We’re still workshopping first drafts in class. Four per class. It’s a lot of reading to get done (plus writing the critique letters to go with the stories), but it’s not so bad. The stories are interesting. They're never perfect of course (I keep realizing more and more nothing’s ever very close to perfect on the first try or the second try), but for first drafts they were really good. Everybody's pieces seem to have lots of potential, and they all have great things working in them already. For instance, I felt like Rob’s story didn’t really have an effective climax yet, but it did have some really great realistic-sounding dialogue and a lot of interesting tensions between his characters.
I like seeing how everyone’s drafts reveal how creative we all are. One of the drafts featured a hardboiled detective. Another was really creepy, told from the point of view of a stalker. One of my favorites was Theresa’s new story, the one I got to peer-review last week. In hers, Theresa used this present-tense omniscient voice to describe a slightly dysfunctional and very hilarious Thanksgiving dinner. With that omniscient voice she portrayed the dinner from the perspectives of just about everyone in the house except the family dog, Shotzie.
Meanwhile, my own drafts are starting to come along. “Someone to Watch Over Me,” the swing story, got workshopped last Thursday. I already knew there were a lot of mistakes, well, not mistakes exactly, but weak points in the story that I knew were there and I knew I needed to fix.
For instance, since I was in a hurry to get a complete story drafted, I summarized and glossed over a lot of scenes I could have dramatized and shown just so I could get to an ending. Actually, the current ending is another weak point in the story. It’s slightly implausible and melodramatic; the black singer, Mae Bellport, is suddenly shot while singing on a stage in Georgia (Dr. Bailey has joked that when writers can’t dream up a good ending to their stories they usually start killing off characters).
So I thought the workshop would be pretty useless and a little bit embarrassing (because people would just be pointing out mistakes I was already aware of), but that wasn’t exactly the case. People did pick up on the weak points I knew were there, but they also pointed things out I hadn’t realized or started to think about yet.
They pointed out that the alternating voices in my story sound too much alike. “I’d like to be able to open up the story and just read a sentence and know who’s talking,” Collin commented.
That was a really good piece of criticism, I thought. What really helped was that they were specific about it. Antonette pointed out sentences in Mae’s perspective that she felt sounded more like things Danny, my other narrator, would say. The criticism really gave me some more important things to focus on in my rewrite, things I would not have caught so soon on my own. This workshop may have saved me from a rewrite or two.
