After the MFA

Before you read, you may want to check out the first and second parts of “After the Workshop.” In brief summary, we’ve gone to a short-fiction workshop, had our critique, and gone home to review the obvious places — the hotspots — that need work in our story. And now it’s time for…

Commentary Hierarchy

After I find hotspots and possibly do some work on them, the second phase of data mining is considering all the various specific comments that I’ve received and creating a hierarchy. As I said above, I try to separate noise from signal.

**In what might appear to be a total contradiction, I do utilize all comments (’signal’ and ‘noise’) when trying to find hotspots on my story. This is because I do believe that all comments, even those that may be specifically useless, may point to hotspots. It’s like some subconscious drive points readers toward the important parts of stories. So this places me in the odd position of accepting all comments when mining for hotspots, but then discarding certain ones when looking for specific advice. Go figure.

I believe that, once we start considering the process of mining commentary, we all start to come up with rules of thumb. I’ve noted my own rules below. There’s a good chance that you will disagree with some or all. That’s fine — make your own.

Signs of Noise

These are types of comments that I downplay or even discard:

1. Criticism without specificity: This type of noise involves people telling me that a character, plot point or section is not working, but they cannot articulate why. Criticism without specificity might lead you to discover a “hotspot” in my work (as noted above), but offers little in the way of actual insight on how to revise.
2. There’s nothing new here: The main objection someone offers is that the thing I’ve written has been done before. Of course- Everything’s been done before. If I write a scene with one original idea in it, I’m psyched for days! Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a revolutionary writer. That’s okay. I would argue that originality — the ability to surprise — is a rare quality and can’t be forced anyway. That shouldn’t stop me from writing about what I want to write about.
3. Comments involving the idea of something being “cool”: What’s cool? I’m 36. My cool ratio continues to decline at an inverse ratio to the power of my distance (in years) from age 24, where I reached my own personal tiny apex of cooldom. Although, if I ever write a screen play, I reserve the right to take “cool” into account.

Signal

Comments I tend to favor:

1. My genre: For the last six years or so, I’ve been writing in what folks sometimes call adult literary fiction which means I favor character over plot, avoid the ear marks of so-called “genre” works (like science fiction and fantasy – both of which I very much love to read- romance, Western, horror, etc.) Therefore, I tend to favor comments from people working in the same area.
2. Criticism with specificity: If someone can criticize my work with a surgeon’s accuracy, I’m much more likely to give credence and weight to their commentary. I like comments that point to the narrator’s voice, word choice, specific plot points and reveals, and comments that point out obvious disconnects or contradictions in plot flow.
3. Folks with similar goals: Again, this goes with #1 above. Specifically, I favor comments from someone like me who has been writing short, adult literary for the last few years with the aim of finishing a collection.
4. The editorial gift: From my perspective, some people have an editorial gift. They might not be the best writers, themselves, but they have a good sense of how a story should flow and they seem to come up with wonderful insights on how scenes could be revised or let the characters and story shine through. I cling desperately to these people.

Again, my interest in not so much to convince you that you should adopt my opinions as much as I’m trying to suggest that, at least for me, it helps to have some filters when it comes to weighing the validity of specific comments.

These filters help me screen out less useful commentary and focus on that which I believe will most strengthen my writing. It’s also helpful to be aware that these screens exist and to use them as part of my writer’s toolbox.

Coming up next: Networking toward the future.