The Scrawl has migrated to The Life Mosaic.

I’ve migrated my blog posts and twitter feed for my 2006-2011 side project, The Scrawl / Scrawlers, to here at The Life Mosaic.
When I started grad school for my MFA, I partnered up with Barry Hess to create Scrawlers, a website where people could post 100-word short stories and workshop them with fellow writers. We had something like 50 contributors and it was a lot of fun, but it never really took off and so after contacting the writers to archive their work, we shut the site down in 2012. Barry and I had a blog, The Scrawl, that served as a companion piece to Scrawlers, where we blogged about writing, reading, creativity, and offered original writing prompts. It’s that blog that I’ve now migrated to The Life Mosaic.
There are 304 posts migrated. Because of their scope, there won’t be an archive list in this post like the post when I announced I’d migrated Hypothetical Fatherhood. Also, there are many aspects to these posts that are broken, like links, photos, tags, categories, etc. The last few are things I can fix, but that’s back burner territory. The main reason to migrate them to this blog is to keep all of my public blogging in one centralized location. My plan is to go back and fix only the posts that give the main blog any trouble.
Glancing through the archives, some of the posts are really good and worth spotlighting now. Other posts, well, not so much. And yet, all were necessary as I continued learning what it’s like to write openly for any given person to see. Even if it wasn’t that great, I did it.
That’s one of the best things about creativity: sometimes, you don’t like what you did but you’re glad you did it.
All of those posts were stepping stones to help me make me the writer I am today, the person I am today. Plus, the blog really fit with the mantra of Scrawlers: “Writers read. Writers write.” I did the work. I didn’t just think about writing, I did it. You have to do a lot bad writing and okay writing to get to any competent writing, let alone good writing. Plus, if I was going to ask people to click the “SCRAWL!” button and not do any writing myself, what good would that be?

Here’s what Barry and I wrote about Scrawlers and The Scrawl in 2006 (with some mash-up and editing):

“Writers Read. Writers Write.” This is the mantra of Scrawlers, a free online writing workshop encouraging original 100-word short stories and poems. Writers post their stories and the conversation continues in the comments as writers and readers workshop each others’ scrawls.
Scrawlers was founded in Minnesota in 2006 by Barry Hess and Nathan Melcher. Inspired by a mutual interest to combine the creative arts with web innovation, Barry and Nathan built Scrawlers to marry those interests into a web-based creative outlet. Ultimately, they are driven by the desire to use Scrawlers themselves and a hope it will benefit the writing community. The Scrawl is fuel for your creative fire. Regular features include:
First Thing Monday – We offer weekly original writing prompts with the hope you can kick off your week with some creative writing First Thing Monday.
A Closer Look – We enjoy recommending great films, novels, short stories, and other creative material with a bit of analysis to go along with it. We’ll share what we like, why we like it, and what we think you can get out of it.
Writing and Reading – “Writers Read. Writers Write.” We explore the challenges, rewards, and tactics to becoming a close reader for both pleasure and academic purposes and offer thoughts on the how/when/why of creative and academic writing including embracing constraints and the drafting, workshop, and submission processes.
Classroom – Together we’ll build better teaching, presenting, and workshopping skills for the classroom and we’ll write about some of our favorite lesson plans and assignments.
Performance – We write about improv comedy performance, teaching, festivals and theory, as well as theater producing and performance and the joy of playing the ukulele.
Inspiration – We lift up innovative technology, social media, presentation style, web development, and reading and writing to better inspire creativity. We hope you’ll share your resources with us in return.