Tag Archives: classes

Pandering to My Inner Nerd

February 2, 2012 By in practical advice, writing Tags: , , , , , 4 Comments

Now that I’ve gotten about 2 dozen people’s written comments on the first 25 pages of my novel Two Women and a Boat, it’s time to do something about them. But I’m not the kind of person who can pull up an electronic document, pick up a pile of markups, and just dive in. I’m more methodical. More anal.

WHAT I’M SOLVING FOR:

  1. Much of the feedback, like typos and grammatical errors, is the same throughout all the edited manuscripts.
  2. I won’t act on all the feedback I get from each critic.
  3. I don’t want to have to keep going back and forth over those 25 pages over and over. I want to be able to go through and correct all the typos, then all the single-line fixes, then all the global fixes, etc.
  4. I want to keep track of who gave what feedback.
  5. I want to be able to incorporate the recommended grammatical fixes from all seminars/classes/lectures.

I don’t mind taking a little more up-front time to create a system that will save me time later, but I’m not a natural programmer (unlike my amazing husband). I can’t just look at a pile of data and order it in a way that will get me what I wanted. After four tries, I think I’ve come up with a database that I think is perfect.

It captures the name of the critic, a description of the correction, the date it was entered and the date it was completed, the manuscript version, and, the touch that I really feel will make a difference in my ease of editing, a field for correction type. I’m all excited now because it means that I can power through these 24 packets of comments, enter them into a single long list, add in all the rules that I know I should be looking for in my whole manuscript, and THEN sort by the type of correction I’m making. I can do all the globals at once. I can fix all the typos in one sitting. All the missed words, all the added words, all the local changes…

And now I’m going to get back to it.

Who Do You Believe?

January 28, 2012 By in practical advice, writing Tags: , , , , 4 Comments

I’m currently at Borderlands Press Boot Camp, and today is the day that we met with the folks running the group and got small-group feedback. Last night, a staffer read our separately-submitted two-page excerpts (we were requested to send in two pages from a current work in progress) out loud. We were instructed to raise a hand when we felt that we had heard enough to make a decision about the book, either yes or no. The group was brutal. They completely trashed nearly everyone’s submission, and by the time they got to mine (the last one), they were just shrugging their shoulders and asking each other “what the hell is this” and laughing in a not-kind way.

Mr. A, the man furthest to the left, said that it was a mess – he couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be happening. Mr. B, the man in the center, just laughed derisively. He shouted out “Muffin-faced? What does that even mean?” (I find this slightly funny because I stole that term from Paul Theroux, who used it to describe Queen Elizabeth in an article in Vanity Fair.) Mr. C, the man furthest to the right, seemed to want to hear more. He was willing to forgive its obvious deficiencies because he wanted to hear the end.

I was expecting the small-group feedback to look a lot the same – that everyone would trash me and I’d feel like an idiot. Imagine my shock, then, when Mr. A pronounced it “nearly perfect,” and observed that “either you’ve been writing for a very long time, or you’re gifted.” In the next session, Mr. B’s written notes said “I confess: I loved this.” Mr. C, the man I was sure would hale me as a genius, made some very discouraging remarks. He did say that it worked, that I had managed to walk a very fine line between horror and hilarity. I feel like he was tough on everybody, and that perhaps I got off a little easier than some, but it was still much tougher than I was expecting.

Here’s my dilemma, and I know that this has happened to everyone: On Friday night, I sat and listened to Messrs. A, B and C. I listened to how they presented themselves, how they put their thoughts together, the points they made, etc. I decided that Mr. A was a waste of time. I didn’t agree with his ideas or opinions and thought that he was a little full of himself. I wasn’t entirely sold on Mr. B either. He laughed at his own jokes and parroted the words of the other two men constantly. Mr. C seemed the most well-prepared, the most articulate, the most mentally together of the three. I had already decided that I would listen more carefully to his advice than to Mr. A’s or Mr. B’s.

But now that I’ve gotten their advice, I can’t help but feel that perhaps Mr. A and Mr. B are smarter than I had given them credit for. Obviously, they’re smart enough to see what a “perfect,” “gifted,” lovable writer I am. And perhaps Mr. C isn’t quite as bright as I wanted to think he was.

It’s tempting to believe the people who flattered me, but I’m going to go home and look at the dozens of copies of this same 25 pages I’ve now had critiqued and handed back, and I’m going to try the suggestions that Mr. C gave me. I’m not going to rest on my A and B laurels.

You Have to Give to Get

January 25, 2012 By in practical advice, writing Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Tomorrow morning, I leave at just after 6:00am for Baltimore to be part of the Borderlands Press Boot Camp. Each of the participants had to read and critique 15 other participants’ stories, up to 25 pages. Does this sound familiar?

I think that as a writer, my most valuable asset is having a group of people whose opinions I respect, to look over my work and give me feedback. But, like any valuable asset, it doesn’t come free.

In addition to the not-inconsiderable financial cost of grad school, I have upwards of 50 books to read each semester – that’s ~2 per week, 10-15 of which require annotations. I also have to write something like 100 pages of new work each semester. I have to read, critique and be prepared to discuss in detail the work of 5-6 of my fellow students per semester. For Borderlands Press Boot Camp, I had to pay to attend, but I also have to read and critique the work of the 15 other participants and be prepared to discuss it in detail. For the critique group I’ve been part of on and off for the past 4 years, I have to read, critique and discuss in depth an entire novel (not just the first 20 pages) every couple of months.

I’ve learned so much from all the people who have taken the time to critique my work, and when I critique theirs, I think hard about what I could do to make their work the best thing it can be. But I also want to point out to everyone who has ever said to me “You’re a writer. Could you just look at this thing that I wrote and tell me what you think?” that no, I can’t. I don’t feel that it would be fair to the dozens of other people who have made some real sacrifices and put in a lot of time to help me make my writing the best it can be.

 

 

Grad School Adventure!

December 6, 2011 By in grad school, personal Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

Tomorrow, I leave for grad school. Classes don’t actually start until Thursday, but I’m not 22 anymore and don’t really fancy the idea of driving for six hours and then immediately jumping into things. I’m more of a get there the night before, scope things out, catch up on last-minute reading, have a relaxing soak sort of person.

I’ve been reading like nobody’s business, and as I expected, I didn’t get to all the 57 things I had to read before school started. I’m hoping that, as I did during my undergrad days, I can just keep my mouth shut, take a lot of notes, and hope the teacher doesn’t call on me. Some things never change.

Here’s what I’m nervous about:

  1. I’ll meet my critique group and they’ll all hate my writing – think it’s puerile, silly, unworthy of their time.
  2. I’ll attend the literary pedagogy classes and everyone in them will talk exactly the way the books are written, which is to say that they will be pedantic, boring and full of themselves. It makes the thought of teaching really unpleasant.
  3. I’ll miss my family so much that by the fourth day I’ll be ready to quit and just come home. This is the longest the Pirate and I will have been apart since he moved in with me ten years ago, and I’m afraid I’ll feel lost without him. I’m even more afraid that he’ll be lost without me.
  4. This is actually my biggest and most overriding fear: I won’t learn anything new. That I will have already heard everything that they have to say and I’ll be essentially wasting my time and money.

My current schedule looks pretty full. It’s funny, but low-residency grad school looks an awful lot like attending a writer’s conference. You get the schedule of all the “learning activities,” which are the same as the lectures given during conferences, and you don’t have to sign up for any of them. You just show up when the thing starts.

According to the student guide, students are supposed to attend “at least seven learning activities,” including participating in your assigned workshops. I’ve picked out 24 “learning activities” (that doesn’t include the required stuff like library orientation, mentor meetings, student readings, or new student orientations, of which there seems to be at least one a day), so I’m wondering if perhaps I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. On the other hand, it’s not like each of these is an ongoing class. Each one is, at most, a two-hour lecture. I can’t imagine only doing seven of these things, but then again, I’ve never done this before.

I’m off to start packing. I leave tomorrow morning and make the drive down to Los Angeles. I’ll let you all know how it’s going.

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