Revising a short story can be both challenging and rewarding. In a way, you have a lot more control once you've completed the first draft - our goal is to make the most of that control in order to refine the story. Here's a look at how my approach to revision has changed over time.
Showing posts with label short stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label short stories. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
June 9, 2010 Newsletter - Short Story Workshop Starts Friday
In our latest Creative Writing Newsletter, read about the Short Story Workshop coming up this Friday and the encore of Freewriting Across Genres coming on June 25. If you would like to register for either of these courses, visit our Online Registration Page.
Also, you don't want to miss our Online Workshop Survey. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can help us determine which classes to add to our roster over next couple months.
Also, you don't want to miss our Online Workshop Survey. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can help us determine which classes to add to our roster over next couple months.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Writing Short Story Characters with Purpose
The saga of the MFA Thesis continues with Character Development.
The next step: developing my characters to reveal genuine motivations in the tight form of the short story. And this can be challenging. In order to be interesting and compelling, characters in fiction must have something at stake in the outcome of the story.Saturday, January 2, 2010
Blogging Thoughts
Websites are a funny thing. I started 1-2-Writing after a few less-than-positive experiences with writing workshops - both online and in-person. The biggest problem I ran into was price - I was paying money for workshops (some rather serious money - $500 for one of the online courses I took) and getting some really bad service. It wasn't that I disagreed with the feedback or that the instructors were people I didn't like - it just seemed like they didn't know how to teach. They were good writers, great people, but not very well organized. I wouldn't have minded if the workshops were free, but they weren't. It didn't help that I was barely employed at the time - I had just gotten out of the Army, I was paying rent for the first time in my life, and the only jobs I had were these part-time spots that barely covered rent, let alone food and health insurance and car insurance and my internet cable and...but who's counting? When you get to the point that you're buying generic dried beans from Harris Teeter so you can make a batch of chili that's even cheaper than the last batch, you get a bit irate after dropping a few hundred dollars for a writing course that doesn't pay off.
Like I said, though, it wasn't that I disagreed with the feedback. The real problem was the relative lack of feedback. The course for which I paid $500 was a 15 week novel writing course - I received no feedback from the instructor until after I submitted my third assignment some nine weeks into the course (and trust me, two months is a long time to wait for feedback worth $500). We were told the problem was instructor illness, and then the course was extended, and a new instructor brought in, but it was very hard to get back in the swing of things. The web administrator offered us all $250 refunds, but there was no reply back when I e-mailed in.
You can imagine that this experience turned me off to online workshops. Unfortunately, I think I was one of the lucky ones. After this experience, I made it into an MFA program, so I don't pay money for writing courses now. But I have friends who do. I've seen one friend pay a very, very large amount of money (thousands of dollars) for writing help with turned out to be little more than line edits. And it galls me because there isn't a lot I can do about it. I'm not exactly famous, I can't exactly say I've written enough to argue with these instructors who've published several books each. All I have out there is a short story and the fact that I'm earning in MFA. But I do have some knowledge. Maybe I haven't published much yet, but I've written a lot, especially compared to where I was when I first dropped engineering to pursue creative writing. It's not so much that I know enough to teach everything, but I can teach more than some of my teachers have. They may have known more, but they didn't have the time or - in my opinion - the knowledge of teaching necessary to convey their experience.
That, however, was two years ago - before I'd even finished applying to MFA programs. Since then, I've taught three semesters of undergraduate writing as part of our MFA program. What amazes me the most about teaching is not how much I know about writing, but how much I still have to learn about teaching. I've had to reconsider what I thought about the $500 instructor who disappeared. Sometimes, I wonder what I would really do if I became so sick that I couldn't teach - I'm not sure I would want my students to know just how sick I really was, and it's possible that she really couldn't continue with the course. And although I feel that I am a better teacher than some instructors I've met, I realize now that I am not the best teacher out there, not by far. Over the years, I've learned how to provide good feedback and good encouragement, but I've taken workshops from teachers who can literally light up a room. Two teachers I highly recommend for anyone who has a chance - Zelda Lockhart and Pat Schneider - changed the way I write. Another writer who I've only met through an online workshop - Karlyn Thayer - really kept me going when I was first learning to tighten my short stories. I wish I had space here to list all the teachers who've helped me - there's no way I would have made it even this far without the help of many, many people, most of whom I've only known for brief periods between moving. I have more than enough proof that writing workshops do work - maybe not always, and maybe not perfectly, but they do help your writing.
And something else to consider is what I've learned from the writing instructors who weren't as helpful. Sometimes, the books that best show you how to write well are the ones where you can see where the writing failed - I think the same is true for writing workshops. The great workshops gave me the experience and the desire necessary to take up writing - it was the bad ones that pushed me to take charge of my writing, to stop waiting for my writing to "improve enough" for me just just start publishing. What I've found is that it doesn't happen that way - some days you write well, some days you write through setback, and some days are so bad that you want to write but can't. Regardless of the situation, regardless of where you're at or the resources you have, you have to keep faith in your writing and push onward. If you read a book that's terrible, you sit down to write another one - if you take a workshop that's not worth the money, you start a website and do better.
With this thought, I encourage each of you to keep up the faith and know that, whatever your publications or lack of publications, you're a writer. And something I've learned over the years is very simple, but many people forget either one side of it or the other: every writer has something to learn, and every writer has something to teach us.
Happy Writing,
Ryan
Like I said, though, it wasn't that I disagreed with the feedback. The real problem was the relative lack of feedback. The course for which I paid $500 was a 15 week novel writing course - I received no feedback from the instructor until after I submitted my third assignment some nine weeks into the course (and trust me, two months is a long time to wait for feedback worth $500). We were told the problem was instructor illness, and then the course was extended, and a new instructor brought in, but it was very hard to get back in the swing of things. The web administrator offered us all $250 refunds, but there was no reply back when I e-mailed in.
You can imagine that this experience turned me off to online workshops. Unfortunately, I think I was one of the lucky ones. After this experience, I made it into an MFA program, so I don't pay money for writing courses now. But I have friends who do. I've seen one friend pay a very, very large amount of money (thousands of dollars) for writing help with turned out to be little more than line edits. And it galls me because there isn't a lot I can do about it. I'm not exactly famous, I can't exactly say I've written enough to argue with these instructors who've published several books each. All I have out there is a short story and the fact that I'm earning in MFA. But I do have some knowledge. Maybe I haven't published much yet, but I've written a lot, especially compared to where I was when I first dropped engineering to pursue creative writing. It's not so much that I know enough to teach everything, but I can teach more than some of my teachers have. They may have known more, but they didn't have the time or - in my opinion - the knowledge of teaching necessary to convey their experience.
That, however, was two years ago - before I'd even finished applying to MFA programs. Since then, I've taught three semesters of undergraduate writing as part of our MFA program. What amazes me the most about teaching is not how much I know about writing, but how much I still have to learn about teaching. I've had to reconsider what I thought about the $500 instructor who disappeared. Sometimes, I wonder what I would really do if I became so sick that I couldn't teach - I'm not sure I would want my students to know just how sick I really was, and it's possible that she really couldn't continue with the course. And although I feel that I am a better teacher than some instructors I've met, I realize now that I am not the best teacher out there, not by far. Over the years, I've learned how to provide good feedback and good encouragement, but I've taken workshops from teachers who can literally light up a room. Two teachers I highly recommend for anyone who has a chance - Zelda Lockhart and Pat Schneider - changed the way I write. Another writer who I've only met through an online workshop - Karlyn Thayer - really kept me going when I was first learning to tighten my short stories. I wish I had space here to list all the teachers who've helped me - there's no way I would have made it even this far without the help of many, many people, most of whom I've only known for brief periods between moving. I have more than enough proof that writing workshops do work - maybe not always, and maybe not perfectly, but they do help your writing.
And something else to consider is what I've learned from the writing instructors who weren't as helpful. Sometimes, the books that best show you how to write well are the ones where you can see where the writing failed - I think the same is true for writing workshops. The great workshops gave me the experience and the desire necessary to take up writing - it was the bad ones that pushed me to take charge of my writing, to stop waiting for my writing to "improve enough" for me just just start publishing. What I've found is that it doesn't happen that way - some days you write well, some days you write through setback, and some days are so bad that you want to write but can't. Regardless of the situation, regardless of where you're at or the resources you have, you have to keep faith in your writing and push onward. If you read a book that's terrible, you sit down to write another one - if you take a workshop that's not worth the money, you start a website and do better.
With this thought, I encourage each of you to keep up the faith and know that, whatever your publications or lack of publications, you're a writer. And something I've learned over the years is very simple, but many people forget either one side of it or the other: every writer has something to learn, and every writer has something to teach us.
Happy Writing,
Ryan
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Style and Popular Literature
One of my favorite writing teachers, Bill Henderson, addresses a fundamental question on his blog:
Are commercial bestsellers poorly written?
If you have a chance, definitely check out his post at TrueVoice - The Blog. I've included my response below, but there are several great perspectives on TrueVoice regarding the role of style in popular (and successful) fiction.
Style and Popular Literature
I'm afraid I have great respect for certain popular writers. The latest Harry Potter book was filled with dozens of horribly structured paragraphs, and there are some Stephen King books simply not worth reading, but I enjoy these authors. I appreicate what they can do with a character, how they can bring a story right up to the edge and somehow create a happy (and believable) ending.
At the same time, I have incredible respect for some of the literary short-story authors I've read lately. I can't remember their names, and I only remember their stories from which magazine I found them in (e.g. Georgia Review or Ploughshares). But these are stories I could not have read six years ago. I hated them, dreaded them. In college, the complex literary stories made me avoid the serious literature classes (quite a feat for an English major). I wanted to study creative writing - I didn't want to get bored out of my mind and then start pulling C's. I didn't understand story structure well enough then to appreciate what these stories accomplish. And what I understand now I learned from writing. Workshops taught me how to read stories in-depth, and I will never again enjoy my cherised "pop" novels which happen to be filled with run-on sentences and poor speech attribution.
Most readers, though, are like my mom - they don't write. Hand her Ann Rice and she'll pass the time; hand her Moby Dick and she'll talk about the ex-cousin-in-law who dropped out of his Ph.D. program. Readers like my mom enjoy a good story, and they rarely notice adverbs or participles that dangle into space. If they're good readers, they might feel queasy as the brooding superhero was saying his words darkly, but not always. To many readers, good writing is a product of deep thought. They think that "specificity of detail" means using phrases like "the fact that" and "he was verbed adverbly." They use these phrases themselves, and then they tell people like us (their friends/neighbors/bartenders who claim to be writers) things like "oh, yeah, I'm working on a book, too. It's about..."
Do I begrudge the bestsellers they're fame? Not really. They tell stories that are fun and witty and enjoyable despite transgressions of style. Honestly, I despise awards committees who slap labels like "A Genre Essential Book" on novels that lack either plot or fully realized characters. I worry about the editor who let it go when dozens of poorly-worded paragraphs in Harry Potter 7 crossed the desk. I feel robbed of my time when the books are bad and robbed of an even better read when the books are good but flawed.
Is style important? To us, certainly. To the typical reader? I'm not sure. I feel like an elitist saying this, but I remember the days when I could read a book without critiquing the word order on every other page. When I was younger, I had no patience for many of the books we call "literary." I read E.B. White because the book was about King Arthur, not because I understood the meaning of clean prose. Pride and Prejudice was a favorite because I thought Elizabeth Bennet was fun.
This, I think, is where the popular books excel - they develop characters who readers relate to. They provide compelling plots and exciting action to help readers quickly escape this world of work, taxes, and parking tickets. They reveal that it's possible to write a compelling story despite structural mistakes. It's the kind of trick I'm still trying to pull off.
In the meantime, though, I'll keep working on the fundamentals of style. I'm already much better at sentence structure than conflict, but there's always room for growth. When the day comes that I discover my compelling blockbuster story, I want the style to back me up all the way. I want the the story to read fast so the reader can dive in and forget that the images dancing through his mind are the product of black ink on white paper.
1-2-Writing Workshops Online
About Ryan Edel
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)