writing, workshops & other things

courtesy of Miss Nicole Blackman [www.nicoleblackman.com] some words of wisdom or at least for consideration...

From Wm. Vollmann
“Biographical Statement (c. 1989)”by William T. Vollmann from Wordcraft, later republished in Expelled from Eden: a William T.Vollmann Reader, 2004 (Eds. Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson)“... My loneliness was worse because I was trapped in books. Then I realised that if I could not get out of my books I could at least bring other people in to visit me. I could do this only by writing books.”

and Rick Moody...
“Writers and Mentors”
by Rick Moody
(The Atlantic – Fiction Issue 2005)“
On the first day of my workshop with Angela Carter, in my sophomore year,Carter was charged with reducing the number of would-be participants in her class to fourteen. Maybe thirty people were in the room, and she simply stood before us and tried to take questions. Some young guy in the back, rather too full of himself, raised his hand and, with a sort of withering skepticism, asked, “Well, what’s your work like?” You have to have heard Carter speak to know how funny the next moment was. She had a reedy and somewhat thin British voice, toward the upper end of the scale, and she paused a lot when she spoke. There were a lot of ums and ahs. Before she replied, she cocked her head and said “um” once or twice. Then she said, “My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man’s penis." The room emptied out at the break, and I’m not sure a quorum of fourteen returned. Maybe only eleven or twelve.”...

“Now, once an audience begins to experience itself as a community with power, it begins to ask certain questions about stories. I’m sure thata nalogous questions are asked about poems and essays in workshops everyday, but I have less experience with those forms. Pardon me, then, if I confine myself to the kinds of questions that are commonplace of the contemporary fiction workshop.

1) Does the story begin effectively?
2) Does the story end effectively?
3) Does the story have conflict?
4) Does the story move from beginning to end?
5) Are the characters believable?
6) Are the characters likeable?
7) Is the story dramatic? Does drama help the story move?
8) Who is narrating the story?
9) Is the language of the narrator effective?
10) Is the language in the way?
11) Does the story contain extraneous elements that can be removed?
12) If the story is in the third person, should it be in the first, orvice versa?
13) Does the story have a theme?
14) Does it move effectively toward its theme?
15) Does the character experience epiphany?
16) Are you moved?

This is just off the top of my head. Many other such questions can be imagined. To the extent that a student comes to expect these questions, or to the extent that he or she writes in expectation of them, the likely product will be stories (or poems or essays) that reduce the chances of innovation, that ratify the workshop system, and that ratify the idea of the university but do little for the development of the form or for our language as a whole.If I had to do it myself, I might instead ask questions like these:

1) Has the writer attempted to eliminate all adverbs?
2) Does this story prefer Anglo-Saxon words to Greek and Latinate alternatives?
3) What’s wrong with using a few more semicolons?
4) Does this story contain any sentences that you want to remember to your grave?
5) Would Samuel Beckett like this story? Would Gertrude Stein? Would Virginia Woolf?
6) How would this writer put paint on canvas?
7) Is this writer just using his or her eyes, or has he or she tried touse other senses – for example, the all-important literary sense of audition?
8) What would happen if you reorganised the sections of this piece at random?
9) Does this story like music?
10) Does this story answer the question “Why bother to write?”
11) Can this story save any lives?”