Productive Workshopping

I have participated in a number of writing workshops with graduate students, undergrads, and non-students. Some are more satisfying than others, and here are some things I've figured out to get the most out of your workshop time.

Appreciate it!
People are reading your work, and that is a blessing. Before workshops, I was just forcing my work on my friends and family for feedback. Hell, I still do that! The goal of a writer is to be read, and I am excited when anyone reads my work.

Tell people how you want them to read your work
When I'm reading someone's work, I never know whether to go at it with a red pen or put down the pen and give feedback on the story. I can't seem to do both, although editors who have been at it longer than I have seem to be able to do this better. If the author doesn't tell me what kind of feedback he wants, I'm forced to guess what stage the piece is in based on the quality, and give feedback I think I would want -- that's a lot more work for me, and a lot of room to miscommunicate.

Writing a first draft of a novel, I don't want feedback on every grammatical mistake or typo or language that can be condensed here or there. I know! It's a first draft! While it may sound trivial to say this, it's important, because if people are reading with a fixer-upper attitude, they will often not be able to get as engaged in the characters and the story.

I want workshoppers to read my book as if they're reading a published novel. I want feedback in terms of how the story makes readers feel, what it makes them think about. Did they have the reaction I wanted? If not, can I live with the reaction they did have? When my characters are in love, are you?

Give out questions
I decided to be a total control freak after a workshop I found to be unproductive because I wasn't getting the kind of feedback I wanted. So I wrote up a questionaire and gave that out with my work. I asked questions like:

1. How long did it take to read this passage?
2. What happened in this section of the story?
3. Were there any memorable lines?
4. How did you feel after reading?
5. What do you want to happen next?
6. What do you think will happen next?

Be a control freak
Don't worry about looking like a dick. You are all there to be serious, to improve your writing, and to get the best feedback you can. When I'm asking someone to read a 90-page section of my book, I don't want to waste their time getting feedback I won't use.

Don't don't don't don't influence your readers with outside information

Avoid preconceptions about your influences
With this current workshop, I vowed to take serious control over my workshop time to get the best feedback and workshop experience. In my last workshop before this one, I made the mistake of letting people I know I like a particular author -- a lot. Everyone read my work comparing it to that author and telling me that I was simply failing to copy his style. I am positive that if I hadn't mentioned that author, no one would have made the connection.

Avoid biographical inferences
People seem to look for clues that the characters and story in a book reflect secret details of the writer's life. The truth is, everyone in a book is me. Every object in the book is me. It all came through me, the writer, onto the page. Some of the characters have biographical similarities to me because I write from my experience.

The danger in readers looking for biographical inferences is just the same workshoppers reading your work with a preconception about your influences. It contaminates the writing itself. If people in the workshop picture you in the story, their reactions won't be the same as a reader in a book store who doesn't know you from Adam. It may be impossible to stop people from doing this, but some ways I control it is by making sure to have a few key differences between myself and my narrator and main character(s) that I can spout off to defuse people's questions about whether so-and-so is secretly me.

What were you going for? No comment.
I never answer questions that can't be answered by reading the text. I never tell workshoppers what I was "going for" or anything about my characters that I didn't write. All that accomplishes is inviting the workshopper to suggest how you should write that information into the story, or how you should rewrite to achieve that thing you were "going for."

Workshopping is not about having other people rewrite for you. It's about getting reactions to your work. Your job when you go back to the drawing board is to figure out how to get reactions you can live with.

Dodging questions
Sometimes people get frustrated when you refuse to tell them "what you were going for" or some other biographical back-story information about the characters in your story.

The key is to not put yourself in an authorial position. Now that it's written you are just another reader. Just answer questions with information everyone already has from reading the text. Speak in maybes, or say things like "well I get the impression that. . ." And that's not disingenuous. You may not have written what you wanted to, but the workshop is not the time to do the writing. It's a time to assess what you have done.

Another great way to dodge questions in general is to be silent. A lot of the time people are excited to talk about characters and stories they care about. In my last workshop, I was very happy to note the heated and varied opinions everyone had about the characters because it meant they were really talking about themselves and that my writing made them think about themselves. When someone asked a question, it was easy for me to wait a moment and let someone else interrupt me before I could say anything, or to shoot back another question and get the conversation going again without me.

Take comments appropriately
It's important to realize that a comment is a reflection of the commenter as a writer. Don't be overly defensive, but don't take every comment that comes your way. You write the way you write for a reason, and no one can write your story.

Know what comments are good for
Most of the time workshoppers, whether they are writers or friends and family who never read for pleasure, are good at spotting problems. But a lot of the time their suggestions of how to fix those are not as useful.

I want to know more. . .
Everyone wants to know more about characters in a good book. Good fiction gives the illusion of more than is on the page. A constant workshop feedback is "I want to know more" about XY and Z. But you are the writer, and the work is your selection of details. Try to dig deeper and find out why the reader wants to know more. Did you leave out critical information, or is the reader just curious?

Be thankful and reciprocate
Thank everyone for reading your work. You're lucky if someone listens to your thoughts for that long. Give good feedback and care about the work of others as much as you'd want them to care about yours. Aim to have the most insightful, productive comments in the room, and when your time comes, people will want to pay you back for the help you've given them.

Write until you can't (until you can't).

The "Problem" Method: Writing Big Messes

At the start of this semester, about 65 pages into the first draft of my novel, I told a professor of mine that my approach was something like this: I write until I can't.

One of the most common reasons when I couldn't write any more was that I had lost my focus. In the process of first-draft-writing, I had explored so many thoughts out of fear of missing something that I had lost that unifying, unsayable thread that resonates through my story. So I would stop writing and edit enough to get back on track. It's kind of like pruning a hedge. You have to step back every now and then to get some distance and remember what you're going for.

When I described it to my professor was when I first realized it was probably not an ideal way to work, and I should try to work toward a more methodical method.

The "Solution:" Writing Less, More Often

As things go in and out of my mind, I forgot about that problem until I sat down to write this post. I scratched my head for a minute and wondered why I hadn't thought about it. But it turns out, somewhere along the way, I had naturally internalized a method of writing less per sitting that solved the problem. Writing 25 pages in a sitting and then being at a loss of how to keep going (usually stuck until I cut 12 pages out) gave way to writing one chapter at a time before doing enough housekeeping-editorial work to keep it focused enough to write the next one. My chapters average about 7.27 pages and something like 1,700 words, which isn't usually enough pages to get too hopelessly far from Kansas.

Essentially, I am just stepping back and looking at the hedge from a distance at more regular intervals, so keeping it's shape isn't such a dramatic affair.

Conclusion: Flexibility

Now that I think about it, there may have been some advantage to turning out so many pages at once. But the process seems daunting to me. For one, I am busy with Real Life stuff, and it was over the summer, when I was unemployed, that I was turning out so many pages at a time. I also think that while I turn out fewer pages at a time, the increasing awareness of all of the patterns in the work make each page require a lot more synaptic activity than early pages.

Ultimately, each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, and any approach that works is valuable. The process is never static, just like clouds -- even if you can't tell they're moving, they are. When one approach stops working, it's time to change it up -- just write until you can't.

Selection of Details: Write what you want to write.

I know the story I want to tell.  I know it so well, in fact, I know much more than will be on the page.  I know what stories it's like, and what psychologists would say about my characters.  I know what philosophies they misconstrue to one another.  I know every job they ever had and their shoe sizes.  That's all necessary for the way I write, but the actual art of writing, whether a newspaper article or a novel, is not compiling details -- it's selecting which details to include and which to omit.

The negative space of omitted details is where the reader is drawn into the work and individualizes it.  Every detail omitted ceases to be dictated by the author, and an author trying to tell you a character's shoe size when it isn't in his book, is no less authoritative or correct than any random person telling you that detail.  In fact, that would be intrusive upon the readers.  When someone else reads your work, it's no longer yours.

In each stage -- outlining, first draft, revision, editing, and polishing -- the selection of details plays a different role.

The Outline Stage


In the outlining stage, I tried to tell the story as quickly as I could.  I wrote down everything I considered a major event.

The First Draft Stage

I write each chapter in one sitting with very few exceptions, and sometimes it can be a nasty sitting.  At this stage, the selection of detail is intuitive.  I write what I want to write.  This means I don't overthink it, under the assumption that those unconscious or less conscious decisions are a valuable part of the detail selection process.

Sometimes I hit all the major points I wanted to and sometimes I don't -- sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't.  Usually it's a bit of each, and I'm always surprised.  The surprises usually fall into one of these categories:

1) I forgot some important details I have to add in.
2) I forgot some details I realize I forgot because they were unimportant.
3) I added some nifty details that I could never have thought of until I was immersed in writing the chapter.
4) I added some unimportant crap that I thought was nifty at the time, or I had to write to get from one point to another.

The surprise aspect is one of the most valuable aspects of this stage of writing.  I have an outline written, and a notebook full of ideas I had for the chapter when I was going about Real Life, but if I look at those too closely and sit down to write with anything too specific in mind, I get jammed up like a neurotic athlete (like the one Woody Allen said apologized for stealing second).

I was never a very good athlete because I overthought everything, didn't trust my reflexes or instincts.  If you overthink what should be second nature in sports, you will mess up.  In first draft writing, I trust my instincts.  The irony is, K. Bookman is a much better athlete than me because he can trust the reflexes internalized by his practice, and yet, he doesn't write first drafts this way at all.  So again, the process is wholly individual, and the important thing to remember is it's all about awareness.

The Rest of the Stages
I'm not there yet.  Don't want to bore anyone with speculation.

What makes details worthy of selection?

Yikes.  Tough question.  Details included in a story should all add up to something.  It's okay if you can't say what that something is.  Writing is about the unsayable, and I don't believe in reducing a work down to its "point."  The "point" is the experience of reading it.  But there are important ideas that tie a work together, feelings which inform the work, preoccupations that should be reflected in every detail to make it a satisfying read.  If you don't know why a detail is there, it probably doesn't need to be.  Try taking it out.  If it doesn't work without it, ask yourself why.  The articulated answer will help you evaluate the worthiness of details in the future.

Art and Depression: Don't Be a Jerk.

This is an odd thing to write about, but it is part of my process.  The long and short of it is, don't let the emotionally draining process of writing make you a jerk.

My novel puts me in a sensitive state sometimes, vulnerable for better or worse.  I have been stuck at a chapter that reminded me more than I expected of past events of my own life.  But because I am "writing to the end," there was no way around it.

To write this chapter I had to immerse myself in the pain of the characters, completely unguarded if I was to write anything of genuine substance.  I knew it would be the most difficult chapter of the book, but I wasn't prepared for exactly how crippling it would be and I ended up saying something I regretted to a friend when I was upset.

I felt paralyzed and numb between writing pages and pages of partial drafts and back stories and then finally the complete chapter (to its end).  I knew it was necessary – as Hemingway said, writing is easy, you just sit at the keyboard and bleed.  But going into such a vulnerable depression-like state can be like using some drug to write about the trip – you can't know exactly what will happen.

When hurt, you become self-centered, and it's difficult or impossible to be sensitive to others, and that's what happened to me.  And real life is something you can't rewrite.  Artwork and writing are meant to enhance quality of life, not detract from it.

Many great artists have suffered from depression, but no art is worth the damage done by its unchecked effects.  Hemingway, who said that thing about bleeding that I mentioned above, ended up taking his own life.  As have other talented writers, such as Hunter S. Thompson and more recently David Foster Wallace.  Pain is a necessary part of life, and it's necessary to create any informed work of art, but that doesn't mean it should consume your life, and part of the artistic process is keeping that in check.

I did need to suffer through this chapter, but in the future I have to examine my process and keep working on this aspect of writing.

PS
I googled "barstool writing," yes in a vain attempt to see if my blog surfaced, and I found that I did not coin that term.  Not that it matters, but I thought I had.

Writing to The End

A great piece of advice I was once given by a guest-lecturer in a book-writing workshop course was to write to the end, meaning, write to the end of the first draft before you mess with it too much.  But at the time, like with all great advice, I never realized how good it was.


Applying the short story process to the longer works.

Before I started writing longer pieces, I wrote short stories, and with those, it was easy to write to the end.  It was so easy, in fact, that I never thought about it or realized that's what I did.  I always wrote my first drafts in a few sittings -- usually one.  I would never stop a few pages in to tighten up a metaphor or iron out some grammar; and I would never start in the middle, then write the end, and write the beginning after that.

But when I started trying my hand at longer pieces, I didn't strive to write to the end, since I had never had to think about that part of my writing process.  I floundered around for a while, trying to write long pieces the way I thought I wrote short pieces: write a character until I know him well enough to watch and record what he would do in a given situation.  

That was not a structured enough approach to make a novel-length piece work (for me), and I ended up writing very long character studies which added up to very little in the way of a long piece.  This was around the time I received the advice to write to the end -- but at the time, I didn't heed it.  (It's damn hard trying to give artists advice about their process, isn't it?  I think it's because you can't give anyone experience, and experience is the only way to realize what works and what doesn't.)


Putting away childish things.

When I started writing my current novel, the process was new from its inception.  I knew the entire story before I sat down to write it, and since I started, I have been going full-speed ahead toward the end, in order.  

Perspective

It has been tempting to go back and rewrite passages to strengthen their language or their resonance with the rest of the piece, and some of my friends like K Bookman write this way.  But I can't do that because I feel like if I can't see the a complete draft, I can't see how a change to any one part would change the rest of it.  I keep a notebook of ides for changes I would make to the draft if I were allowing myself to work that way.  When I get to the end, I will sort them out.

Pacing

With a complete draft, I will have a better idea of how important each scene is in terms of pacing, and how long I should spend on any part of the story.  While writing the first draft, I write everything I can think of for each part so that in there somewhere might be something useful.  But the amount of stuff I could think to write is hardly a good measure of how the book should be paced.

Percolation

Thinking before you act is usually well-advised, anyway.  So not making changes to the draft until you get to the end gives you more time to think about your ideas.  You will probably keep thinking of changes to make to CHAPTER ONE throughout the entire writing of the book.  The longer you sit on it, the more ideas will percolate between the ears.  When you get to the end, I think, you're in a much better place to make decisions.


(I promise the alliterative "Ps" were not on purpose.)

PS: Awareness.


The point of this post and this blog is that awareness is key to improving your process, even if you don't work at all like me -- even if you're not a writer at all.  I didn't notice that writing to the end was an important part of my short story writing success, until I had to consciously re-introduce that way of writing into my approach to longer works.  I can't say I wasted time, because there's no way to skip this whole "experience" stuff.  But I am convinced that raising your awareness and sensitivity to what you're actually doing will always give you the most edge in your craft.

Keeping Snippets and True Things

I am writing my novel chronologically, but I've got it all up in my head, so I get antsy sometimes. I am in love with every step of the process, from writing the first draft (which I know I will miss when I'm through it) to rewriting and revising, and then finally editing. My usual complaint to K Bookman is that I wish I could do everything at once, but I have to do it in order, and I have to deal with real life obstacles -- at least when real life becomes too hairy to ignore!

Keep track of your snippets.

So when I get the itch to write a scene that is five chapters ahead of where I am in my first draft, or something that doesn't even fit in the book, I write exactly what it is that comes to me in a snippets file for that chapter (or a misc file in the latter case). When I finally do get to these chapters, having these snippets is a great way to re-immerse myself in the voice that has been percolating in my subconscious.

Example: I was driving home one day over the summer and I realized something irksome. I wrote it down.


In those days, "For Sale" signs only made you sad for the people inside, and they were more and more.


Write true things.


That brings me to the idea of true things, which I guess can be traced back to Hemingway, but I don't know much about that, really, and I'm sure someone else said it before him one way or another, so let's ditch that train of thought.  That sentence, I'd consider a "true thing."  It's a simple observation, but, especially in context, it can have a coherent "moreness" to it.  Sometimes the moreness of a true thing gets put into pedantic English Class terminology, chewed up and spit out into the right way to interpret a piece of artwork.  None of the "meanings" people come up with to explain the moreness of true things in literature are entirely satisfactory, or else the author would have just said that.  So it should be noted that those interpretations of a work are just someone else's description of the experience of having read it.

Future topics inspired by this post: Writing to the end; Time management; Metaphor and Lit-Crit Stuff.

Writer's Block: Prompts and Picking Your Battles

I want to keep this blog as concrete as possible, posting solutions to problems I have had in writing, rather than posting abstract advice that is little more than common sense.

Writer's block is an age-old copout. Sorry, but professional writers know there is no such thing. See how long you keep your magazine job if you tell your editor you won't be handing in your four-hundred words on fly fishing because you got writer's block. Somehow professional writers on deadlines meet deadlines. The obvious thing is to give yourself a deadline and stick to it -- but who is going to hold your feet to the fire when you miss it?

Give yourself prompts.

I couldn't give myself false incentives like that, so what I did to get over my writer's block was have a list of writing prompts -- remember high school? -- and whenever I couldn't write my own story, I would pick one of the prompts and make myself write a picture's worth of words (1,000). I was allowed to stop writing the prompt only if I went back to writing what I was supposed to be working on. If I didn't get re-inspired to keep working on my main project, I would end up with a neat little flash fiction story. Giving myself prompts, I realized I could write about anything, on the spot.

Example Prompts:

Write a story that has a dog, a train, and death.

Write a story about accidentally doing good while trying to do evil.

Write a story that takes place in a single moment without any passage of time.

Write a story about a misunderstanding leading to violence.

Pick your battles.

Sometimes it's just better for me to do homework, read a book, take out the trash, or go to the gym, than to try writing.

I just finished four pivotal chapters in my book, and reached a very conclusive point. The next chapter I have to write involves introducing a main character who has been off-stage for the entire novel in a chapter that unlike any that comes before or after. Rather than try to dive right in and frustrate myself, I took a day off. The next day I did nothing but re-immerse myself in the story by reading everything I had written thus far. Today, I have just been thinking about the important bits of the chapter in question. Tomorrow, I get back to writing.

I find that I can avoid a lot of frustration this way, and my process has been much less of a strain than my friend K Bookman who is also writing his first novel. He writes at a certain time every day, rain or shine, and tears his hair out when it isn't flowing for him.

Know yourself.

The most important thing is to know yourself, and what works for you. Sometimes I force myself to write and write garbage. Other times I force myself to write, and I surprise myself with the results. Writing, perhaps especially sustained writing of a long piece, is about recognizing and refining your process.

PS: Read.

K Bookman and I have opposite takes on this as well. But when I can't write, usually I haven't been reading enough and have to read a few chapters of my favorite novels. K Bookman disagrees, and he says he can't read anything before he writes or it interferes with his process.

Barstool Writing

When I'm having a hard time getting the keys moving, I remind myself to do what I call "barstool writing." That entails conversationally and writing quickly.

I write conversationally and I don't look things up while writing a first draft. I know a bunch of things, and my characters and narrators usually know less than I do. Writing round-about descriptions of things I know nothing about, like women's clothing, has resulted in writing that I find satisfactory. If I looked up the right words for everything, the characters would know things that would not be reasonable for them to know.

I write quickly without thinking too much of what to say, for almost exactly the same reason that I don't look up words. I can sit for an hour trying to think of the perfect word before I go on, convinced it makes a difference. If I did that while telling a story in a bar, the bartender would cut me off. Even though I don't have time to think of all the right words, I still, miraculously, get the point across. I may have to be repetitive, and even say things like "you know" or "it was kind of like," but I get the point across, and end up with more genuine, unexpected descriptions.

(Note that "conversationally" refers to the style of writing, and "quickly" refers to the rate with which I write. These are both important considerations when analyzing craft in order to improve.)

Example:

I didn't know what kind of dress it was that I knew I wanted to describe, but I had an image of it in my head.  I started looking it up and then decided, there is no way my narrator would know that, and wrote:

"She had on an off-white dress with tiny, pale blue flowers and a pucker under the bust line, which she did not fill out."

I find that much more interesting than any fashion-catalog description of the dress, and it illustrates what the narrator thinks is important.