It’s funny, but no matter how many times I tell my students that stories need conflict and some sort of drama, I still get stories about vacations, trips to the beach, or other perfectly pleasant situations. While the writing in these stories can often be quite sharp, the message doesn’t seem to be getting through that not all subjects and scenes are created equal. Not every premise is equally capable of becoming an engaging story; some are just too trouble-free. The easiest way to get the ball rolling in a story is to present us with some sort of problem, but it continues to be tempting (and not just to my students) to write about safety and normalcy. Why?

The dangerous power of the writer

My theory is that writers, particularly young writers, are very aware of the power of words. They know that words once said or written can do damage; they can break hearts, hurt feelings, start wars. Words and the power of imagination behind them can be very dangerous. When we’re creating something, we don’t want to presume that we’re worthy of describing large, dramatic events; putting a fictional character in danger is almost as bad as putting a real one there. Perhaps our impulse is to apologize for ourselves, and to write small and humbly. We’re left futzing with familiar, tame scenes, attracted by the security of them.

After the jump: how to choose the right subject.

Choosing the right subject for you

Of course, great drama can be wrought from small moments in life. But we need to draw out the tension in those small moments. When choosing your subject, don’t write about the Battle of the Bulge if that’s not what you’re interested in or comfortable with. Choose something that you feel you could probe from the inside out. At the same time, don’t choose something that is inherently benign. If the story is benign, or harmless, then the reader simply won’t care about it. Drama is what makes us care about a story, so start with a familiar setting, but give us a strong sense of tension. Always, always, introduce a problem. We don’t want to read about Eden before the Fall; we want to see the fruit getting eaten.

Here at Writerly Life I’ve talked a few times about the importance of point of view as an element of the story. It’s always true that two people may see the same moment or situation with completely different eyes; so here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re choosing what point of view to stick with in your story.

Who has access to the real conflict?

The first question to ask yourself is whether your character has the correct amount of access. Stories are about conflict — so have you chosen the character who actually is able to see the conflict and comment on it? To see a political conflict from the perspective of the politician’s four-year-old son, for example, won’t capture the sophisticated power struggles at play. On the other hand, writing from the point of view of the parent who is never home won’t work if all the drama is happening at home. You must choose a character who is able to see everything that the reader must see in the course of the story.

After the jump: more questions to consider when choosing your point of view.

Who is in a position to change the story?

The second thing to remember is that it won’t do any good if your character can see everything but can’t do anything about it. Stories run on choice and change; they cannot be passive observation only. Be sure to choose to write from the point of view of a character who has the power to actually change things in the story and have a choice. While there may be many victims in the story, if they are powerless than it is not really their story that you are telling. You’ve got the find the character who sees these victims and makes a choice to do something about it, or else fails to do something about it.

Stick with it?

I began this post by telling you to stick with a point of view, but there are, of course, many situations when changing up the point of view is appropriate. This is more true in novels than in stories, where there’s more room to develop multiple characters. But changing the point of view at a crucial moment can add greatly to the development of your plot. It can add to mystery and suspense, or give us the final revelation the story needs. So if something is being held back in the course of your story, consider saving a switch to a more enlightened point of view for the very end. It’ll be the final punch of emotion that your reader needs.

1. Know your editing notes

First, it’s very useful to have a universal editing language that everyone in the workshop can agree on. It can save time if you don’t have to write “I don’t think this is the right word for this description” every time, but can instead just put “wc.” Here are a few editing shorthand notes that many writers use when workshopping.

WC: “Word choice” — a general comment that this isn’t the right word and the writer should try a different word
AWK: “Awkward” — if the phrase just isn’t hitting right, sounds too wordy or just clumsy, and the writer should rephrase
Squiggly underline: general disapproval. The squiggly line can highlight anything that isn’t working and can be accompanied by further elaboration on why it isn’t working.
Straight underline: great! Underline the things that are working well.
STET: ignore. If the editor makes a comment but then changes his mind, STET tells the writer to ignore any markups there.

If you are being workshopped

Here are a few things to keep in mind if you are up to be workshopped.

No talking — while some teachers vary on how strictly this is enforced, you should not really be talking while you are being workshopped. Your work should speak for itself, and there’s no need for you to defend the piece. Now is your time to be listening and taking notes.
Don’t get personal — remember that your work, not you, is being criticized.
Stay calm and take in what you can. The influx of feedback can be overwhelming, but it’s best to act as a sponge and take everything in. Sort out conflicting opinions later, when you are calm and ready to begin revising.

After the jump: how to workshop.

If you are doing the workshopping

Now here are a few rules for if you are discussing someone else’s piece.

Separate the work from the writer — Remember that it is a work of fiction, not a person, that you are critiquing. Keep your language directed at the piece, not at the failings of the writer.
Begin with the positive — It’s always nicer to hear what’s working first.
Use “I” statements — I know it sounds like kindergarten, but it’s important nonetheless to avoid absolute declarative statements such as “This piece was terrible.” Try instead, “I was confused in a few places,” or “I wasn’t sure if this character was developed enough.”
Avoid comparisons — It’s never a good idea to play writers off each other and make comparisons within the class.

Follow these general guidelines, and you’ll have a productive, respectful workshop!

At the same time, Americans have a sort of obsession with group movements and the dynamics of people that move on a massive scale, almost in the same way that countries like China do. Take a look at the work of a fave author of mine, John Steinbeck. Steinbeck was particularly fascinated by our dual nature as Americans, our potential for both iconoclasm and startling moments of national unity. He writes:

One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land…I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep those two squatting men apart…this is the zygote. For here “I lost my land” is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate — “We lost our land.” The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one…this is the beginning — from “I” to “we.”

Here, Steinbeck shows that the seeds of revolution, one of our most prized ideals, are not in the seeds of individualism. They are, instead, when we begin to work together, when we unite for a common goal. This, too, is powerful and valuable, an important moment to study in an American story. And here, too, Steinbeck is talking about “collective action” over individual striving:

This you may say of man — when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.

It’s Man the monolith Steinbeck is talking about here, and how Man the group is linked to progress. Does progress only happen when people become a little less than individuals, and become instead a massive movement, a many-headed creature? As a staunch individualist, no matter how much I love Steinbeck, I’m inclined to disagree. But the power of his ideas can’t be denied, and neither can their strong place in the American ethos.

So who wins in your story: the collective or the group? What do you think?

American Semiotics

Before we started exploring actual texts, we broke down a few lists of the images, symbols, and ideas that go into our notion of an American story. We need to have a firm grasp on the tropes writers rely on in America before we can study how they are critiqued, after all. To begin with, I showed students a Levi’s commercial from a few years back that I found absolutely fascinating. It’s here:

Like all jeans commercials, this one is showing a lot of young, pretty people running around with their shirts off. But it’s also quite innovative, and almost approximates art. For one, Levi’s is using Walt Whitman himself as the narrator; they are relying on a very old wax cyllinder recording of Whitman reading his own poem about America. The words themselves are deeply moving. On top of that, Levi’s is capturing some of the images that we have powerful emotional associations with, such as fireworks, children, fields of corn, tough urban landscapes, lovers, night skies. It has the word “America” flickering and half-sunken in a gritty dark lake, capturing a national anxiety about the current, troubled state of our country and the ideals we hold dear. It’s quite an extraordinary commercial, as commercials go, and it seems almost a call to arms to America’s youth, to stand up and make something of themselves.

After the jump: what all this means for our own stories.

How to use American tropes in our own stories

As I’ll discuss in future posts, many American writers very deliberately deal with the same images and tropes that the commercial deals with. But instead of celebrating them in an empty way as the commercial does, the writers want to critique and question them. They want to break them down, explore the anxieties behind them, and sometimes even mock their naiveté. The American ideal of the melting pot, for example, is mocked in stories like “The Godfather”, in which Italian immigrants are not allowed to assimilate but are instead shut off in ghettoed societies, forced to use crime to climb the social ladder.

You, too, can explore haunting American symbols in your writing and explore their value or truthfulness in society. Sprinkle images of the earth or cornfields or the flag in, and then explore and critique these images. Make sure your version of an American story is nuanced rather than jingoistic.

Ashok wrote:

Thanks for the link – have bookmarked the blog, will definitely be back.

I dunno what you can use for the class. The thing is, there are lots of people that read a ton who don’t really care for any poetry at all. When explaining poetry, I always start from New Criticism – every work of literature is a self-contained world, one is trying to find and explain the dynamic between an internal speaker and internal audience…The contemporary poet I really like is Katia Kapovich. “Apartment 75″ and “Painting a Room” are incredible.

Thanks, Ashok. I’m definitely finding in my class that students are more reluctant to talk about poetry even if they like it, just because they don’t feel equipped with the tools to discuss it. I’m beginning most poetry discussions with a little talk about what is technically at work in the poem, whether it’s about the rhythm, meter, or specific devices. That’s one way to make young writers more comfortable in the world of poetry.

katyusha wrote:

I don’t know all that much about poetry, because I don’t read so much of it– not the modern stuff, anyway. I do like Louise Bogan, however. Her poems are fairly short (one is two lines).
first link
second link
“The Dragonfly” is good (2nd link), and “Medusa”, but I think my favourite is “Night” (also 2nd link).
Also, as crazy as it may sound, Shel Silverstein is still one of my favourite poets of all time. Kids’ poetry that it may be, some of it’s pretty profound. And the lighter stuff is great too– I’ve never taught, but based on classes I’ve taken I’ve always gotten more from the ones that broke up the heavy stuff a bit.

Thanks, Katyusha. I’ll definitely check out those poems. And I’m glad you mentioned Shel Silverstein. Most of us were first introduced to him as a children’s poet, but his playful spirit with language continues to charm me (and he has several adult poems that are more mature, as well).

After the jump: more thoughts on what poems can teach us.

Margaret Fieland said:

One of the things that poetry can teach us is how language can be used to create an effect. Victor Hugo’s “Les Djinns” illustrates this beautifully, starting with short lines and building up to longer and longer ones, then getting shorter and shorter.
No English translation, in my opinion, can do complete justice to the French original, but the following is pretty darn good:

http://www.johannes-eva.net/index.php?page=hugo_en

Another thing that poetry can teach us is the importance of each and every word, and of each and every word choice, the use of imagery and language.
PS: I’d love to see you do a piece on any or all of poetry in translation, what makes a good translation, how to go about translating a poem.

Thanks, Margaret, for that succinct definition. That’s absolutely what I think is so valuable about studying poetry even if you’re a die-hard fiction writer. It’s just so important to understand the value and weight of individual words and the way they bump together in a sentence. Too often, story-writers focus on the “macro” side of editing without thinking about stories on the sentence level.

Thanks for your comments and suggestions, readers! I hope to see you next week at the mailbag again.

An Exercise To Follow Your Pen

When teaching creative writing, I like to get students doing a writing exercise on the very first day. It makes it very clear what this class will be about, and what I expect of my students. One exercise I use is a very open-ended one, but that can have very good results. I have students write words on scraps of paper — any words at all. Words they love, words that sound weird, words that they hate — anything goes. Then I shuffle up the papers and have students randomly draw some words from the pile. For five minutes, they must write inspired by the first word they have drawn. Then for another five minutes, they must continue the piece, writing about the next word, and so on. It’s an immediate way to simply follow your pen the way Toucan Sam tells you to follow your nose. It takes worry and planning out of the equation and makes writing your primary purpose.

How To Trust Your Pen

Writing in this immediate way is a crucial part of the creative process, particularly if you’re feeling paralyzed. What a lot of writers are fighting a constant battle with is insecurity and self-doubt. You don’t trust yourself to produce good writing, so you write nothing. The way to combat this self-doubt is to temporarily take yourself out of the equation. Instead, trust your pen.

Think of it this way: your pen is capable of producing hundreds of pages of great writing. It has all the potential in the world wrapped up inside it. All you have to do is let it get started. Stop being an obstacle between your pen and the paper; just let it get writing. Start with a prompt like the exercise I mentioned, and get writing. Let the words come as they will. Don’t think beyond the next sentence. Don’t doubt. Trust.

Now Refine Your Words

What will come out of this exercise may not be Shakespeare. It will necessarily be rough. But that’s what first drafts are supposed to be like. Now’s the time when you can look back at your work and refine it. Pick the part that has the most potential and write a new work beginning where you started. This exercise will give you beginnings — but more importantly, it will give you the confidence to trust yourself and your own writing. After all, it was you holding that pen the whole time.

As the students get to know each other, I can imagine them getting more comfortable with talking, but at first it will be slow going. I’ve started planning an opening talk with a few notes about what I want to say, but mostly I’m keeping my lesson plans loose; if someone has a comment, I want to be able to drop things and let the discussion go in interesting directions, rather than clinging to my notes. That means I have to cultivate a strong go with the flow attitude, even if the discussion isn’t going exactly where I planned.

To break the ice, I have planned a few simple writing exercises to force shy young writers to put pen to paper in the very first class. They’re tried and true writing exercises that I’ve written about before here on the site. If you’re beginning your own creative writing group, it’s a great idea to limber up muscles and break barriers of shyness by getting the group writing together and sharing their efforts. Establish a group leader that can rotate each week, and have that group leader keep things on track. As the teacher in my class, I want writing to be unstructured and relaxed, but it will be my responsibility to keep students focused and thinking about writing. As a student who only graduated a year ago, I know how tough it can be to think about writing in the midst of a hectic college schedule. But that’s precisely why this introductory creative writing course is so valuable: it’s a time when the only thing that is expected of you is writing and thinking about writing.

What can poems teach us? And which poems are the best to learn from?

The first question to ask when assembling a reading list is, What do I want the readings to teach? For the poetry section of the syllabus, I want the chosen poems to teaching my students about voice, mystery, and detail, among other things. I’ve chosen a very wide range so far, from selections from Walt Whitman to excerpts from Rumi. For contemporary poetry, I’m a little more out of the loop. Some of my favorite poems that I’m including are Billy Collins’ “Workshop”, selected odes to ordinary household objects from Sharon Olds, and Tom Wayman’s “Did I Miss Anything?” These contemporary poems are memorable and teachable to me because they ask questions or capture singular, complex moments in modern life, including our love of workshop language, our regret at missing every opportunity for a realization, and our dependence on simple, ordinary objects. They’re good for teaching because their structures can be replicated, but filled with students’ original ideas.

But what do you think? Poetry lovers, give me poem suggestions to teach and tell me what you think they can teach new writers. I’ll certainly check ‘em out. That leads me to that question of what poems can teach us. Why do we read a poem in a creative writing class? More than anything, I think the poem can teach us how the personal makes something universal. The more vague and cliched an idea is in a story or poem, strangely, the less universal it feels: it becomes alien from us, feeling unreal, something made up for a glossy magazine or a television commercial. If you rely on the personal details and experiences of your own life, however, it begins to feel as if everyone could identify and sympathy with it. Art lives in personal experience, and there’s no art form more personal than poetry.

What do you think poetry can teach us, and what poems will best show that lesson? Share your thoughts, and keep the poetry discussion going.

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.”

2. Ask what the goal is, and help the writer reach it.

It’s important not to get too bogged down in the small details. A workshop discussion is often in danger of this: some small irritating flaw catches someone’s attention, and half an hour flies by as everyone piles onto it while losing sight of what the story really needs. Instead, keep your eye on the target here. What the writer really needs from feedback (because it is something he/she can’t do him/herself) is feedback about the feel of the story, the story’s perceived goal, and whether that goal was achieved. So how do you go about commenting on that?

Start by asking yourself while reading, what kind of story is this? As you’re reading along, you might find yourself saying, “Aha — now I understand this is a love story.” Or you might know from page one that it’s science fiction, or that it’s a satire. It might take several pages to get a feel for what type of road you’re walking on in this story. If you can’t figure it out at all, that’s certainly a comment to include — to tell the writer gently that you never felt like you knew where you were. If you do figure it out, though, it’s your job to figure out how well that goal is reached.

Every different type of story has different needs that must be met. If it’s a love story, you’ve got to feel like the two characters are real and have a genuine inner life. If it’s science fiction, the ideas or questions must be new and innovative. If it’s satire, some aspect of society must be questioned or made absurd in a new way. In your comments, tell the writer whether you thought those needs were met, and how he or she could do better to make you the reader on firm footing.

3. Did it surprise or challenge you?

While it’s good to have a story that follows the rules, that’s actually only half the battle for a good story. A good story makes us feel we’re on firm footing, then pulls the rug out from under us. A good story shows us a playing card, then flips it around and turns it into a bouquet of flowers. A good story keeps us guessing. A good story plays by the rules only just so far, and then breaks them.

The next thing you’ve got to comment on is whether the writer’s story challenged you in a way you had never seen before. If the story is only an adequate copy of a Raymond Carver classic, then it is still a failure, because you’ve seen it all before. In your comments, gently remind the writer that we’ve seen this premise before, and ask how he or she can make it feel new to us. That could mean fresher language, a new plot twist, or a new setting — whatever it takes to make the story feel as fresh as Raymond Carver’s did when they first appeared fifty years ago. In fact, Carver’s stories feel as fresh today as they did then purely because they have that something special in them — they continue to surprise and challenge, decades later.

So don’t be afraid to ask the writer point blank: how does this story surprise us? How does it challenge us? What can you do to keep it surprising? If you can guide the writer toward answers to those questions, you’ve been a helpful commenter.