Learning to Plow
"We all wish we could get it right the first time. You must throw up in the morning and clean up at noon." ~ Ray Bradbury
Since deciding that being a writer was to be my lot in life, I've always had the drive to finish the things I start. It often took me a long time to start anything, but once I started, I always finished. This is partly due to having a little voice in my mind that has never failed to remind me of the yet-to-be-completed manuscript that required some of my attention. This voice is commonly known as Anxiety, and the desire to silence it, or at the very least keep it in check, has always served as a partial motivation for writing.
However, in those early days, the only thing I seemed capable of producing was the first draft of anything. Once the first unexamined, imperfect, unpolished version of any story was out of my head, that was it. I never wanted to do anything else with it. It was dead to me, a memory I had no desire to relive.
George Orwell, in his essay "Why I Write," famously said, "Writing a book is a horrible exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness." For me, that's what writing those first drafts was like: suffering from some painful illness. However, it wasn't long before I came down with another case of it, hence the other half of this famous passage: "One would not undertake such a thing if one were not compelled by some demon one can neither resist nor understand." Whether I liked it or not, I was becoming compelled to write. Once one thing was done, no matter how shabby an effort it was, I went on to something else.
I'll admit there was also an element of laziness to this as well (a trait Orwell claims is universal among all writers, along with vanity and selfishness). For a long time, I thought that I would eventually learn to get whatever story I had in my head down on the page the first time. All I had to do was keep writing. This wasn't to be the case though. I was not a Harlan Ellison, who could do that. I was like most writers; I had to plow shit before I could get my beautiful garden.
Still, there was another element to it, and that was my distrust of Workshopping and Feedback. Part of it was ego driven, absolutely. The first time I went to a workshop, I left the room nearly in tears, for I'd made the fatal mistake of thinking that workshopping was--to put it bluntly--a circle-jerk, with everyone telling each other how brilliant they were. Workshops weren't that though. They were places where you went to get feedback to help improve your work. That feedback could range from the use of a single word, inconsistencies in characterization, or major story events and structural elements.
In those early days though, I couldn't take any kind of criticism. Even once my skin had thickened enough to understand that, however, they still didn't seem to initially work for me. The instructors I had were not forceful people who kept a tight reign on how long people could talk. So the enumeration of every perceived fault often went on to the point where you left the room thinking you were hopeless. You couldn't tell what really worked or didn't, nor did you leave with any sense that the piece you'd submitted was worth the effort to revise. Why this happened is simple: the criticism steadily became less about what they objectively and technically felt didn't work or needed fixing in the story and more about what they subjectively didn't like about the story. It devolved from actual criticism to subjective opinion.
So, I avoided Workshops. I became hellbent on not getting an MFA. If Graduate Workshops were anything like the Undergrad Workshops, they were to be avoided. I didn't even show my work to anyone for nearly three years.
Nonetheless, I kept writing. I couldn't stop. I thought, one day, one day, I'll figure this out.
My tool-set though was incomplete. I couldn't tell if something worked or not. Only a reader can. A writer can never assess their own work in this way because we always know more than the readers. A reader's objective and innocent viewpoint however can tell you what you've failed to include, to explain clearly, or what you've over done.
I felt like I was floundering. I became desperate for a feedback loop. If I was going to get one though, it had to be a good one, or more accurately, a helpful one.
To that end, I applied--and eventually--attended the James E. Gunn Center for The Study of Science Fiction's Speculative Fiction Writing Workshop (or the CSSF), in Lawrence, Kansas.
Truthfully, I was actually shotgunning it. The CSSF was one of four workshops I applied for. The others were called Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey. Each was noted as being a great place to improve your craft, do a lot of writing, and get good feedback. In the end, I got into the CSSF, and in the space of two weeks I learned a number of things that have become of my critical vocabulary which will help me in my future. I'll go into my experiences at the Workshop in a future post, but a few of the things I learned included:
1. Cutting "Filter" & "Stutter" Words (they bog do sentence and distance readers from the characters)
2. Finding the "Heart" of your story
3. Writing Opening Sentences that "Hook" readers
4. Writing Closing Sentences that Echo the opening
5. Learning to think of Revision as "The Time where you get to look like a Genius"
6. What Good Critical Feedback is (What works, what doesn't, how it might be fixed, and that's it)
7. Writing a good story means being a Sadist towards your Characters (I was evidently too nice)
8. The Balancing Act between Showing and Telling (when and how to do each)
9. An objective assessment of your personal strengths and weaknesses as a writer
That's quite a bit to learn in two weeks. The most important period in the workshop for me personally was the weekend between weeks one and two. During that time, we were all tasked with revising one of the first two stories we'd had workshopped that first week so we could resubmit it and get another round of feedback on the new draft.
I chose my first story (which, I personally I thought was the most hopeless one of the three, hence why it was the first one workshopped. "First is the worst, second is the best.").
The criticism I got was mainly structural. I had all of these extra scenes in the story that distracted readers from the story's heart. So they had to go. The story shrank from 37 pages and 7000 (or so) words to 13 pages and about 3000 words. (Yes, you read that correctly). And, it improved the story. the story I wanted to tell was still there, but now, it was actually focused and readable.
In hindsight, almost two months removed from those experiences now, however, the most important thing I learned beyond enjoying the process of revision was this (and this is my own metaphor for it that I used earlier):
You Have to Plow Shit Before You Get a Beautiful Garden.
As I said in a previous essay, the hardest part of the writing process for me is the first draft. It was a slog for me in my early days, and it remains a slog for me today. The difference now, however, is that I now have not only the confidence and self-knowledge to know that all first drafts suck, but also the skill and critical acumen to improve what's there.
That first draft is a manure pile that will nourish the soil of your story idea, and the more you plow it, the more you work at it, the better your story can be. There must be something to work first though. Even if that thing is a pile of shit on a plot of dirt, you can make it into something beautiful, something good. You just have to be willing to plow it.
In those early days though, I couldn't take any kind of criticism. Even once my skin had thickened enough to understand that, however, they still didn't seem to initially work for me. The instructors I had were not forceful people who kept a tight reign on how long people could talk. So the enumeration of every perceived fault often went on to the point where you left the room thinking you were hopeless. You couldn't tell what really worked or didn't, nor did you leave with any sense that the piece you'd submitted was worth the effort to revise. Why this happened is simple: the criticism steadily became less about what they objectively and technically felt didn't work or needed fixing in the story and more about what they subjectively didn't like about the story. It devolved from actual criticism to subjective opinion.
So, I avoided Workshops. I became hellbent on not getting an MFA. If Graduate Workshops were anything like the Undergrad Workshops, they were to be avoided. I didn't even show my work to anyone for nearly three years.
Nonetheless, I kept writing. I couldn't stop. I thought, one day, one day, I'll figure this out.
My tool-set though was incomplete. I couldn't tell if something worked or not. Only a reader can. A writer can never assess their own work in this way because we always know more than the readers. A reader's objective and innocent viewpoint however can tell you what you've failed to include, to explain clearly, or what you've over done.
I felt like I was floundering. I became desperate for a feedback loop. If I was going to get one though, it had to be a good one, or more accurately, a helpful one.
To that end, I applied--and eventually--attended the James E. Gunn Center for The Study of Science Fiction's Speculative Fiction Writing Workshop (or the CSSF), in Lawrence, Kansas.
Truthfully, I was actually shotgunning it. The CSSF was one of four workshops I applied for. The others were called Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey. Each was noted as being a great place to improve your craft, do a lot of writing, and get good feedback. In the end, I got into the CSSF, and in the space of two weeks I learned a number of things that have become of my critical vocabulary which will help me in my future. I'll go into my experiences at the Workshop in a future post, but a few of the things I learned included:
1. Cutting "Filter" & "Stutter" Words (they bog do sentence and distance readers from the characters)
2. Finding the "Heart" of your story
3. Writing Opening Sentences that "Hook" readers
4. Writing Closing Sentences that Echo the opening
5. Learning to think of Revision as "The Time where you get to look like a Genius"
6. What Good Critical Feedback is (What works, what doesn't, how it might be fixed, and that's it)
7. Writing a good story means being a Sadist towards your Characters (I was evidently too nice)
8. The Balancing Act between Showing and Telling (when and how to do each)
9. An objective assessment of your personal strengths and weaknesses as a writer
That's quite a bit to learn in two weeks. The most important period in the workshop for me personally was the weekend between weeks one and two. During that time, we were all tasked with revising one of the first two stories we'd had workshopped that first week so we could resubmit it and get another round of feedback on the new draft.
I chose my first story (which, I personally I thought was the most hopeless one of the three, hence why it was the first one workshopped. "First is the worst, second is the best.").
The criticism I got was mainly structural. I had all of these extra scenes in the story that distracted readers from the story's heart. So they had to go. The story shrank from 37 pages and 7000 (or so) words to 13 pages and about 3000 words. (Yes, you read that correctly). And, it improved the story. the story I wanted to tell was still there, but now, it was actually focused and readable.
In hindsight, almost two months removed from those experiences now, however, the most important thing I learned beyond enjoying the process of revision was this (and this is my own metaphor for it that I used earlier):
You Have to Plow Shit Before You Get a Beautiful Garden.
As I said in a previous essay, the hardest part of the writing process for me is the first draft. It was a slog for me in my early days, and it remains a slog for me today. The difference now, however, is that I now have not only the confidence and self-knowledge to know that all first drafts suck, but also the skill and critical acumen to improve what's there.
That first draft is a manure pile that will nourish the soil of your story idea, and the more you plow it, the more you work at it, the better your story can be. There must be something to work first though. Even if that thing is a pile of shit on a plot of dirt, you can make it into something beautiful, something good. You just have to be willing to plow it.
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