(no subject)

[stakebait]

Thank you, whoever nominated my story Charades for the Angel Without Wings awards!

You know what the problem with “sucky first drafts” is? Second drafts. I recently read truepenny on habits of thought that no longer work, and am now wondering if the issue I had with writing workshops was a bit beside the point. They seemed to think every story can be fixed and every story needs fixing, whereas I wanted to leave well alone with the best and scrap the worst and start over. But while I still think they fell down on teaching when to revise, they do teach how to revise. If I’d just gone into it for what I wanted out of it and ignored the rest, I might be better at this now. I’m okay at tidying up the mechanics, but the Big Rethink that might save a fair but flawed? Not so much.

Its fine enough to just toss a short story that’s not working and try another one, but it’d be maddening to do over and over with novels after a hundred pages or so. And since part of the reason I’ve been trying short stories is to practice for novels, I really should try to adopt a plan that will scale up.

Which means I’ve also got to break myself of the habit of editing a story through from the beginning to wherever I left off each time before I add anything new. This takes long enough with the last few scenes of a 10,000 word story – at 100,000 it’ll be completely unworkable. And it also means that the beginning of any story of mine is edited many times more than the end. OTOH, I am superstitiously reluctant to mess with anything that's working at all.

Comments

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

I'm selfishly glad it's Not Just Me, though I'm sorry you had to kick the habit too. :) I'd never heard anyone mention this particular revision kink before. The last few pp might actually be okay, or even the last chapter, since it's more smoothing than heavy revision. I'm in the habit of starting with page one, paragraph one, which is slow enough at 25 pages that I can see 225 will be Right Out.

If workshops don't really get past the sentence level then I didn't miss as much as I feared. I'm okay at the sentence level -- which is not to say I have nothing to learn, or anything, but especially with the help of a beta, I'm at a place I'm comfy with, for the moment at least.

It's that bit with the table that you're talking about that I don't seem to know how to do, or even how to go about learning. Are there workshops just for that? At least, sometimes I think I get it right, but when I get it wrong I often can't figure out how to fix it even when I know where it's broken.

(Beyond practice, of course. I've grasped that that seems to be the answer to most writing questions, but I don't want to practice the wrong thing if I can help it, and then have to train myself out of it again.)

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Long reply eaten. Warning from LJ gods not to devolve into whinging. Short answer: thanks!

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Hee! I shall try again to at least summarize my long comment of yesterday, then.

Basically, I don't mind wasting the time writing junk. What I don't want to do is waste the idea, because if it's an idea for something as time consuming as a novel, I'm already in love with it.

Plus it's hard for me to believe in the freedom of sucky first drafts when I know my track record for unsuckifying in rewrite is so limited. The better my salvage skills become, the more I'll be able to relax into the reality of "you can always fix it later." That's the hope, anyway.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Dude, I would so totally take that class, you have no idea.

Hmmmm. If there were enough of us interested, I wonder if we could get a group together to do it online, and then go hunting for a teacher -- an editor might be as good or better than a more experienced writer for that kind of thing.

[gwynnega]

Are there workshops just for that?

I've been in a fair number of workshops, and most of 'em mostly focus on line-edits. At my most recent workshop in my MFA program, though, the teacher mostly eschewed line edits in favor of more sweeping stuff, and I think most of the students in the class were wildly grateful (I know I was) and felt like they got way more out of the workshop than is the norm. Of course it helped that the teacher was insightful about what we each needed to work on. It would be awful to have a teacher suggest sweeping changes if they were the WRONG changes...

[gwynnega]

Yes, and it's a shame - because workshops are most useful when they combine the two approaches, depending on what's needed. (I.e., why spend half an hour on how to polish a section that should just get chucked out?)

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Dunno about Gwynnega but my experience matches that. Also I think it's easier to line edit as you go. Big Stuff often required a full read through, a pause to get enough distance to see it in perspective, another read, and maybe a conversation -- and people in classes often don't have/take that time with each one.

Big stuff is also much easier if you can get in sympathy with what the story is trying to accomplish. In my workshops, there were so many stories so alien to me that I wouldn't have trusted myself beyond the turn of phrase level, because for me to like it it would have to be turned into some other story altogether, and I lacked enough context to tell whether that is exactly the feedback they needed, or whether it simply wasn't meant to be the kind of story I would ever like.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

?

Just kidding. :) And feel free to rant. It's entertaining.

[gwynnega]

Personally, I've never felt timid about suggesting structural changes in workshops. I know there have been times when I've said stuff like, "It really starts on page five," or "I was with you until page ten and then you lost me, and here's why." I can recall other people coming up with similar comments in my MFA workshops, but the line edit stuff is definitely more prevalent. I don't know if that's because the structural stuff is perceived as more threatening to the author or if it's just more of a mindset, a sense that that's what they're supposed to be focusing on. Sometimes, too, it may be harder to verbalize what's not working with a story on a macro level.

[gwynnega]

I could be snerky -- well, only half-snerky -- and say that I think it's harder to make crits on a macro level unless you've read the story 2-3 times to get a good idea of its structure and that's not that likely during workshop, altho that again might only indicate the crappy quality of workshops I was unlucky enough to be in

No, it's quite true - and I've been as guilty as the next person of not reading workshop stuff as thoroughly as I should. Which is why I think one-on-one critiques and more informal workshops among like-minded individuals (who are more likely to spend enough time actually reading the work) are generally more useful. Though a really good teacher can make all the difference in a workshop...

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly. Not that micro's not worth working on, but macro's what I need the help with. I can turn phrases till the cows come home, but a pile of pretty bricks is not a house.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

*nods* Well a class on how to outline wouldn't hurt me any. I don't bother for short stories, but again, trying to scale up. I've got a top level outline for my novel, but it doesn't go scene-by-scene, and I'm not sure whether I really can outline to that amount of detail in advance -- though I do know that figuring out what has to be on-staged and what can be off staged is part of this skill I'm trying to develop, so that I don't have to flail at the end of every scene until I intuit what the next should be.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

It would be awful to have a teacher suggest sweeping changes if they were the WRONG changes...

Hee! This is true. Though I think if that were the main focus, the discussion of how to tell if you need sweeping changes, identifying the problem, and what types of changes might work for which problems would be enlightening even if their particular solution didn't pan out.

But that requires the teacher to break down their thought process of what the story needs into why, which could be tricky if it's mostly unconscious reflex, what "just feels right," rather than conscious logic.