Workshops and Draft Purgatory

This quarter I tallied my total number of workshops, including my MFA. Total count: seventeen. Granted, I am a shopmonger. I have taken nonfiction, fiction and poetry. I have taken multiple shops at one time. I love dissecting how works–in-progress are/aren’t working. I appreciate how shop drives me to produce. I love the whiskey bar post shop decompress.

The downside of workshop is that you have to endure being workshopped. Of course, the point is to break everything down. That’s how everyone learns. I have even felt nostalgia for past shops where I was vivisected, but that was later, because I turned in something better. The shop story worked towards a happy ending. But over time this story's power has dwindled.

Time presents a new workshop problem: I generally know what everyone is going to say before they say it. What I hear over and over is that my voice engages but my structure has problems, and/or that my piece needs more weight. Here begins the heartbreak of writing—just because you are aware of your writing Waterloos doesn’t mean you know how to avoid them. Or revise them.

My goal for the next few weeks is to sort through the wreckage of five years (gah!) of drafts. Admittedly, much of this did go towards a book on Laura Ingalls Wilder, which will come out with Press 53 this fall. Completion! (I’ll be writing more in this later and—locusts willing—launch a website this summer). But I also have essays, memoirs, stories, flash fiction, aborted first novel chapters and now poetry sitting in desktop purgatory. So that’s my goal in the upcoming weeks. To attend to these lost souls. See what can be saved. What gets put in the DNR file.

Notes From The Annual Writers Conference

I found my one, lone page of notes from AWP in the dryer this morning. I know that was over a month ago. The notes were on a panel on dealing with difficult students in the nonfiction writing workshop.

Here’s what I wrote:

How to workshop the TMI piece: 1) be specific 2) be honest 3) help writers clarify their own ideas

Running a writers’ workshop is like running a kindergarten. You deal with the same players: 1) the star 2) the resenter 3) the diva 4) the tattler.

When dealing with a diva (who will constantly interrupt the workshop), diffuse by asking: “What would you like to accomplish in this piece?”

Sometimes people use memoir as a way of processing their feelings. This can get weird. One way to ease the discomfort of workshopping true story is to treat the nonfiction protagonist the same as a fiction one. Ask: 1) What does the character want? 2) What stands in her way? 3) What’s at stake if she doesn’t get what she wants?

And that’s it. Nice, right? All manner of respected literary giants around and I spend four days stuffing my face with every variety of ethnic food I could find. My excuse is that I live in a small town built on subs, gringo burritos and pizza. I crave spice.

On Writing About Writing

For three weeks I have been reworking the first chapter of my book. And yes, I’m going dotty because in many ways I have been working this same chapter (it began as an essay) for five years. About now it’s like tough, old dough that requires a violent punching. But this is the last stand. I have to make final decisions and once my book is out there I can’t take it back. If Chapter One doesn’t hold, then the reader will never go any further. So I am fine combing the situation and it’s brutal.


My Stymie of the Day takes place on page seventeen. I am worried about being one of those writers writing about writing.

In Montana workshops the general rule was to disdain stories about writers and writing. I'm I was one of the naysayers, but the more I think about it, I'm a sucker for stories that star writers (Sophie's Choice, Wonder Boys, Winslow in Love to name a few). Writers done well make for great main characters. But a bad story about a writer is worse than a bad story about a lawyer. Hence the sordid slushpile tale about the young "writer" who gets his "college girlfriend" "pregnant" and she breaks down over the "abortion."

Lesson: Write about writing if you must——but proceed with caution.

My book (as Chuck Klosterman would say) is 85% a true story. Nonfiction presents a different dilemma: How does the writer set up the project without writing too much about being a writer. My issue right now is that I have to get our heroine (me) from North Carolina to Montana to begin the story. The blog pretty much outs why I moved to Montana. But do I really want to write about that? The MFA, it seems, is often the published writer's dirty little secret. Writing about the MFA is akin to talking about that great yoga pose that aligns the lower intestine. Writers are supposed to emerge from remote valleys and mountain caves, not graduate school

Here's were the creative part of creative nonfiction comes in. I could simply say, "I moved out to Montana to write" and not say why. I have encountered this sidestep often in books, essays and author bios. "So and so lives and writers in the high plains of Nebraska." What so and so might neglect to mention is that he/she is in a PhD program in Lincoln, or a tenure track professor.

How much of the “writerly” parts should an author include? Eat, Pray, Love neglects to mention the lucrative book deal. But while as a writer (and poorling) my first question was how Elizabeth Gilbert financed all this self-actualization, it’s obvious most readers didn’t want to hear about it. They just wanted the story.

These are questions. And I haven’t decided yet.

I should also mention that the part about the MFA takes up maybe two paragraphs.

Thoughts?

(Note: It’s okay in a writing blog directed at other writers to write about writing)

The MFA, uh, pyramid scheme?

Reviewing two creative writing program-related new books last week, the NYTimes uses the word "Ponzi". In the headline.

From the review, on Mark McGurl's The Program Era:

The actual process of tuition is hard to generalize about, so his book is, instead, full of incomprehensible diagrams, theoretical analysis and sentences like “Technomodernism identifies with the ‘emptiness’ of pure formality — that is, with the systemacity of the system itself, drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis."

The review is a little more forgiving for Tin House's The Writer's Notebook.

Workshopped to Death

In honor of National Poetry Month I offer this bipolar post.

Manic

An article on the benefits of workshop, gleaned from Glimmer Train. During my Montana MFA, I sometimes grew frustrated because I felt as though I spent more time critiquing others' work than producing/revising my own. But then this phenomena occurred after my first year, where I began to understand the divide between talented student writing and publishable work. Snap! In many ways this was the beginning of my real work as a writer.

Depressive

Link to a site called Dead At Your Age, which searches for historical figures born on your birthday, and compares your longevity to theirs.

My results:

You've outlived Massillon Coicou by almost a month. He was a novelist, playwright, activist and one of Haiti's greatest poets. He died by execution on March 15, 1908, 61 years before you were born.