After the MFA

In the first installment of this article, we introduced the notion of strategies for tackling your stories after they’ve gone through the standard short fiction workshop.

Finding and Using Hotspots

By the time a workshop ends, I usually have extensive notes. I also have notes (typically written on story drafts) from others. If I’m on my game at all, I’ll start using these notes to highlight “hotspots” in my story.

A hot spot is an area that people are commenting on and reacting to. On the one hand, a hotspot may indicate very good writing (everybody liked it). What’s nice about this is that it clarifies which tools are working for me in the story.

I think this is doubly helpful in that, as I write and rewrite my stories, I lose my ability to gauge whether something is working or not. How surprising was the surprise ending? How funny was that line? By the sixth revision, the surprise ending seems to have been given away on page one and those funny lines on page five now seem forced and a little too clever for their own good. The positive feedback of the workshop helps reaffirm my initial instincts and also helps me keep faith in my work.

A hotspot might also indicate areas to work on. My own rule of thumb is that if I’m in a workshop of any real size (let’s say 10 or more people) and if 65% or more of the people are reacting poorly to a section, there’s a good chance that I will rewrite the scene from scratch. Heck — I might get rid of it entirely and replace it with something else. If a large portion of people are reacting poorly, then obviously something’s not working. Maybe the scene lacks clarity. Maybe the writing lacks verve. Maybe the whole thing is confusing and contradicts other parts in the story. I need to start rethinking these negative hotspots. Again, the collective feedback is valuable because it lets me aim my proverbial writing guns at exact targets.

Along these lines, another benefit of spotting negative hotspots is that so often the areas that I thought were going to be problematic receive little or no commentary. In another words, the areas that I was worried about were actually fine — what a relief!

One great example is a short story of mine that I had workshopped a few years ago. In the story there is a scene in which the main character almost drowns but is rescued by a man who seems to have some sort of key to the drowning man’s life. In my head, the whole event — as I wrote it — had a contrived air. I thought, okay, nobody is going to believe that the main character just happens to be saved by this nearly mystical figure — the metaphor is too obvious, the plot is too naked. Guess what? — Everyone was fine with it. There were other sections that people wanted to see changed, other negative hotspots, but my biggest worry didn’t materialize at all. In this case, the workshop refocused me.

Perhaps the most telling hotspot (from my perspective) is the type that gets utterly contradictory responses. Half the people love the scene and the other half hate it. This could be symptomatic of subject matter: maybe I just wrote a grisly torture scene, but if it’s not symptomatic of content, and if I am workshopping with serious writers it usually isn’t, then it’s important to pay attention to these seemingly contradictory responses.

My take is that these scenes (passages, sections) usually rest on a bedrock of an excellent idea: Something deep inside stirs the reader’s passion, but the actual execution is either poor, unclear, or confusing. Again, it is my belief that these sections are among the most important scenes in our collective works, and they deserve care and attention.

The very fact that many people react to a given scene means that something embedded within offers a flash of greatness — it’s a hotspot. From my perspective, some people will be swayed by that flash of greatness and will come to the defense of a scene, even if doesn’t quite work yet. On the other hand, because I did not frame the writing quite correctly (maybe I smothered the scene with too much dialogue or exposition, maybe a character’s motivations seem contradictory or confusing, maybe the actual sequence of events is not clear to the mind’s eye), there is also cause for a strong negative reaction — some readers feel as though they’ve been tricked. For a moment, they saw diamonds in my palm, but when I opened my fist again, they got a lump of coal.

It is my humble opinion that most of these contradictory hotspots can be saved by careful rewriting, revision that protects the dynamic elements that first drew the reader to the scene while jettisoning useless or unclear language. In other words, keep the ideas but revise the voice, character and delivery.

Coming up next: Moving from hotspots to creating a hierarchy of comments.