The Value of Workshops

Workshop minimum requirement: coffee

A few years ago, I began my first college writing workshop. Sure, I’d taken some creative writing classes before, but I couldn’t imagine that the natural talent required to create art could really be taught in the classroom. I failed to appreciate the mechanics of writing well, and the value of the writing community. I also couldn’t have imagined how it feels to share your work with fifteen to twenty other readers.

When I first read aloud an excerpt from my first novel draft, I was overwhelmed to the point of tearing up (just a little, okay?). That silence as you read is loaded. When you finish, you become a total cliched breath-holding, nail-biting quivering child, speaking in public for the first time. You want everyone to like it so very much, and you feel your dreams riding on that quietness. You wonder if you write for other people or for yourself. Only the truest writers write for themselves and don’t care what others think, right? Right?!

I don’t think so. Not entirely, anyway. There’s value in workshops, and it’s not just in getting others to beta read your work, or to get feedback and free editing. A great deal of the value is in hearing others discuss your characters as if they’re real. The readers discuss the choices your characters make, and how that might change what happens next. It breathes life into the work. It encourages you to keep going, to keep spending those hours writing and editing and researching and imagining. Workshops are a beautiful thing. So seek them out, friends. Even if it’s just you and your pal, meeting weekly over coffee to talk about the next chapter. They’re worth every minute!

Evolving Process

As I edit the draft of my novel, I've noticed my writing process is evolving. My previous process went something like this:

Me, staring angrily at my computer screen instead of writing.

But my writing process changed, and now I've been able to write a full length novel and several short stories. There were two Big Things that changed to liberate me from angry staredowns with my laptop. The first is outlining, and the second is counting my words.

Outlining. *Shudder*. The word brings me back to middle school. All of my English teachers taught me that step one was to create an outline for my essays. I hated it. I much preferred writing out all of my ideas, and then going back to organize them. I hated outlining so much that when I had to turn in my outlines for points, I sneakily wrote the essay first, then crafted the outline to turn in. Thus, when I began writing creatively (not for points, and not for dollars), I still shunned the very idea of an outline. It seemed antithetical to include something so academic in my creative outlet. 

I don't even know how I'm going to finish this blog post with this image in here, it's that uninspiring.

Eventually, I decided that I would finish a novel, but I didn't know how. I had so many beginnings, so many ideas scribbled on looseleaf, so many chapters saved onto my hard drive, and not one full story arc to my name. So I began outlining instead. I found it deeply satisfying to create a story from beginning to end, and it made me excited to fill in the gaps. It directed my energy, because I knew what had to come next, and even if I wrote like crap to get from Chapter One to Chapter Two, at least I got that far.

Outlining gave me direction, but it was counting words that pushed me to follow through. I became obsessed with my word count when I began NaNoWriMo, but what's in a word count when you're writing something that's not a minimum of fifty thousand words? Motivation, that's what.

Not that kind of motivation. REAL motivation.

But if outlining is academic, surely adding math would ruin the artistic process, right? Nope, not for me. I'm so Type A that I find meeting my word count goal inspiring. And the truth is that I tend to think I'm finished with a chapter with only half of my needed word count. That's where I push through. I look at my count, review my outline, and more often than not, it turns out I haven't written enough or described enough, and my characters haven't developed enough. And that's where my best writing comes from. When I'm motivated to meet this tiny little chapter word count goal, it gives me what I need, piece by piece, to meet my hundred thousand word novel goal.

So try combining that crap from school that you hated with your writing. You might be surprised by the results!

"Throwaway" Writing

I am easily distracted. I tend to get started on something big, then when that long-awaited moment of writing inspiration strikes, it has the potential to sink me into a whole new project. I have a word for these harried, late-night scribbles--I call them my "throwaways". These are the dream inspirations, character examinations, setting descriptions, or illustrations of a feeling, like so:

If you click the photo, you can support my writing habit

“We’re almost there,” I say cheerily, strutting ahead despite my own frustration, and we continue along the road, withdrawing from the seasonal colors of the meadow into open countryside, complete with lush, fruited grapevines lining the road. I approach a climbing vine on the wire fence and stare at one dark, fat cluster of grapes that dangle obscenely. My mouth waters and the color skips like a missed heartbeat, it’s purple purple purple blue, and I have to raise my eyes away before it lifts me off the road.

I got in trouble for calling that a "throwaway". An author friend of mine had to sternly set me straight on it, not once, but twice in the last week. And honestly, does this particular scribble have promise? Heck, I don't know. But I do know that referring to these as "throwaway" pieces is a terrible misnomer. It's self-deprecating, it cheapens the work, and it fails to highlight the opportunity they present. Sometimes it takes someone outside of ourselves to point it out.

Don't be afraid to scribble, even if it's just an exercise. But don't sell yourself short. Every moment you spend creating shouldn't be thrown away. And maybe, if you're really onto something, it'll be the seedling for your next poem, short story, or novel. Whatever it is, don't let it wilt and die. You never know what it can become if you take the time to breathe a little more life into it.

Conscious Writing

Years ago, I had the terrifying epiphany that many young adults experience: that life was happening faster than I was consciously aware of. I couldn't have been older than sixteen or seventeen, and there I was, contemplating my own powerlessness in the face of time. It was too heavy then to process, and so I didn't, and instead descended happily back into focusing on my anxiety over the "small things".

Years later, I experienced it all over again as an abrupt, unwelcome awareness of myself and the unyielding passage of time. But this time I remembered that this sense of overwhelming consciousness had happened once before, and it felt good, as if I had slowed time just by being aware of it. It was a revelation, and I felt that by being conscious, I was somehow cheating death. And I continued thinking about it and wondered if perhaps there was a way to maintain that awareness, to stay awake long term, and maybe it would make my life feel longer. So I did what any Type A overthinker would do--I penciled it into my schedule. Literally. I added it to my daily calendar as a reminder to "WAKE UP!" every day at 6pm, and for about a year, I did just that. I would stop what I was doing at 6pm damn near every day, and think about where my life was and where I wanted it to go. I also took those moments to be happy for the successes I'd had or witnessed, no matter how small, and reflected on my failures and how I could grow from them.

I don't have that reminder set anymore, and I'm no longer focused on cheating death. And although it's not every single day that I practice "waking up", I'd like to think it's become a part of my lifestyle. I do my best to live with my eyes wide open. And I love being able to explore the world around me and connect with the earth and the people that inhabit it. Life is beautiful, even at its most challenging. And as I feel pressured by myself to write, to finish, to not miss an opportunity by delaying any further, I must consciously remind myself to stop and wake up. Look around. Look at the beauty here, even in pain and imperfection. Take a moment to process it. Then I can write about the world, and maybe I'll be able to do it some justice.

To my fellow writers, dreamers, family and friends: don't forget to be aware. As we write and live out our dreams, our fantasies, and our own unique versions of reality, we must remember to pop our heads above water for a look around and a gulp of air. Our world is, after all, where we draw our inspiration to create in the first place.

Motivation

One memorable night several months ago, I lifted my tablet off the nightstand. It was late, I was over it, but I was going to get through Chapter 12, damn it. But I felt like the story was meandering into a dark, uninteresting hole. So I told myself, "Let's see what Writer's Digest has to say." Instead of clicking on their actual Facebook page, I accidentally loaded everything that had been tagged with #writersdigest, where, lo and behold, someone had tagged a friend with this: "Elle, could you provide a link to the quiz?" 

I am not ashamed to admit that I clicked to see what the heck they were talking about. Divine providence, I thought. It took me to a quiz on character motivation, designed to uncover your "storytelling superpower". Seemed innocuous enough. I started the quiz.

At first, the questions seemed kind of silly. "Pick a season". Okay, sure, whatever. Now I have to pick a color? *sigh* Fine. A photo? Between the ocean, mountain, and desert, duh, I'm going with ocean, have you even read my book description? I made my selections of that and other such nonsense for another thirty seconds or so, and submitted the quiz, feeling like I'd wasted a good half minute of writing time. And then it gave me a result that blew me away: 

Superheroes? I never, ever, ever- are you listening? EVER- thought of myself as writing about superheroes. But when I read the description, I realized that they nailed it. My leading lady, Mida Efren, wears sealskin, not a supersuit. But she has an underlying motivation to protect those that she loves. And that motivation seeps into every scene, every interaction, every moment she shares with the reader. Mida wants nothing more than to end her people's suffering, and she'll accomplish it by any means necessary.

You know, I don't know that I fully appreciated my main character before I took this quiz. She seemed sort of selfish and inexperienced; at odds, even, with Efrenen tradition. But once I began critically examining her motivation, her reason for being, the story pretty much wrote itself. I wonder if that affects how we live our own lives in the same way. Once we uncover our deepest motivation and follow it above all else, do our own stories pretty much write themselves?