☠ All aboard the Pirate Ship️ 🏴‍☠️

Ahoy mateys! Below is The Pirate Ship Charter: an outline of why The Pirate Ship exists and what it hopes to be. 🦜

Let’s start with what we enjoyed about the ship…

• 🤗 building friendships with a base of sharing ideas — in many cases moving from Twitter to IRL conversation
• 🗣 engagement below the line — robust discussions about ideas, respectful criticism and, yes, praise
• 📚 reading and writing work that was personal, built on a depth of ideas and experimenting with content + form + aesthetic
• 🕸 interconnected pieces of writing that complement and build on each other to explore even further
• 😳 accountability provided by being part of a cohort group, and push for quality when you are writing for people who expect it!

What was less enjoyable…

• 🍪 following cookie cutter forms to get engagement
• 😰 relentlessness of having to publish everyday
• ☹️ reduced focus on quality “just to get something out”
• 💰 cost

So the exam question is

How do we keep the good things going, without the bad?

We think the answer is …

Forming a small group of engaged writers that want to explore deep ideas, are willing to engage and challenge other writers and have a desire to experiment with content and form — The Pirate Ship!

To make this work we need writers who…

• want to write with depth, personality and engagement with ideas, and potentially a mix of form
• will engage with other people’s writing with a thoughtfulness, a willingness to challenge respectfully and as a way to explore ideas further
• are still exploring and curious
• are willing to engage in interconnected writing activities to explore ideas more deeply
• want it to be free, but are willing to help keep it that way 😇

What you’ll put into and get out of the Pirate Ship

• We hope that writing will become a path to your personal growth and having fun alongside being a path to building your audience
• You’ll build a library of incredible content by contributing something at least once a week
• You’ll support fellow writers through engagement, respectful challenge and praise, and you’ll get the same thoughtful engagement with your work in return. Each week, you’ll be randomly allocated a partner to whom you’ll give feedback, and another that you’ll get feedback from — but engage as much as you like of course! Note that carousers will be asked to walk the plank.
• Shiver me timbers, you’ll actually get the opportunity to “meet” fellow writers through regular (probably monthly) chats, where you will also help guide the future direction of The Pirate Ship
• You’ll have the opportunity to take part in regular writing challenges that connect our work, akin to the #ship30for30saturdaychallenge
• We’ll celebrate each others’ success!

Key planks of The Pirate Ship

• We want to collect all writing of all types in one place to make it easy for everyone to find. Twitter is great for many things but not so great for longer form writing… so we are proposing to set up a Medium magazine (called The Pirate Ship) as the place for us to all collate our writing. Feel free to also post the writing on Twitter, your blog or other media too.
• Twitter is, in our view, a better place for engagement and feedback, so we are proposing that any piece is linked on Twitter and this stays the main place for feedback and discussion — it allows it to remain in the open and makes it easier for others to contribute
• The Pirate Ship will be managed through a public Notion page, which will allow us to manage the weekly writing partnerships, regular writing events and more
• A Discord / Slack (thanks for the suggestion Nicaia!) as the basis for communication — let us know if you have a preference

Thanks all for your help in getting us this far, and looking forward to the journey ahead!

Octavian and Amit

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash