Work in Progress: "Don't Listen to Them"

Now that I’ve had some time to breathe after teaching throughout the semester while also going through my own massive collection of critiques and applying the wise suggestions and comments to my work-in-progress, I’ve had the chance to think a bit about the process of critiquing.

I’m sure this thought process is a work-in-progress in itself, so there’s a good chance that I will disavow these comments at some point, as I continue to ponder from the perspective of a critiquer and critiquee how to be most effective at guiding writers to improving their work.

First, let me note that in general, I think the standard workshop critique process works very well. (By standard, I mean: everyone reads a copy of the manuscript, writes notes on the margins, types up a 1-2 page commentary that covers what’s working in the piece and what’s not, and discusses these points in a constructive, well-managed situation; the author listens, takes notes, and at the end asks questions. Perhaps the writer goes home and downs some scotch to help take the edge off, but the class only gets the de rigueur, “Thanks. You’ve all been so helpful. I really appreciate all your comments.”)

Sometimes I’m the teacher, running the show—and one of my challenges there is reminding everyone that no single opinion is more important than the others. There’s a tendency for the voice of the “teacher” to rise above the others. While I recognize that I have more experience, we’re all a room of readers, and when your book is out there, that’s what you’re going to get: not a room of teachers (who wouldn’t agree on anything, anyway). Deep breath…art is subjective! (One of the great skills of attending a workshop is learning how to sort through the fifteen critiques to find what you need, what will actually help your book. More on that another day.)

In fact, I often find it interesting when people in the workshop disagree with my “teacherly” assessments. Actually, what challenges me the most is when I think something is great and others don’t see it the way I do; I want to take aside the writer and whisper, “Don’t listen to them.” But I’m sure that’s how they feel when I say that something isn’t working for me, and others feel they’re reading the best thing since sliced bread. What I enjoy most about the interplay in a good workshop is how generous and genuinely excited people are when we read something we like: I don’t know if I’m lucky, or if my “frosty look of death” quells the whiners, or maybe I teach at places that encourage exploration and the humility of learning, but I haven’t suffered through the workshop (or student) who complains about everything, tears stuff apart, and never has anything nice to say. (Note: If you’re ever in that situation, get out yourself out ASAP…or, if you can’t do that, really, don’t listen to them! I’ve met people who have stopped writing because of bad workshops.)

And sometimes I’m the one sitting in my fabulous writing group, listening to the critiques, taking home the stack of comments to wade through—after I’ve had my scotch to recover from the being-critiqued experience.

All this brings me to the question I’ve been pondering lately. For me, the best critiques tend to share these characteristics (and I recognize that others would have a different list):

--corrects anything that is factually wrong (even the most minor detail…I was told that the Rehoboth Beach restaurant is Grotto Pizza, not Grotto’s Pizza as I had written, and I was sincerely grateful to learn that).

--points out areas of confusion

--offers light suggestions for how to fix things. Ultimately, I may ignore that particular suggestion, but seeing how someone else would approach the problem of throwing the sisters together without being too coincidental is helpful for me; these solutions often lead me to my own.

--asks questions of any magnitude. I find this especially helpful in a novel-in-progress, where the writer is still shaping the story: How many years was the father with Barbara? Why is Nora so bitter?…whoops! Nora wasn’t supposed to seem bitter, which brings us to the following--

--and here’s the biggie: I need a good critique to help me see that I’m viewing things from an odd or skewed perspective…basically, from my own point of view. Obviously, always I’m seeing things from my point of view; we all are. But when several people tell me, “I think the father would be more frantic because his daughter is missing,” I listen, because I am NOT a father with a missing daughter, and because I don’t have children, I am very alert to clues that I may be missing some sort of "standard" parental behavior. This is assuming I want this father to be “normal”: in other cases, when people say, “The father should be more frantic here,” I note to myself that the exact point I’m making here is that the father ISN’T frantic when perhaps he should be, and so I, as the writer, need to work harder to show WHY the father is not following this “expected” behavior.

--Which brings me to an even bigger question I’ve been pondering about critiques, both the ones I write and the ones I get: In cases like that (“the father isn’t frantic enough”) are we responding to the work as ourselves? Or do we try to imagine how THIS CHARACTER—as drawn, as we’ve been experiencing him through the work—should respond? Which approach is more helpful to the writer? I often find it confusing when someone suggests a character act a certain way: in real life, yes, I know a “good” person would act that way. But would my character? Isn’t the point that he’s flawed and not “good” right now?

For me, this often comes up because I write about flawed parents, so yes, a mother “shouldn’t” kill herself and leave behind her two children (as in my novel A Year and a Day). So, I need the critiquers to understand that they have to accept that premise and move forward from there: She shouldn’t, but she did…so how would THAT WOMAN then respond in or react to or handle various situations? Not, What would you do? And, of course, not, What would I the writer do?

As you sort through that stack of critiques—or listen to the comments carom about in a lively workshop—try to remember that distinction. You are you, and your character is your character. (Sorry, Flaubert: you are NOT Madame Bovary!) Are the people offering advice and suggestions thinking as themselves…or thinking as your character? What would Jesus do?

No answers, only questions. I’m sure I’ll explore this topic further down the road, and I’m interested in any thoughts you might have. You can email me here.

Tales from the Writing Life

Here's an excerpt from a letter I received from a literary journal (that shall remain nameless) that runs a well-known annual contest:

“Dear Leslie: Congratulations! Your fiction submission, [THEY GIVE THE EXACT TITLE HERE], has been selected as a semi-finalist for the [CONTEST NAME]. While the semi-finalist designation does not include a cash prize or a reading by the final judge, we hope that your standing in the competition pleases you.
…

“You can be assured that your work was read by editors who wish that they could publish all the sincere and well-crafted work that is submitted to [JOURNAL TITLE]. Your manuscript was distinguished from 588 poetry submissions (emphasis mine) as a semi-finalist in the [CONTEST NAME], meaning that it was among the top 30 manuscripts. …”

Perhaps it was distinguished from the other 588 poetry submissions because the lines flowed all the way to the right edge of the paper. Or because it went on for 25 pages. Or because there was a plot. And lots of dialogue. And characters. A setting.

How unique to contain all those qualities. Or maybe not, considering my submission was a short story!!

The Jane Chord: Still Obsessed

I wrote here about the “Jane chord,” the (sometimes) magical juxtaposition of the first and last words of a novel that (sometimes) add up to a mystical and metaphorical summary of the entire book.

The blog that first alerted me to this phenomenon (About Last Night) has some interesting follow-up:

Here, CAAF writes, “I decided to look up the Jane chord of the original edition of Sylvia Plath's Ariel, which has the poems in the order Ted Hughes put them after Plath's death, and compare it to the Jane chord of the restored edition of Ariel, which came out in 2004 and ‘reinstates’ the order Plath had planned for the book.”

Her findings:
“Ariel original edition (with "The Edge" as the final poem): ‘Love drag.’
"Ariel: The Restored Edition (with "Wintering" as the final poem): ‘Love spring.’"

Yikes! Do read the entire piece for added nuance.

And here, OGIC writes about Henry James and some other classic authors, hoping to add a word if the word given is an article:

“The Turn of the Screw: ‘The story stopped.’"

And

“E. M. Forster's epigraph to Howards End famously tells us to ‘Only connect’; his Jane Chord underlines the sentiment with ‘One never.’"

Note: I am reading over my entire novel-in-progress, and I didn't want to revise the first line because I didn't want to wreck my Jane chord, "The unison." This obsession has gone too far....

Sydney Pollack: "Try to Be Both"

In today’s Washington Post, I read this appreciation of film director Sydney Pollack and thought he offered some excellent advice for all writers:

“Each time I make a movie . . . there's an argument between these people that I don't necessarily have an answer to. Or if I do, I try to make both sides equal, and I try to be the woman and the man. Try to be both. Who's right here?"

Is a Return to the Heartland Ever Heart-Healthy?

Had a lovely visit to Fitzgerald’s “Middle West,” with a visit to Iowa to see my parents. Not only did we tour the University of Iowa's Hawkeye Sports Hall of Fame, an antique automotive museum (where we saw a car with wooden axles and wheels!), taste wine at an Iowa winery (yes, they exist; yes, there were some nice selections), but we also managed to squeeze in a few meals. Some highlights:

--beloved Pagliai's Pizza, now mysteriously renamed A & A Pagliai’s, which makes it hard to find in the phone book

--a German farm-family feast at the Ronneburg Restaurant in the Amana Colonies. Best pickled beets ever! Amazing strawberry-rhubarb pie!

--a pork tenderloin as big as my face at Joensy’s in Solon, Iowa…literally, this thing was ten inches across. If you don’t know what a pork tenderloin is (you poor creature), go here immediately—Joensy’s is about halfway down, “tenderloin #6”…you’ll know it when you see it. It’s gigantic!

--homemade rhubarb-cream pie made by my fabulous high school friend who, with her husband, has also made FROM SCRATCH a turducken (once). If you don’t know what a turducken is, you can read more here; basically, it’s a deboned turkey stuffed with a deboned duck stuffed with a deboned chicken…with layers of stuffing between each! Yes, she and her husband made this FROM SCRATCH! No wonder I always happily and immediately accept any invitation to dinner at their house.

"Book World" Highlights

Here's an interesting article from Washington Post Book World about a couple who survived writing separate books due to the same publisher, same editor at about the same time. Yikes. My opinion: one writer per family is more than enough!

Her view:
“I had to force myself to block out the sound of his relentlessly efficient typing as I struggled (far longer than he did, it seemed) to find my next insight. He didn't have to cultivate discipline; it came naturally. Writing is all he does, while I divide my time between writing and seeing patients, so I constantly had to change gears, while he always seemed to be in the groove. His task was easier, too; everybody he writes about has been dead for 200 years, and none of them is related to him.”

His view:
“Despite her professional empathy as a psychoanalyst, my wife makes one calumnious statement, arising from her living room perspective. It is not easier to write about long-dead strangers, only differently difficult. We approach them from a greater emotional distance than we do our deceased parents, but knowing them requires more research. She did not have to decipher wavy letters by her subjects on Library of Congress Web sites or try to understand their lives by hunting down books on colonial tobacco culture and 18th-century battlefield drill.”

***

And Mary Karr’s “Poet’s Choice” column printed some baseball haiku. Here’s my favorite:

empty baseball field
a dandelion seed floats through
the strike zone
~~George Swede

More here.

Rushdie Gossip and Insight

I confess I only read this article in the Sunday New York Times searching for gossipy tidbits about Salman Rushdie’s (still startling to me) former marriage to the glamorous and crush-worthy Padma Lakshmi, host of my beloved Top Chef TV show. (Gossips, take note: she dumped him via email!)

But beyond the gossip, I thought this was an interesting comment about writing (his comment, not hers):

"Regardless of whether he is writing about politics, Mr. Rushdie said he finds writing both scary ('Are you going to be able to sustain it all the way to the end?') and exhilarating.

“'There’s a writing self which is not quite your ordinary social self and which you don’t really have access to except at the moment when you’re writing, and certainly in my view, I think of that as my best self,' he said. 'To be able to be that person feels good; it feels better than anything else.'”