The third and final step after the workshop is one that I’ve too often neglected: the cultivation of long term relationships among writers.

From the dozens of excellent writers and peer reviewers I met at grad school, I am now in regular contact with just one. In some cases, it wasn’t my fault. After grad school people move on. and relationships fall apart. Some people have busy work and family lives and don’t have the time and energy to read my stuff. Some people leave writing altogether and focus more heavily on teaching, publishing, or industries that are completely unrelated to the field.

But, just as often, it’s been my fault. Before my thirties, I had lots of time to socialize and couldn’t really imagine the life I have now. These days, I am hard-pressed to find the time to attend late night poetry reading or schmooze it up at a local writers conference.

Besides a lack of time, I’ve also found it exceptionally difficult to locate writers who are working at the same skill level and “field” as me. Few people write adult literary short fiction. At a writers meetup, I am more likely to find folks drafting thrillers, screenplays or children’s books. And while there are general rules of writing that apply to all forms, there is a huge difference between, say, what I do and writing a 90-page comedy screenplay. It’s like building a multi level parking lot vs. building a cape house. Same game, very different rules.

I am planning to move more toward novel writing, and this might actually be helpful as there are more novel writers out there.

So, I do have a handful of people to call on, and they are very helpful but, truth be told, I’d like to meet more. Grad school afforded me a golden opportunity to do just that, but I kind of blew it by not forging more meaningful links and keeping in touch. Keeping in touch can be a pain in the ass, true, but in the long run it can also be helpful. If I had a chance to do it again (I may someday), I would definitely cultivate deeper relationships with people whose comments I valued in the workshop setting.

Do you have tips for staying in touch with writer colleagues? Have ideas for ways to meet potential writing partners or peer reviewers? Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments. And thanks for reading these “After the Workshop” posts.

- Armand

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.

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.

I’d like to add a disclaimer that this is not a how-to column. This column works best as point of reference, a tool by which you can stack my experiences against yours. Somewhere between the two, presumably, lay the truth.

This is After the MFA, so I thought naming this article “After the Workshop” was keeping in the spirit of things. In an effort to keep this from sounding like an advice column, I’ve done my best to switch from “you do this… you do that” to first-person writing. After all, in the end, this is just a testimonial.

After the Workshop: Data Mining, Comment Hierarchy, and Social Networking

There’s been a fair amount written about the effectiveness of the group workshop (Is it the best way to learn writing?) and also about its politics and etiquette (Is your group too nasty? Too nice?). I hope to look at a slightly less addressed topic in this entry: What do I do after the workshop is over?

I’m going to give it my best shot, and I hope that folks will chime in with their own comments.

What is the workshop format?

While I am sure that anyone who comes to this blog is already familiar with workshopping, I’ll include a brief description anyway. Basically, I am addressing the “editorial / revision” type of workshop in which a few students turn a writing sample over to their classmates. Subsequently, the class gather together and each participant offers up criticism (positive and negative) of the submitted work. The commentary is often guided by the instructor.

The main goal, in my opinion, is for us to learn from our own comments. But another goal is for the submitting writer to get a critical perspective of their work and glean comments that might help in strengthening voice, tone, plot, character etc.

Let’s assume workshops can help

For now, let’s assume that we are all MFA students enrolled in workshops with a strong instructor who can spin the workshop format into an excellent teaching vehicle.

Let’s also assume that most of our peers are neither too nasty nor too nice. Let’s assume that we have the optimal conditions for work-shopping; that we are believers in the workshop platform; that we WANT to be helped; and we are not the type of person who a) Doesn’t care what the workshop has to say or b) Only accepts comments that point out grammatical/ spelling errors.

So I just finished my workshop

One of the most difficult parts of being a student in a workshop is that I walk out with a lot of noise in my head. There were twelve other people and each one had a different opinion about what should be done with my work. Not only that, but on some points, there was utter contradiction. Maybe half the workshop wanted me to make clear very early on that Carl was Leona’s father, while the other thought that revealing the information on the last page was the way to go. Not only that, but there was that one person who thought that it would be more effective if Carl was not Leona’s father at all. Furthermore, who cares what all these people think? It’s not their story, it’s mine.

So what do I do? My reaction to work shops is typically a three step process. First I mine the data and notes that I have- so I can find “hot spots” within the story that need work. Then I create a hierarchy of comments. In this case, I want to filter out commentary that I consider less weighty (lets call this noise) and retain commentary that I feel will help me strengthen my story (let’s call this signal). The third step is to start creating a social network of writers with whom I can correspond.

Coming up next: data mining