eQuality Time has a project we’ve been working on for some time. It’s an artistic project and we’ve submitted to the arts council. We’ve been rejected. Six times.
Each time we got back over the project, make big changes or little changes (there are two ways that the arts council can reject you, one has a wonderful amount of artistic feedback, and the other gives almost no feedback, we’ve had the feedback twice) and send it back, and each time we get rejected.
I truly believe that transparency is the silver bullet, so I wanted to share the application here in the hope that some kind passer-by might look over it and say something like “Oh, you need to make X clear, that’s what the Arts Council Like…”
The elevator pitch for the project looks like this:
The 2015 report: ‘Writing the Future: Black and Asian Writers and Publishers in the UK Market Place’ found that BAME authors were less likely to be published or have an agent and were pushed to have their characters match cultural stereotypes. The 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey Results found massive underprepresentation for disability at all levels in the publishing industry, At the same time, writers are more likely to been privately educated and older.
The results are novels far from the perspective of most UK readers, losing sales in an world that puts more and more value on ‘now’ and ‘real’.
Our project is the answer. Twenty of the best young British writers will team up create a topical novel that is relevant to the changes in life in 2016/2017. They will go from blank pages on Monday morning to a publication on Sunday night and show that the long-form novel remains a reflection of life rather than a memory of it.
eQuality Time will select these writers for their words and for their ability to speak to audiences that feel their voices aren’t heard in mainstream publishing. Audiences will be hit by the twin shock of characters that both like them and are reacting to events that they themselves are still processing.
This is a ‘time to write’ project, compensating two groups of ten professional- standard writers for the time over week-long periods to produce two full length literary works on topics in the ‘now’. It is supported by industry figures whose testimonials are attached and our methodology and has been shown to produce spectacularly strong, heartfelt work with writers from primary school age to university students.
We know we can make this work – White Water Writers has been successful over 100 times and there are a dozen of those were university level writers.
Here are our files:
- The Word version of the main Arts Council Applicaton Form
- The Audience Development Plan, which is attached the application as a Word Document.
- The budget as an excel file (it is entered into the arts council form by hand)
If you are passing, and you fancy a glance. Please get stuck in.
(If you are wondering why it’s called BATTLECRY – after the first four rejections I’ve started naming the projects alphabetically so I can tell which one is current in the arts council applications list)
Postscript
This application was submitted and later rejected, as was the one after it. The interested reader may find much to enjoy in the feedback we got here: export (and indeed, the feedback we had for our previous application, which actually scored better… export.1)