Stop Breaking Her Ankle:Revising and Workshopping Part I

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.

Stop Breaking Her Ankle:Revising and Workshopping Part II

“Earthly Tents” (or the story formerly known as “Ripped Up” and “Broken”) is coming along. One of the most important things I’ve learned recently is not to withhold key information about your main characters from your readers. Details like a character having been divorced really affect the way a character acts and perceives the world and, just as importantly, details like that affect the way the reader sees and understands that character.

That’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned recently, probably because it’s one of the biggest problems that exists in “Earthly Tents.” The reader doesn’t discover anything about Alan’s spiritual life until about page 11. The reader doesn’t learn a lot of details about Alan’s divorce or his kids until about pages 9 and 13 (and this is only a 14-page story). This is a problem because Alan’s children, divorce and spiritual life are his main motivations throughout the story, and the reader gains a deeper understanding of Alan through his words and actions during the story if they know those details up front.

Dr. Bailey taught us that it is usually good to somehow incorporate a thread of the story’s conflict into the very first paragraph of the story. In my story the main conflict is Alan trying to cope with the loneliness and pain of his divorce (which we don’t even know about until page 6).

I have to admit, though, this has been a fun problem to fix. On Monday I sat down on the floor of my dorm room with Scotch tape and scissors and a copy of the latest draft of “Ripped Up” (Draft 7, the seventh time Mrs. Miller has fallen off that stool in her kitchen. Rob’s told me I need to stop breaking that poor old woman’s ankle). I started cutting out paragraphs and rearranging the details in my story, and I created a new draft. I’m going to use this draft to do a rewrite, smoothing the transitions between the scissored sentences, adding extra details and basically just revising the piece again. The process is really exciting because once I get done with this rewrite, the story is going to be noticeably better.

Tryptophan May Cause Procrastination:Return From Thanksgiving Break Part I

The Tuesday afternoon before Thanksgiving break, I shut myself in my room and worked on “Earthly Tents.” My goal was to get the story pretty close to done — that is, good enough to include in my portfolio that’s due at the end of the semester. That way I could focus completely on “Someone to Watch Over Me” (which is now titled “All of Me”) over Thanksgiving break.

I accomplished half my goals. I'm really pleased with the way “Earthly Tents” shaped up (though I volunteered to have it workshopped again this coming Tuesday, just to be sure), but when I got home for Thanksgiving vacation, I was on vacation.

Thanksgiving break was five days long, Wednesday through Sunday. The week before Thanksgiving break this sounded like mountains of time to spend with my friends and family and to get work done, but Saturday afternoon when I was only beginning my rewrite of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t already churned out several manuscripts fit for The Best American Short Stories.

Maybe it was the tryptophan that got me. Or the last-minute Christmas-tree-selection trip my family took Sunday afternoon. Whatever it was, it left me frantically typing on my laptop scrambling to rewrite my 16 pages of story as my dad drove me back up Sunday.

I finished my new 26-page draft Monday night (or rather Tuesday morning as I finished sometime between midnight and 2 a.m.), and though afterwards I was awfully tired (and still am even as I type this), I was really pleased with the new draft — except for the ridiculously implausible shootout I tacked on to the story to end it.