skills that his project will require are:
Expertise in storytelling and narrative, which is evidenced by our existing body of published novels (see https://www.whitewaterwriters.com/portfolio) and by the peer-reviewed research papers that Dr Reddington and co-authors have produced. See here for a full research publication list.
‘Understanding the fiction landscape’: this project will be more successful if we correctly identify under-served gaps in the fiction market. Our expertise in doing so comes from both the ‘old-fashioned’ expertise from trustees and contacts who are part of the industry, but is also evidenced by our academic work on the topic (See, e.g. X). In addition, although not an ‘artistic skill’, this will be made much easier by our organisation’s strong research background, which makes such things as focus groups easier.
Our main focus is White Water Writers, which has helped thousands of young people realise their creative dreams on White Water Writers camps. In each camp, a group of ten young people spend a week writing and publishing a team-written novel using our own process. White Water Writers was grant funded but is now self sustaining, with schools paying for their students to take part. We have produced over 200 novels while working successfully with specialised groups such as: children in care, special educational needs, children with life-limiting conditions and English as an additional language students.
We’ve gone on to replicate the model in prisons - enabling inmates of B and C category prisons to write narratives with their children.
We have had firm commitments from the following organisations to help us recruit participants for the project:
In addition, communities of potential participants will be reached by a program of carefully targeted advertisements in more mainstream outlets. Our initial list of organisations is:
To particularly focus on young unpublished writers, we’ll also be producing content for the following online communities of writers:
From here interested writers will be invited to apply by sending short fiction pieces as CVs. Writers will be shortlisted by a panel( including professional writers) and 38 will be invited to a selection day designed to both only identify the best team of writers for the full novel and also develop the talents of all of the shortlisted writers. We will select these writers for their words and for their ability to speak to audiences that feel their voices aren’t heard in mainstream publishing.
Lack of diversity is one of the biggest problems in the publishing industry.
The 2015 report: ‘Writing the Future: Black and Asian Writers and Publishers in the UK Market Place’ found that BAME authors were less likely to be published or have an agent and were pushed to have their characters match cultural stereotypes. The 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey Results found massive under representation for disability at all levels in the publishing industry, At the same time, writers are more likely to been privately educated and older.
This situation is wrong and deeply harmful to thousands of aspiring writers across Scotland and it partly inspired the creation and design of our project.
Our project seeks to dismantle structural barriers as follows:
By funding this project, you help make this sector more diverse, more responsive, and a better reflection of the public it serves.
We haven’t really thought about this. As an organisation we’re very environmentally focused (remote working as standard, commitments around cryptocurrency, running recycling projects, presenting some of our novels about climate change at COP26 ect) we just don’t have a particular environmental strand to this work. We’re happy to add some if that would help.
Three groups will benefit from this project:
Audience: 20 underrepresented British writers This project invites and fairly compensates two groups of professional- standard writers for the time over week-long periods to produce two full length literary works on topics in the ‘now’. For each novel, ten of the best young British writers from underrepresented groups will team up to create a topical novel that is relevant to the changes in life in 2022. They will go from blank pages on Monday morning to a publication on Sunday night and show that the long-form novel remains a reflection of life rather than a memory of it.
They’ll benefit in three ways:
From a 2014 YouGov survey, 39% of the public buy fewer than five books in a year, but the vast majority of them do buy some. (Source, YouGov). These are people who do read, but rarely. Finding ways to increase book sales in these groups would significantly grow the market.
We will deliver to this audience two novels that more accurately voices the diversity of the modern UK and also reflects recent events. Audiences will be hit by the twin shock of characters that both like them and are reacting to events that they themselves are still processing.
Publishers are keen to find ways of increasing the quality of their output, increasing the size of their market, and reducing their costs. We can demonstrate to them effective ways of doing all three of those.
we shall demonstrate the publishing industry that:
We believe that increasing the diversity of authors increases the quality of content produced and the size of the market for long-form fiction. That’s why we’ll be pro-activity recruiting for diverse writers and very much promoting their work.
eQuality Time comes from a very strong background of disability work and inclusive design. Our first major award was winning the £50,000 Nesta Inclusive Technology Prize and accessibility is very much in our, and the project’s, DNA. We believe in the social model of disability and we openly commit to make any and all adjustments that are needed for people to participate in and enjoy our work. We’ll do this preemptively where possible and reactively where not.
Obviously inclusion accounts for more than just disability and we work hard to make sure that everybody we come into contact with is given our utmost empathy and respect regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation or any protected characteristic.
This is a very environmentally low-impact project with little travel. A print-on-demand service will be used for the produced books to reduce wastage.
Publicly and openly.
Project management will include formal, minuted, review meetings between Dr Reddington and the eQuality Time trustees. Formal review meetings will be scheduled at the end of each month, with written reviews of progress at the end of each three-month period. These meetings and reports will each evaluate the status of the project against its indicators and relevant changes will be made where necessary. The written reports will be shared publicly and all writers and staff will be made aware of them.
Finances will be similarly open - all trustees have full access to our accounting platform, and payments require two signatories.
The lead on this project will be eQuality Time COO, Dr Joseph Reddington. He is familiar with managing artistic projects of this scale. He will be supervised by the eQuality Time trustees - particularly the Treasurer, Chair, and board member Francesca Baker for financial, personally and creative issues respectively.
The project has four stages:
STAGE 1: Working out what people want to read with Focus Groups. For this project, as per the budget information, this will be led by an external organisation. One of objectives for the grant is developing our organisation so that this activity is easily replicable in-house.
STAGE 2: Recruiting writers by marketing, shortlisting, and using a selection day. Our recruitment panel and trustees include several members that are extremely experienced in advertising and event management.
STAGE 3: Writing two books. Although this project is to develop both the writers and the methodology, we remain a world leading organisation in collaborative novel writing and this is easily the least stressful part of the project.
STAGE 4: Promoting the book and the writers to commercial fiction agents and publishers. This is going to be a big area of development and we’ll admit we don’t yet know how well we’ll do. We believe that with the solid artistic outputs created by STAGE 3, and a lot of hard work, we can get ourselves in front of the people who should be seeing our work.
The lead on this project will be eQuality Time COO, Dr Joseph Reddington and he will make operational decisions based on information from writers and staff. Strategic decisions will be made by the eQuality Time trustees. The boundary between operational and strategic decisions is made clear in our Delegated Authority policy. Of the trustees, the Treasurer, Chair, and board member Francesca Baker will be focal points for financial, personally and creative issues respectively.
Dr Reddington is familiar with managing artistic projects of this scale and designed the group writing process the writers will use.
There are no partnerships in this project.
Our timelines can be seen in the below Gantt chart (online here), and the milestones for each of our objectives can been seen in the objectives list below (online here).
To make sure the project plan was properly planned we produced a comprehensive Theory of Change on the topic of making publishing more modern and diverse: from there, we built a project concept that both captured our dream and met the needs of writers, readers, and funders.
We developed this project plan into the aims and objectives above and started doing the groundwork. This included:
TODO - fill out their risk document first
The aims and objectives table that we presented in 1b set out success criteria and milestones for each of our objectives. We will work through this list and tick off the ones we’ve done.
More viscerally, we’ll know that we’ve been successfully when we are holding an amazing team-written novel in each hand. And we’ll know we are successful when we stand up in front of members of the publishing industry and show them that this is the way to a more effective, more honest, and more productive path for the industry.
The forth and final stage of this project focuses on dissemination.
While a detailed evaluation report will be a cornerstone of this project, we must not forget that the project produces its own outputs - two timely, high quality, novels, and these novels will be excellent fodder for both our own internal evaluation and for the wider community to dissect.
At one level, we’ll be sharing our findings by promoting the novels that we create. At another level, we’ll be writing up our findings in terms of both a full project report and in terms of shorter academic notes for presentation at events and conferences.
Our application shows how our two aims break down into nine objectives and SMART goals, and gives evaluation methods for each.
As detailed in the table, we have a variety of objectives, and they benefit from different styles of evaluation, some are highly quantitative, some qualitative, and it’s clear that the project will require a detailed evaluation report to cover both the affect of our approach on the artists, and the affect of the artists on our approach. We believe that both will be changed for the better.
Feedback is built into the project design at multiple stages. At the most basic - we’re creating two novels, one after the other, so that the second one can make use of the lessons learned in the first. During each individual writing sprint, there will be tight feedback between the focus group participants and the writers.
In terms of good practice - we shall be constantly soliciting feedback from artists and other staff on how they are feeling and where they are on their own journey.
Our delegated authority policy states that all purchases need two approvers, A majority of trustees must approve all purchases of over £400 and purchases of over £600 should come with several costed alternatives.
Only the COO and trustees can approve payments and any payment requires two approvers. We manage budgets and accounts using Quickbooks, keep source documents for all transactions, and prepare bank reconciliations monthly. Income and expenditure are allocated to a budget heading and to a fund to ensure accounting separation.
Dr Joseph Reddington in his role as project lead, overseen by the charity treasurer.
eQuality Time has managed grant budgets of £62k from Nesta, £45k from Comic Relief, and £10k from the National Lottery. We have provided arts projects to Kings Collage London, and Keele University to the value of £60k and £20k respectively. Our application to the arts Council for £35k is well within our normal size.
The COO has completed an ACCA chartered accountancy qualification and will have responsibility for this project’s budget which has been reviewed and approved by Trustees. He will be overseen by the treasurer who has a CIMA qualification and will present budget reports to the trustees at monthly meetings. We anticipate no cash flow problems as all income is from the Arts Council.
The project will have a dedicated account within Quickbooks, and financial reports will be submitted to the trustees monthly alongside our expected budget for the month. Our attached budget aggressively verified expected costs and any deviation from expected spending will be obvious to the project lead immediately.
The budget attached to this application gives full details on every line of the budget. In this section we present a summary.
For all equipment and facilities, we provide three quotes and a justification for our choice. For example, one (!) of the three quotes we have for renting (up to) ten laptops for a week slightly chapter than the cost of buying ten laptops and we provide a justification in the budget for choosing to purchase rather than rent.
For our cover designers and selection day facilitators, we already have casual staff that can fill those roles, and we filled in our existing agreed rate with those staff.
For our project manager role, we looked at three similar (we focused on maternity cover because that gave us the right length of contact) job adverts and used the quoted salaries as the basis for an average, we do note that there was a wide range of potential salaries for almost identical roles.
Core costs is based on Full Cost Recovery – calculated as the organisational spending on overhead per FTE staff times FTE on project.
In building this budget we didn’t include any measures for inflation or STPR due to the short (less than one year) duration of the project.
For paying our writers we used the Society of Authors guidelines on paying artists £11 per hour. We are also fully committed to the Society’s C.R.E.A.T.O.R campaign and will include equitable and unwaivable remuneration of each use/exploitation of any resulting work. We also pay well over the Living Wage for all other roles.
The invoiced value of UK book publisher sales at home and abroad across physical and digital formats was £3.3bn in 2014, with 17% of this figure accounted for by digital sales. (1) Exports of physical and digital books were worth £1.45bn to UK publishers in 2014. (1) http://www.thecreativeindustries.co.uk/industries/publishing/publishing-facts-and-figures
The Creative Industries Economic Estimates are the official statistics used to measure the economic contribution of the creative industries in the UK and quote 255,000 people employed in ‘publishing’. Even if we assume only 5% of that number is in fiction publishing, that is a large audience of individuals to reach.