Before and After the Book Deal. Courtney Maum

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ editor. But do not let her write. And take heed if you’re paralyzed by the idea of a bad draft: a good book usually takes about seven shitty versions, not one.

Developing your voice

      Narrative voice is your literary aura, your essence, the thing that allows writers the world over to write about the same topics in thrillingly different ways. Even though it’s yours, your voice can take a long, long time to find.

      Postcollege, I spent two years trying to write like Raymond Carver. Raymond Carver I am not. But I got it into my head that this is what serious writing sounded like: alcoholic, importantly mundane. It was depressing to try to write like this, but the shorter my sentences got, the more I felt like I was approaching publication somewhere really big. It took me hundreds of rejections to give myself permission to dance like no one was watching—clearly, no one was. I embraced my inner freak and incorporated humor into my writing. And I started getting published.

      I think a lot of young writers make similar detours—they start out writing a certain way for a specific audience, before eventually coming to the realization that they don’t like this kind of writing—or these people!—very much. In a popular lecture the author Claire Vaye Watkins delivered at the Tin House Summer Workshop called “On Pandering,” she admitted that she herself spent much of her early career writing for old white men. “Countless decisions I’ve made about what to write and how to write it have been in acquiescence to the opinions of the white male literati,” Claire said in the lecture, which was published as an essay in issue 66 of the magazine. “Not only acquiescence but a beseeching, approval seeking, people pleasing. More staggering is the question of why I am trying to prove myself to writers whose work, in many cases, I don’t particularly admire?”

      Purists argue that once you’ve found your voice, you need to keep it isolated in order to protect it: don’t read work by any other writer while you’re working on a project; live inside your words. IMHO, these people are wrong (and also maybe need to be checked on? It sounds like they haven’t left their house in quite some time). If you want to be a writer, you need to engage with the writing world. You need to purchase, read, and celebrate the work of other writers, editors, and translators. There will come a time when you might need to protect the slant or tonality of a project by isolating yourself, aesthetically, but that point is not at the beginning of your career.

      Much is said about the merits of reading other writers, but it’s important to go out and hear them, too. Something instructive happens at live readings. You will hear people who are merely reading from their writing, and you will also see people perform. You’ll see jokes land, and you will also watch them fall so flat that people have to step around them where they lie, cowering, on the floor.

      Having a piece bomb at a live reading is a form of rejection, but rejections can be way finders. As your confidence builds, you’ll come to learn the difference between bad-faith rejections (rejections that come because the rejecter is prejudiced against you or what you stand for in some way) and useful rejections, which indicate whether you are close (hot!) to or far (cold!) from finding your own voice.

      When you do find your voice, you’ll still encounter rejection, but it won’t sting as much: you have fuel now, you have water in the desert, you have found your core. So write. Submit. Get on stage and bomb. Get excited by your rejections. They are road maps toward the kind of work that you were born to write.

Making the most of your writing workshop

      Writing workshops take many forms. They might be a compulsory part of your MFA program, they might take place during a summer conference you’ve signed up for, or you might be in a homegrown workshop comprising writers you have been working alongside for many years.

      In case you’re not familiar with the workshop scenario: each participant gets to have a piece of writing “workshopped” by the other writers in the class. You’ll usually have about a half hour to hear what your fellow writers thought of your piece, starting with positive feedback, and working, gradually, as your heart rate rises, to the “constructive feedback” portion: i.e., what you’re doing wrong.

      In my experience, workshops are an invaluable tool if you know what to do with the feedback you are given, some of which will be insightful and beneficial, some of which will be biased or dead wrong. Follow me for a moment on a tangent to the supermarket. Let’s say you have gone there to gather ingredients to make a chicken curry. For this chicken curry, you need some chicken, but you don’t see any there. There is a man working in this supermarket; you ask him about the lack of poultry products in the store. He says not to worry, and he hands you five eggplants, a bottle of laundry detergent, and a mini horse. Don’t worry, he repeats, when he registers your surprise. These items are free. You will need them on your journey. You should take them from the store.

      You have been raised to be polite; you don’t want to hurt this man’s feelings, especially if these items are gratis. So you take the eggplants and the detergent and the horse and you try to make the curry when you get to your apartment, but you don’t have what you need to make it; instead you have a horse. He’s cute, certainly, but you can’t help but feel like your life has taken a direction that you did not want it to go in. You feed the curry, which isn’t very good, to the horse, who poops on your rug.

      Is it possible to get what you actually need out of a workshop, instead of the desire to never write again? Can you make a curry with some detergent and a horse?

      Ask for what you need

      Now that I’ve been writing and publishing for a while, it’s mind-altering to realize that workshops do not have to be a vomitorium of disgruntlements from your workshop peers. Did you know that you can ask for specific feedback? Did you know that you can challenge people to give you more than meh?

      “I think it’s a nice idea to tell people what you specifically want help with when your piece goes up for workshop,” says author Julia Fierro, who founded the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop in 2002. “Pacing, plot, the narrative structure, the pace of dialogue . . . If you don’t ask for what you need, you can have this out-of-body experience during the workshop; I’m here, but I’m not here.”

      To protect yourself against the tepid feedback that the author and founder of the workshop program CRIT, Tony Tulathimutte, calls “the bland reading the bland,” encourage specificity from your peers when your piece is on the chopping block. If someone says that they don’t like one of your characters, ask if there is a technical choice that impacted the way they feel. And as a workshopper, you should challenge yourself to the same standards. Saying that you “liked” or “didn’t like” something isn’t helpful: offering ideas the writer can use to solve a problem or improve a passage is.

      Learn what to let go of

      You’ll encounter different personality types in workshop, and if you take all of their advice to heart, the only thing you’re going to want to write at the end of workshop is an SOS.

      “You can get wounded in a way in workshop that you will eventually figure out is time wasting and pointless,” says Tony on the topic of bad feedback. “There are pernicious aspects to it: the tacit pressure to pander, to people please, to impress either the teacher or the people you are sharing a room with. This is inevitable, I don’t know a way to work around this: the group gaze of a workshop only heightens this pressure. You just have to stick with it long enough that the participants learn to workshop the manuscript, not the author.”

      You also have to learn where your peers are coming from so that you don’t get wounded. People have preferences СКАЧАТЬ