subscribeWriting Workshop Wednesday: Poetry
Wednesday August 11, 2010
The Wednesday workshop wisdom continues! This week…
Poetry workshop take-aways // or, why this novelist kept taking so many darned poetry workshops.
I think in novels. As a kid, I thought, Oh, I think in stories. No. I learned later: I think in novels. In my first workshop at 15, I told my advisor that I couldn’t write a short story. Couldn’t. Couldn’t. “I write long things. Um. Novels. I think in novels. I can’t make it short. I can do chapters, if that’s okay.” That wasn’t okay. I was coaxed into writing stories that… read like chapters. My advisor finally coaxed me into making my final project a “novella.” But it still read like half a novel. By the time I got to college and realized that short fiction was the name of the workshopping game, I sighed and got to work learning what this short story thing was all about. In the meanwhile, I signed up for poetry classes. Poetry. Verse. Shakespeare. I knew what a sonnet was, thus, I could write poetry. WRONG. But those workshops taught me so much. This advice is hardly a substitute for what I learned, and may seem obvious, but it absolutely changed the way I thought about writing fiction — and about poetry. By learning to write it, I learned to read it, to appreciate a poem written well (like those of a former classmate, whose work I adore). Admittedly, the poetry I wrote for workshop reads like a novelist wrote it. (It’s also terrible.) Which is [yet another reason why] I write novels.
Besides the fact that poetry is (1) beautiful and (2) absolutely worth reading, you novel-reading people you! these were some of my biggest poetry workshop take-aways.
1. Words are beautiful.
So is the way a set of words can be strung together, the sounds they make when they smack and rub and brush against each other. Words are alive, alive on the page and in the mind of the reader. So many writers seem to use words as a means to an end. Yes — words are the vehicle by which you tell your story. But paying attention to diction, to image, to the particular words you use and how you string them together is an often overlooked part of novel writing. (And yes, paying attention to words is also a pursuit better left to revisions, not first drafts.) Most novelists are so focused on plot, on character, that they forget novels are built with words. We have more room to waste words than a poem in our 80,000 novel, technically speaking, but why should we waste a single word? Why? There’s no good reason. None. Words are beautiful and they deserve to be used well.
2. Image, image, image.
String together images as well as actions. Build images as well as dialogue. When we read we build an imaginary landscape in our minds, we populate it with the writer’s words and the images they draw with those words. Too much exposition and not enough grounded image loses my attention. Too much dialogue without rooting me firmly in the scene distracts me.
Showing versus telling, to me, is that difference between rooting me with image and giving me exposition. Telling me, “Anna’s father beat her when she was young” is very, very different from giving me the visceral recollection of a slap. But — images come with intensity, with meaning and depth. Images are immediate, are sensory, tangible things. Sometimes an image is too strong and exposition may be the better choice. But I hate to be told a crucial bit of information in a casual, throwaway bit of exposition when it can be relayed with an effective image or even a strong bit of dialogue (and “voice” is related to image, because I feel voice).
Images don’t need to be paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs of scene-setting detail. Too much image, too many adjectives and clunky nouns can overload an image. Too much image without enough meaning, depth underneath it. Images can be brief and still have strength. They can be slices of a life, picked out by a discerning eye, weighted with the promise of story.
Novels, as a medium, are not built around images as directly as a screenplay is built around image. Not even poetry needs image the way film needs it. But to ignore the effectiveness of well-placed images is to deflate the potential power in a scene.
3. Space is a tool.
Physical distance on the page can allow for emphasis. Where you choose to break sentences, add commas or semicolons or emdashes–these breaks influence the way your words are viewed, are digested by your reader. Judicious use of space is a subtle tool in any writer’s arsenal, regardless of how long their work. This goes for chapter breaks and section breaks as well. Those breaks can and should be regarded as tools, not just “breaks.” Space is a tool! Use it.
But don’t abuse that space.
With lots of dramatic paragraph breaks.
Because after a few instances, it looks silly and loses the emphasis you’re going for. Like the ellipsis, or the exclamation point, paragraph breaks for the sake of drama should be used sparingly, or at the very least, pay off for the reader.
4. Repetition. Repetition is a tool.
But it’s also one of the easiest tools to use too often, too much, becoming annoying rather than effective. There’s a difference between repetition and redundancy. You can use repetition to be effective. You can never use redundancy for anything.
How many times does your character’s name appear in a given passage? How frequently are the same words in close proximity? When you read aloud, do the same words pop up over and over? There are a plethora of action verbs and adjectives at your beck and call to describe similar actions and behaviors without being redundant. Decide which is effective repetition and which is redundant blah and eliminate.
5. Unnecessary words are clutter. Cut them out. Efficient images are effective images.
This is the simple reason why you see blogs and advice to writers repeating over and over to eliminate adverbs. The truth is this: adverbs are not inherently evil. But when you say she was grinning widely or shouting loudly — you are being redundant.
Redundancy, as we’ve agreed, is not effective writing. When the reader is pulled out of your image by its clunky phrasing, it is not an effective image. And we’re going for effective images, yes? And I know, as we agreed, words are beautiful things. But too many of them leads to clutter. Clean them up and really be honest when you’re doing it; this cleaning up may take multiple readers and a loving editor but you’ll have stronger prose.
6. One of the quickest ways to establish voice is careful diction.
Diction: the choice of words and the way in which they are used. Establishing voice is not simply a matter of throwing in key vernacular or vocabulary (like “y’all” or “dahling,” say). It’s not about short sentences. Or about long, flowing, elegant sentences replete with word upon word, flowery adjective piled upon adverbs of glorified density. No. Diction is all of that. Establishing a voice is about finding consistency, about finding a style and a flow that reads naturally. (I do enjoy well-used vernacular, but please: simply tagging sentences with vocabulary does not count as adding it naturally!)
Poems can establish voice effortlessly in single lines. Some of the shortest poetry can still feel as if it has a character behind it despite its few words. Getting into a character in a short poem was one of the hardest and most effective lessons for me in establishing voice, in getting into a character’s head and speaking their words. When I am having trouble finding a consistent voice, I fall back on my poetry workshop tricks. I look at my word choice, the consistency, the tone my words evoke. I ask for feedback. I read it aloud. It helps.
7. Your reader has five senses. Do you take advantage of them?
Not only within the imagery of the page, but with the very words on the page. When I say I love “evocative” writing, I mean to say I love writing that seems to lift from the page, that has undeniable depth. I measure that depth by the sensory experience I have when I read it. When someone needs to shake me out of a world — that’s a world written well. Every one of those worlds draws me in through smell, through sight and sound, through the occasional stirring of a memory through an image that brings my own sensory experiences to bear on my reading experience. The reason This Is Just To Say hits me so hard every time I read it is because I know what it feels like to bite into that cold, sweet plum, the juice dripping down my chin. I feel that. But some of my favorite books evoke that same visceral experience for an image or a scene I’ve never personally experienced because they use the same tricks of making reading a personal, sensory experience. I’ve never faced down a dragon. I’ve never been in a war, a battle. But the best scenes bring me there and keep me grounded through those little details, and through sense.
——–
Do you read or write poetry? (Or both?) Has any poem or verse influenced you or your writing (be it the “greats” of the past centuries or someone more modern)?
What tricks do you think writers of prose can learn from poetry?
The first installment of Writing Workshop Wednesday!
Wednesday August 4, 2010
I was thinking lately that I’ve spent a lot of time in workshops and have [probably] had every kind of experience in one. I figured I may as well share some of the many things I’ve learned — and ask you all to dive in and offer your own advice for others! I want to make it a series of posts for the next several Wednesdays. If you all like it, I’ll keep the craft talk going! So this week, I’m going to talk about…
Tips for the Novice Workshopper // i.e. things to get over, and fast, to maintain your sanity and survive a workshop.
[A lot of these tips can help when working with a critique partner for the first time, too.]
No one will read your work the way you read it, or the way you “meant” for it to be read. Be prepared for interpretation.
This is a big one. Especially if no one has read your work before, or the only people who have read it are family members, close friends who are not writers/readers by nature, or teachers in a one-on-one environment. It’s an alarmingly simple concept: the same words can be (and are) read in different ways by different readers, especially critical readers. There’s no guarantee anyone else will read, interpret, and see your world as you do. Reading is an intensely personal experience; not everyone will take your characters’ actions and words to mean the same things you do, or you want them to. Consider: Do you need them to read it a certain way, or are those possible interpretations enriching? Do the different ways people interpret something left somewhat open-ended give the story greater depth, or does it lead to confusion? Confusion should be cleared up, but I love when an author leaves room for interpretation. I’m not talking about cliffhanger or open-ended endings, but rather details left undefined.
For instance, in the first writing I ever had workshopped (I was fifteen), my characters’ appearances were vitally important. I needed everyone to see them the way I saw them. The reason? Because I’d seen them that way, darn it. (Which is not a reason.) Strangely enough, half of my classmates read an ethnicity into one of my characters that the others hadn’t, which started a debate on perceptions and realities, which was… enlightening. Something I hadn’t intended ended up being one of the most interesting things my peers discussed about my story. I learned early, then, that one must prioritize, in a sense. If certain information is vitally important to get across to the reader exactly the way you envision it—and you do have to ask yourself why that information is so important before you push for it—then that’s something to ask for very specific feedback on, to ensure that your readers “got it” or “saw it” the way you needed them to, for the sake of the story. But everything else you don’t need to prioritize, it’s okay to leave it open. It’s okay, really. Is it important, for instance, what color your character’s hair is? Do we need to know everyone’s eye color or height or weight or age or build or what they ate for dinner last night or what clothes they’re wearing? Etc. Priority of relevant information distribution is something I’d never considered before a workshop taught me to see it like that. Readers can only digest so much detail at once. Clogging the first pages of a story—especially in short fiction, when page space is scarce—with needless detail and description lessens the impact of the story and its characters. Before workshop, I’d never really considered how a reader digests information, how the way I reveal it can impact their interest and their imagination. Now it’s something I never lose sight of.
Criticism is important for growth; so is knowing how to take it AND how to give it.
Writing workshops are a very good way to learn how to take criticism. They are, or should be, a safe space. I’d been told, jokingly, that enduring a writing workshop is like having your soul ripped out. But possible soul-ripping-out is very perspective-based. The first time you ever receive critical feedback, regardless of how mentally prepared you are… it’s soul-wrenching, no doubt. But moving past that is essential, because the reason it hurts is either due to (1) an inexperience with criticism or (2) related to the above point, about how your reader didn’t necessarily see it the way you do. But criticism, given in a constructive way, is essential for growth.
What do I mean by “constructive”? That’s one thing I kept asking my teachers, because no one wanted to explain it to me in concrete terms. One professor explained that negative comments in workshop should be framed by positive comments. That’s helpful, sure. But what constructive criticism means to me now is feedback to help a writer make their story the best it can be—pointing out things that don’t work and why. Pointing out places that could be stronger, and how. Simply saying “This character felt flat” is not as helpful as saying, “Her dialogue felt wooden. I believed her actions but when she spoke, she didn’t feel real to me.” That I can take home and work on. Specificity and suggestions are essential. I want to come away from a workshop with “homework” to do—not a list of complaints and issues with no suggestions on how to make my story better. Even suggestions I won’t follow are good, because they show me what got my readers thinking and where my writing took their thoughts. I love knowing what possibilities are out there in readers’ minds.
Personally I never spoke in workshop when I didn’t have something to offer in the way of a suggestion. I couldn’t bring myself to point out flaws without offering solutions. What this meant, sometimes, was that I started challenging the writer with questions, ones I had, ones their story brought up for me. I always love to know the writer knows more about their story than I do, so I tend to ask a lot of questions–not necessarily for me, but for the writer to think about.
In workshops, it becomes obvious after a while what kind of criticism everyone is best at giving. (Natalie Whipple spoke a little about this on her blog last month, as regards crit partners. There are definite similarities in a workshop environment.) There’s bound to be the one person who’s a stickler for grammar, the one who pays attention to character above all, the one who’s always looking at language and page space, the one who’s focused entirely on plot and “what happens,” always pushing you to think about plot. In the workshop environment, isolating who gives which criticism consistently may help you interpret their comments on your story in a different light.
The writer’s brain gives you a different perspective when reading. Learn how to turn that perspective on and off.
If you have a writer’s brain, a writer’s passion, you are not like everyone else. (You are really a superhero! No. Sorry. Just a writer.) The workshop environment was the first time I experienced writers who were willing to look at what could be on the page rather than what was, those whose brains were programmed to look at a story in a first draft and give advice on how to make that second draft even better. That kind of reading calls for a different way of thinking about a work than a normal reader will think about it. It’s different again from say, an English major reading a text and analyzing it through a specific critical lens, or a casual reader tearing through a novel and experiencing it for pleasure’s sake.
That said, realizing that you need to turn on and off the writer’s brain when reading can be helpful. In life. Nathan Bransford discussed this idea in a recent blog post and the point he was getting at is this. Know what you’re reading and how you ought to be thinking about what you’re reading before you go into it. Turn off the hyper-analytical writer’s brain before reading a bestseller. When a friend offers you a story to critique but wants you to first give them a basic read, to “get a feel for it” or to see how it all flows… turn off the writer’s brain. Become a reader. Absorb it, don’t let the criticism start intruding until you need it to. Maybe your friend has the grammar of an orc, but is the story solid, are the characters real, is the setting evocative? It’s hard to turn off the critical brain once you’ve gotten used to it, but it’s essential to learn how to turn it on and off, otherwise you’ll be micro-criticising everything in the back of your mind, all of the time. That’s no good for sanity, people.
The writing you do isn’t the ONLY kind of writing that is (1) worthwhile for you to read and (2) worthy of your respect.
Of course you, oh wise blog reader, know this. But in my first workshop? There were kids who believed it was Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, or bust. They looked down at anything called “genre” and termed it “irrelevant” for them to (1) read and (2) ever consider writing. What could they learn from reading genre? One teacher actually told the class, straight out, “Happy endings are unrealistic, fictitious, and boring.” (I was sixteen, that was at Yale. So I cried a little.) But, contextually, this was back when Harry Potter was considered “Something my twelve year old sister is reading,” not yet a multi-billion dollar book-and-movie-and-video-game-etc franchise. Genre was something to be looked down upon, something without artistry or commercial value. Stunned, I thought of all of the fantasy books that had won awards and influenced culture—can anyone say Lord of the Rings?—and couldn’t believe that my fellow workshoppers wouldn’t give genre a chance. I was determined to prove them wrong.
(The genre-in-workshop story for me has a happy ending, but I’ll save that for another Wednesday.)
Perhaps in retaliation for this vehemence I experienced in my first two workshops, I grew to have the opinion that the only writing I should be reading was young adult fantasy. High school assigned reading wasn’t worth my time, so I skimmed most of what I was assigned, except for Shakespeare (who was and is too seminal to mess with). Those I did read influenced my teenage brain more than I should have let them. (The Fountainhead had me on a snotty individualism kick for months; The Stranger gave me an existential crisis.) So at some point I said, Screw anything not in MY genre. This Jane Austen person? Not reading her. Pride and Prejudice? BAH. …Then, my mother made me sit through the BBC’s miniseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth. Having fallen for that Mr. Darcy quite thoroughly (I blame Mr. Firth), I tore through that book in a few days—a staggering pace for me, for a non-fantasy novel. Suddenly books written before 1960 were, well, relevant. (And that Jane Austen person? I never doubted her again.) Ever since I’ve never dismissed a book out of hand and really, it was a lesson I should have learned long before high school. (Something about books and covers and judging, I think it was…)
Bottom line? Dismissing any writing out of hand is silly. (Says me, who refuses to read Eat, Pray, Love because it’s a bestseller. Um. *runs away guiltily*)
Learn to love reading aloud. Or at least learn how to do it decently. (Which means practice.)
It’s a fact of life that most of us become writers [partly] because we’re terrible at other things like, say, acting. Or speaking. Or singing. Or… the list goes on. There are some few of us writer-types who do multiple things well and I applaud them. But I—and just about 98% of all of the writers I know—do writing best. That means speaking, public speaking, public reading… that’s pretty far down on the list of things I do natively and do well. There are some writers I know who are amazing readers. They will take the story they’ve written and captivate an audience with it. I envy them. I want to be them. But I’m not, so I practice. I do try. I am still attempting to become comfortable with simply talking about my books, talking about my characters and plots without getting lost in the details. It’s something I could not do in my first workshops. I shook and could not get the words out of my mouth in a slow, coherent manner until some years later. Reading poetry aloud helped. Going to readings, hearing other writers read, helped. Listening to audiobooks helped, too, hearing actors perform books I know and love—that helped. I’m still learning and trying because a long time ago I learned that a writer can’t simply hide behind her desk for the entirety of her career. She’s got to get out, talk about her books, and even read. So. Practice.
Some people are born gifted. Plain and simple. But that doesn’t mean you are talentless.
Any artist in any field knows who I am talking about. There’s always that one boy in your high school, one girl in your college class. They are not only gifted but magical. No, honestly; you find yourself wondering whether or not they made some kind of Faustian bargain as toddlers or maybe their parents consumed an experimental drug when they were in the womb, because they are unnaturally gifted for their age, for their experience. It’s not luck—there’s definitely a difference between a lucky person who is talented and this kind of thing—this is pure, phenomenal talent. It’s always easier to spot in those dance prodigies, those chess players, in athletes, in singers. You’ve seen those kids on those singing competition shows. But with writers, it hits you in that workshop and it feels the same. God or whomever has seriously given them a talent and, well, then there’s you. Try as you might, you need several drafts to get it right. You need to hack and edit and edit and edit anything you write to bring it into the territory of reasonably good. But there’s that poet whose words sparkle on the page and she spent forty minutes last night writing that little thing of brilliance, then went and watched TV. Or the first novel that’s won a kajillion awards.
That these people exist is a fact of life. But simply because they are amazing doesn’t make your talent less. Their success doesn’t hinder yours, doesn’t affect you at all. Everyone is different, everyone works and thinks differently, and if there’s any big thing I learned by being in class after class of writers, there’s no right way to be a writer, or to succeed as one. It’s about perseverance, cheeky optimism, and yes, some talent. But talent can be grown and honed, too. (Meryl Streep went to acting school, you know.) Those magnificently gifted writers you meet along the way shouldn’t serve to discourage you, but encourage you. They’re good. But so are you, you negative, overly-critical, self-effacing ninny. I’m talking to you. You’re good too. Remember that.
——
Anything to add on the topic? Any advice of your own to give based on your own first workshop or crit partner experiences? Please share!
Two days
Tuesday December 29, 2009
I won’t make my deadline. (The deadline finish the WiP’s rewrite by January 1st.) I’ve known this for a while now and I’ve made my peace with it. The husband, too. He chuckled and said, “It was fictitious. You know you’re on a deadline, but I’m trying to remind you that the deadline isn’t ‘in the future’, it’s now.” It’s true. The fire under the butt has been lit for some time and it’s also true that I’ve made some serious progress so far this month. (That, and I devoured First Lord’s Fury by Jim Butcher over a 2 day span last week. Oh, the Codex Alera, how I love it so.) Considering November was swallowed by the Black Hole of NaNoWriMo, I am pleased that I was able to hop back into this (very different!) story and get it in snapping shape. The NaNo draft helped me amp up this one, I think, by comparison. They’re such different stories and getting back into my narrator’s head this month after being third person all over the place last month helped reassert the importance of voice, diction, and character in first person.
This month the husband (why am I calling him that now? Has he outgrown ‘the boy’?) read the entire draft in its new and happily rewritten form and he made a whole bunch of suggestions. (The first being, once he got up as far as it’s written, the comment, “Why isn’t it DONE yet?! GAHHHH!” Oh, a familiar sentiment from the Alpha Readers. [I shall call you that, ladies!]) He’s easily caught up on logical errors and always wants everything to be “Epic!” and so if a supposed action sequence dribbles on the page, he’ll call me on it. “I expected EPIC, Erin, EPIC!” Of course, I am not writing Epic Fantasy (let’s remember that is its own genre) and he knows that, but his sentiment is rather universal. Dribbling scenes are no fun for anyone.
In non-writing news, the holidays have been fun. We did Hanukkah (all eight nights of candles and presents!) and Christmas, and of course the husband’s birthday fell between the two so it was more or less non stop presents and such. We got him a PlayStation 3 (us, really) for the birthday, as well as a fun assortment of toys related to it (oh, BluRay!). I also made him a scrapbook, my first foray into the world of scrapbooking. (I cheated; I used a kit and a bunch of pre-made stickers. Is that cheating? I know people get intense about scrapbooks.) I thematically designed it around our “love” (cough, or relationship), starting with hilarious photos from 2004, through our backpacking venture in 2007, leading to the wedding and honeymoon. It was one of those sugary-cutesy things I’m only really inclined to do every few years, though the look on Bryan’s face was absolutely worth it. (If cutesy-artsy things didn’t take me forever to do — perfectionism! — I’d do them more often. The girlie 12 year old part of me enjoys it immensely. [My inner 12 year old is always the loudest of the inner children. My inner 8 year old wanted a Lego kit for Christmas -- either a Star Wars one or a castle/knights one -- and I think she's still upset about not getting one again.])
Hm. I keep making parenthetical observations in parentheses. Are there parenthetical commentary abusers anonymous meetings? Or messageboards?
Oh. Day after Christmas, we found FernGully at Target for $5. After seeing Avatar the weekend before Christmas (which was AMAZING!!!!), I realized I really needed to own a DVD version of that movie. (My 8 year old inner self was reasonably appeased by this purchase.) I sat and watched it that night with rapt attention. I’m not ashamed at all. I was Crysta for Halloween one year and had a three-year (minimum!) obsession with fairies. These are the things that (all added together) led me to writing fantasy in the first place. Kind of fascinates me, in a way, backtracking through my years of obsessions and how they’ve all influenced me. (Lock me up before I start self-psychoanalyzing all of that.)
The Christmas tree is still alive. (Fraser fir is the way to go, folks!) We’re going to take its lights and ornaments off after New Year’s and cart it to our local park where it will be recycled into mulch for the spring. (Yay recycling!) The day after Christmas I started pulling out all the decor boxes, to pack it all up, and the husband (this is his first Christmas tree) refused to let me. “Not yet!” Oh, Christmas is magic, isn’t it?
Obligatory progress report
Tuesday December 8, 2009
The writing deadline I’ve set for myself (or rather my husband guilted me into setting) is looming ever closer and I’m working on reaching it. I’m not sure at this point what the WiP will look like at that point, though.
For the past few days I have been going painstakingly line by line over a printout of my WiP and making edits and pages of notes. There is something fundamentally different between scrolling with the click wheel down a page of text in the Word Processor versus sitting over it with a colored pen with proofreader’s marks. (For the most part I do use the formal notations but I have developed my own system after years of editing papers and stories.) It’s laboriously slow but the result has somewhat startled me. I’ve hacked and slashed a bunch of lines here and there, lines I’d skip over when scrolling because I “liked” them or because I remembered so vividly the day I wrote them. But now that they’re printed in front of me, they’ve been cut. It’s quite fun, being merciless! (Especially because I know I’ve saved a version of this, so the words will never be gone “forever”.)
I am starting to get impatient with finishing this. I feel like that’s a good sign. I keep daydreaming about scenes in it, too. Staring off into space at the gym on the elliptical, I sort of ignored my podcast and thought instead of my plot. Going through this draft like this has shown me its nitpicky errors but also its really lovely moments. I really love this story. It geeks me out, almost. It’s also the first entirely new story I’ve written since college. (The other drafts I’ve been cycling through either started in college or started before college.) This one I started this last January and it’s been purely a project of 2009. Part of me wants to bookend it thusly and just get it done before the new year. But the other part of me, the practical one, looks at my work schedule and thinks it can’t really be done. The husband even said to me yesterday, “Think of this deadline as a fictitious deadline. Because really, that’s all it is. It’s in our heads. There’s no real external pressure on you.” But that’s just it. Internal pressure is pretty darned effective too. I feel it weighing on me every day now. I’ve worked on four different drafts this year. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of brand new words in 2009. It’s time I finished this one and got on to the next. Boom, boom, done. Yes. (If I write it here, I will do it, I know it!)
the latest updates
