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A Fiction Workshop Primer

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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 ]

Understanding Fiction Workshops

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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

Scrutinizing Third Person, Present Tense POV

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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 ]

Proofreading Scripts vs. Fiction

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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 ]

Proofreading Your Own Work

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In the previous post I mentioned various proofreading methods I considered for my short story collection, The Year of the Elm (TYOTE). While the objective in all cases was the same — eliminating nagging typos and errors — each method had different strengths and weaknesses.

Because I knew TYOTE would be read by almost no one, and would bring in almost no revenue, I decided to pursue the option that promised to teach me the most about the proofreading process, and about my own ability to spot mistakes. Against all advice, and despite knowing in advance that I could not be one hundred percent successful, I decided to proofread the final draft of the collection myself. (Full disclosure: one other person gave the stories a proofreading pass early in the process.)

Having written professionally in a number of mediums I know I have a decent eye. Not great, but good enough to catch a lot of common errors. Still, like every writer, I have my nemeses. For example, I am constantly transposing ‘from’ and ‘form’, and no spell checker can save me from that fate. Even when I consciously watch for that mistake, slowing my eye to a letter-by-letter crawl, I invariably miss an instance. (Case in point, when I originally wrote ‘from’ and ‘form’ above, I wrote it as ‘from’ and ‘from’ — and didn’t catch the mistake until re-reading the sentence for the umpteenth time.)

Too, it’s worth noting that much of my professional writing has been script work, both in the motion picture and interactive industries. 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.  [ Read more ]

Extending Smashwords’ Functionality

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Note: It has been brought to my attention that I failed to note that I ultimately chose not to implement the process outlined below. This omission happened while revising the original post and was unintentional. See comments for more.

This winter past I spent a fair bit of time thinking about how best to finish the editing process of my short story collection, The Year of the Elm. In particular I considered a number of possible proofreading solutions in order to track down as many typos and errors as possible. Along with hiring an editor or doing the work myself, I came up with what I thought might be a way to merge the inherent functionality of Smashwords with the goal of open-source proofreading.

In an exchange of emails, Smashwords CEO Mark Coker graciously helped me refine the idea in a manner consistent with the Smashwords TOS, which states that only finished works can be published through the site:

9d. You further warrant the book represents a complete work:
• this is not a work-in-progress
• the uploaded file is not a partial sample or sample chapter, or is not a collection of sample chapters
• the uploaded book represents a complete story with a beginning, middle and end

Because any work (fiction or nonfiction) that is ready for proofreading should be finished in every other respect, the proofreading process falls into a gray area relative to this requirement. For that reason, I need to stress that the proofing I am talking about is just that: a final attempt to track down typos and other miscellaneous errors after the entire work has been written, revised, edited and checked by as many eyes as possible. A work that has errors on every page, or obvious mistakes in abundance, is in need of copy editing, and is not what I would deem a finished work.  [ Read more ]

Where Stories Come From

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Many moons ago I found myself in a bar called Green’s Grocery just outside of Nashville, attending a wedding reception for an old friend of mine. After wishing the newlyweds well I found an empty chair and struck up a conversation with a very nice man who turned out to be an accountant. When he asked what I did for a living I told him I was a storyteller. His eyes widened a bit as if I had confessed to alchemy.

From that moment it was little more than a hop, skip and jump to the question that every writer is asked sooner or later: where do you get your ideas? It was a question I’d been asked before, but until that day I had never fully realized that the human ability to invent stories or cobble them together out of life events is not universal.

As I talked with the man, and struggled to explain how ideas came to me, it became clear that he had never had the same thing happen to him. The more I tried to abstract the process, or explain it by using analogies, the more he insisted that the kind of narrative genesis I had been familiar with since childhood was simply foreign to him. The absurdity of the thought almost convinced me that he was pulling my leg, but it was obvious that he wasn’t. He simply did not think that way.  [ Read more ]

Writing Grief

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For the past year or two I have been living with two impending deaths. One was natural, merciful and literal. The other was unnatural, tortured and figurative. Both have both come to pass.

I have been alive long enough to know that there is no way to anticipate or speed the grieving process. There is no way to shed grief but to endure it and to respect the truth of it. I am also aware that the trend these days is to encourage people to move on with their lives, or to otherwise ignore or distract themselves from grief — advice that is often proffered by friends and family who do not want to embrace the totality of loss, or the inevitability of mortality, in their own lives.

As I have watched myself move through this process in two instances, I have noticed that as a writer I do not have the tools to accurately describe what I am thinking and feeling. Were I authoring these events I would struggle greatly to communicate the totality of what I feel as a character.  [ Read more ]

Getting Back Up

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One of the things you learn when you find yourself lying flat on your back with metaphorical blood running out of your mouth is that the ceiling always looks different from that perspective. You see the cracks in the plaster, the peeling paint, and the old stains that were never properly sealed. It’s a lesson in point of view, as well as a reminder that you can adopt different points of view voluntarily, instead of waiting for life to knock you on your ass.

As anyone who has spent time on the web knows, internet time is a literal warping of the time-space continuum. My previous post here was a little less than two weeks ago, but it feels like ten years. In the interim I’ve watched the sun move across the walls each day, and felt the warmth as it slid across the floor and washed over me. I’ve had time to think and to rest, and with the tail of my shirt I’ve been able to stanch the flow of blood.

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Taking A Punch

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I’ve taken a few punches over the past year. Some of them were economic, some were emotional, but they’ve all taken a toll.

For the time being I’m going to have to step away from this site. I hope to be back soon.

— Mark Barrett