Posts Tagged ‘david alexander smith’

Aphorisms for Writing Science Fiction

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Dramatic Structure

1. Build the story around a theme. Literature explores themes — a proposition to be argued or some aspect of human experience to examine, such as emotions, places, times, crises, or events. Know your theme and stage only those events which advance or illustrate it.
2. Observe dramatic economy. A story’s dramatic elements — words, places, characters, dramatized events — are all resources in which the author asks the reader to invest his time. For the story to work to its fullest, these must pay off: the reader’s investment in learning must be rewarded by understanding, enjoying, and appreciating the story. If the dramatic elements are unused or incompletely used, the reader may disengage.
3. Maintain scale throughout. A story has a dramatic size — the scope of its characters, setting, and time sweep. When the story’s scale shifts from that established in its opening, the reader can become desensitized and disengaged. Many stories have an unintended inflation of scale as the author keeps seeking bigger scenes or emotions. A novel that begins with a day-to-day narration should end at roughly the same pace. A story that opens by showing us a single character’s emotions should end by focusing on the feeling of a single person (the same character or a different one).
4. Character action must derive from internal imperatives. Character is shown best through action. If a character’s actions are inconsistent with his personality or environment, or if a character’s attributes are asserted but never demonstrates in actions observed by the reader, then the character loses credibility and the story loses tension.
5. Point-of-view is a scarce resource. Stories are told from a point of view (POV). Unless the author is using the omniscient narrator who sits outside events (rare), in which case the narrator becomes a character, the POV will usually be vested in one character per scene. The POV character is the lens through which the reader will perceive all that goes on, and inevitably the POV character is infused with additional importance; inevitably the reader is more sympathetic to the POV character and will understand that character better than any others in the same scene.The POV character could be someone who
   1. faces crucial choices which cannot be staged externally
   2. observes best
   3. is the author surrogate, or
   4. is the reader surrogate.

   Often the POV character is the protagonist; equally effective is a sidekick POV character who sheds intimate light on the protagonist (cf. any Watson or The Great Gatsby).

   Choose the POV character carefully. It may change from scene to scene (sometimes within a scene), but is usually the most important staging decision the author makes.

6. A story walks better on two legs. Few plot lines are so strong that by themselves they can carry the entire narrative. Much more frequently they require breaks for travel time or emotional pacing (either the characters’ or the reader’s). To do this without slowing the pace, the author can run a second story line and alternate his action between the two stories, just like a person walking on two legs, one moving, the other resting and anchoring.Often the story lines can become symbolic of larger-scale conflict, with the micro implying the macro and vice versa. Under the principle of dramatic economy, they must tie together, the more frequently and complexly the better, through character, setting, action, event, theme, or combinations of all these.
7. The inner journey must match the outer journey. Unless actions involve characters about whom we care, they appear to the reader as meaningless running around. For us to care about the characters, they must be emotionally engaged in the action, and they must express through their behaviors the inner conflicts that are driving them to do what they. Essentially to any good story, therefore, is that the character’s inner journey (his change) is as important as his outer journey (the events he experiences), so that even if the character returns to the same place by story’s end, he has undergone so much that he is now a different person. (Think Frodo in Lord of the Rings, or Sarah Connor in either Terminator movie.)
8. Link the out-of-whack event to the protagonist’s emotional disturbance. Ever since Aristotle writers have known the reliable formula for gripping action: Knock a character’s life out of whack and spent the rest of the story watching him try to get his life back into whack. For the inner journey to match the outer, the out-of-whack event must link with the protagonist’s emotional disturbance — something about the character’s world-view is destroyed early on, and the character is seeking to rediscover his own emotional equilibrium. As E. M. Forster said, The king died, then the queen died is a plot. The king died, then the queen died of grief is a story.

Making Scenes Work

1. Increase immediacy. An author is always trying to create in his reader images so strong that the reader is mentally transported. John Gardner called this the fictional dream, a story so smoothly told that the reader absorbs the images as if seeing them before his own eyes. Immediacy is the degree to which the reader experiences events directly. It can be increased by:
   • Showing rather than telling.
   • Describing things with tactile, visual specifics rather than generalities.
   • Peripheral characters who are fully fleshed out individuals rather than velour-shirted droids.
2. Reward the careful reader. Readers are greedy: they will pay attention only if they are rewarded for doing so with all little cookies like apt phrasing, witty dialog, incisive description, humorous asides.
   

   As for you, the writer, never forget the following. The reader is like a circus horse which has to be taught that it will be rewarded with a lump of sugar every time it acquits itself well. If that sugar is withheld, it will not perform.
   Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

3. Punish the careless reader. Readers are also lazy: they will pay only as much attention required to give them the stimulus they crave. An author should create text so tight that the reader who skips two or three pages will miss something crucial to the story and will backtrack to reader it. That kind of punishment (making him re-read) will swiftly persuade the reader to remain engaged. Mysteries punish the careless reader, which is partly why they have such a faithful following.
4. Hearsay is inadmissible. Immediacy is an emotional concept, not just a descriptive one. Conflict of communication between characters should be conducted directly between them, rather than through intermediaries, because each removal from the immediate dulls its impact and risks losing the reader’s engagement. Flashbacks and POV cuts are commonly employed principally to assure that if a character saw a crime or an event, the reader sees it the same way.
5. Let the reader have his own emotions. Writers who lack confidence often overkill their situations by not only staging events but also telling the reader how to react to them. This is invariably a mistake: readers force-fed feelings either become lazy (”Why bother to pay attention? The author will wake me up in time.”) or rebellious (”Hey, even Adolf wasn’t as bad as that”). Writers more confident — of themselves and of their readers — relay events and let the reader feel things for himself. Readers who feel for themselves also become more engaged.
6. Everything happens in the eternal Now. Immediacy also means immediacy in time. The ideal narration occurs in the real-time present, with the reader experiencing everything simultaneously with the characters. This also raises the stakes for readers and tends to reward careful ones.Moving away from the eternal Now (for instance, a character remembering a past event, a character narrating a past event to another character) weakens immediacy because the reader knows that the event is in the past, therefore it is fixed and unchangeable. Sporting events are much more exciting live than on tape delay.) Wherever possible, adjust time sequences so that events occur directly before the reader’s eyes.
7. Use the specific to imply the general. We observe only specific things; from them, we infer generalities. In the same way, an author who wishes to imply a general phenomenon will usually do better to stage a specific thing — an incident, a phrase, a character. By contrast, describing generally defuses immediacy, because we have no specific scene to attach the action, and nothing to visualize. The micro also easily extrapolates to the macro: Joseph Heller put all of World War II on the island of Pianosa, Mervyn Peake saw the world through the castle of Gormenghast; and then there was Forrest Gump.
8. Onstage sex is a winner. We are talking here not about biomechanics but fundamental emotional contact. Staging sexually charged encounters between focus characters invariably makes them more human, more accessible to the reader. Sex also reveals character: among human beings, intimacy and sex are tightly correlated. Sex is intimate personal knowledge not generally shared. Most of our words for closeness have sexual connotations, from the Bible’s “And Adam knew Eve.”
   

   You have to decide which drum you’re going to beat: sex or death.
   Robert Frazier.

Improving the Prose

1. Fill descriptive holes. Much fiction suffers from tactile deficiency because its author is concentrating so hard on moving characters around that he forgets to stage their environment. Description, the vegetables of a reader’s diet, must be integrated throughout the story and the action. Every scene, every sentence, contains places where adjectives and adverbs may be dropped without adding pad words. These locations — descriptive holes — should generally be filled.For instance, “The boy hit the ball” contains three descriptive holes: “The <adjective> boy <adverb> hit the <adjective> ball.” In each spot, the author can slide in a piece of description essentially for free.
2. Describe with nouns and verbs. Although adjectives and adverbs strengthen immediacy, overdependence on them leads to forsoothly writing and psychic overload in the reader. Even better than using descriptive modifiers are descriptive nouns and verbs. English is a gigantic language with a myriad of words, each with its own shades of meaning. Find the best noun and verb and use them.
3. Descriptors should be sensory. Descriptors are either sensory (blue, sour, loud, smooth, putrid) or internalized (sad, dour, proud, uncouth). When in doubt, sensory descriptors are better: they increase immediacy and they use the specific (”His hands clenched”) to imply the general (”He was angry”). Internalized descriptors also tend to editorialize, which prevents the reader from feeling for himself and thus induces in the reader either laziness or rebellion.
4. Don’t describe nulls. This is really a subcase of Point 16, filling descriptive holes. Avoid using words that saying nothing. “He picked up one of the rocks” shrinks to “He picked up a rock”. Or consider this bit of dialog:
   

   “You killed my brother!” she screamed at him.
   He said nothing.
   “And you’re trying to kill me!”

   This tiny snippet has two nulls: “at him” and “He said nothing.” The latter is particularly egregious, because the author had a free opportunity to give us an emotional reaction (”His eyes flickered in anger”) or a description (”The mantelpiece clock ticked loudly”) and did neither because he was concentrating so intently on the dialog.

5. Vary your syntax. A photograph is conveyed into newsprint via a pattern of individual dots. A story is conveyed to a reader via a pattern of individual words and sentences. Textual variety is important; without it, the reader becomes bored and irritable without necessarily perceiving why. Noun-verb-object structure is fine and should dominate, but if repeated becomes a club which can be used stylistically (Hemingway, Pinter) but more often just bludgeons a reader insensate.
6. Vary your vocabulary and referents. A scene typically uses only a few building blocks — characters, places, objects — and then manipulates them extensively. The author thus refers to the same things over and over. These multiple references are by themselves a kind of descriptive hole; by changing the noun used to identify the well-defined object, the author can slid in additional information. If Policeman Jones is later addressed as “Bob” or described as the “chunky cop”, we learn bit by bit.
7. Choose metaphors appropriate for their environment. Metaphors are a special kind of extended, custom-generated adjective; they should be chosen to enhance and harmonize with the overall universe. A detective would not squint “like a near-sighted grandmother”, he would squint “as if trying to pick a suspect out of a lineup.” Taken to extremes, of course, this become camp: “She was tough as a blackjack and sharp as a stiletto.”Even important than harmonizing metaphors is avoiding obvious metaphoric clash: in a romance, the hero should not run toward the heroine “as quickly as a stampeding bull.” Block that metaphor!

This article is Copyright. Reproduction and distribution specifically prohibited. All rights reserved. Reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Tags: david alexander smith, writing advice
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Critiquing in a Workshop Context

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

by David Alexander Smith

Critiquing in a workshop context is a skill worth learning. Some tips for the novice:

1. Before you begin. Familiarize yourself with workshop procedures and etiquette. Take some time with the Glossary of critiquing terms and become familiar with the jargon; we use it frequently, especially in the verbal critique, and it is efficient and illuminating. Familiarity with the jargon will also help you see attributes of the story on which you are working.
2. How to approach the critique. We recommend reading the story three separate times, with intervals for reflection between each reading:
   1. First reading, as a reader. Just read it once through as if you had come upon it published somewhere. Collect some general impressions as a reader. Perhaps write some short notes to yourself.
   2. Second reading, as an auditor. Having absorbed the story and gained a sense of what it did and wanted to do, go back and examine it in detail, thinking about your general impressions. Why did the story affect you as it did? What specific parts of the text work, and what parts fail? In each case, why? Where did your attention wander, and why did the text allow you to do that? Here is the place to make detailed comments on the manuscript. What textual aspects, minor in themselves, occur frequently enough that they merit general comments?
   3. Third reading, as a synthesist. Now that you have been through the story twice, once in gory detail, go back to your general impressions. What did you perceive, when you paid close attention, that you missed the first time? Why? What patterns emerged? What could the author do to bring additional texture into your normal initial reading? What other general conclusions did you discover, on close reading, that were invisible initially? More substantively, where do you find yourself asking, ‘Why choose this rather than that?’In the third reading, put yourself in the author’s shoes. Try alternate approaches to solving the problems you identified. You should have a clear sense of what the author was trying to do, whether it came through, and why. You may be able to identify specifically which parts worked and which failed to achieve the author’s goals.
3. What goes into the written critique? Critiques, whether written or verbal, are normally structured on a top-down approach, starting with the major issues and working through them to the minor.
   1. General critiques. These are the big issues, the story’s major building blocks. Often the written critique will provide extensive examples, whereas the verbal delivery will simply assert the problem and go on to discuss alternate solutions.
   2. Specific. All the nuts and bolts. Fiction is made up of words, and it is only through the pointillist changing of words that we can change the fictional image. So the critic can be as detailed as he or she wants in deconstructing paragraphs, sentences, phrases, and words, and then reassembling them. The written critique is the place to do this in detail – sometimes in great detail. Some people simply mark up the manuscript with copyedits or marginal annotations; others flag locations and type up specific suggestions. Either way, detail is good, and more detail is better.The written critique of a short story will typically be 2-5 single-spaced pages long. It can be longer if the story requires more. Longer works usually generate proportionately longer critiques. The written critique of a novel can be enormous.
4. What goes into the verbal critique? The verbal presentation consists of talking through the issues for benefit of three distinct audiences:
   • The author, who has to absorb the big ideas first (so he can sift among many critics).
   • The other critics, who may change their minds or expand their ideas based on what they hear.
   • The critic him or herself, who may in the verbalization express different perspectives. (This last is especially common in a critic going later in the round, because the critic may be stimulated by previous critiques.)

   With the written critique already done (and to be handed back to the author), the critic need not worry about getting his words in edgewise. Thus the critic need not try to score cheap points at the expense of his audience. Rather, the verbal critique should be educational and constructive, contributing ideas to a large mental stew pot that the author, in rebuttal, stirs and tastes.

   For folks unused to workshop verbal critique, reading the written critique is a means to start, if only as a means of structuring your comments. But as the critic gains experience, the verbal critiques are often quite a different presentation: they use the written words as an outline and then describe them. A good verbal critique is thus conversational, the critic talking directly to the author, and watching the author to make sure the author understands the critique (if not necessarily agreeing with it).

   As the verbal critique works around the circle, themes become reinforced and sometimes established. What the first critic may tentatively hypothesize can become, by the fifth critic, an accepted conclusion. Or a particular area may become a topic of debate, with different critics weighing in on various sides. (In such circumstances, remember that you are not trying to win the debate, you are trying to give the author a full briefing on your views. The author wins the debate.)

   Later critiques tend to be variations on melodies already laid down. If a half-page insight you were keyed up to deliver is neatly made by someone ahead of you, don’t grind through your prepared remarks. Instead quickly agree with the point, or expand on it, or give more time to focusing on other issues. Similarly, things you may not have identified in your personal written critique may strike you, on hearing them, as particularly noteworthy or frivolous, and you can extemporize about them. Either way, voice your reaction to what has gone before – again, the critics are trying to brief the author on the full range of opinions.

   Of course, don’t hesitate to disagree with a previous critic, but give that critic the same respect you accord the author – that is, credit the critic with intelligence and perception in observation, just a different diagnosis or prescription. Point and counterpoint is the essence of a good workshop.

   A good verbal critique may, therefore, be loosely outlined something like this:

   • Overall impression of the story.
   • Some major strengths.
   • Some major problems.
   • Specific examples illustrating the problems, and why they fail.
   • Discussion of alternate ways of tackling the problem.
   • A specific alternative solution, if only as an experiment.
   • Recapitulation of the story overall, emphasizing its strengths on which to build and highlighting the critical changes to improve it.

   Don’t feel bashful about suggesting changes, even to the point of offering up major surgery such as a new plot line, collapse or conflation of multiple characters, or some other radical rethinking. The author won’t be offended (in CSFW, we do this all the time), and is always free to decline your suggestion or to accept it. Or, in the authorial rebuttal, the author or the group can pick up a particular alternative and tinker with it in a variety of ways. Some remarkable inventions that amaze and delight everyone, most especially the author, have come out of these spontaneous combustions.

5. How to react when you are being critiqued. For most newcomers (and even for some of us grizzled veterans), this is the hardest time, because you want to explain or rebut point by point, and you may not. Try not to let the stress get to you. Ways to do this:
   1. Whose work is critiqued first? A newcomer to a workshop should seldom be the first author to have a work critiqued. Much better is to have one of the established members’ works as the focus of the first critiquing round, so the newcomer has a chance to see how the workshop functions, the level and nature of critique. Watch how the critics and author interact during critique, rebuttal, and roundtable.
   2. Take notes. Take a lot of notes on the specifics of what you hear. You will need the record for the rebuttal, so that you can ground yourself and take best advantage of the time. Note-taking also engages your superego, which is so busy trying to digest the information content the poor old id has limited stage time to be hurt or upset.
      Take specific notes of good ideas that you hear, ideas that you think are misguided, or intriguing solutions that you want to explore. If a critic identifies a problem without offering a solution, flag the point and plan to return to it in rebuttal and discuss what might be done. (This is also healthy in keeping critics on their toes rather than allowing them to pontificate generally.)
   3. Hit the high points. You need not transcribe every suggestion – you’ll find it impossible to keep up. At the end of your round, you will receive back many marked-up copies of your manuscript and many detailed written critiques. You can study both at leisure. CSFW critics write down almost everything they plan to say, so that you needn’t worry about writers’ cramp. (If you find yourself scribbling at top speed, you can interrupt to ask the critic, ‘Do you have all that written down?’) Concentrate on noting the points that made you think.
   4. Interrupting for clarification. You must keep silent except when the critic is unclear or unfocused; then you can gently interrupt and ask either for clarification or a specific example. Don’t interrupt to explain what you meant or show how the critic misread the text – save that for rebuttal. You’ll get your chance.
   5. What goes around comes around. Never forget that we’ve all been through it many times and do it to one another all the time, so most critics, however harsh their comments on the prose, understand the stress a critique imposes on the author.
6. Authorial rebuttal. When the verbal critique is done, the author now has the floor. This is an important time.The author is not required to say anything, but usually the author is filled with reactions bursting to get out. This is where your scribbled notes can come in. Take a deep breath and organize what you want to say – the critics, having shot their bolt, will wait attentively. Go back through your notes and talk about your reactions. Now you can explain what you were trying to do, what the critics missed, or what should have been there but isn’t. (”It will already have been there,” is a common authorial response to a particular apt criticism.)Here also you can explore whether a particular solution does work, doesn’t work, or might work. Having made all your responses, you can open up the discussion to focus on solutions and let the rebuttal devolve into a free-flowing discussion.
7. Conclusion. Newcomers, especially those with little or no prior experience in other workshops, sometimes find a structured workshop experience overwhelming. Compared with the typical casual critique, a structured workshop is a tidal wave of ideas. Nothing can prepare you for the sheer volume of work, thought, insights and suggestions that the critiques will deliver. It will be more extensive and more thorough than you probably thought possible.

As you absorb this torrent of ideas, bear in mind that a detailed critique is the highest form of respect one author can pay another, and the more effort put into the critique, the more respect the critic has for the author — and for the work being critiqued.

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A Checklist for Critiquing Science Fiction

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

by David Alexander Smith

1. Theme and meaning. Does the story move us? So we emerge from our fictional journey emotionally engaged, or wiser than we went in? Do we remember the story after we’re done? Along the way, does the story force us to think? Do we re-examine, or see afresh, things we take for granted in our mundane universe? (If not, why is the story in an sf setting?) Does the story have a theme? Is the theme integrated with the events?
2. Literature. “Literature is worth reading even when you know how the story comes out?” By that standard, is the story literature? When we read it, are we conscious of the author’s artifice or awkwardness, or is the experience so strong that we are lost in the action and forget even that there’s an author talking to us?

Creating the Universe

3. Imaginativeness. Are we taken to a strange, new, exotic or interesting place? Are the new creations — aliens, technology, societies, all the microchips of life — fascinating? Are their rules of engagement consistent and credible? Are they integral to the new world we are visiting, or just arbitrarily stuck on? Do they fire out imagination?
4. Premise. How well does the fictional universe come across? Is the reader truly transported into another place, a place he could imagine living in? Is the fictional universe vivid? Is it complex? If we could go there, would we want to?
5. Internal Consistency. Does the fictional universe hang together? Are its institutions, governments, cultural mores, technology, history, and other large-scale actions credible? Do you believe that the society shown could really exist as it’s portrayed? Can you slam its doors without worrying that the knobs will fall off?

Peopling the Universe

6. Characters. Do we care about the characters we meet? Do we cheer when they succeed, cry when they fail, boo and hiss when they’re evil, applaud when they overcome their weaknesses? Do they have depth and complexity? Do we find the peripheral, ficelle, and one-scene characters entertaining in their own right?
7. Motivation. Do the characters care? Do they act according to their motives (rather than being pushed around authorially like chessmen)? Do they struggle? When they oppose one another, are their conflicts logical from each one’s point of view? Do they make sensible choices given who they are and what they know?
8. Believability. Do we see ourselves in these characters? Where they differ from us, do we understand how they came to be who they are? Do we say, “there but for the grace of God, go I”?

Storytelling

9. Plotting. Does each action follow naturally from its predecessors? Is it a natural outgrowth of the personalities of the people who create it? Are the storyline mysteries natural (rather than manipulative)? Are the characters whacked around by powerful large forces that we know and appreciate? Are big things at stake? Are the characters locked in to their problem?
10. Pacing, tension, and drama. Does the story hook us? Does it hook us quickly? Are we intrigued by the end of the first page? Are we drawn forward by events, always wanting to know more? Does tension swell and contract like a muscle, building to a powerful climax? Does the climax resonate with the theme? Are we on the edge of our seats?
11. Dramatic economy. Do the things in which we readers invest at the story’s beginning pay off by its end? Does the story reward the careful reader with cookies of sparkling scenes, characters, insights, and dialog? Does it punish the careless one by peppering the text with information vital to the story? If we skip any twenty pages, have we missed something that we have to go back and re-read?
12. Language. Is the language striking? Are we hit with eyeball kick images that make us stop and gasp? Do the sentences flow? Do they create mind pictures? Does dialog bring characters to life? Can you tell who is speaking even without attribution? Is description maintained throughout the action so that we never feel blinded or muffled/ Is the imagery rich? Is the language worth reading aloud?

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Some Notes on Critiquing Method and the CSFW Critiquing Manifesto

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

by David Alexander Smith

Those of us who’ve been in the Cambridge SF Workshop for some time have developed an approach to critiquing that we find serves us well. These principles — our Critiquing Manifesto — help us work together to create the best fiction we can.

1. Why Are We Here?

Often workshops founder because the people have different reasons for attending. Everyone in CSFW subscribes to a basic principle:

We’re here to help one another produce our best fiction.

All other goals are subordinate to that. If you want to work out personal issues in your fiction, that’s fine, but if the results are bad fiction, you can’t defend yourself by saying your life happened that way.

2. How Do We Critique?

We subscribe to a two-edged commitment to criticism: (A) Tell the truth, and (B) Criticize the prose, not the writer.

As a critiquer, not a reviewer, comment on anything that moves you. Line edit if you want. Argue with character motivation. Question the rubber science. Suggest alternate plot lines. Identify clearly what you think needs improvement.

At the same time, you must respect the author’s right to tell his own story. To be sure that the critics understand the objective of a work critiqued in pieces (such as a novel), the author often submits an overview of the story’s objectives. Without this, critics sometimes misinterpret the author’s intent, and thus suggest improvements that run counter to what the author’s trying to achieve.

Critics have a duty to help the author achieve his or her objectives — not yours. You may not like heroic fantasy, but if you’re critiquing an author who does, you have to provide suggestions for making it more fantastic or more heroic. You’re not here to demand that an author change his agenda. You can suggest other agendas, but if the author declines them, you must help the author go his way, not yours. Several points follow from this.

A. You must do the work.

It’s unacceptable to say, “I never read military action stories, so I’m not going to comment on this.” Wrong. You’re not here reading for pleasure. You’re here because other people have agreed to work on your material. And they won’t do that unless you work on theirs. Put in the hours, even if you’re struggling to find things to say.

B. Be general first.

If something bothers you over and over, state the general issue first. The other participants — who didn’t write the material but read it, just as the critiquer did — can evaluate the general issue and think about it.

C. Then be specific.

It’s not enough to say, “the characters are wooden and the plot is slow.” Which characters? When don’t they react appropriately? Where does the action flag? Why do you feel it’s slow? Identifying chapter and verse as an illustration helps everybody examine the issue.

D. Then be constructive

Once you’ve identified the problem, suggest an answer. “She shouldn’t just sit there when he threatens her, she should tear his face off.” Show us how you’d do better what you think the author did inadequately.

The author, of course, doesn’t have to take your suggestion, but the act of examining an alternate story line is enormously helpful. All too often, writers see their stories as having no options — they must occur a particular way. The eye-opening experience of examining a whole different road will often jog someone’s thinking process so that the author will create a third solution, neither his original choice nor the critic’s alternate, that’s better than both.

3. How Do We Listen?

As an author, you must absorb what is said to you. That doesn’t mean you accept it or reject it, it means you listen to it. You take it seriously as being motivated for your benefit. Perhaps you say back to your critic, “I was trying to do this, but it didn’t come across. How could I have gotten that idea (feeling, theme, view) to work for you?”

Being critiqued in a roundtable workshop is no fun. You sit there, naked and exposed, as someone goes over your flaws with a microscope. Ouch! A bunch of other people who’ve also read your material agree with the critic. Double ouch! Emotionally you’re in turmoil, but intellectually you’re realizing that a good chunk of what’s being said is dead right. So you don’t even have the normal defense of rationalizing that your critic is full of beans.

How do we get through this and come back for more? Because the prose gets better. Just like exercise, which hurts at the time but produces results, workshopping reveals all the flaws and lets you correct them. And, when you come right down to it, wouldn’t you rather hear the problems from a few folks in private, than have editor after editor recognize them, reject your story, and never tell you? Or worse, have your story published with the flaws there for all eternity, for hundreds of people to notice and cluck over?

That’s why in our workshops:

A. No outsiders

You can’t be vulnerable with other people if there’s somebody who can take free shots. What goes around must come around, otherwise the temptation to cheap-shot a helpless victim is too great.

B. Everyone must submit periodically.

A person who stays in the workshop for a long time without submitting becomes effectively an outsider.

C. You have to build trust.

You have to come to believe that people really are trying to help you, otherwise you’ll close up to the comments.

D. Things are written down.

You can react to them later, after the pummeled feeling subsides.

E. Over time, we become very respectful of one another.

We hold nothing back in terms of identifying and pounding problems … but we’re all extremely solicitous of each other’s intentions.

4. What About Giving Away Ideas?

We’ve had people get very upset when given ideas or when asked for ideas. “I’m not going to write your story for you!” Is that a valid fear?

If you write something and I suggest an idea to improve it, you don’t have to accept it. That act of acceptance or rejection — that artistic and literary choice — means you’re still the author, all the way across the board.

Now how about me? I came up with this neat idea and gave it to you. My cleverness is going to show up in print under your name. Aren’t I shortchanged by that?

In 19 years of critiquing, I’ve never felt that way. To begin with, I’ve always received lots and lots of neat ideas from the workshop. My work is peppered with them. They make my books stronger. Second, my idea that shows up in your story would never have occurred to me, but for the fact that you created an environment where it popped into my head. I’ve given you the benefits of an hour or two’s thought, and received in return ideas that I’d never have developed in ten hours’ thought. We’re both better off.

As long as things are reasonably reciprocal, everybody wins.

If you stick with it, sooner or later everybody gets published. Everybody progresses. Everybody achieves. When that happens, each person in the workshop can share in that wonderful feeling, because everyone contributed to making it happen.

Tags: critique, david alexander smith, workshop
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