Writing workshops, words and weariness

I have a cold. A really stinking, streaming, vile and intractable cold. So if you were expecting to hear from me, and haven’t, this is why.

But even if I’m not up to much, the world moves on. Todd has produced the first pictures for our graphic novel pitch, and very fine they are too. James Burt, over at Literature Network reminded me of why I have my doubts about the value of writing workshops, and missed one point that really concerns me – these workshops are only ever about ‘literary’ fiction and if you want to write genre fiction you need to find a specialist workshop, or – gods forbid – commercial fiction … don’t bring that tainted phrase to the workshop because you will probably be stoned, or at least verbally pummelled. Lest we forget (although I had to get James to remind me) Dan Brown and David Foster Wallace were in the same writing group – but I’m willing to bet Mr Brown didn’t pitch up with bits of ... da Vinci ... for group crit!

There’s another reason I really don’t like workshops in the long term. It’s the long term. If you need a deadline, or a group crit, to get you to write, you’re not building a sustainable writing career, you’re building props and crutches. Your writing discipline might take the form of irresistible urges, or painful hours of nothingness (Flaubert). You may need to lock yourself in a room to write without allowing yourself to be distracted (Colette), or you may be the kind who has to be dragged away from your desk. What you shouldn’t be doing is teaching yourself that other people are expecting/waiting for your work – because, particularly for novel length work, unless you’re very lucky, that process happens rarely and not having anybody waiting for your work can destroy a beginning writer’s ability to write it! Building dependency on other writers is a very bad idea, because other writers are no more equipped with patience, kindness and clear sightedness than the population as a whole. If you’re lucky enough to find one or two people with whom you can exchange work on a regular basis that’s a different thing.

Workshops also breed what Zadie Smith called MFA Cookie Cutter fiction – which was a bit of a bastard, as she was saying it, in part, about me, and I’ve never taken an MFA or any other kind of writing degree. But if you read slush for any magazine of worth, you soon get to see the standard ‘workshopped’ story. They are good and clean and all seem very much alike … I wonder why?

So a workshop process is a good one, as part of your writing trajectory, or to dip into and out of at various stages in your writing career, and I do this all the time so please accept I’m not a workshop hater, I find dedicated workshops such as novel exchanges to be almost invaluable, but becoming a workshop junkie really isn’t good for you, or your fiction.

lolcat courtesy of stuffonmycat at Flickr

Growing as a writer (and as a person)

I am doing something this weekend that absolutely terrifies me. Sketchcrawl is worldwide activity but in Brighton, at the Jubilee Library, at midday on Saturday 21st November, it will be happening to me!

I am a terrible sketcher (getting better, but very slowly) and my urban sketches are the worst of my work. So why am I doing this to myself?

Because when I signed up for it, I was the kind of person who wanted to grow, and I wanted to meet other artists because that would help me, and I wanted to draw Brighton, because I love it, and bringing those two together would make me grow, whether I wanted to or not.

But today I am not that person – today I am a shivering wreck of terror about the whole thing. I don’t want to expose my paltry sketch skills to the very much better artists who might come along. I don’t want to ruin anybody’s Saturday by having organised something that turns out to be dreck. I don’t want the responsibility or the pain or the humiliation.

But I do want to grow. So I’m going through with it. If you have paper and pencil, feel free to join me – as you cannot possibly be worse at this than me, and even if by some amazing chance you were, I will be kind and supportive and happy to see you, because that’s what I’m hoping to other, better, artists will be for me. And I'm already in contact with one accomplished, lovely artist who will be coming along, and that's a GOOD start.

So growing is painful. But necessary. I’m growing into a different form of writing too – two different forms, actually. Excellent Agent has me working on a book-length non-fiction. I feel quite odd about it: one the one hand, it’s making me a better writer, on the other I’m nervous that I could end up ‘doing’ non-fiction for life when I really want to be a novelist. So I’ve opted to grow in another way too –I’ve found an artist with whom I’ve very excited about working on a graphic novel, provisionally entitled Savage’s Steam Emporium.

Todd Alan is great, nearly as driven as me, and proving to be fun to work with. Of course I am not going to become a full-time graphic novel writer, but it’s been a dream of mine since I picked up my first Marvel comic, aged 12. And I’m equally terrified about this too: maybe Todd will put in hours of work for no purpose, maybe publishers will laugh at us, maybe Excellent Agent will blow her stack at me for doing this (EA, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry!) when I should be working on serious income-generating projects.

But I’m growing. And that is the only thing to do. What doesn’t grow, stultifies, and who wants to be a stult?

Sooo… the things I wanted to talk about:

Jim Murdoch’s new novel, Stranger than Fiction. I really enjoyed this, and Jim’s profoundly idiosyncratic view of the world is always fascinating. I tried to come up with one of those pithy one-liners that you are supposed to use to encapsulate a project for the movie industry (which is popularly supposed not to be able to cope with more than a sentence of information at a time) and what I decided on was Alan Bennett meets Douglas Adams! The characters from Jim’s previous novel are resurrected, having died at the end of the last one, in a manner not unreminiscent (is that a word?) of Eoin Colfer’s continuation of the work of said Douglas Adams. I loved it. Jim’s novel, I mean, not Eoin’s – haven’t read that and probably won’t – I’m not sure why I don’t like writers picking up the work of deceased literary stars and taking it on, but I don’t.

Writers who won’t – don’t get me started! I have been talking to a writer for seven months (seven!) about a project that she’s capable of achieving and has all mapped out, but she just can’t bring herself to start. Way back in 2006 Fortune Magazine’s Geoffrey Colvin wrote an article highlighting research that shows that the gap between success and failure is filled by practice and consistent feedback on the quality of that practice. Now I’m not a great fan of workshops, because I think they become an end in themselves for many people, but if some writers just used a quarter of the time they spend thinking and talking about their work on actually getting words down, they would develop some of that practice and might find that not only did their ability to work improve, but the work itself did too.

But then there are writers who won’t stop. I feel guilt every November when I watch some talented writers diving into NaNoWriMo with flailing abandon. You see, when I was a NaNo coordinator I pushed a lot of these people into their November excess and now I watch in horror this one and only time of the year that they write anything at all. It’s an unintended by-product of NaNo frenzy that some writers find they can’t get into the habit of writing all year round, or writing without the plaudits and excitement of the massive social network that surrounds the event. And this means that in November they are happy to produce 50 or 70 or even 90 thousand words that they put in a drawer and forget about. It’s as if they store up all their writing stimulus through the year to splurge it out in one great orgy of unstoppable wordiness. Okay, it’s not my problem (I’m not a coordinator any more, for one thing) but it does worry me more than a little that NaNo might be destroying writers rather than creating them. Anybody else got any evidence, especially to disprove my theory that a few writers can only perform under NaNo stimulus?

And I was going to blog about an average day in my life, but it’s too depressing to contemplate the deadlines looming over me right now, so I shall save it for next time.

The picture shows Morgan, formerly known as Toulouse, but she wouldn't answer to it ...

Missing In Action

That's what I am, and I apologise to you for it. But by next week I hope to be back with:

1. A book review
2. Commentary on a day in the life of a writer
3. A short rant about writers who won't start and writers who won't stop.

Until then, I beg your pardon, but I am working flat out on lots of things, ministering to the kittens (one of whom has been renamed) and just not having quite enough time to go round.

I'll be back ...