Rivals are often the toughest critics — but Brooklyn’s unpublished and unappreciated scribes are putting their differences aside and joining forces in hopes of attracting the one thing that all writers crave: readers.
Author Nayia Moysidis is uniting aspiring wordsmiths with her website Writer’s Bloq, which acts as a platform where novelists, poets, and storytellers can exchange prose and ideas among themselves — and better their chances of getting noticed.
“The first step is bringing people together to create opportunity to help great writers get discovered,” said Moysidis, who claims most of the year-old site’s team reside in the borough. “Industry professionals want to see writers who are really passionate and confident in their own skin.”
The site has already helped literary upstarts make a name for themselves in a bordering literary borough, Manhattan, with a reading at the legendary bookstore the Strand.
Now Moysidis wants to assist some of Brooklyn’s best newby scribes tow in fans outside of the County of Kings with a series of “Bloq Parties” across the East Coast.
But doing so requires something most writers lack: money.
So she launched an online fund-raising campaign to fund the effort.
Kickstarter.com could play a crucial role in the start-up’s bottom line, but Moysidis hopes her site takes after another much-buzzed-about website, Vimeo.com.
That artistic online community is known for a different medium — video — but Moysidis said she wanted Writer’s Bloq to share its emphasis on sharing high quality content crafted by pros and dedicated amateurs, rather than the ad-packed free-for-all that is YouTube.com.
Such a community can provide better feedback — potentially turning the site into a high-tech revival of old literary phenomenons such as Parisian parlor culture.
“My vision for creating a Parisian parlor is both based on the difficulty of discovery, for both writers and publishers, and the manner through which many writers have seemed to move away from the model of collaborating and supporting one another,” she said. “[It’s] a model in which writers both compete and collaborate to reach their greatest artistic potential.”
