Writing Workshops, and Why Summerhill and I Fight So Much
As most of you probably know, I'm lucky enough to have a local furry writing workshop that I participate in. We've been doing it for several years now, and so by this point, people are pretty good at articulating their feedback and being good with helpful advice and constructive criticism.
One of the best things about having a group of people to go over your works in progress (as opposed to just say, your mate or your mom or whatever) is that if one person points out something that seems troublingly problematic but the other five people don't (or the other way around), you can better gauge what does and doesn't probably need more work. You can build a consensus like the geth and prioritize what needs tweaking or fixing or removing or whatever.
The problem I've run into with Summerhill is that the story itself, along with the way it's told, are so weird and unusual that I can't really get a good consensus in my feedback. Which (and I do need to say this first) is not the fault of my writing workshop. I recently let them see the first 10,000 words of my new draft, and they universally agreed that it was much better than my first draft--but everyone's individual feedback was so different that I have a hard time telling what it is I actually did that made it better.
Which, okay, yes, I'm glad to hear that I did a better job with what I sent out. But 10K words is still only a fraction of the whole thing, and rewriting and redrafting the rest of the novel is still going to take a lot of time and work, and I'm still trying to get a better handle on what to do in order to make it better. I'm trying to just trust my instincts, which would be easier if this story hadn't already been so uniquely difficult and frustrating the whole way through.
That, and I've been working on it for over a year, by this point, and while I'm not in any mood to rush it, I'd like to not have to take an entire other year to finish it.
(Also, before anyone chimes in with, "Take some time off and work on something else," I've already been doing that, taking one- or two-month breaks pretty steadily to write other short stories, so it's not that my brain is on Summerhill overload.)
One of the best things about having a group of people to go over your works in progress (as opposed to just say, your mate or your mom or whatever) is that if one person points out something that seems troublingly problematic but the other five people don't (or the other way around), you can better gauge what does and doesn't probably need more work. You can build a consensus like the geth and prioritize what needs tweaking or fixing or removing or whatever.
The problem I've run into with Summerhill is that the story itself, along with the way it's told, are so weird and unusual that I can't really get a good consensus in my feedback. Which (and I do need to say this first) is not the fault of my writing workshop. I recently let them see the first 10,000 words of my new draft, and they universally agreed that it was much better than my first draft--but everyone's individual feedback was so different that I have a hard time telling what it is I actually did that made it better.
Which, okay, yes, I'm glad to hear that I did a better job with what I sent out. But 10K words is still only a fraction of the whole thing, and rewriting and redrafting the rest of the novel is still going to take a lot of time and work, and I'm still trying to get a better handle on what to do in order to make it better. I'm trying to just trust my instincts, which would be easier if this story hadn't already been so uniquely difficult and frustrating the whole way through.
That, and I've been working on it for over a year, by this point, and while I'm not in any mood to rush it, I'd like to not have to take an entire other year to finish it.
(Also, before anyone chimes in with, "Take some time off and work on something else," I've already been doing that, taking one- or two-month breaks pretty steadily to write other short stories, so it's not that my brain is on Summerhill overload.)