For those still seeking more information about the Google Book Settlement, we’ll be hosting five phone-in seminars next week. These are open to all authors and agents. The seminars are free, except for your usual long-distance phone charges. We’ve expanded the capacity to accommodate many more people. We encourage you to forward this on to other authors and groups of authors.

Each seminar will provide a short, clear explanation of the settlement and will answer all questions from participants. Each seminar will last about an hour. The seminars will be conducted by Paul Aiken, Jan Constantine, and Anita Fore, the Guild’s Executive Director, General Counsel, and Director of Legal Services.

Here are the dates and times, click on a link to sign up:

Monday, January 25, 2010 at 10:00 AM Eastern Std Time

Monday, January 25, 2010 at 3:00 PM Eastern Std Time

Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 10:00 AM Eastern Std Time

Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 3:00 PM Eastern Std Time

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 10:00 AM Eastern Std Time

When a seminar is full, it will be removed from the list of options on the online registration form.

The Google Settlement — What it means for writers

A FREE workshop will be held for writers in mid-town New York, Wednesday, Jan. 20 from 2-4:40 p.m.

Are you out or in? Come get your questions answered.

Hear the best-informed, best-known authorities on what the second version of the Google Book Search Settlement would mean for writers if it is approved by the court.  The second opt-out deadline is coming up a week after this seminar, so there is still time to figure out what’s best for you, personally, and then to act. This workshop will focus on the settlement and writers — just writers.

Much of the public debate has settled on other aspects, like orphan books, yet we writers are still confused about what the proposed, new Book Rights Registry would mean for us.

Sponsored jointly by the American Society of Journalists and Authors, ASJA, the National Writers Union, NWU, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, SFWA.

FREE but please tell us if you’re coming, either by calling 212-997-0947 or a quick e-mail to asjaoffice AT asja.org. (Put “Google settlement” in the subject line.)

Speakers: Professor James Grimmelmann, who together with a group of his law students has been commenting line-by-line on the legal ramifications of the settlement for many months. The project is called the Public-Interest Book Search Initiative, sponsored by the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School See it at The Public Index The site has remained steadfastly non-partisan.

Poet, attorney and principal at Writers’ Representatives, LLC: Lynn Chu, who has written about the settlement in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. Chu, a literary agent of many years standing, organized a group of writers who object to the settlement. She currently is at work on a law review article on its ramifications.

Other speakers: to be announced.

Considerable time will be reserved for your questions

LOCATION: The workshop will be held Wednesday, Jan. 20 from 2 – 4:30 p.m. in the conference room of the New York NWU office, 256 w. 38th St., 12th floor.  That’s between 7th and 8th.

WEBCAST, PODCAST: We hope to webcast the program and also to make podcasts available, free. Watch the ASJA, NWU and SFWA sites for information!

Entry fee is $20 plus $2.58 in taxes, Canadian. This cost is to defray costs of the workshop. You pay the fee when you’re notified that you have a slot and not before. Instructions will be emailed to entrants directly.

There are a limited number of slots available and right now, it’s one slot per customer, no multiple submissions.

Maximum length is 10,000 words, including any synopsis of the rest of a novel, novella, etc. Shorter lengths, including flash, are fine, even encouraged, but only one story.

Genre: science fiction, fantasy, horror, the usual for a Worldcon
Type: short story or novel excerpt
Language: English or French
We will also consider entries for critique of non-fiction critical essays on the subject of genre, same length requirements.

The entries will be distributed in advance so the window to get space in the workshop won’t be open for very long.

Official details will be forthcoming on the Anticipation website (http://www.anticipationsf.ca) and through other avenues of communication. You can also email writers-workshop@anticipationsf.ca directly to request a slot now.

Oz Whiston
Creative Writing Track Programming

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.

© 1988 by James Patrick Kelly, First published in The Bulletin of The Science Fiction Writers of America

You don’t believe in writers’ workshops — never have. Maybe you had a bad experience in college. Some reedy creative writing type sneered at sci-fi and said you probably ought to think about a career in plumbing. Or perhaps it was that incestuous little workshop in your home town, one of those adult education courses filled with achingly sincere poets and would-be Joyces who responded to criticism by saying silly things like “I only write for myself.”

You swear by writers’ workshops. You went to Clarion — lots of us did — and it changed your life. Or maybe you were one of the lucky ones, because you lived in Boston or Austin or Minneapolis or Denver or Eugene — someplace where there was an established professional workshop. Somehow you wangled an invitation and, mirabile dictu, they took your work seriously. After a while, you did too. And the rest is literary history.

There are probably thousands of writers’ workshops in the United States. The vast majority live down to their reputation, noisily proving the cliche that you can’t teach writing. About the only good they do is to provide an incentive for the neophyte to write regularly. There are a precious few, however, that work. What you learn in a good workshop is not how to write, but rather what your audience makes of what you’ve written. Forget about silver-haired authority figures handing down the ten commandments of good writing. There’s no shock quite so instructive as listening to a roomful of astute readers misconstrue your intentions, no pleasure quite so memorable as hearing a stranger speak of your work with understanding and appreciation.

How to recognize the good workshop? Almost all of the sf variety are based on the Milford model, for which the legends credit Damon Knight. This was the way Milford worked when it was the national workshop (and works today; a scaled-down Milford continues as one of the most outstanding of our many regional workshops.) This is the way Clarion works — with a few minor variations. This is the format of Sycamore Hill, the current national workshop. The problem is that most of the Milford-format workshops are either too far away or else are filled and have waiting lists. If you’re really interested, what you may need to do is start your own.

Here’s how.

The Milford model works best with between five and seventeen members. Too few and the workshop loses its necessary diversity, too many and the critique of each story drags on to excruciating lengths. The group usually gathers together in one place for some length of time: a single day or maybe a weekend for the smaller, regional workshops, five days to a week for a national workshop like the old Milford or Sycamore Hill. Clarion takes six weeks. Both Sycamore Hill and Clarion are annual events, while many of the regional workshops meet on a monthly or bimonthly schedule. Only writers with manuscripts in the workshop take part in the critique; no audience is allowed. While the furnishing of the workshop room is a matter of circumstance and taste, the optimal arrangement is for the group to sit around a large table or otherwise gather the wagons into a circle. The stories are read beforehand; the more conscientious critics read more than once. Each critic holds forth in turn, most referring to notes they’ve taken. The custom is to pass these notes to the writer at the end of the session. During critiques the writer may not respond to comments unless asked a direct “yes or no” question. No one is supposed interrupt another’s critique, although there’s often some — usually trifling — cross talk. Repetition is inevitable, although wistful sighs and vacant stares can sometimes prod repeaters to pass when they have nothing new to add. After everyone else has spoken, the writer gets the opportunity to give thanks, explain, rebut or say nothing. A free-form discussion occasionally ensues; otherwise it’s on to the next story. Some workshops enforce these simple rules as a group or the organizers may act as semi-official referees.

Describing the model doesn’t really give the sense of what a workshop is like. There’s a misapprehension that the criticism is unremittingly harsh, that the critiques are subject to personal feud and ideological debate, that some people recklessly rewrite perfectly good stories, while others offer conflicting opinions which can reduce the poor writer to total confusion. You’ve probably heard some of the horror stories, tales of crushed egos and burnt manuscripts. Well, there are no guarantees. Once in a great while, workshops stray. Nevertheless, two points need to be made.

The first is that the workshop provides the writer with a range of opinion. Unanimity is rare; it’s a big genre, folks. The reality is that some people simply hate elves, others resent metafiction, many think vampires are silly and hardware puts more than a few to sleep. It’s hardly surprising that the critics around the table tend to respond most intelligently to stories which are like the ones they themselves enjoy. While the feminist might legitimately comment that she never reads sword and sorcery and would not have finished the story under consideration had it not been in the workshop, the cyberpunk might confess a secret love of heroic fantasy and offer a connoisseur’s insight. Yet even allowing for a diversity of tastes, a consensus usually emerges. This consensus may not always solve a story’s problems or fully appreciate masterwork, but it will not settle for cliched situations, cardboard characters, off-the-shelf concepts and stale emotion, and it can easily recognize narrative drive, believable dialogue, fresh ideas and deft characterization.

The second point is that there’s no criticism quite as blunt as a fistful of rejection slips. Workshopping offers a more humane way to receive bad news — if indeed the news is bad. Not only that, but the process can give writers a new perspective on how decisions to reject or accept are made. For in a sense writers play at being editors during a workshop. They get to read for the mythical Adequate Science Fiction Magazine or the anthology Wicked New Visions, edited by (your name here). They are not, however, allowed to hide their opinions behind the cryptic “This material is not suitable for us at the present time.” They must face the writer and explain specifically and at length why the story does not suit. They must justify their readings, rationalize their aesthetic prejudices. It’s a difficult role to play, but it can be invaluable both for the writer and the editor-for-a-day. Admittedly, some people do get carried away. Sweeping rewrite syndrome is an example. Yet even this excess is much more likely to spring from enthusiasm than malice; people want more than just publishable stories, they want the writer to do his very best, every time, and no excuses, please. What’s the harm in this? The writer is free to ignore meddlesome advice, and in almost every session some particularly sympathetic critic will make at least one suggestion which can help focus or improve the story.

It’s clear, however, that some writers are uncomfortable with this notion of colleagues helping to write their stories. (Some writers are also uncomfortable with the notion of editing.) Whose story is it if you use that killer ending Kate Wilhelm suggested? Will peer pressure homogenize your work? These are fair questions, to which there are no universal answers.

Which brings us to an important caveat: workshops are not for everyone. They are definitely not for the thin-skinned; people who have difficulty separating criticism of the work from personal criticism are well advised to stay away. Nor are workshops for followers of Heinlein’s Third Rule for Success in Writing: “You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.” There’s no point in workshopping non-negotiable stories. Of course, what you expect is a standing “O” from your colleagues, immediate sale to a top market followed by a raft of award nominations and multiple Best of the Year appearances. That’s only natural. But it’s dishonest to decide beforehand that no matter what transpires during the critique, your story is perfectly salable and you’re not changing a goddamned word. Beware as well if you have a truly idiosyncratic writing voice; the process seems to work best for stories in the mainstream of the genre — so to speak. It’s also difficult, although not impossible, to get a satisfactory critique of a novel. Especially at national workshops like Sycamore Hill, where even the strong stagger under the reading burden, there are limits placed on manuscript length. No one has time to read an entire novel. Fragments, unfortunately, tend to get fragmentary criticism. Novels-in-progress are better suited to the more frequent regional workshops where over time, chapter by chapter, the book at least has a chance to considered in its entirety. To restate: workshops are not for everyone. Some of our most gifted writers abstain for reasons of temperament and practicality. It’s simply a matter of what works for you. Some of us write in longhand, others compose at the keyboard. Some are morning people, others can’t count to three before lunch.

One workshop secret — admittedly not very well kept — is that the critiques are not, in and of themselves, sufficient justification for shelling out plane fare from San Francisco to Raleigh, North Carolina, or for leaving home and your paying job for six weeks at Clarion. There are other benefits, intangible and yet undeniable, to the attending a writers’ workshop.

Validation, for example. One bane of the beginning writers’ life is fluctuating confidence. Workshops have helped resolve many, many more confidence problems than they have caused. You know you have some talent, otherwise they wouldn’t have accepted you at Clarion. And even though you haven’t had a sale since Labor Day, the other writers in the workshop still read your latest manuscript with care and enthusiasm. A multiple award winner sits next to you; across the room is a writer who sold her first story when you were still struggling with The Cat in the Hat. They believe in you, therefore you are a writer, even if all the editors haven’t tumbled to it yet.

Community. It’s a lonely business, okay? Most people you meet have no idea what you do. You try to tell a neighbor about the magazines and he asks if you know Stephen King. At the workshop, everyone understands. When you’re making a point in casual conversation, you don’t have to explain about relativity or narrative lumps or royalties. Your colleagues have the same problems and maybe even some solutions. It’s comforting to know that you’re not necessarily crazy for writing this stuff, or at least if you are, then there are other lunatics loose too.

Influence. Sometimes you learn things at a workshop that have nothing to do with the story you brought. Since writers tend to get prickly about this, perhaps the less said the better. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to critique a manuscript without discovering both clever solutions and poor decisions. The careful writer can emulate the former and eschew the latter without violating his artistic integrity. All of us learn from our reading or we ought to. Moreover, some writers attend workshops with the announced intention of influencing their colleagues. Which leads us to …

Controversy. The genre keeps changing and people keep arguing about it at workshops — oh, how they argue! It’s fascinating to watch ideologies and styles contend in real time, as opposed to the maddeningly slow pace of publishing and the USPS. What is surprising about this clash of ideas is not that arguments occasionally get out of hand; it’s how often they remain civil and useful. People who talk to each other find common ground. Or they come to understand exactly why they disagree instead of relying on what he said she said she thought she read in a fanzine somewhere. Even for those who are not direct parties to the debate, workshop controversies provide an incentive to self-examination. The great controversialist Plato used to argue that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Ultimately, what sends writers off to workshops is ambition. It’s easier to stay home and keep plugging away, certainly cheaper. But you want something more. You want to get better. Maybe a workshop will help, maybe not. Lots of people say it’s worth a try.

NOT COPYRIGHTED

Introduction by Lewis Shiner

This manual is intended to focus on the special needs of the science fiction workshop. Having an accurate and descriptive critical term for a common SF problem makes it easier to recognize and discuss. This guide is intended to save workshop participants from having to “reinvent the wheel” (see section 3) at every session.

The terms here were generally developed over a period of many years in many workshops. Those identified with a particular writer are acknowledged in parentheses at the end of the entry. Particular help for this project was provided by Bruce Sterling and the other regulars of the Turkey City Workshop in Austin, Texas.

Introduction (II) by Bruce Sterling

People often ask where science fiction writers get their ideas. They rarely ask where society gets its science fiction writers. In many cases the answer is science fiction workshops.

Workshops come in many varieties — regional and national, amateur and professional, formal and frazzled. In science fiction’s best-known workshop, Clarion, would-be writers are wrenched from home and hearth and pitilessly blitzed for six weeks by professional SF writers, who serve as creative-writing gurus. Thanks to the seminal efforts of Robin Wilson, would-be sf writers can receive actual academic credit for this experience.

But the workshopping experience does not require any shepherding by experts. Like a bad rock band, an SF-writer’s workshop can be set up in any vacant garage by any group of spotty enthusiasts with nothing
better to occupy their time. No one has a Copyright on talent, desire, or enthusiasm.

The general course of action in the modern SF workshop (known as the “Milford system”) goes as follows. Attendees bring short manuscripts, with enough copies for everyone present. No one can attend or comment who does not bring a story. The contributors read and annotate all the stories. When that’s done, everyone forms a circle, a story is picked at random, and the person to the writer’s right begins the critique. (Large groups may require deliberate scheduling.)

Following the circle in order, with a minimum of cross-talk or interruptions, each person emits his/her considered opinions of the story’s merits and/or demerits. The author is strictly required, by rigid law and custom, to make no outcries, no matter how he or she may squirm. When the circle is done and the last reader has vented his or her opinion, the silently suffering author is allowed an extended reply, which, it is hoped, will not exceed half an hour or so, and will avoid gratuitously personal ripostes. This harrowing process continues, with possible breaks for food, until all the stories are done, whereupon everyone tries to repair ruptured relationships in an orgy of drink and gossip.

No doubt a very interesting book could be written about science fiction in which the writing itself played no part. This phantom history could detail the social demimonde of workshops and their associated cliques: Milford, the Futurians, Milwaukee Fictioneers, Turkey City, New Wave, Hydra Club, Jules Verne’s Eleven Without Women, and year after year after year of Clarion — a thousand SF groups around the world, known and unknown.

Anyone can play. I’ve noticed that workshops have a particularly crucial role in non-Anglophone societies, where fans, writers, and publishers are often closely united in the same handful of zealots.

This kind of fellow-feeling may be the true hearts-blood of the genre.

We now come to the core of this piece, the SF Workshop Lexicon. This lexicon was compiled by Mr Lewis Shiner and myself from the work of many writers and critics over many years of genre history, and it contains buzzwords, notions and critical terms of direct use to SF workshops.

The first version, known as the “Turkey City Lexicon” after the Austin, Texas writers’ workshop that was a cradle of cyberpunk, appeared in 1988. In proper ideologically-correct cyberpunk fashion, the Turkey City Lexicon was distributed unCopyrighted and free-of-charge: a decommodified, photocopied chunk of free literary software. Lewis Shiner still thinks that this was the best deployment of an effort of this sort, and thinks I should stop fooling around with this fait accompli. After all, the original Lexicon remains unCopyrighted, and it has been floating around in fanzines, prozines and computer networks for seven years now. I respect Lew’s opinion, and in fact I kind of agree with him. But I’m an ideologue, congenitally unable to leave well-enough alone.

In September 1990 I re-wrote the Lexicon as an installment in my critical column for the British magazine INTERZONE. When Robin Wilson asked me to refurbish the Lexicon yet again for PARAGONS, I couldn’t resist the temptation. I’m always open to improvements and amendments for the Lexicon. It seems to me that if a document of this sort fails to grow it will surely become a literary monument, and, well, heaven forbid. For what it’s worth, I plan to re-release this latest edition to the Internet at the first opportunity. You can email me about it: I’m “mailto:bruces@well.com”.

Some Lexicon terms are attributed to their originators, when I could find them; others are not, and I apologize for my ignorance.

Science fiction boasts many specialized critical terms. You can find a passel of these in Gary K Wolfe’s CRITICAL TERMS FOR SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY: A GLOSSARY AND GUIDE TO SCHOLARSHIP (Greenwood Press, 1986). But you won’t find them in here. This lexicon is not a guide to scholarship. The Workshop Lexicon is a guide (of sorts) for down-and-dirty hairy-knuckled sci-fi writers, the kind of ambitious subliterate guttersnipes who actually write and sell professional genre material. It’s rough, rollicking, rule-of-thumb stuff suitable for shouting aloud while pounding the table.

Part One: Words and Sentences

• Brenda Starr dialogue

Long sections of talk with no physical background or description of the characters. Such dialogue, detached from the story’s setting, tends to echo hollowly, as if suspended in mid-air. Named for the American comic-strip in which dialogue balloons were often seen emerging from the Manhattan skyline.

• “Burly Detective” Syndrome

This useful term is taken from SF’s cousin-genre, the detective-pulp. The hack writers of the Mike Shayne series showed an odd reluctance to use Shayne’s proper name, preferring such euphemisms as “the burly detective” or “the red-headed sleuth.” This syndrome arises from a wrong-headed conviction that the same word should not be used twice in close succession. This is only true of particularly strong and visible words, such as “vertiginous.” Better to re-use a simple tag or phrase than to contrive cumbersome methods of avoiding it.

• Brand Name Fever

Use of brand name alone, without accompanying visual detail, to create false verisimilitude. You can stock a future with Hondas and Sonys and IBM’s and still have no idea with it looks like.

• “Call a Rabbit a Smeerp“

A cheap technique for false exoticism, in which common elements of the real world are re-named for a fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature or behavior. “Smeerps” are especially common in fantasy worlds, where people often ride exotic steeds that look and act just like horses. (Attributed to James Blish.)

• Gingerbread

Useless ornament in prose, such as fancy sesquipedalian Latinate words where short clear English ones will do. Novice authors sometimes use “gingerbread” in the hope of disguising faults and conveying an air of refinement. (Attr. Damon Knight)

• Not Simultaneous

The mis-use of the present participle is a common structural sentence-fault for beginning writers. “Putting his key in the door, he leapt up the stairs and got his revolver out of the bureau.” Alas, our hero couldn’t do this even if his arms were forty feet long. This fault shades into “Ing Disease,” the tendency to pepper sentences with words ending in “-ing,” a grammatical construction which tends to confuse the proper sequence of events. (Attr. Damon Knight)

• Pushbutton Words

Words used to evoke a cheap emotional response without engaging the intellect or the critical faculties. Commonly found in story titles, they include such bits of bogus lyricism as “star,” “dance,” “dream,” “song,” “tears” and “poet,” cliches calculated to render the SF audience misty-eyed and tender-hearted.

• Roget’s Disease

The ludicrous overuse of far-fetched adjectives, piled into a festering, fungal, tenebrous, troglodytic, ichorous, leprous, synonymic heap. (Attr. John W. Campbell)

• “Said” Bookism

An artificial verb used to avoid the word “said.” “Said” is one of the few invisible words in the English language and is almost impossible to overuse. It is much less distracting than “he retorted,” “she inquired,” “he ejaculated,” and other oddities. The term “said-book” comes from certain pamphlets, containing hundreds of purple-prose synonyms for the word “said,” which were sold to aspiring authors from tiny ads in American magazines of the pre-WWII era.

• Tom Swifty

An unseemly compulsion to follow the word “said” with a colorful adverb, as in “‘We’d better hurry,’ Tom said swiftly.” This was a standard mannerism of the old Tom Swift adventure dime-novels. Good dialogue can stand on its own without a clutter of adverbial props.

Part Two: Paragraphs and Prose Structure

• Bathos

A sudden, alarming change in the level of diction. “There will be bloody riots and savage insurrections leading to a violent popular uprising unless the regime starts being lots nicer about stuff.”

• Countersinking

A form of expositional redundancy in which the action clearly implied in dialogue is made explicit. “‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, urging her to leave.”

• Dischism

The unwitting intrusion of the author’s physical surroundings, or the author’s own mental state, into the text of the story. Authors who smoke or drink while writing often drown or choke their characters with an endless supply of booze and cigs. In subtler forms of the Dischism, the characters complain of their confusion and indecision — when this is actually the author’s condition at the moment of writing, not theirs within the story. “Dischism” is named after the critic who diagnosed this syndrome. (Attr. Thomas M. Disch)

• False Humanity

An ailment endemic to genre writing, in which soap-opera elements of purported human interest are stuffed into the story willy-nilly, whether or not they advance the plot or contribute to the point of the story. The actions of such characters convey an itchy sense of irrelevance, for the author has invented their problems out of whole cloth, so as to have something to emote about.

• False Interiorization

A cheap labor-saving technique in which the author, too lazy to describe the surroundings, afflicts the viewpoint-character with a blindfold, an attack of space-sickness, the urge to play marathon whist-games in the smoking-room, etc.

• Fuzz

An element of motivation the author was too lazy to supply. The word “somehow” is a useful tip-off to fuzzy areas of a story. “Somehow she had forgotten to bring her gun.”

• Hand Waving

An attempt to distract the reader with dazzling prose or other verbal fireworks, so as to divert attention from a severe logical flaw. (Attr. Stewart Brand)

• Laughtrack

Characters grandstand and tug the reader’s sleeve in an effort to force a specific emotional reaction. They laugh wildly at their own jokes, cry loudly at their own pain, and rob the reader of any real chance of attaining genuine emotion.

• Show, not Tell

A cardinal principle of effective writing. The reader should be allowed to react naturally to the evidence presented in the story, not instructed in how to react by the author. Specific incidents and carefully observed details will render auctorial lectures unnecessary. For instance, instead of telling the reader “She had a bad childhood, an unhappy childhood,” a specific incident — involving, say, a locked closet and two jars of honey — should be shown.

Rigid adherence to show-don’t-tell can become absurd. Minor matters are sometimes best gotten out of the way in a swift, straightforward fashion.

• Signal from Fred

A comic form of the “Dischism” in which the author’s subconscious, alarmed by the poor quality of the work, makes unwitting critical comments: “This doesn’t make sense.” “This is really boring.” “This sounds like a bad movie.” (Attr. Damon Knight)

• Squid in the Mouth

The failure of an author to realize that his/her own weird assumptions and personal in-jokes are simply not shared by the world-at-large. Instead of applauding the wit or insight of the author’s remarks, the world-at-large will stare in vague shock and alarm at such a writer, as if he or she had a live squid in the mouth.

Since SF writers as a breed are generally quite loony, and in fact make this a stock in trade, “squid in the mouth” doubles as a term of grudging praise, describing the essential, irreducible, divinely unpredictable lunacy of the true SF writer. (Attr. James P Blaylock)

• Squid on the Mantelpiece

Chekhov said that if there are dueling pistols over the mantelpiece in the first act, they should be fired in the third. In other words, a plot element should be deployed in a timely fashion and with proper dramatic emphasis. However, in SF plotting the MacGuffins are often so overwhelming that they cause conventional plot structures to collapse. It’s hard to properly dramatize, say, the domestic effects of Dad’s bank overdraft when a giant writhing kraken is levelling the city. This mismatch between the conventional dramatic proprieties and SF’s extreme, grotesque, or visionary thematics is known as the “squid on the mantelpiece.”

• White Room Syndrome

A clear and common sign of the failure of the author’s imagination, most often seen at the beginning of a story, before the setting, background, or characters have gelled. “She awoke in a white room.” The ‘white room’ is a featureless set for which details have yet to be invented — a failure of invention by the author. The character’wakes’ in order to begin a fresh train of thought — again, just like the author. This ‘white room’ opening is generally followed by much earnest pondering of circumstances and useless exposition; all of which can be cut, painlessly.

It remains to be seen whether the “white room” cliche’ will fade from use now that most authors confront glowing screens rather than blank white paper.

• Wiring Diagram Fiction

A genre ailment related to “False Humanity,” “Wiring Diagram Fiction” involves “characters” who show no convincing emotional reactions at all, since they are overwhelmed by the author’s fascination with gadgetry or didactic lectures.

• You Can’t Fire Me, I Quit

An attempt to defuse the reader’s incredulity with a pre-emptive strike — as if by anticipating the reader’s objections, the author had somehow answered them. “I would never have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it myself!” “It was one of those amazing coincidences that can only take place in real life!” “It’s a one-in-a-million chance, but it’s so crazy it just might work!” Surprisingly common, especially in SF. (Attr. John Kessel)

Part Three: Common Workshop Story Types

• Adam and Eve Story

Nauseatingly common subset of the “Shaggy God Story” in which a terrible apocalypse, spaceship crash, etc., leaves two survivors, man and woman, who turn out to be Adam and Eve, parents of the human race!!

• The Cozy Catastrophe

Story in which horrific events are overwhelming the entirety of human civilization, but the action concentrates on a small group of tidy, middle-class, white Anglo- Saxon protagonists. The essence of the cozy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off. (Attr. Brian Aldiss)

• Dennis Hopper Syndrome

A story based on some arcane bit of science or folklore, which noodles around producing random weirdness. Then a loony character-actor (usually best played by Dennis Hopper) barges into the story and baldly tells the protagonist what’s going on by explaining the underlying mystery in a long bug-eyed rant. (Attr. Howard Waldrop)

• Deus ex Machina or “God in the Box”

Story featuring a miraculous solution to the story’s conflict, which comes out of nowhere and renders the plot struggles irelevant. H G Wells warned against SF’s love for the deus ex machina when he coined the famous dictum that “If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting.” Science fiction, which specializes in making the impossible seem plausible, is always deeply intrigued by godlike powers in the handy pocket size. Artificial Intelligence, virtual realities and nanotechnology are three contemporary SF MacGuffins that are cheap portable sources of limitless miracle.

• The Grubby Apartment Story

Similar to the “poor me” story, this autobiographical effort features a miserably quasi-bohemian writer, living in urban angst in a grubby apartment. The story commonly stars the author’s friends in thin disguises — friends who may also be the author’s workshop companions, to their considerable alarm.

• The Jar of Tang

“For you see, we are all living in a jar of Tang!” or “For you see, I am a dog!” A story contrived so that the author can spring a silly surprise about its setting. Mainstay of the old Twilight Zone TV show. An entire pointless story contrived so the author can cry “Fooled you!” For instance, the story takes place in a desert of coarse orange sand surrounded by an impenetrable vitrine barrier; surprise! our heroes are microbes in a jar of Tang powdered orange drink.

This is a classic case of the difference between a conceit and an idea. “What if we all lived in a jar of Tang?” is an example of the former; “What if the revolutionaries from the sixties had been allowed to set up their own society?” is an example of the latter. Good SF requires ideas, not conceits. (Attr. Stephen P. Brown)

When done with serious intent rather than as a passing conceit, this type of story can be dignified by the term “Concealed Environment.” (Attr. Christopher Priest)

• Just-Like Fallacy

SF story which thinly adapts the trappings of a standard pulp adventure setting. The spaceship is “just like” an Atlantic steamer, down to the Scottish engineer in the hold. A colony planet is “just like” Arizona except for two moons in the sky. “Space Westerns” and futuristic hard-boiled detective stories have been especially common versions.

• The Kitchen-Sink Story

A story overwhelmed by the inclusion of any and every new idea that occurs to the author in the process of writing it. (Attr. Damon Knight)

• The Motherhood Statement

SF story which posits some profoundly unsettling threat to the human condition, explores the implications briefly, then hastily retreats to affirm the conventional social and humanistic pieties, ie apple pie and motherhood. Greg Egan once stated that the secret of truly effective SF was to deliberately “burn the motherhood statement.” (Attr. Greg Egan)

• The “Poor Me” Story

Autobiographical piece in which the male viewpoint character complains that he is ugly and can’t get laid. (Attr. Kate Wilhelm)

• Re-Inventing the Wheel

A novice author goes to enormous lengths to create a science-fictional situation already tiresomely familiar to the experienced reader. Reinventing the Wheel was traditionally typical of mainstream writers venturing into SF. It is now often seen in writers who lack experience in genre history because they were attracted to written SF via SF movies, SF television series, SF role-playing games, SF comics or SF computer gaming.

• The Rembrandt Comic Book

A story in which incredible craftsmanship has been lavished on a theme or idea which is basically trivial or subliterary, and which simply cannot bear the weight of such deadly-serious artistic portent.

• The Shaggy God Story

A piece which mechanically adopts a Biblical or other mythological tale and provides flat science-fictional “explanations” for the theological events. (Brian Aldiss)

• The Slipstream Story

Non-SF story which is so ontologically distorted or related in such a bizarrely non-realist fashion that it cannot pass muster as commercial mainstream fiction and therefore seeks shelter in the SF or fantasy genre. Postmodern critique and technique are particularly fruitful in creating slipstream stories.

• The Steam-Grommet Factory

Didactic SF story which consists entirely of a guided tour of a large and elaborate gimmick. A common technique of SF utopias and dystopias. (Attr. Gardner Dozois)

• The Tabloid Weird

Story produced by a confusion of SF and Fantasy tropes — or rather, by a confusion of basic world-views. Tabloid Weird is usually produced by the author’s own inability to distinguish between a rational, Newtonian-Einsteinian, cause-and- effect universe and an irrational, supernatural, fantastic universe. Either the FBI is hunting the escaped mutant from the genetics lab, or the drill-bit has bored straight into Hell — but not both at once in the very same piece of fiction. Even fantasy worlds need an internal consistency of sorts, so that a Sasquatch Deal-with-the-Devil story is also “Tabloid Weird.” Sasquatch crypto-zoology and Christian folk superstition simply don’t mix well, even for comic effect. (Attr. Howard Waldrop)

• The Whistling Dog

A story related in such an elaborate, arcane, or convoluted manner that it impresses by its sheer narrative ingenuity, but which, as a story, is basically not worth the candle. Like the whistling dog, it’s astonishing that the thing can whistle — but it doesn’t actually whistle very well. (Attr. Harlan Ellison)

Part Four: Plots

• Abbess Phone Home

Takes its name from a mainstream story about a medieval cloister which was sold as SF because of the serendipitous arrival of a UFO at the end. By extension, any mainstream story with a gratuitous SF or fantasy element tacked on so it could be sold.

• And plot

Picaresque plot in which this happens, and then that happens, and then something else happens, and it all adds up to nothing in particular.

• Bogus Alternatives

List of actions a character could have taken, but didn’t. Frequently includes all the reasons why. In this nervous mannerism, the author stops the action dead to work out complicated plot problems at the reader’s expense. “If I’d gone along with the cops they would have found the gun in my purse. And anyway, I didn’t want to spend the night in jail. I suppose I could have just run instead of stealing their car, but then … ” etc. Best dispensed with entirely.

• Card Tricks in the Dark

Elaborately contrived plot which arrives at (a) the punchline of a private joke no reader will get or (b) the display of some bit of learned trivia relevant only to the author. This stunt may be intensely ingenious, and very gratifying to the author, but it serves no visible fictional purpose. (Attr. Tim Powers)

• Idiot Plot

A plot which functions only because all the characters involved are idiots. They behave in a way that suits the author’s convenience, rather than through any rational motivation of their own. (Attr. James Blish)

• Kudzu plot

Plot which weaves and curls and writhes in weedy organic profusion, smothering everything in its path.

• Plot Coupons

The basic building blocks of the quest-type fantasy plot. The “hero” collects sufficient plot coupons (magic sword, magic book, magic cat) to send off to the author for the ending. Note that “the author” can be substituted for “the Gods” in such a work: “The Gods decreed he would pursue this quest.” Right, mate. The author decreed he would pursue this quest until sufficient pages were filled to procure an advance. (Nick Lowe)

• Second-order Idiot Plot

A plot involving an entire invented SF society which functions only because every single person in it is necessarily an idiot. (Attr. Damon Knight)

Part Five: Background

• “As You Know Bob”

A pernicious form of info-dump through dialogue, in which characters tell each other things they already know, for the sake of getting the reader up-to-speed. This very common technique is also known as “Rod
and Don dialogue” (attr. Damon Knight) or “maid and butler dialogue” (attr Algis Budrys).

• The Edges of Ideas

The solution to the “Info-Dump” problem (how to fill in the background). The theory is that, as above, the mechanics of an interstellar drive (the center of the idea) is not important: all that matters is the impact on your characters: they can get to other planets in a few months, and, oh yeah, it gives them hallucinations about past lives. Or, more radically: the physics of TV transmission is the center of an idea; on the edges of it we find people turning into couch potatoes because they no longer have to leave home for entertainment. Or, more bluntly: we don’t need info dump at all. We just need a clear picture of how people’s lives have been affected by their background. This is also known as “carrying extrapolation into the fabric of daily life.”

• Eyeball Kick

Vivid, telling details that create a kaleidoscopic effect of swarming visual imagery against a baroquely elaborate SF background. One ideal of cyberpunk SF was to create a “crammed prose” full of “eyeball kicks.” (Attr. Rudy Rucker)

• Frontloading

Piling too much exposition into the beginning of the story, so that it becomes so dense and dry that it is almost impossible to read. (Attr. Connie Willis)

• Infodump

Large chunk of indigestible expository matter intended to explain the background situation. Info-dumps can be covert, as in fake newspaper or “Encyclopedia Galactica” articles, or overt, in which all action stops as the author assumes center stage and lectures. Info-dumps are also known as “expository lumps.” The use of brief, deft, inoffensive info-dumps is known as “kuttnering,” after Henry Kuttner. When information is worked unobtrusively into the story’s basic structure, this is known as “heinleining.”

• “I’ve suffered for my Art” (and now it’s your turn)

A form of info-dump in which the author inflicts upon the reader hard-won, but irrelevant bits of data acquired while researching the story. As Algis Budrys once pointed out, homework exists to make the difficult look easy.

• Nowhere Nowhen Story

Putting too little exposition into the story’s beginning, so that the story, while physically readable, seems to take place in a vacuum and fails to engage any readerly interest. (Attr. L. Sprague de Camp)

• Ontological riff

Passage in an SF story which suggests that our deepest and most basic convictions about the nature of reality, space-time, or consciousness have been violated, technologically transformed, or at least rendered thoroughly dubious. The works of H. P. Lovecraft, Barrington Bayley, and Philip K Dick abound in “ontological riffs.”

• Space Western

The most pernicious suite of “Used Furniture”. The grizzled space captain swaggering into the spacer bar and slugging down a Jovian brandy, then laying down a few credits for a space hooker to give him a Galactic Rim Job.

• Stapeldon

Name assigned to the voice which takes center stage to lecture. Actually a common noun, as: “You have a Stapledon come on to answer this problem instead of showing the characters resolve it.”

• Used Furniture

Use of a background out of Central Casting. Rather than invent a background and have to explain it, or risk re-inventing the wheel, let’s just steal one. We’ll set it in the Star Trek Universe, only we’ll call it the Empire instead of the Federation.

Part Six: Character and Viewpoint

• Funny-hat characterization

A character distinguished by a single identifying tag, such as odd headgear, a limp, a lisp, a parrot on his shoulder, etc.

• Mrs. Brown

The small, downtrodden, eminently common, everyday little person who nevertheless encapsulates something vital and important about the human condition. “Mrs. Brown” is a rare personage in the SF genre, being generally overshadowed by swaggering submyth types made of the finest gold-plated cardboard. In a famous essay, “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” Ursula K. Le Guin decried Mrs. Brown’s absence from the SF field. (Attr: Virginia Woolf)

• Submyth

Classic character-types in SF which aspire to the condition of archetype but don’t quite make it, such as the mad scientist, the crazed supercomputer, the emotionless super-rational alien, the vindictive mutant child, etc. (Attr. Ursula K. Le Guin)

• Viewpoint glitch

The author loses track of point-of-view, switches point-of-view for no good reason, or relates something that the viewpoint character could not possibly know.

Part Seven: Miscellaneous

• AM/FM

Engineer’s term distinguishing the inevitable clunky real-world faultiness of “Actual Machines” from the power-fantasy techno-dreams of “Fucking Magic.”

• Consensus Reality

Useful term for the purported world in which the majority of modern sane people generally agree that they live — as opposed to the worlds of, say, Forteans, semioticians or quantum physicists.

• Intellectual sexiness

The intoxicating glamor of a novel scientific idea, as distinguished from any actual intellectual merit that it may someday prove to possess.

• The Ol’ Baloney Factory

“Science Fiction” as a publishing and promotional entity in the world of commerce.

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.