 In a workshop environment, where aspiring writers are hearing a lot of repeated generalizations flying by, it is easy enough to acquire a set of “rules” for writing.
Show, don’t tell.
Write what you know.
Use complete sentences.
Avoid brand names.
But rules aren’t as helpful for creating original work as one might hope when one is floating in the murk of one’s own ideas and hoping for some formula for making a story work.
Other frequently cited complaints (i.e. “I didn’t understand this scene”) lead to other unstated rules that could be considered just plain wrong (i.e. explain your scenes).
And yet, if the formulas are wrong–if the best work has to circumvent them to create its own internal rules–are there no insights that we can apply to our own and each other’s work? Is workshop of no use at all?
Filters, rather than formulas, can indeed be useful. When I engage in revision or editing, I test the strength of the verbs and the structure of the sentences. I track the expectations that arise in me as a reader and note how the piece fulfills or surprises them. In other words, I understand some of the structures of story and plot, some of the ways that craft functions, and I do, eventually and sometimes immediately, run my work through those filters.
But my first job as a writer is to listen to my storyteller. I may have prepped my storyteller with exercises or planning, but when I am committed to the blank page, the key is to trust the storyteller, to be willing to get it wrong in order to get in down and sometimes in order to get it new.
And my first job as a reader is to pay attention to my pleasure and questions and worries–without assuming that questions or worries indicate a problem. Questions and worries drive us on through a story and only the reader’s experience can be offered back to the writer in a workshop in order that the writer may think through the effects of the piece and its intentions.
| Two thrilling examples of original work and a powerful clarification of filters (not formulas) come in the newest books of my guests at an upcoming public and free online event.
Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club) and Catherine Brady (The Mechanics of Falling) are award-winning and best-selling but more importantly wonderful, original writers whose latest offerings are inspiring, even life-changing.
Fowler has a collection of stories (What I Didn’t See and Other Stories) that has blown the top of my head off (in the best way possible). In 1991 or so, I read “Emergency,” a short story by Denis Johnson that would become a part of his collection Jesus’ Son. It changed my sense of what was possible to write about and the ways in which it was possible to write. Fowler’s latest collection does the same–only consider that I am a much more mature and educated writer, and still it does the same. (The ability of the best books to change how we understand both writing and the world is germane to the main point of my first paragraphs).
Cathering Brady’s latest book, Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction, works another magic altogether. It collects everything I’ve learned and consider most important to understand about writing but could never articulate and demonstrate half as well as Brady does into one mighty book. It’s so smart and so generous, much like Brady herself. If you’ve read her short stories and hungered for a behind-the-scenes look at that kind of resonant, encompassing world-creating, this book will grab you as it does me.
This Saturday, Nov. 13, at 10:15 a.m. Pacific, Brady and Fowler will join me in the Book Writing World for an online conversation, and you are invited to attend and to bring your writing questions to these two brilliant, generous experts. This is free and open to the public, but you do need to register here, now, for free.
https://bookwritingworld.webex.com/bookwritingworld/j.php?ED=142008897&RG=1&UID=0&RT=MiM0
You’ll connect through your computer and will be able both to see the authors and talk with them. (Calling in is an option; details will be sent after you register and before the event).
See you on Saturday! Register now and tell your writer friends. |
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In a workshop environment, where aspiring writers are hearing a lot of repeated generalizations flying by, it is easy enough to acquire a set of “rules” for writing.
