Writing Workshops - Pointers for Success II
Posted by Andie Ryan Blog at 4/15/2010 10:25 PM 
Categories: Writing Workshops
Tags: good writing New York Herald Tribune draft dialogue fiction writing workshop fiction workshop Tinkers Pulitzer Prize revision William Saroyan Paul Harding John P. Marquand apprenticeship criticism bad writing Augustus William Hare Bellevue Literary workshop instructor
Categories: Writing Workshops
Tags: good writing New York Herald Tribune draft dialogue fiction writing workshop fiction workshop Tinkers Pulitzer Prize revision William Saroyan Paul Harding John P. Marquand apprenticeship criticism bad writing Augustus William Hare Bellevue Literary workshop instructor
Lots of people lamenting how much Bad Writing is out there, and how the odds are so against Good Writing. Well, there's a lot of good writing out there too, but as long as we're all learning, here are a couple more workshop stories.
By the way, has anyone read the debut novel Tinkers by Paul Harding? It just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the writing has been lauded in critical reviews. Small press too (Bellevue Literary). Check it out.
Teacher's Pet
"Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again."
-- William Saroyan, "Fame and Fortune and Fun at the Hampshire House," Sons Come & Go, Mothers Hang In Forever (1979)
I was in a fiction workshop once with one other person I knew, and we both also knew the instructor because we had taken workshops with her before. We got through the first round of critiques, but one student was extremely upset by the fact that my friend and I were getting what they perceived to be "good commentary" when they were getting less complimentary feedback from the instructor about their work. This person quit the workshop after that first round, convinced that the writing submitted by my friend and I was getting unfairly preferential and more positive treatment -- just because we knew the instructor! The student sent a scathing email to everyone that complained about the perceived favoritism, and they never came back.
Unfortunate, right? Because the work that my friend and I submitted had already been revised repeatedly (good thing we didn't know then how much MORE work was ahead of us, or we'd have just gone sailing). Our work had simply been worked on more than the work submitted by the other student, which by all impressions was a very promising story, but also clearly a much earlier draft.
It was a bummer when this person left, too, because not only did they need some insight that they could have gotten had they stayed, but it was one less reader that would be able to provide feedback to the rest of us. There were only six students to begin with.
If this happens to you, if you're the beginner in the room, try not to take it personally if you get the feeling you're being forced to drink alone from the Revision Fire Hose. If you stick with workshops long enough, and especially if you find an instructor that helps you achieve another level with your writing, you will eventually find yourself in a situation where you'll be submitting progressively sharper drafts of your work. This earns you a kind of shorthand with the instructor, and usually a degree of respect, because they know after several submissions that you're serious about sticking with it, and because you've been down the road before with the same piece. (Same thing happens with a professional editor, by the way.)
This must be very frustrating to someone just starting out, because they naturally feel they're missing something, missing a broader message, or even a secret that will make revision less painful. There is no secret, trust me. It doesn't exist. There will always be bad writing that gets published before yours, writing so bad it'll make you believe you can crap better dialogue. The truth is, it's just familiarity, and you'll learn all the same things through experience and apprenticeship, same as we all did.
And when it comes time for me to workshop the next one, I'll be back in the beginner's seat! The big circle.
Should I say the apprenticeship never really ends? No, probably not.
Conflicting Comments
"Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one's horse as he is leaping."
-- Augustus William Hare, Guesses at Truth (1827)
One likes it, another doesn't; one gets your ending, another doesn't. One finds your favorite scene overstuffed and full of itself; another thinks it's poetry; one loves your setting, another has bad dreams from it.
What to do?
Don't let them throw you. Identify any patterns in the commentary. If the positive and negative comments are evenly split, you get to make the choice -- that's what one of my instructors used to say, anyway -- but this won't usually be the case unless you've written something really controversial. If you go through two or three rounds with the same piece, assess what comments are repeated with each draft. This is a really great indicator, because it can point out to you flaws that you may not be aware of -- flaws that translate into messages or projections in your writing that you may not intend. Take a separate piece of paper and summarize each point -- positive on one side, improvement-related on the other. These are good, early indicators of writing strengths and weaknesses.
I was cleaning out my own workshop files the other day -- about ten short stories that were revised several times. One story was Shakedown, as an infant. I read through the student commentary. What I found was that many of the comments were repeated -- by a professional editor four years later after the story had become a novel! How many bricks had to sail into my temple to get me to realize it? A lot. This continued into the master classes, when I was workshopping several chapters at a time. People thought my protagonist was a pig, and so did my editor. I had to make some real choices about that, and they weren't easy. But the payoff was that I had to dig a lot deeper to understand the character, and in so doing, I think I was able to create a more empathetic one.
But when push comes to shove, make a decision and take it for a test drive. As the writer, you can always go back and change your mind -- rewrite. Don't let the indecision or the contradictions paralyze you, and listen to your instincts if you really feel something is wrong or right in your own story. Just try to be really objective. If you find yourself changing things back and forth and back again, get closer to the material to try to understand what the best choices are for your story, get out the shovel, and start digging. Sometimes you'll decide to take some comments to heart after a longer while, or it may take time to gain enough insight to really understand them.
Apprenticeship again. The farther you go, the more you learn, and the more intuitive you become about your work and your characters.
"If you have one strong idea, you can't help repeating it and embroidering it. Sometimes I think that authors should write one novel and then be put in a gas chamber."
-- John P. Marquand, New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 5, 1958
Not that I'm suggesting anything by quoting Marquand, but why is so much bad writing allowed?
6) The authors know something about the editor, last year's holiday shrimp cocktail, and a lamp.
5) The authors have famous friends in high journalistic places.
4) They have high friends in famous journalistic places.
3) Their story is so weird or disgusting or perverted that we just can't help ourselves.
2) The authors already have a national media platform so the publishers don't have to do any work.
...and the number one reason why authors get to publish bad writing...
1) They're just better lookin'.
All quotes from The International Thesaurus of Quotations, compiled by Eugene Ehrlich and Marshall DeBruhl (1996, HarperCollins). Still my favorite.
By the way, has anyone read the debut novel Tinkers by Paul Harding? It just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the writing has been lauded in critical reviews. Small press too (Bellevue Literary). Check it out.
Teacher's Pet
"Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again."
-- William Saroyan, "Fame and Fortune and Fun at the Hampshire House," Sons Come & Go, Mothers Hang In Forever (1979)
I was in a fiction workshop once with one other person I knew, and we both also knew the instructor because we had taken workshops with her before. We got through the first round of critiques, but one student was extremely upset by the fact that my friend and I were getting what they perceived to be "good commentary" when they were getting less complimentary feedback from the instructor about their work. This person quit the workshop after that first round, convinced that the writing submitted by my friend and I was getting unfairly preferential and more positive treatment -- just because we knew the instructor! The student sent a scathing email to everyone that complained about the perceived favoritism, and they never came back.
Unfortunate, right? Because the work that my friend and I submitted had already been revised repeatedly (good thing we didn't know then how much MORE work was ahead of us, or we'd have just gone sailing). Our work had simply been worked on more than the work submitted by the other student, which by all impressions was a very promising story, but also clearly a much earlier draft.
It was a bummer when this person left, too, because not only did they need some insight that they could have gotten had they stayed, but it was one less reader that would be able to provide feedback to the rest of us. There were only six students to begin with.
If this happens to you, if you're the beginner in the room, try not to take it personally if you get the feeling you're being forced to drink alone from the Revision Fire Hose. If you stick with workshops long enough, and especially if you find an instructor that helps you achieve another level with your writing, you will eventually find yourself in a situation where you'll be submitting progressively sharper drafts of your work. This earns you a kind of shorthand with the instructor, and usually a degree of respect, because they know after several submissions that you're serious about sticking with it, and because you've been down the road before with the same piece. (Same thing happens with a professional editor, by the way.)
This must be very frustrating to someone just starting out, because they naturally feel they're missing something, missing a broader message, or even a secret that will make revision less painful. There is no secret, trust me. It doesn't exist. There will always be bad writing that gets published before yours, writing so bad it'll make you believe you can crap better dialogue. The truth is, it's just familiarity, and you'll learn all the same things through experience and apprenticeship, same as we all did.
And when it comes time for me to workshop the next one, I'll be back in the beginner's seat! The big circle.
Should I say the apprenticeship never really ends? No, probably not.
Conflicting Comments
"Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one's horse as he is leaping."
-- Augustus William Hare, Guesses at Truth (1827)
One likes it, another doesn't; one gets your ending, another doesn't. One finds your favorite scene overstuffed and full of itself; another thinks it's poetry; one loves your setting, another has bad dreams from it.
What to do?
Don't let them throw you. Identify any patterns in the commentary. If the positive and negative comments are evenly split, you get to make the choice -- that's what one of my instructors used to say, anyway -- but this won't usually be the case unless you've written something really controversial. If you go through two or three rounds with the same piece, assess what comments are repeated with each draft. This is a really great indicator, because it can point out to you flaws that you may not be aware of -- flaws that translate into messages or projections in your writing that you may not intend. Take a separate piece of paper and summarize each point -- positive on one side, improvement-related on the other. These are good, early indicators of writing strengths and weaknesses.
I was cleaning out my own workshop files the other day -- about ten short stories that were revised several times. One story was Shakedown, as an infant. I read through the student commentary. What I found was that many of the comments were repeated -- by a professional editor four years later after the story had become a novel! How many bricks had to sail into my temple to get me to realize it? A lot. This continued into the master classes, when I was workshopping several chapters at a time. People thought my protagonist was a pig, and so did my editor. I had to make some real choices about that, and they weren't easy. But the payoff was that I had to dig a lot deeper to understand the character, and in so doing, I think I was able to create a more empathetic one.
But when push comes to shove, make a decision and take it for a test drive. As the writer, you can always go back and change your mind -- rewrite. Don't let the indecision or the contradictions paralyze you, and listen to your instincts if you really feel something is wrong or right in your own story. Just try to be really objective. If you find yourself changing things back and forth and back again, get closer to the material to try to understand what the best choices are for your story, get out the shovel, and start digging. Sometimes you'll decide to take some comments to heart after a longer while, or it may take time to gain enough insight to really understand them.
Apprenticeship again. The farther you go, the more you learn, and the more intuitive you become about your work and your characters.
"If you have one strong idea, you can't help repeating it and embroidering it. Sometimes I think that authors should write one novel and then be put in a gas chamber."
-- John P. Marquand, New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 5, 1958
Not that I'm suggesting anything by quoting Marquand, but why is so much bad writing allowed?
6) The authors know something about the editor, last year's holiday shrimp cocktail, and a lamp.
5) The authors have famous friends in high journalistic places.
4) They have high friends in famous journalistic places.
3) Their story is so weird or disgusting or perverted that we just can't help ourselves.
2) The authors already have a national media platform so the publishers don't have to do any work.
...and the number one reason why authors get to publish bad writing...
1) They're just better lookin'.
All quotes from The International Thesaurus of Quotations, compiled by Eugene Ehrlich and Marshall DeBruhl (1996, HarperCollins). Still my favorite.
This is a great place for me to visit as I need to understand more of this. Thanks for the tips.
Adam Bruno,
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Yes . . . The best writers are always in apprenticeship mode. Life is so full of detail and nuance, we will never get it all down. Thank goodness for that.
Celebrate a well-crafted phrase, sentence, or paragraph, and then move on and try to do it again.
Thanks for the entertaining, enlightening, and encouraging ideas.
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