Ripped Up:Another Workshop

My latest draft of my first short story "Broken," which is now “Ripped Up” and might be retitled “Earthly Tents” (Dr. Bailey’s suggestion), was workshopped again yesterday.

I’m glad my story was one of the revised drafts that came up for workshop because I felt like I’d hit a ceiling: I’d revised it as much as I could but I knew it still needed work. “You’re close,” was the way Dr. Bailey put it after class yesterday.

For this draft the workshop was less about believability and what works and what doesn’t and more about how things were working in my story, what was working well and what wasn’t working so well, and the feelings and impressions it left with the reader. Dr. Bailey tried to get the class to look at it in a different way, to look at my characters like real characters (plausible and developed) and to talk about how well my story accomplished the things short stories are supposed to accomplish (like the feeling the ending left the reader with). It was really exciting stuff.

My ending is still weak. Based on what everybody said in class, I’ve decided what I really need to do is rehearse more for the ending earlier in the story, move up the details about Alan’s religious life and add more about his relationship with his wife to bring out how lonely he is. Dr. Bailey told me he wants to conference with me before I do anything else to the story, and I’m eager to hear what he has to say. This story’s “close.”

Just Down the Hall:Living with Writers

Sometimes being ambitious isn't very fun. Late Monday night as my fingers were frantically punching the keys of my laptop to get a first draft hammered out for class Tuesday, I was beginning to think maybe I’d taken Bailey a little too seriously when he said "be ambitious."

But I got it finished in time for class, a 14-page rough draft of a story set in the swing era, told from two points of view: a white band leader and the young black singer he hires to sing in his band. I spent more time going back through my jazz class notes, flipping through books on jazz from the library and searching the Web for information on jazz ballrooms and 1930s slang than I actually did writing.

Thankfully class yesterday was only a peer review and not a full-blown workshop. I was partnered with Theresa, and we traded stories and marked them up. Class ended before we were done discussing the stories with each other, so Theresa just came to my dorm room after class since she just lives down the hall from me. We sat cross-legged on the floor and talked about our stories for while.

I really like being around so many talented writers, other people my age who take writing seriously. They're people I have a lot of respect for.

I live in Hassinger Hall, a small three-story dorm with the offices of the English Department in the basement. Three other writing majors live just down the hall from me, so it’s really easy to just walk down the hall and get some feedback or bounce an idea off Thersa or Dan or Liz. Some of us are even working on converting the business major in room 306 into a writing major.

Rob, a friend of mine from the summer workshop, and I actually swapped some of our old (poorly written, we now realize) short stories the other day. We gave each other the weirdest ones we’d ever written because Rob was somewhat dismayed about not being able to write science fiction (Tom Bailey likes only realistic fiction. No sci-fi. No fantasy. No horror. He once told us he likes to feed elves to his dogs).

Which reminds me. Tonight is Halloween. I put together a scary-story reading for tonight at 10 with some other people on my floor. I’m real excited. Garth, an English Lit major, is going to read some Poe, Theresa might be reading “The Lottery,” and I’ll be reading Stephen King’s “The Moving Finger.” It should be great.

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.