WRITING: Workshopping

A story I’d written over the holidays was workshopped last night at our meeting, and the feedback was revealing, confirming, enthralling, sobering, and most of all, motivating.

The bad news:  With a single final phrase, it is obvious that I have not learned as yet to completely relinquish control of a story to the reader’s imagination.  A few years ago, I was forced to face my tendency to explain exactly what I meant in a story, heck, in every sentence. This affected not only my tag sentences that reiterated what I’d just written, but also my lack of giving any imagery to the reader to feel comfortable enough to walk around in the story and pull his own experience into play.  While I’ve slowly disciplined myself to be more creative and less revealing, I may have gone a bit overboard on the use of imagery in overdoing the picture; in other words (here I go again), if I’m not allowing myself to tell you succinctly what’s there, I’m bombarding you with a flourish of color and unnecessary detail.  This, I can fix.

The good news:  Steve has pronounced that I’ve come a long way.  That’s four years of long way–and I don’t kid myself into thinking I’m anywhere near the goal, but it is so satisfying to realize that absorbing some skill by reading, and outputting some skill by practice in writing, that I’m making some strides.  This same recognition by myself was evidenced by John’s picking up of the author’s joy in writing–something I was completely aware of as I wrote.  "Look at me!  Look at me–I’m writing damn fine imagery!"   While I’m sure that some hints of the writer’s exurberance is good, it shouldn’t overtake the story. In our circle, being called an "author" is a dirty word.  This, I can fix.

Several members pointed out what may be a completely unnecessary paragraph in the exposition.  And–what coming off of a Suttree reading gave me the false confidence to do–go back to my run-on sentence days.  One hundred and fifty-nine words is divided into only three sentences.  Think I got carried away?  I knew it at the time, but just didn’t know where to chop.  I can fix this, too.

And one of the most self-satisfying triumphs is that everyone knew what the story was about, followed the arc, and was satisfied by the ending.  The ending!  I may have finally, at least with this piece of work, approached a climax and resolution technique.  Of course, I do have to cut off the tail end of ten words that suggested, "if you didn’t get it, it’s…"

Thanks, gang.