About
On the 28th April 2011, our contributing writers received an email. It read as follows:
The one thing I’ve noticed time and time again about so many of my friends, is that they’re brilliant, creative people. Each of you - at some point in the time I’ve known you - has expressed an interest in writing. If only you had some sort of motivation. Or something to write about. Or any of a dozen reasons, mouthed into cups of tea and slices of cake.
So, I’m inviting you to take part in the Great Cake* Experiment, and I really want you to say yes.
There seem to be three things required for any sort of blog post:
- A topic
- An arbitrary but achievable deadline
- Enthusiasm, excitement, maybe even annoyance - but basically, some sort of inciting or motivating emotion, to get you past the ‘meh, it’s been a long day’ feeling that can take over sometimes.
And from what’s been said to me, it’s always been a lack of one of these things that has stopped you writing. So the Great Cake* Experiment is designed to get you past these obstacles, so you can write again …oh and also, there’s cake.
The rules of the game are as follows:
- At 4pm every Monday afternoon, you’ll receive an email with a topic, word or phrase.
- You then have a week to come up with a blog post on this subject. The post needs to be ready and online by midnight the following Sunday night. 200 word minimum.
- I can’t really provide the emotion you need most to help you write, not on a weekly basis. But I can appeal to people’s fundamental competitiveness, and love of cake*. (*or cheese, or other foodstuff, but mostly if you’re my friend, it’s probably cake). So if you’re going to do this, I’m going to ask you to pledge £5 before you start. I don’t need you to send it to me now, I just need a promise that you’ll pay when the time comes.
- When all the posts are online, you’ll be given the chance to vote. One email per person, where you choose the 3 posts you enjoyed most.
- I’ll tally the votes each article receives, so we’ll have a weekly top 3 writers (I won’t include the math on point accumulation here just yet)
- At the end of the three months, the person with the most accumulated points gets everyone’s £5 to spend on cake*. (*or cheese, or something tasty. No using it to pay your phonebill or anything so mundane though. It has to be something you love)
Cake aside, I really do hope you will say yes. I’ve read something by each of you at some point, or had that same conversation about writing, and I’d really like this to be somewhere you can practice and talk to other people in the same position as you. I’m including everyone’s name in the to: field; you all know each other, or know of each other.
I hope to hear from you soon,
K.x
Everything you read here has come off the enthusaism and hard work of the writers who wanted to see if we could make this site work.
Some more information on The Great Cake* Experiment:
For now, there isn’t be a comments section available on the site. In fact, you can’t critique something here unless you’ve posted something of your own. If you’d like to get in touch, either to find out more about the site, or the people involved, you can send an email to greatcakeexperiment(at)gmail(dot)com
Most of the writers here have blogs of their own. If you’d like to follow any of them individually, there are links on the ‘who’s who’ section of the site.
First word/phrase goes out to contributing writers on Monday 16th May.
Overall winner will be announced on Sunday 14th August 2011.
