Be Your Own Editor

You may have heard of an endeavor called National Novel Writing Month, affectionately referred to by its creators and participants as NaNoWriMo (unless they want to avoid sounding really goofy, in which case they refer to it as National Novel Writing Month).

The project is gaining popularity and notoriety every year, and since my friend W. is participating this year (the month in question, by the way, is November), I thought I’d take a closer look and think about how such exercises can help the struggling novelist.

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Some of you may have read my posts on my experience taking a Fiction I class last winter at Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Joan sends in this follow-up question:

Would you advise enrollment in an online Gotham Writers’ class?

A little background—I have zero education in creative writing and am really afraid of feeling like a loser in a class packed with MFA types. My self-esteem is solid except where writing is concerned. Any snobby mention of my elementary style will send me quivering to the corner.

So, two sides to my question—is Gotham online worth $445, and do you think a writing class will brutalize my ego?

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I’m nearing the end of my 10-week session at Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and it’s been an invaluable experience to learn the importance of feedback, to be prompted to consider such matters as pacing, voice, and description, and to simply be forced to write something every week. At the same time, it has—to be blunt—separated the wheat from the chaff, and the potential from the lack thereof. But that, too, is part of the workshop process. And it’s helped me realize that the lack thereof are pretty cool people, too.

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Some of you have been following my trials and travails as a participant this winter at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. It’s been a valuable experience not only because of the opportunity it’s provided for a workshop/critique environment, but also for the interesting writing exercises we’ve done each week. Ugh, I hate writing exercises. I hear you. Was I thrilled at the prospect of writing a page describing… a place? No. But that’s the beauty of exercises: they’re not written for publication (or necessarily for anyone else’s eyes at all), so they allow you to free your mind and let loose your creativity.

Now I’d like to see what you all can do with a simple exercise. It’ll take you just a few minutes, and I guarantee you’ll get either an interesting idea or simply food for thought out of it. And if I really like it, you’ll get an autographed hardcover copy of Jonathan Franzen’s acclaimed memoir The Discomfort Zone.

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I’m halfway through my 10-week term at Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and I’m starting to panic about having workshop withdrawal when I finish. My fellow writers aren’t perfect—in any group, some people’s feedback will prove more insightful and helpful than others—but having gone through the first critique of my own story this week, I realize that any workshop situation beats writing in a vacuum. Having your writing picked apart can hurt, but it’s a necessary growing pain.

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I didn’t write about session three of my Gotham Writers’ Workshop class in fiction because I was too busy writing. And worrying. You see, week three was my time to hand in a story for my writing workshop classmates to take home, read, examine for hours, pick apart word by word, and prepare nasty criticisms of for our next class. And because next week is President’s Day, they have two weeks to come up with nasty things to say about my story! How do writers handle this? I’m used to editing, so of course, I’ve had no trouble coming up with nasty things to say about some of my classmates’ stories…

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