Be Your Own Editor

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…

Since I decided to take the class at the last minute and hadn’t done much creative writing lately, my story took shape in the one week preceding its deadline. I came up with eight pages. I fretted about its shortness until I remembered that, so far, the worst stories have each been about twenty pages long, and the best story was only six or seven. Then I found something else to fret about. Is the title stupid? Jeez, how nervous am I going to be when I actually have to hear the criticisms? So far, though, I’ve found my classmates able to provide varied, intelligent, and specific criticisms of one another’s writing without getting mean or personal.

Our topics the past two weeks have been “point of view” and “description,” two things impossible to discuss independently of each other. In fact, all of our topics (”character,” “setting,” etc.) overlap with and relate to every other aspect of fiction we discuss, as they should in any good piece of fiction writing. For a point-of-view exercise, Teacher had us write the same scene (a person tries to get on a bus with no money) two different ways: first, from the first-person POV of the broke bus-rider; next, in third person, bringing the reader inside the heads of both that character and someone they interact with.

This proved a more interesting exercise than I at first thought, especially since we were required to employ both dialogue and actions and not change them between the two versions. Fascinating to understand how a shift in point of view can completely change the tone, meaning, and effect of a story without your even intending it. I recommend you give it a try; maybe you’ll realize that the problem with that story you’ve been struggling with is that it should be in the third person, not the first. Or that it should be told not from the protagonist’s point of view but from that of a secondary character (the most famous example of this being The Great Gatsby).

The nature of description in a story, of course, depends entirely on point of view. By description, I refer not only to physical, visual description, but to all the senses and beyond: sounds, smells, touch, taste, as well as more metaphysical stuff such as the description of an emotion or the atmosphere of a room. This aspect of writing is where a lot of beginners get caught up in the overuse of adjectives and adverbs, rather than strong nouns and verbs. Example:

“The cave was deep, dark, and creepy.”
“Blackness filled the cave, and he longed for a flashlight.”

Which brings me to the “cave exercise” we wrote in this week’s class. Our mission: Describe a cave. Pitch dark. Now, ways exist to “cheat” in this exercise and not force yourself to use the other senses to write about a cave you and your characters can’t see. Someone remembers what the cave looks like, you’re in the cave with Superman, etc. But that’s cheating yourself, people! And wasting good money, if you’re taking a writing class. Some interesting pieces resulted, involving descriptions of such things as the attraction between people, the sound of water dripping, and the smell of urine. (You don’t need to know the details about that one.)

The lesson is to keep in mind, always, whether your setting is dark and silent or bright and noisy, all of your senses. Use them. If you get stuck writing about a character or setting or emotion, think: “I know: smell!” Then feel the ideas flow. Emotions have smells, too.

In two weeks, I’ll let you know how it felt to be on the receiving end of Gotham’s “Booth” of criticism. I foresee both fear and exhilaration, but most of all, the opportunity to make my writing better. I’ve watched the writers whose work we’ve discussed so far as they listen to our critiques, and they all take furious notes and are furiously grateful and anxious to start rewriting at the end of it.

If you want to learn more about the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, which holds classes both in New York and online, visit their website. It also includes some great writing resources.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Writing Classes and Workshops. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.