Office Hours

Thoughts on the workshop, part two.

Hi everyone,

I’m finalizing this from the road (a hotel in Harrisburg, PA, to be exact) so please forgive any and all typos, errors, or unclear places.

All misteaks, that is, are totly mine.

Last week, in our discussion of writing workshops, I mentioned that I like to begin with a period of specific praise for the story being workshopped.

Then, having praised our colleague, there comes that moment when we realize we now have to make some suggestions.

To perform this pivot (from “praise” to “critique,”) I often ask my students to posit what I call “the Hollywood version” of the story – a simple, one-sentence description of what the story seems to want to be about.  (I wrote about this in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, pages 19-20.)

The idea is to summarize the story in a pithy way that emphasizes its essence:

“A person has to choose between two lovers,” might be one such statement.

“A zealot ends us sacrificing a principle dear to them,” might be another.

The Great Gatsby: “A man tries to reverse time by winning back his lost lover.”

A Christmas Carol: “Greedy miser is given a chance to repent.”

Often, as we try to come up with such a summary, we find ourselves working from a rambling, detail-rich summary (“A guy goes to breakfast, orders the pancakes, but then there’s an accident outside and so, leaving his briefcase behind, etc.”) to something briefer and simpler – more “mythic,” we might say. 

We aren’t trying to track every movement of the story, but to distill it down to its essence, asking: Why does this story matter?

We’re talking, really, about the deeper aims of the story: what essential tale is hidden there under all of the details? ¹

We do this because, if we’re going to be shooting advice at somebody, we want to be doing so within a context.  (If a weird-looking machine fell into your yard, the first thing you’d want to do, before trying to “fix it,” would be to ascertain what, exactly, it was meant to do.)

To critique outside of this framework can lead to that most odious workshop occurrence, The Random Criticism Pile-up: “Why not make more use of the color pink?” “I wonder if the mother should be completely different?” “What if he turns into a bird?”  “I had the thought that this might actually want to be set in Amsterdam.”

Egads! What can a writer do with any of that?

Any story can, of course, be changed in a million ways, per the reviewer’s whimsy; the point is to make changes that serve the story’s evolving view of itself.

In this model, we’re rejecting the habitual stance of the workshop, which tends to be, “There’s a problem here. Let’s fix it.” (This approach might be called The Goiter-Remediation Approach: “Remove/fix this bit, and all will be well.”)

But this really isn’t true.  Often, if we take this approach, we strip the life (the fun, the energy) right out of the piece.

A better approach involves understanding that the story’s “defects” and “assets” are inexorably linked; they’re both manifestations of the same essential energy.

If we try to see the story’s “defects” and “problems” and “obstacles” and “issues” as merely features of the story – or even as “sites of future coolness” – then we’ll be working with the story, instead of against it.

This leads me to a related idea: what I call “avoidance moments.”

Often, the class will end up identifying a handful of “problematic” places in the story, where, we agree, something is not quite right.  (Places, we might say, using last week’s color-coding model, where the story dips down into the Yellow or Red zones.) 

Such places might be marked by a logical issue, or the language going wonky or imprecise, or a wild, inexplicable formal move, or a leap back or ahead in time, or…well, anything that drains our reading energy away in a negative or distracting way.      

But I’ve come to feel that such moments aren’t mistakes but, rather, places where the story has something vital to say but just isn’t ready to say it yet. 

Often, we don’t need to fix these, but just identify them for the writer, who might then want to think, “O.K., my story is trying to tell me something. I can leave this unresolved for now, until it becomes clear to me, in a later draft, what I should do.”

A story is really very wise.  It knows when we’re not quite ready to make a big decision and it spares us, by way of one of these avoidance moments, from making that decision too early, and thereby messing thing up.

These moments, I’ve also noted, tend to occur at really important junctures, when the stakes are high for the story.  So, the story might be understood to be saying, “Look, this is important – my power is going to depend on what we do here - mind if we wait a few drafts before we commit?”

When, in Draft 8, we come across an avoidance moment…this is just the story saying ( sort of like those old eight-ball toys used to do): “I don’t know, yet.  Can you ask me later?  Like in, say, Draft 15?”

There are no errors in this model, only clues, clues the subconscious is leaving us in the form of a series of To Be Determined signs.  The story is, very intelligently, delaying answering a vital question it’s not prepared to answer.

Often, strangely, a story’s avoidance moments end up being related to one another. They end up cross-talking, cross-informing one another; they are mutually dependent.

And “solving” one of them will often help us “solve” another. 

I’ll often get near the end of one of my stories knowing that there are, say, three outstanding avoidance moments still in there - poorly written bits, or places where the logic isn’t quite right, or transitions that don’t feel very happy. I know that these places are going to give themselves up to me (i.e., allow themselves to be solved) in a certain sequence. So, I’m just trying to solve one, knowing that the others will follow. 

There will be, for example, a few dull, underdetermined sentences here on page 4, which seem meant to describe something about the main character.  I can’t get that section to settle down into some prose that I like.  Meanwhile, on page 22, that character is at a decision moment.  And I don’t yet know what he should do.

Those two moments are cross-talking: depending on who I make him be on page 4, he’s more likely to do this or that on page 22. 

And I can’t just “decide” to fix one of these places; in revision, the language at one of these places will suddenly pop into clarity (I’ll suddenly like what I’ve got there). And then – voila – that place has become locked in.

And my eyes turn to the other, related, avoidance moment, to see if it’s ready to be solved yet. Often - aided by the increased clarity at the other spot - it is.

So: what we would usually consider a mistake or just bad writing, we understand to be a sort of note-to-self, saying: “Attend to me later, please, but only when you’re ready.”

So, the attitude we try to take toward stories is one of patience and curiosity.  We aren’t “fixing” it; we’re “attending to it” or “abiding with it” as it works itself out in front of us, at its own pace. 

But I think at, at every step of the way, some humility is in order. Art is hard, and it’s complex: nobody knows how it works.

And I’m not just saying that: every story has to be treated like a new adventure, or it will eventually rebel and refuse to go any further.

When I was first started teaching workshops, I had it in mind that my goal was to, through my clever notes, elevate the story to one of publishable quality. 

So, I tended to give too many notes that, I expect, were not very useful. I sort of…overwhelmed the writer with advice, trying to “do a good job.”

Now I understand my goal to be: trying to say one, maybe two things, that will help the student have a better next draft - if the path to a Great Story is visualized as a long stairway, I’m just trying to bump the workshopped story up a step or two.

Finishing a story is a long process.  We can’t expect the writer to leap over the dozens of intermediate drafts, since it is by those very drafts that the story is going to (gradually) open up to her.

Why do we offer notes on someone else’s story anyway? Well, the natural assumption is that we’re trying to help the writer improve her story.    

But over the years I’ve come to think that maybe what we’re doing is trying to improve her next story. 

It may be the case that, once a story is far enough along in its progression to be brought into workshop, it’s sort of too late for a group of strangers to leap in and “fix” it; the story can only be finished on its own terms, by the writer’s subconscious mind. 

But, having heard an earnest and specific discussion of how the story works, the writer’s subconscious might have learned something about how to proceed next time. 

It might, on the basis of that precise praise and criticism, go directly toward something the writer is good at, and/or swing away from something the writer always feels she should do, but maybe shouldn’t.

If nothing else, this mindset takes the pressure off the workshop process.  We’re not trying to repair this story; we’re discussing (in front of her) the writer’s talent, her tendencies as an artist; what she does well; her special powers.

And then the writer (lightly, subliminally) takes that discussion with her as she starts something new, and it helps her in some quiet, mysterious way.

We hope.

Finally: I am definitely fine with the writer speaking during the workshop (although we don’t want the writer to fall into a defensive stance there). 

But, just to be sure, as we approach the end of the session, I always ask the writer: 1) Would she like to redirect us? 2) Is there anything she’d like to ask us? 3) Have we given her anything she can work with?

We always want to remember that, even after a really great workshop, it is the writer’s subconscious that is going to be doing the heavy lifting, in a mysterious way that even she has no way of foreseeing. 

We hope we’ve helped her even a little and affirmed her talent, and that she knows we are wishing her all the best.

1. (By the way - in last week’s comments, Nancy Welch mentioned workshopping with Buddy (Lewis) Nordan at the University of Pittsburgh, and it sounds like he used a similar method.  Nancy said: “…he always asked participants to begin their comments with the statement, "For me this is a story about ... because .../especially when ..." and possibly "For me, this story may also be about ... I sensed this especially when ...." Asking readers to ground their feedback in a reading of the story made all the difference and was remarkably difficult even though many of us came with plenty of training in talking this way in literature classes.)