Hi, Mary. That sounds perfectly horrific as nightmares go. I've been thrown into a funk by commentary I've received but have yet to weep. Isn't one measure of our writerliness our ability to take a punch? When I weather a harsh critique and try to make something out of it, the results are usually good if not great. Once you've made that …
Hi, Mary. That sounds perfectly horrific as nightmares go. I've been thrown into a funk by commentary I've received but have yet to weep. Isn't one measure of our writerliness our ability to take a punch? When I weather a harsh critique and try to make something out of it, the results are usually good if not great. Once you've made that connection, all you want is a tougher hide and all it takes to develop a tougher hide is the wanting of it.
Oh, John, I still can't stand to think about it. It was so distressing. It was only much, much later that I realized the workshop leader shared at least some of the blame for the situation, as it was her job to be in charge of the group and let us know what the expectations were for workshopping. Unfortunately, the group turned on her as well. Honestly, it was pretty shocking. The thing is--I wasn't harsh! I didn't throw punches. I truly thought I was giving helpful feedback at the time. (I did contact the woman later and apologized and she said she understood where I was coming from. Still--I feel permanently scarred by the whole thing!)
Can you now amend the long-term effect from "scarred" to "reshaped" :-)? I was side swiped by "reality" once all too recently wherein—because it had to do with nothing less than the whole of my strategy to improve as a writer—I briefly felt like I was driven down a deep dark hole but when, about a month later, I came out of it, I had developed a whole new strategy to recover.
If only. No, I am scarred. It's something that plays over and over in my head--I think because i was so surprised by the whole thing. It left me shaken--that I had not perceived something going on in the moment; that i had not read the room properly. Or--worst of all--that perhaps I spoke with too much confidence, that i came off as a Miss-Know-It-All. And that perhaps I really was too full of myself in that workshop. I don't know. It's so far in the past now, it's time to give it up! But it has affected the way I respond to the work of others ever since, so I suppose that is an upside.
You're a know-a-heck-uv-a-lot. That makes you vulnerable :-).
I no longer suppose I can be in the writing business and avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It was very hard not to take this personally when this poop hit the fan:
It's a story describing how my whole recovery strategy from a spate of rejections was crushed in a cruel and unforeseen way. Double layered rejections? C'mon! It shook me a whole lot like what you describe. It put me in a nasty funk.
And then Story Club bailed me out. After George had us read Tillie Olsen, I found out that she launched her career with a Stegner Fellowship. So last year, I applied, fully aware of the prohibitive odds, blah-blah-blah, and this year applied again.
Applying for the Fellowship twice gave me an experience analogous to George's revelation about how workshops should treat stories as works-in-progress that may have many drafts ahead of them, even when the course and the workshops end.
So, I took joy in recruiting, Tom-Sawyer like, a small cadre of friends to critique my application this year, who encouraged me and helped me to tweak it into a better application than the last. I proposed working on an existing draft MS of a novel I've drafted several times which forced me to explain in less than 1000 words how I could make it better. I learned a surprising amount about the manuscript trying to make a good pitch. In this effort, the prospect of working on it again became new and exciting and fresh. I've started to wonder if I couldn't turn out a pretty engaging novel just by pitching the next draft of it each year to the Stegner fellowship admissions folks :-).
Hi, Mary. That sounds perfectly horrific as nightmares go. I've been thrown into a funk by commentary I've received but have yet to weep. Isn't one measure of our writerliness our ability to take a punch? When I weather a harsh critique and try to make something out of it, the results are usually good if not great. Once you've made that connection, all you want is a tougher hide and all it takes to develop a tougher hide is the wanting of it.
Oh, John, I still can't stand to think about it. It was so distressing. It was only much, much later that I realized the workshop leader shared at least some of the blame for the situation, as it was her job to be in charge of the group and let us know what the expectations were for workshopping. Unfortunately, the group turned on her as well. Honestly, it was pretty shocking. The thing is--I wasn't harsh! I didn't throw punches. I truly thought I was giving helpful feedback at the time. (I did contact the woman later and apologized and she said she understood where I was coming from. Still--I feel permanently scarred by the whole thing!)
Can you now amend the long-term effect from "scarred" to "reshaped" :-)? I was side swiped by "reality" once all too recently wherein—because it had to do with nothing less than the whole of my strategy to improve as a writer—I briefly felt like I was driven down a deep dark hole but when, about a month later, I came out of it, I had developed a whole new strategy to recover.
If only. No, I am scarred. It's something that plays over and over in my head--I think because i was so surprised by the whole thing. It left me shaken--that I had not perceived something going on in the moment; that i had not read the room properly. Or--worst of all--that perhaps I spoke with too much confidence, that i came off as a Miss-Know-It-All. And that perhaps I really was too full of myself in that workshop. I don't know. It's so far in the past now, it's time to give it up! But it has affected the way I respond to the work of others ever since, so I suppose that is an upside.
Mary,
You're a know-a-heck-uv-a-lot. That makes you vulnerable :-).
I no longer suppose I can be in the writing business and avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It was very hard not to take this personally when this poop hit the fan:
https://johnpoplett.com/blog/2023/03/25/oversharers-delight-a-brave-and-beautiful-story/
It's a story describing how my whole recovery strategy from a spate of rejections was crushed in a cruel and unforeseen way. Double layered rejections? C'mon! It shook me a whole lot like what you describe. It put me in a nasty funk.
And then Story Club bailed me out. After George had us read Tillie Olsen, I found out that she launched her career with a Stegner Fellowship. So last year, I applied, fully aware of the prohibitive odds, blah-blah-blah, and this year applied again.
Applying for the Fellowship twice gave me an experience analogous to George's revelation about how workshops should treat stories as works-in-progress that may have many drafts ahead of them, even when the course and the workshops end.
So, I took joy in recruiting, Tom-Sawyer like, a small cadre of friends to critique my application this year, who encouraged me and helped me to tweak it into a better application than the last. I proposed working on an existing draft MS of a novel I've drafted several times which forced me to explain in less than 1000 words how I could make it better. I learned a surprising amount about the manuscript trying to make a good pitch. In this effort, the prospect of working on it again became new and exciting and fresh. I've started to wonder if I couldn't turn out a pretty engaging novel just by pitching the next draft of it each year to the Stegner fellowship admissions folks :-).
John
Ha! Well, good luck getting that fellowship. That would be wonderful!
P.S. - thank you!
It's all for the greater glory of Story Club!