Ink Bloom Initial Research Summary

I chose 5 interviewees from Dr. Ray's list and scheduled + interviewed them within a week's time. Here's what I learned.

Research for the Ink Bloom project focused on uncovering the biggest and easiest-to-solve problems writers are facing. Based on information from stakeholder Dr. Ray, we crafted a set of interview questions to plumb the depths of writers’ minds. We started with the hypothesis that writers would be most helped by having mentors matched to them. However, Dr. Ray stressed we should follow the data rather than cling to the hypothesis.

The Interviewees

We interviewed 5 writers who are either actively paying for writing assistance or have paid for it in the past. Our selection criteria centered around writers trying to solve their writing problems with money since that places them closest to our currently known target audience.

Most of the writers are associated with The Writer’s Studio in some way, whether students or faculty.
All are adults, no younger than 30 years old
None are currently professional writers, but almost all of them want to be.
2 are associated with teaching writing of some kind.
3 have full-time jobs
1 is making a go of writing as a profession but is living off savings and not actually making consistent money as a writer
None are published beyond short stories or articles in small magazines

Observations

Every single writer wants to be published by a traditional publisher. A few are willing to self-publish if they must, and one has self-published a few short stories on Amazon. But every single one mentioned either querying literary agents in the past or aiming to query in the future. These writers are serious about writing professionally.

All of them mentioned writing community. Being around other writers who understand their struggles and can offer fresh eyes and feedback on snippets of writing, if not an entire manuscript. They talked about accountability and finding or making the time to write. The community helped motivate them to write, as well as carve out time to make it happen. One mentioned he found a paid writing opportunity through writing community.

Most writers want criticism on their work, but feel their peers are “too nice”. As long as it is constructive and helps them reach their goal of being published, writers would like their work torn apart. However, writers struggle with knowing whose advice will actually help them get published. Peer critiques may just be “the blind leading the blind” since they are also unpublished amateur writers.

Conclusions

We started this project with the idea that writers wanted to be connected to mentors. While our data doesn’t disprove that concept, it does not support it as one of the primary issues writers are dealing with.

Mentors can help solve any of the 3 primary problems writers face. However, writers do not appear to go out looking for a mentor. They look for a solution to a specific problem. It just happens that sometimes mentors are a good way to solve that problem.

Writers are often a quiet, solitary sort of people. Often it is just the writer and the page and the words in their head. But many of them do not want to be alone the whole time. They are determined to reach their goal of being published and strongly feel other people can help them get there. As long as they can find the right people.

Whether through mentorship or community support, writers want to reach their goals alongside fellow writers. But they are primarily goal-oriented. Our solution’s approach needs to focus on solving one or more of these specific problems, not just offering to connect writers to mentors. Even if mentors might solve all these problems.

Interviewees

Problems Found

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