Thursday, March 15, 2012

This was my first week of having two classes, and I'm pretty tired. My Monday class went very well. We workshopped four pieces (which is killer to do in 3 hours) and as a result we didn't really have time to discuss anything profound from a craft standpoint. Everything I learned was within the context of the pieces we were workshopping. Shelly concentrates very heavily on frontstory/backstory, which is something I've been thinking about as well, and also on point of view, which is becoming more and more the focus of my work (no pun intended) as the semester continues. Both of my pieces have fairly fluid point of view, shifting where they aren't supposed to, and in that way I'm just a tiny bit experimental. I like streamlining points of view as opposed to concentrating on one character, but I recognize that it can (and often does) get out of hand and become very confusing. But that's something I'll know more about after I'm workshopped on Monday, which I'm very excited and nervous for.

My second class was with Myla Goldberg and it's really, really far downtown. So far downtown that to make a 6:30 start, I had to get on the bus at 3:45, which seems a little bit ridiculous considering I'm 20 minutes away from just about everything in the city. Lower Manhattan--and I mean really lower, the last stop on the J train--is quite a bit farther than I'm used to traveling, but it went seamlessly--so seamlessly that I was actually there an hour and a half early. The class is held in a conference room at Hive at 55, which is, as I understand it, a "freelance office space," whatever that means. Myla is the sweetest woman in the whole world, but also very talented, as I understand it. The other students in the class range from 10 to 50 years older than I am, and I recognize many of them from the class I took with Myla Goldberg last fall. Myla's class is eight sessions long, and she plunged right in. She had sent out two stories to be workshopped as well as one published story to read from a craft standpoint, and she didn't waste any time. The first woman who went broke that very concrete rule of not speaking during one's workshop. As I put it quite graphically to my father later, talking when you are being workshopped is the equivalent of going to dinner with the queen, pooping on the table, and eating it with your feet. It's just not done. I've been in a lot of writing workshops, even on a high school level, and it seems pretty clearly understood. This one woman would not stop explaining herself and I actually thought Myla, who is very sweet and soft-spoken, was going to lose it. After a while, the woman got the idea, and chewed on her tongue for the rest of the class. The other woman who was workshopped had written a much stronger story and I enjoyed workshopping her very much.

We also read a short story by Aimee Bender for class today, called What You Left in the Ditch, which is about a man who loses his lips in a war. I'll leave it at that. It's an absolutely spectacular story and I would recommend it in a heartbeat. From a technical standpoint, it's really incredible. Myla called our attention to the way Bender affects all of the reader's senses--even using punctuation to indicate sound, with the extremely creative use of hyphens (to indicate when the husband's plastic lip replacements clack together as he speaks).

After going over the short story, she handed out the two stories to be workshopped next week, as well as the third published story, and then the list of workshops to be handed in. I have to hand in six days from now, next Wednesday, much to my surprise, and she has a page recommendation that's a good 10 pages more than what I was planning. It's not a matter of impossible as much as a matter of compromising my usual ways of doing things. I was going to wait to write until the workshop (seeing as it's the same piece) but I guess if I wait I only have Tuesday and Wednesday to add ten pages onto something that I'm really not quite sure of. That seems a little risky, to say the least. But my other option is even scarier--try to write something new, and hope that I can get fifteen pages up to par in that much time? Assuming that I even had a new idea, which I don't? I can't ask her to switch; her workshop schedule is set in stone. There has to be something I can do that doesn't require me to kill myself on Tuesday and Wednesday, but for me it's quite difficult to turn out a lot of words at one time because of the relative complexity of the words. While some authors pass a lot of time through explication, I'm at a point in my writing where 95% of it is in scene. Scenes are shorter and take longer to write. In general. But I am pretty good under pressure, so hopefully that 15 page recommendation will not go unfulfilled. I would hate to see Myla disappointed, especially because I'm the youngest person in the class by a long shot. In any case, I don't really have much of a choice. If worst came to worst I could submit Interior Space but I feel like that's been workshopped to death, so I'm trying to avoid it. Can someone please tell me why the verb "to workshop" is not actually in the dictionary?