Blogchatter WritFest: Literary Festival meets Writing workshops
Blogchatter WritFest, an online festival, running for 7 consecutive years is a haven for readers and writing aficinados. It was conceptualized in the early years of the Blogchatter, which now has grown to become one of the most active blogging communities in India. The needs of aspiring writers to learn from the authors they have read and admired led to the unique offering of Blogchatter WritFest where author interactions are majorly about conversations on writing craft.
Blogchatter WritFest Season 7
2023 marked 7 years of the writing festival evolving from author talks to interactive sessions connecting readers with authors. The focus has been on the functional aspects of learning about the craft of writing. Panel discussions were streamed live on Facebook, exclusive writing workshops for registered participants were organised on Zoom, the social handles saw quizzes around the authors’ body of work and book giveaways made the participants happy.
An insight into the reading tastes of New India
The publishing landscape is changing continuously and the popular books mirror the aspirations of the younger generation. One of the panel discussions chaired by Tanushree Podder, Riva Razdan and Ayush Gupta discussed How to Write for a Modern Audience.
Ambica Gulati, who attended the session remarked, “I think Blogchatter has taken a super initiative in bringing together so many authors and most of them published by eminent traditional publishers. It was an insight into new India and how it thinks and lives, and the changes digital tools have brought into our lives.”
Bringing authors, publishers and readers on one platform
Speakers for the sessions wrote in genres as diverse as contemporary fiction to thrillers, to queer writing to non-fiction to books for children. The interactions with the participants from the community were rich with questions shared before and during sessions.
Seethalakshmi says, “I found the WritFest sessions to be incredibly insightful, covering a wide range of topics such as the art of writing, connecting with a contemporary audience, and embracing diverse perspectives.”
Marietta Pereira opined, ” The Blogchatter online writing festival 2023 held in May saw authors across varied genres sharing insights into what went into the engaging content that they produced through panel discussions and workshops. This proved to be a learning experience for the participants. The participants were also given the liberty of posting queries which were ably answered by the authors.As a first- time participant, I came away feeling inspired and more knowledgeable.”
Learnings from workshops
The community made a deep dive into the writing process and what worked while writing mythological fiction and books for children.
Janaki Srinivasan talked about the session on writing thrillers and said, “The biggest learning from the Blogchatter Writfest on plotting and pacing in thrillers for me was that each writer featured had their own style and way of putting forth their ideas, some did detailed homework, some just wrote as the thoughts came by. It just goes on to show that there is no one formula that fits all.”
As a way to foster a reading culture, Blogchatter sent books from the featured authors to the active participants.
The recordings of the online sessions are available here.
