Before and After the Book Deal. Courtney Maum

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СКАЧАТЬ they do. Maybe that one dude just doesn’t “do” science fiction; the teacher secretly yearns to write erotica; nothing resonates with that one student unless you’re writing about her.

      Nevertheless, during your initial critiques, you are going to have a dozen people throwing feedback balls at you and you only have so many hands. First-time workshoppers have a tendency to incorporate all the recommendations they were given into their revision, resulting in what Julia calls a “Frankenstein.” This happened to me: after workshopping an unruly piece during a summer conference, I spent four dismal months revising a draft honoring each of my classmate’s opinions: This one will make Sonia happy because no one’s using foreign words; this one will please Jeremy because the narrator’s motivations are clearer. I ended up with nineteen drafts of that short story, each one of them further from the kernel of magic I’d had in the first. It took me a year to let the useful feedback rise to the top of my brain (and to let go of everything else) so that I could actually think, with agency, through what I needed to do to make the story stronger in a way that preserved its weirdness. That story, “Notes from Mexico,” won an award in a chapbook contest, and it’s closer to the original first draft than not.

      This is not to say that I think that I, or you, or any writer, should be above constructive criticism, or that other writers (and readers) don’t have the ability to help us with our work. (They do. I would be incomprehensible without my editors.) What I want to emphasize is that workshops can’t actually help your writing until you understand how to preserve your special sauce. Protecting what is odd and tender about your voice is not you saying that you write better than anyone else, so screw all of their opinions . . . it’s about knowing where your creative boundaries are and getting to the point where you can distinguish useful feedback from biased criticism. The former will actually serve your manuscript. The latter usually comes from a writer who prefers you write like them.

      This level of awareness takes time to come by, and in order to get there, you’re going to have to ruin a few pieces by incorporating bad advice. Once you know how to sieve good advice from the extraneous, you can workshop to the high heavens, with your armor intact.

      Find positive in the negative. Even in the comments of [name redacted] That Person You Can’t Stand

      There are going to be asshats in your workshop, and if you can’t find a way to transform their tomfoolery into something positive, animus will poison your writing time. “Even with the reader who doesn’t like your work, who doesn’t read it correctly, who 100 percent isn’t your ideal reader and is giving you the kind of feedback you absolutely don’t want,” says Catapult’s writing programs assistant, Stella Cabot Wilson, “even this person’s feedback might still be helpful in some way—either as something to strike against, or for giving you a new idea or opening up how you think about your work.”

      Also remember that the workshop is a crash course in what it feels like to have other people read and publicly comment on your private writing. If you can maintain your dignity and confidence when a windbag calls your content “navel-gazing,” you’ll be better prepared for the faceless online commenter who gives your debut two stars because he doesn’t like the shirt you’re wearing in your author photograph.

      If there’s someone in workshop that you just can’t make the positivity leap with, use your interactions with them as a character study: at least you’ll have material to draw from when it comes time to write a jerk.

Learning to revise

      It is a truth known but little spoken that the secret to great writing is revision. After putting countless failed manuscripts out to pasture, I’ve come to see writing as the pleasurable—even hedonistic—part of the writing process, and revision as the work.

      In revision, you improve the places in your manuscript that can be deepened, tightened, or clarified, and you cut . . . a lot. In Stephen King’s craft book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he suggests that a good second draft is the first draft minus 10 percent. In the movie Neruda, the actor playing the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda says, “To write well, delete.” Did Pablo Neruda actually say this? Let’s pretend he did!

      Like a lot of baby writers, I started out attached to every word I wrote. My sentences defined me! Each one advanced not just the narrative of my story, but my personal one as well. I valued baroqueness over efficiency, circuitous reasoning over candidness, the em dash over the period. My writing was overlong and hyperactive, in need of scissors and sedation, both.

      If I’m proud of anything in my writing process, it’s that I have become a Herculean deleter, callous and unfeeling, my only queen the work. On a Thursday many years ago, three days before my agent was going to send my first novel out on submission, she called to tell me how excited she was about it, how absolutely positive she was that this was going to be my debut book, and that P.S., it needed to be twenty thousand words shorter by Monday morning. Twenty thousand words less!! I didn’t waste time fighting her on this or asking why. I reread the manuscript (quickly) and answered those questions for myself. Then I went for a run with angry music on. And spent the weekend deleting, down to the exact number, twenty thousand words.

      The difference between a published writer and an unpublished one might be their ability to revise. Even if an agent or an editor sees promise in a manuscript, they might pass because they don’t have the stamina for the amount of revision the work needs. If you can train yourself to revise well, you’re pushing your manuscript thirty steps closer to a publication yes.

      At the beginning of the revision process, you might be so close to the material that you can’t see your project’s flaws. Happily, there are a lot of talented professionals who can. Online writing programs across the country have manuscript consultants for hire, and many of these offer intensive revision workshops such as the Novel Incubator program at GrubStreet, the Novel Year program at The Writer’s Center in Washington, D.C., the Novel in a Year: Revise and Launch Class at StoryStudio Chicago, the twelve-week Novel Generator Program at Catapult, or the Writing by Writers Manuscript Boot Camp in Lake Tahoe, just to name a few.

      If you want to improve the way that you revise, you should use a manuscript consultant as a bellwether, not a crutch. Don’t just read their notes, decode what they are saying for your writing as a whole. Identify any negative patterns that crop up in your writing and keep a list of what they are so that you can start to edit them out yourself. Learn your narrative weaknesses and devise a shorthand for dealing with them. If you’re terrible at landscape descriptions, for example, rather than spending a dark day trying to ace a paragraph about Bolivian salt flats, why not put a line in parentheses about what you want to go there and highlight it in yellow, then come back to it on a day where you have the energy to write a challenging paragraph.

      Revision is about editing out the parts of a narrative that take you away from the story’s truth. Belabored points, repetitions, opaqueness, narrative indulgences, all these are examples of nonessentials that can slow a story down, but it’s equally important to learn how to identify subject matter that can belittle or offend.

Using sensitivity readers

      Writing is about storytelling, and every time we come to the page, we’re taking a certain risk with the stories that we share. Maybe we’re using valuable free time for an uncompensated activity that doesn’t make sense to the people that we love. Maybe we’re telling a true story whose publication might damage relationships we value. Or maybe we’re venturing into territory that we haven’t lived firsthand. If you’re writing from a viewpoint that is vastly different from your own, delving into a culture that isn’t native to you, writing about a historical experience you didn’t live through, or venturing out of your comfort zone СКАЧАТЬ