Last night I was workshopped by the Advanced Fiction group for the first time. The story I turned in is the one I have been working on up until this point (it's called "Interior Space") and I was pretty confident when I turned it in, although I knew that there were obviously some elements that have to be worked on before I'm anywhere close to done. I have scanned the notes I took during the workshop and will post them when I get home, although without any of the drafts it's pretty difficult to understand what exactly happened. Below, I summarize the main points of the workshop.
I tend to get the same criticism over and over, and last night's workshop began the same way. I'm tremendously familiar with my characters and the world they live in, but I sometimes skip steps when trying to introduce the reader. The effect is that the reader is a little bit lost as to the expository details of my story--the ages of the characters, the way the characters relate to one another, etc. I am actually getting better and better; the main suggestion of the group was that I have to give more obvious hints. The upside of my weakness in this department is that I am really good, really, really good at showing instead of telling, which apparently is unusual for writers of my age.
The second criticism I got from just about everyone was that the point of view was very strange, just technically speaking. It was written originally in third omniscient, but shifted into third multiple and even third limited. This is an element of craft that I need to do a lot of work on; no matter how many times Shelly explains it, I just don't quite get the subtle differences. I'm used to a more elementary form of the issue--if only it were as simple as first and third person! I'm allowed to have "Interior Space" tell the story of both characters, but I have to decide on a more formal perspective. The story seemed to vacillate between two character's points of view and the reader wasn't quite sure whose story it was and whom they were supposed to follow. It is very clear that one of my characters has a clear arc and a clear set of faults and desires--one of the major strengths of the work is that the characters, including this one, are so strong. The other character is well-developed but doesn't quite have an arc and doesn't seem to change over the course of the story. In the words of my teacher, I have arrived at the ending of the story--and the ending was very well received--but I haven't quite earned it. There seemed like a little gap between the end of the story within the story and the end of the text itself. This is much clearer upon actually reading drafts. I have no idea how I'm going to present any of this in the final presentation, but I guess I have time to figure that out.
The workshop went overall really well, although I guess I thought I was closer to being done than I actually was. This always seems to be the case. I've started the second short story (and I did something very wise in the first story, actually--I had a phone ring towards the end, which goes unanswered in the first text and is of no consequence but will link the reader to the second story) and I've got a first page. It's been a little more difficult than I thought it was going to be to do turn out a lot of new material, but I think some of that is a time constraint. All of a sudden, I actually have work in the 2 AP classes I still take--but at the same time, not having all the time in the world will actually inspire me to do more when it starts to get late at night.
I also have to go back to doing morning pages. I guess it's mostly that I barely wake up with enough time to brush my teeth, never mind take 25 minutes to write, but I guess I should probably start doing that...
Note: There was a little glitch with the blog and I had to take both posts down, copy and paste them into Word, and put them up again. The dates, therefore, might be slightly skewed, but the date at the top of each post is the date on which I wrote the entry.
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