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:
- How long did it take to read this passage?
- What happened in this section of the story?
- Were there any memorable lines?
- How did you feel after reading?
- What do you want to happen next?
- 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment