How to Comment on Someone Else’s Writing
Commenting can feel
like a test for writer and
reader alike.
Recently a commenter asked about commenting on other people’s work, and I’d been meaning to write an in-depth post about this. I’ve written before about commenting on others’ writing, and I recommend that you click that link and check out the tips I provide, including finding positive things to say and covering all the bases of language, story, and characters. But it’s been a while since that post, and it’s time to revisit this very tricky issue. Whether you are a creative writing teacher or a student in a class, how do you workshop others’ work? What are the big issues or pitfalls, and what topics need to be covered to create a thorough critique? I’ll cover some of the basics of workshop comments in today’s post.
1. Put yourself in the writer’s shoes.
What’s most important in this delicate situation is remembering how it feels to be on the hot seat yourself. It’s funny how as soon as we’ve made it through our own workshop, we immediately forget the agony, the fear, the gnawing self-doubt, the hyper-sensitivity to any comment that could be interpreted as an insult. We’ve dared to put ourselves out there, and as a result even the gentlest jibes can cut deeply. That’s why it’s important to remember how scary a position it is to be in.
It’s also important to remember what you wanted to get out of a workshop when you had your own work on trial. You may have enjoyed those workshops that were overflowing with praise, but personally after the pleasure fades from one of those classes, I’m left feeling a little empty, wishing I’d gotten more concrete advice on how to take this story to the next level, from good to great. Every story deserves both praise and criticism. Remember what you wanted from a workshop, and make sure you work hard to provide that experience for your classmates or students.
After the jump: how to do “the crit.”
There were so many thoughtful comments about how to teach creative writing that I just couldn’t tackle all of them last week, so here are a few more I wanted to respond to. I also want to respond to comments about my post on How to Write Surrealism. So let’s get started!
Donna Caterina said:
My favorite writing teacher would be one who can identify my ‘voice’ then tell me when I am ‘off key’. I like to write memoir/travel and find that I do that better when I find and read authors that speak to me and hold my interest. This kind of reading helps me learn to tell the story.
I am so interested and glad I put this on my page.
Looking forward to this
Thanks, Donna, and thank you for adding Writerly Life to your sites! That’s another good point about good creative writing teachers — they’re not there to impose their style on others, but to help others refine their own styles. It’s important for me to remember that I shouldn’t let personal taste get in the way in my critiques — I must think about what each student needs to make her voice come through clearly.
Justin said:
As a regular reader of your blogs, I encourage you to take the same approach to your class that have with your posts. Be consistent to keep your students focused, be creative to keep them interested, and be open enough to foster healthy discussion and debate. The same principles that keep people coming to read your advice and opinions on writing, will be the same principles that keep your students engaged.
Thanks for the kind words, Justin! I do hope to be open and friendly on this blog while also be instructive. I hope to continue striking that balance in a classroom of students. For one thing, I’m only a few years older than my students — I hope they’ll see me almost as a peer, but will still respect my experience. After all, we’re all on this writing journey together.
Now let’s get on to the surrealism! In my post on the topic, I talked about how the best surreal writing is only one notch or two away from the very real. Readers had comments about their favorite surreal authors and how they manage to do it so wonderfully.
Mohamed Mughal said:
One of the best ways to learn how to write in a surrealist manner is to read surrealism that has worked for other writers. In Slaughterhouse 5, Vonnegut penned a celebration of the anti-hero, the story of an unwitting man who takes a winding, chronologically non-linear dash through the space/time continuum…Did it work? Yes. …Vonnegut effectively gave a new generation of writers permission to experiment. Surrealism works when it’s anchored in compelling, instructive and relevant themes, when it’s written with a larger point that the abstract beauty of surrealist prose.
Thanks for your thorough analysis, Mohamed! Vonnegut is certainly one of the modern masters of the surreal. What I find particularly compelling about his voice is the slightly sardonic but ambiguous tone — you’re never quite sure whether he means something or is being tongue-in-cheek about it. It’s also important as you say not to have surrealism just for weirdness’s sake. Surrealism should serve some purpose in your story, to teach or to match a feeling of being unmoored from reality due to disturbing events. What will your purpose for surrealism be?
Paul Bassett Davies said:
Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte were both surrealist painters but Magritte’s work is more disturbing. In Dali’s vision, everything is distorted. The paintings are visually stunning but all the impact is achieved on the surface. In Magritte’s work, everything is normal but one element is displaced, creating a sense of unease and dissonance. For me the best surrealist writing is like this.
Thank you, Paul, that’s a great point. This is exactly what I was writing about in my post — while Dali seems playful, free of malice, Magritte truly makes the viewer uneasy because of how reality is just a bit off. Dali’s images are a dream: Magritte’s are a skewed reality. That small touch of surrealism can often be more effective in a short story.
Thank you, commenters! Next week I’ll tackle What Makes Religious Writing?
How to Be Brave in Your Writing
A blog I and many writers read regularly, Men with Pens, had an interesting article up recently about bravery in writing. It asked readers how brave they were as writers, and equated many writing projects with climbing mountains (and being willing to descend into valleys too). The team at Men with Pens makes a good point, but I’d like to expand the idea a little and also disagree in places.
The article makes it clear that writing benefits from steady, concerted effort. Climbing a mountain or heading down into a valley takes effort and confidence — you’ve got to have endurance to keep plugging away, taking it a step at a time. This is all true and important in writing. What I think takes more bravery in writing, however, is the courage to transgress.
Most people can agree that climbing steadily the way the turtle wins the race is valuable. What many people might not understand, however, is when a writer writes about the darker, more private aspects of life, or dares to say the things people think but never dare to say. What makes biting, memorable writing, however, is exactly these transgressive moments. Lorrie Moore said (I’m paraphrasing) that what should go into your writing is the stuff you’d be embarrassed to show your parents. The stuff that takes real courage in writing, therefore, isn’t the honest slog, but the daring to write what you are afraid to admit even to yourself.
Agent X at Men with Pens does make the great point that what is so scary about writing is how solitary the journey has to be. You’re climbing that mountain all by yourself. What is even more isolating about it, though, is when you do take the plunge and write those things no one wants to see in print. Friends and family, in particular, might be pretty peeved about what you’re writing. They might want to shape your ideas and tell you what you should write. That’s where it takes real courage to be a writer, and to write what you know should go into your story, regardless of the personal risks. If your family truly understands what it takes to be a writer, then they won’t mind those transgressive steps you must take.
Find a Border and Cross It
I work as a web editor for the great literary magazine Washington Square Review, NYU’s magazine. If you check out the site, you can read a lot of the archives and there are some wonderful pieces from very famous authors. The first issue back in the sixties even had a film script submission from a young Martin Scorcese!
The most recent issue had a theme of “Borderlands.” This theme could be interpreted in any number of ways by our authors, but it created a great focus for the magazine because of the movement, choice, and risk associated with a border and crossing it. Many great stories are made up of a borderland in one way or another; characters live straddling two worlds, whether it is the worlds of home and work, what is going on in their lives versus what is going on in their heads, the past and the present, an old culture versus a new one…the potential for borderlands as an idea goes on and on. When a character is caught between two worlds, the result is almost inherently dramatic.
Try thinking about what borderland your character is in the midst of crossing right now, or what border he or she is too afraid to cross. Sometimes a border is simply the line between what a character is thinking and what he is willing to say. Particularly in a short story, which often only needs one dramatic outburst or one thoughtless comment to change the tide of the action, borders are important. What is keeping your character from saying what he wants to? And what will make him cross that border into a dangerous, no-man’s land of consequences?
Think about your story in terms of borders and which ones must be crossed, and you’ll find a more natural flow of climax and drama. Bear inexorably toward that one line that must be crossed. Force worlds to collide.
I recently received a literary magazine in the mail. It was my complimentary copy of a magazine that my story had appeared in. When I opened the envelope, I was completely surprised — I had almost forgotten that I had gotten the story published! You might think that’s strange, but let me explain the typical, very long timeline of a story’s journey from conception to print.
I wrote the story “Shooting Range” when I was a junior in college. That would be in 2007. I finished the first draft very quickly (two weeks), then put it aside until the end of the semester. That spring, I sent the story out to a few magazines. Five months later, in senior year, I began revising the story to be part of my senior thesis. A year later, in the spring of 2008, I found out that a magazine wanted to publish the original version of the story. Of course I was wildly excited, but I’ve been published before, I know how long the wait can be. I was patient and after sending in a final version of the story, I let time pass. And pass it did — I didn’t hear a thing for the rest of 2008 or for any part of 2009. Occasionally I would check the website: it still had the same issue listed as its most current one. In the spring of 2009, when a year had passed, I emailed the editor to make sure I was still on the radar, but got no response.
One full year later, I got a package in the mail. It was the issue of the magazine with my story in it. One story journeyed from 2007 to 2010 — and that is a very typical trajectory for a story. The path is usually even longer for a book. It should be a reminder for you how much patience you need to have on the publishing trail — and how you should always be moving forward, continuing with other work while you’re waiting for older stories to appear.
The expression says to “keep things in the pipeline”, and that’s crucial if you don’t want to waste years of your life on getting published! While one story is accepted and you are waiting for publication, another story should be sent out to magazines, waiting for word back. At the same time, one story should be finished but getting edited, and at the same time, you should be working on new stories. Only by having stories continually moving on and out in this way will you feel yourself moving along the path to literary success.
Photo of the Week
, originally uploaded by karin2xk.
What a pensive and evocative photograph. It’s so melancholy and yet beautiful. Hopefully it will inspire you to write something this week.
How To Avoid Clumsy Writing
I recently looked back on a story I had written in high school and got a lot of laughs out of it. While there were some good ideas and even some passages I was proud of, there was a lot that needed work. I’m proud that I’ve moved on in skill from those days, but also proud of where I came from. I’d like to think there was potential in those pages! But I did learn a few things about clumsy writing and how to strip it ruthlessly from your fiction. It boils down to two basic ideas that you should keep in mind when both writing and editing.
Pare Down Unnecessary Words
The biggest mistake young writers make is trying to show off their vocabularies simply because they can. Often, the biggest word or most elaborate phrase does not match the mood, tone, or voice of the story. It doesn’t fit the character, the setting, or the emotion, yet we still use the most complex phrase or word we know because we think it will make us seem sophisticated. Experienced writers learn that good writing is actually a process of weeding these things out. Here’s an example of a sentence from my high school sentence:
It was, not without trepidation, that he turned his tennis shoes to Jameston Books, where he had worked before leaving for college.
What are your guesses about what is wrong with this sentence? I start to wince when I reach “not without trepidation”, which may be the clunkiest way possible to say that the character is nervous. Why not just say that he’s nervous? You are also allowed a chuckle at the bit of alliteration I wasn’t able to resist (“turned his tennis shoes”). A more efficient way to say that would just having him walking or going to Jameston Books. But trepidation is a word that just doesn’t fit in this sentence.
Pare Down Unnecessary Ideas!
Writers don’t just go over the top with their words — they spell out too much with their ideas. Show, don’t tell is an ancient adage, but it can’t be restated enough. Here’s an example of a sentence where I couldn’t resist saying exactly what I wanted the idea to be, rather than letting the reader figure it out:
“Arthur! David! Were you buying that book?” he demanded, with twenty years of solitude, bitterness, and fear coiled up in his voice.
First, this sentence is pretty laughably melodramatic, but it’s also a bad idea to be saying so much outright about what I think is going on. One writing teacher I had called this “Wonder Years syndrome.” If you remember the old tv show “The Wonder Years” (a terrific show, but with a few flaws), the show would often have a touching moment between characters. That was all we needed to understand what was going on, but then a voiceover would come in and say something like “With that smile, I knew she didn’t need me to protect her anymore.” We the viewers already knew this — we didn’t need to be told! Yet the temptation for writers to make themselves understood very clearly often leads to saying too much.
It comes from an inferiority complex, I believe; writers don’t trust the power of the scenes they’ve written, so they rush in to explain when no explanation is necessary. So when writing and revising, remember these two steps: strip out clumsy words and phrases, and strip out those clumsy, unnecessary ideas too.
Mailbag: Teaching Creative Writing
This week I’m responding to thoughts and comments on my post about Teaching a Creative Writing Class. That’s right — in the fall, I’ll be loosed upon the unsuspecting student population as a teacher. And I wanted my readers to speak up about what they would want in a writing teacher. Many readers had suggestions. Susie said:
As a teacher myself (and granted, I teach the little guys), I know how easy it is to get overwhelmed, especially if you are given a literal whole world of resources to choose from! Decide what your Big Ideas are first, what you want the students to know, and choose your literature around those goals. Then you can bring in a selection of different pieces to illustrate each Big Idea, and you’re not tied into a particular author, time period, or genre. I’m excited for you–best of luck!
Thanks, Susie! This did end being the way I decided to structure my syllabus — rather than moving in a linear way through short stories and their history, I grouped readings around certain things at work in different stories. I have weeks based around voice, plot structure, or dialogue, then I just picked stories that put these things to use in different ways. Hopefully it will keep the kids guessing about what they’re going to read next.
Felicia said:
As an avid reader who was left cold by some of the classics I was told to read in school, I would have the students explore more than one genre….I find that art suffers a great deal from narrowly defining what is ‘art’ to a single style or genre. Pop art might not be ‘classic’ but it is art. It takes talent, hard work and skill to create and someone out there thinks it is moving and lovely.
Well put, Felicia! I, too, think universities often force students to slog through the perceived heavyweights of the English canon, with not enough emphasis on contemporary fiction or short stories that are more immediate or moving to contemporary students. I’ve taken care not to include stories just because they’re the thing to read; I’m having students read stories that I loved myself.
After the jump: more suggestions and comments on what a good creative writing teacher needs.
Publishing Goals to Set For Summer
We’re officially halfway through summer! Have you been staying on track for your writing goals? If not, then maybe it’s time to set up some goals for yourself. Personally, I’m often too busy during the year to focus on getting published, but there are plenty of things you can do to prepare for the publishing trail over the summer. While many literary magazines don’t accept submissions in the summer, you can get ready for the fall rush in several different ways.
1. Revision
During the year, I rarely have time to look back on my stories and edit them. I have so many new pieces due each semester that I’m kept on the run, looking constantly forward for new ideas. That’s why I reserve the summer for reflection and revision. It’s a good idea to start getting your stories in shape over the summer, because it’s a step that is so often neglected, but one that all the editors agree is essential to making a publishable piece. This summer, go back through your folder and look at pieces you’d like to get published. Start beating them into shape! Rewrite, revise, and do it again. Work your stories like Rocky until they’re in fighting trim.
2. Update your cover letter
It’s time to attend to the details of your publishing campaign. When was the last time you looked at that cover letter you send out? Does it still say you’re a high school student? Does the date in the corner say 1996? Take a look at your cover letter and make sure it puts your best foot forward for you. Update your list of publications, the tone of your pitch, and anything else that will make a more polished, professional, and intriguing entry point to your story.
3. Research
Literary magazines always encourage you to read their magazine before submitting, but who has time to read all of them? Now that it’s the summer, you can catch up on your literary reading and really figure out which magazine is the best fit for your work. Take a bunch out of the library, go through them, and make notes about which magazines favor your kind of writing. It’s fun and useful: you’ll be enjoying the fiction and poetry of writers like you, as well as learning about what each magazine really wants as opposed to taking stabs in the dark.
4. Find your good rejections
I’ve written before about how valuable a good rejection is. One reason they’re important is that they’re the beginning of a way in to a publication. If you got a rejection with a personal note, it often means they would read more work from you with greater interest and attention, and that you’re close to getting accepted. Save all of your good rejections, and use the summer to make a list of these magazines and new stories that you could send to them. Think of this method as a more targeted attack on getting published.
Do these four things, readers, and come fall you’ll be ready to launch yourself upon the literary world!
What Problems Just Won’t Go Away?
Sometimes beginning and expert writers alike get an idea for a character that is thorough and detailed, but doesn’t have any sense of a problem. The emphasis on character is so strong with most books and writing classes that writers begin to think all a story needs is a well-drawn character. They make detailed profiles, answer questionnaires, know exactly what clothes their characters wear, what their favorite foods are, what their rooms look like. The problem with all this is that you end up with a character sketch, which is only half of a story. In fact, it isn’t a story at all, it’s just a writing exercise.
So you’ve got your character. What do you do next? It’s time to think about what kinds of problems will actually drive a story. Problems that aren’t enough to fill a story include a straightforward breakup, death of an aged family member, death of a pet, and hating one’s boss. All of these could be small things that add to the tension of a story, but they’re not good enough to be the only problem in a story. Instead of falling on these trite standbyes, it’s time to think about what problems just won’t go away.
Some problems are really only annoyances or obstacles. The problems that really drive stories are the ones that seem to get more daunting and complex the more you look at them. The ones you try to ignore, but just won’t stop invading your life. It’s the ones that a little change of attitude or a bit more money won’t fix. It’s the ones that force your character to re-evaluate who they are and what they’re striving for. These are the problems that make stories worth reading. It matter much less whether the problem gets solved, as long as it gets your reader turning the page, wondering what possible solution could be found.
For your story, try looking at your character again and asking yourself what kind of problem would really rock his or her world. If you haven’t shaken him or her to the core, you haven’t gotten the right problem for your story yet.
