Be Your Own Editor

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.

At Gotham, in addition to weekly lectures and writing exercises (both in class and at home), each member of the group gets the opportunity to bring in a piece of writing about twice per term to be read and critiqued by classmates. They call their system “the Booth,” since the person whose story is being discussed is not allowed to speak until each member of the class points out one positive aspect of the story and one thing in it that they feel needs work. The requirement to give positive feedback is wise: in writing editorial letters to writers about their manuscripts, both as a literary agent and as an editor, I’ve learned how easy it is to point out only what’s bad—and how important it is to point out what’s good and what makes the piece work. It’s important not only for the writer’s ego but for their rewriting process as well.

Unfortunately, it’s much harder to provide specific examples of what’s good (and explain why) than it is to tell a writer where you got confused or what a character is lacking. A lot of writers, especially complete beginners like some of the folks in my “Fiction I” class, can muster only the vaguest of compliments, along the lines of “I really liked the writing.” If your story blew their mind, you might get “I really, really liked the writing.” But as you progress through higher levels of workshopping, better, more experienced writers will be able to provide more specific feedback.

As for getting negative feedback, it’s the biggest fear of most writers, isn’t it? Not only at the workshop level. We fear showing our work to friends, colleagues, agents, publishers, and (if we’re so lucky) reviewers, because what could be more painful than reading in a rejection letter or (if we’re so lucky) in the pages of a magazine that the novel you put five years of your heart and soul into is “banal” or “lacks depth” or is anything less than beautiful and brilliant? For me, since sharing my work with anyone is a new experience, that same fear exists when it comes to a short story I put only two weeks of my heart and soul into. I found myself thinking, He said my writing was “consistent.” If he’d liked it, he would have said “great” or “amazing” and because he didn’t I must be a total hack and I should stick to my day job as an editor and a Be Your Own Editor blogger.

But part of becoming a successful writer is overcoming the fear of people not liking what we write. No matter how good a writer you become, someone, maybe even someone highly intelligent whose opinion you’ve always admired, won’t like something you’ve written. Among the countless writing classes available, I’ve never seen one called “How to Develop a Thick Skin,” but a thin skin is often the biggest obstacle to success. I have a playwright friend whose work was requested by the (very prestigious) Public Theater in New York, and I and her other friends thought she was crazy for not putting her play in an envelope and hand-delivering it the next day. But she’s hardly alone in her fear of success (fear of failure? fear of the inevitable negative feedback that comes with either success or failure?).

It’s not only about the ability to hear criticism without curling up into a fetal position on the floor and never writing another word. It’s about learning to sift through the criticism, discard the unhelpful stuff, and use the points that may hurt but, deep down, that you know are spot-on. And in hearing the criticisms gently flung at me by my fellow Gotham workshoppers, this wasn’t as difficult as I had expected. A few fell into the “they don’t get what I’m trying to achieve with this story” category, but even those suggest that perhaps I need to make revisions to help more readers “get it.” And most of the rest elucidated points that I had, at various levels of consciousness, already been concerned about as I wrote and then reread my story.

Workshopping and sharing your writing with peers in other contexts is not only an irreplaceable way to improve your work, but also good practice for steeling yourself against your fears—or, if you’re one of those uber-self-confident people that I hate, getting rid of those fears altogether. If you’re not quite there yet, you might relate to this article at Salon.com, the second of two this week on the subject of fear and writing.

As for Gotham Writers’ Workshop, one reason I’m writing about my experience there is because they offer terrific online versions of their workshops, with the exact same structure and quality of instructor. So consider investing in one if you’re not here in New York to partake in the live version. They have workshops beginning throughout March (and beyond), which you can look into on their website.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 1:48 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.