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F&FW: The Feedback Problem [3/10]

July 29, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

Here’s the nightmare in a nutshell. You kill yourself writing a story. It’s the best you can do. You have your opinions about it, but you need to know what others think so you solicit responses from a few readers, and invariably some of them disagree with your own assessment of the work.

Now what? If there’s no objective way to determine who’s subjective opinion is correct, your tendency will probably be to think you’re right, which puts you back where you started. Alternatively, if you’re have little self-esteem or self-confidence, you may assume your readers are right about everything, but that’s just blindness in another guise.

To make matters much worse, if you’re a beginning writer, all of this uncertainty gets magnified by a bazillion. Why? Because you and your readers have no craft knowledge in common which you can use to discuss your opinions. Whatever your ability as a nascent writer, the work you produce will necessarily be driven by a mix of native gifts and capacity for mimicry, rather than by craft-based decisions. If your readers are also new to the craft of storytelling, their responses will also be devoid of craft: “I didn’t like it,” or “I didn’t get it,” or “I wanted more,” etc. And even if you’re lucky enough to have experienced readers, how are you going to know how to respond to or judge their feedback if you don’t share their level of craft knowledge?

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: crit, critique, feedback, Fiction, workshop, writer

F&FW: Feedback Matters [2/10]

July 28, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

Learning how to approach and navigate the feedback process is so critical to being a writer I cannot overstate the case. You may be the most talented author in the world but if you cannot hear what others are saying about your work then you are writing blind. As an example of how emotionally charged the feedback process can be, some of you reading this post are already having a hard time hearing what I’m saying because you think I’m suggesting some sort of implicit collaboration between author and reader. Worse, some of you may think I’m advocating creative capitulation, in which authors pander to their audience or limit their own literary intentions and aspirations for the sake of more reliable communication.

To be clear, learning how to give and take feedback has nothing to do with giving the audience control of your work. If you want to write for a particular market that’s your business and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you like writing mysteries, you know you’re going to have to have a body show up sooner or later — and preferably sooner. On the other hand, if what you want to write is almost pure experimentation, for which there may be, at most, a world-wide audience of ten people, then by all means go for it.

What I am talking about here is the inescapable fact that feedback from others is the only way you can reliably know whether you are or are not on course toward your creative objective, regardless what that objective is. Authors listen to feedback for the same reason that sailors listen to fog horns. The problem for authors, however, is that you have to figure out which fog horns are telling the truth.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: crit, critique, feedback, Fiction, workshop, writer

Feedback and Fiction Workshops [1/10]

July 28, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

You’re a writer. You’ve written a story. You’ve rewritten. You’ve agonized. You’ve edited ruthlessly. You’ve proofread until you’re blind. Your story is as good as you can make it.

Assuming you intend your story to be read, and regardless of your established level of skill, the next step is to find out if you hit the literary target you were aiming at. If you wrote a comic novel, you need to find out if your story makes people laugh. If you wrote a thriller, you need to know if readers are thrilled. If it’s a literary piece, you need to find out if you walked the knife edge of current trends, cultural commentary and authorial style without cutting yourself to pretentious pieces.

That you cannot know these things without in some way appealing to others is what drives authors to drink themselves to death. Whatever level of skill you have, you will always have doubts and convictions about any story you write, and as you grow in skill those judgments will tend to be more reliable. It will never be the case, however, that you will know for certain what you have accomplished until others read your work.

This is the inherent nightmare of storytelling, particularly as compared with art that can be apprehended by the eye. Not only is the creative process entirely subjective, but because writing is a form of intended communication, confirmation of one’s literary accuracy can only come from a reader’s own subjective response.

Despite an abundance of rules governing spelling, usage, grammar, syntax, structure and style, in the end there are no rules. If what you want to accomplish in your story means ‘aardvark’ needs to be spelled ‘advak’, then you do it. You have the freedom — even the responsibility — to do so. This plasticity, however, means that there are no objective standards by which fiction can be judged. If your main character’s name is Wanda in Chapter 1, and Wendy in Chapter 2, you’ve probably made a mistake — and that probability rises dramatically if you’re still learning your craft. But as your authorial talents and aspirations grow in complexity, the low-hanging fruit that can be easily spotted by any reader falls away, leaving complex and inherently murky subjective issues that need to be wrestled with.

In an upcoming series of posts about feedback and workshops, I’ll get into the complexities of the process, and how any writer can make the most of what is an inherently difficult situation.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: crit, critique, feedback, Fiction, workshop, writer

My Fiction Workshop Fortunes

July 26, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

The capacity to tell stories is an accident of birth for me. I was born thinking this way. There was no point in my life when I did not think about stories and causal events, about humorous and dramatic ways in which events could be told, and about how a blank page could be filled with wonder. If I have wandered far and wide, and been driven, seduced or called away from writing in my life, I have always returned to a string of authorial stepping stones that connects my past with the future before me.

Actually becoming a writer — by which I do not mean a professional, but rather a practicing writer — is a combination of accident and intent. The more things go in your favor, the easier it is to harness gifts and put words to a page. The more things go against you, the more you must overcome. Whatever obstacles I’ve faced in life, I was born with a number of storytelling gifts. I also happened to be born and raised in a town that is home to a school that values fiction writing. That I neither knew nor cared about these things until I went to college is yet more evidence that the fates were being kind.

My Home Town School
By nature I am not a particularly adventurous person. I have tended most of my life to look before I leap, even when others have counseled that he who hesitates is lost. So it should not come as a surprise that when I finally decided to go to college, after considerable academic carnage in my high school career, I had no thought of going anywhere except to the school in my home town. It wouldn’t have mattered what college it was, or what town I had been born in: that’s what I would have done at that point in my life, and probably for a decade after. (It’s true that my grandmother, father, mother, aunt and uncle also went to the same university, but that’s not why I went. I went because it was familiar and close.)

That I was born in and grew up in Iowa City, Iowa, is an accident. That Iowa City is the home of the University of Iowa, which is the home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is also an accident. I planned none of it, yet when I finally decided to wade into storytelling, after more academic carnage in college, the Workshop was there.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Fiction, Iowa, Rust Hills, workshop, writers

Optimizing Fiction Workshop Submissions

July 16, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

For the purpose of this post I’m going to break all writing workshops into two groups. In the first group are workshops taken by writers who are learning craft. People in these workshops, whether students in a formal sense or like-minded individuals sharing a passion, are primarily interested in improving their writing skill. In the second group are workshops populated by seasoned writers who already have a solid understanding of craft. These workshops primarily help authors determine whether their fiction is functioning as intended.

To the extent that writers are always learning, and that all writers want their work to be successful, there is obviously some overlap between these two groups. Rather than argue any pure distinction, I will simply note that this post concerns writers who are primarily interested in learning the craft of storytelling, and who are taking workshops that support that objective.

Uncontrollable Variables
There are a number of factors that can help or hinder the rate at which you learn the craft of storytelling. Here are three aspects of any workshop that are outside your direct control:

Workshop Leadership
If the person running your workshop does not know how to moderate such a group, or if they lack the ability to articulate craft issues, the workshop will necessarily suffer.

Workshop Sophistication
The more experience workshop members have at giving feedback, the better the feedback will be. Better feedback — by which I mean more craft-focused feedback — will necessarily improve your understanding of craft.

Authorial Ability
Every writer learns at their own rate, and that rate is not consistent. (Think fits and starts rather than steady growth.) Other than writing as much as you can and participating in workshops, there’s not much you can do to speed the rate at which you learn. There is no crash course.

At best you might hope to control for two of these variables by asking other writers for recommendations, but in general you simply have to trust the fates to even things out over time. What these inevitable uncertainties should encourage you to do, however, is put a premium on variables you can control.   [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Fiction, short stories, workshop, writer, writing

The Truth About Typos

July 14, 2010 By Mark 6 Comments

They always win.

Always.

Yes, you can catch most of them if you try. If you’re the sporting sort you can hunt them down like the dogs they are and wipe them out with glee.

Sooner or later, however, one of them will survive long enough to make a fool of you.

[ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: typos

A Fiction Workshop Primer

July 12, 2010 By Mark 6 Comments

In the previous post I said the entire point of a writing workshop is that it provides the best means by which an author can determine whether or not they’re hitting the literary target they’re aiming at. Because it’s so easy to go blind to one’s own work there is nothing more useful between conception and publication than feedback that tells a writer whether they are on or off their intended course. A workshop can provide that feedback.

The mechanics of the standard fiction/writing workshop are simple. There are variations and permutations, of course — some of which I comment on below, or will deal with in later posts — but the basics have been remarkably consistent over time.

Workshop Mechanics and Process
The general idea in a fiction workshop is that members take turns submitting (or ‘putting up’) stories for review by the workshop as a whole. The expectation is that each author will do as much as they can to perfect the story they’re working on before it reaches the workshop. In this way the workshop’s feedback advances the author’s knowledge as much as possible.

In advance of each meeting the leader of the workshop asks for volunteers to put up stories for the next gathering. Because writers are a skittish lot, and because fiction often dictates its own pace, trying to schedule individuals into slots that will be available weeks or months ahead usually does not work.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Fiction, reading, short story, workshop, writer, writing

Understanding Fiction Workshops

July 7, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

There is so much cultural lore and publishing cachet attached to fiction workshops these days it’s hard to remember that workshops exist to server a utilitarian, craft-driven purpose. Leaving aside questions about the quality of a particular workshop, the history of a given program, or any famous alumni or participants who attended or currently participate, workshops as a process are important to writers because they provide useful and timely feedback that cannot be replicated in any other way.

Again, with emphasis: a fiction workshop is a tool that has proven useful to authors. Workshops exist to serve the needs of writers at a critical time, often at the end of a first, full, good-as-you-can-get-it draft, and not the other way around. If you are smart — and by smart I mean genuinely committed to learning your craft as a means of expressing your art — you will never, ever forget that. If you are not smart you will embrace workshops as a social destination, as an artistic echo chamber, as a church, or as a market. (I’ll have more to say about all that in a subsequent post.)

Just as a ratchet both solves and speeds the problem of turning a nut or bolt, a writing workshop is, in theory, the best possible way for a writer to determine if the words they wrote hit or missed the literary target they were aiming at. I say “in theory” because there are always ways in which a workshop can fail a writer in this quest. I say “best possible” because any other mechanism (and believe me, they’ve all been tried) inevitably introduces even more potential for confusion, error and abuse.

The reason a fiction workshop works, and generally works better than any other method of settling the question of authorial intent and accuracy, is the same reason that any broad-based sampling works. By providing more responses to the author, outliers are marginalized and there is at least the possibility that an informative consensus may emerge. As it was put to me in my very first workshop (paraphrasing):

If ten people (out a workshop-normal fifteen or sixteen) agree on a particular concern, it’s probably something you should take a look at.

And that’s it. The super-mystical reason why workshops are valuable is because they help authors focus on what worked and what didn’t work, and no other process provides the same kind of debate and response. The best you might do otherwise would be to send your work to fifteen people yourself, then compare the responses, but that would cost you considerably more time while precluding any discussion among the respondents.

Obviously, frequent participation in writing workshops may help speed the overall development of a writer simply because feedback can be delivered and processed faster and in a more concentrated way. This does not mean, however, that workshop-centric writers are better, or that participating in workshops is necessary for a writer to be able to grow.

The only way to know if a writing workshop will be helpful to you is to try one. In the next post I’ll talk about how workshops work and how you can get the most out of one.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Fiction, short story, workshop, writer, writing

Scrutinizing Third Person, Present Tense POV

July 5, 2010 By Mark 15 Comments

When I first started telling stories almost all third-person fiction (and first-person for that matter) was written in the past tense:

Carlos went into the dealership and looked around. He knew the salespeople would descend on him soon, and it was all he could do to stand his ground.

Past tense means the events happened some time ago, and you’re writing about them as such. The story already happened, and you’re telling it to someone at a later time.

For fifty years prior to my own apprenticeship, everyone who had any interest in telling stories also secretly aspired to writing the Great American Novel. You weren’t a real writer if you didn’t have an unfinished novel in your desk.

At about the same time that I was learning my craft, however, something was happening in Hollywood that would change all that. Directors like Coppola and Spielberg and Lucas were breaking out of the classic Hollywood production pipeline and bringing wildly entertaining and successful movies to the screen. The documents they worked from — the scripts — were also becoming literary properties in themselves. Writers were starting to sell scripts outright, and some of those scripts were selling for what anybody would call a chunk of money.

Almost overnight — by which I mean the five year span between the early and late 1980’s — writers went from having novels in their desks to having screenplays in their desks. When Syd Field published a book called Screenplay the gold rush was on.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Fiction, screenwriting

Proofreading Scripts vs. Fiction

June 28, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

In the previous post, which also concerned proofreading, I said this:

While I certainly don’t want typos in my milestone drafts, a typo in a script feels like less of a crime simply because a script is a blueprint, not a finished work. When I really came to terms with the fact that I would be producing a finished product with my name on it, my level of concern (and vanity) about typos markedly increased. Where I previously felt that typos in a script were unprofessional, I suddenly felt as if typos in my short story collection would be a personal criticism of me.

I don’t disagree with those statements, but in the intervening days I’ve come to realize that I completely missed the main difference between proofreading a script (screenplay, stage play, interactive script) and proofing prose fiction. It’s not simply that scripts are blueprints while fiction is finished work. It’s that the density and complexity of fiction is infinitely greater than anything you will find in a script, precisely because the availability of techniques is so much greater.   [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction, Publishing Tagged With: difference, Fiction, monologue, point of view, prose

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