On Things I Thought I Already Knew
This past summer, I took an advanced novel workshop class. It was billed as one for writers who have already made significant progress towards a novel draft and was set to begin in June. When I signed up, I might have had a few thousand words of a chapter—and not a particularly good one. I knew I needed to sit my ass down and get some writing done. And for weeks before the class started, I did just that, even if it was only to save myself from future embarrassment. By the time class started, I had close to 20,000 words of a draft and was just starting to feel good about it. Motifs were being established. Themes were emerging. A plot was taking shape. The prose, at times, finally started to sound pretty. Things were going well. Then I met my classmates and my instructor, and before we knew it, we were workshopping. But for me, the real learning didn’t happen in the classroom or even when my classmates discussed the excerpts from my novel. It was the act of giving written feedback to my peers that promoted so much learning. And maybe that’s not quite the right word for it. Often, when we talk about learning, we talk about it in the context of being introduced to some novel concept or information you hadn’t previously considered. And as I’ve gotten older—and continue to get older—I find that there’s often very few new things to learn, especially when it comes to writing fiction after getting my MFA and teaching composition and literature for over a decade. Instead, it was responding to my classmates, thinking deeply about their work, where I learned new things about concepts and techniques I already thought I knew.
When reading my classmates’s work, there would invariably be a moment when my mind would mentally check out, when the excerpt stopped being interesting to me. This presented a real problem as someone who is supposed to offer advice to another writer. It’s not particularly helpful to tell someone “this is the place I was bored.” I don’t think that does much to make things clearer. It doesn’t tell them why. And it very well could be a reflection of my own biases. I may just not be into the painting process or medical drama. It might be a sign that I’m not the reader for this particular book. So I had to decide, if this was going to actually be useful feedback, is this a me issue or is this a textual issue? (Or maybe even a skill issue.) As I read and reread my classmates’s work, I spent a lot of time in those moments of discomfort, where I knew there would be some friction, where I knew I was going to say something that someone didn’t want to hear. After all, nobody wants to hear their work “needs improvement.” It’s a polite euphemism for “it’s not good,” which we always hear as “it’s bad.” And as I disentangled my preferences from the work itself, I realized how much everything comes back to fundamentals.
Most of the time, those moments where I was feeling disconnected from the story weren’t because the author had no talent or that this genre wasn’t for me, but instead, it was a result of forgetting some core convention of storytelling. It’s easy to criticize a writer for some failing in their work, but we have to keep in mind that writing is not one skill but a vast ocean of skills. There’s mechanics of sentence craft and grammar. There’s rhetoric and metaphor and similes. There’s paragraphing. There’s character. There’s conflict. There’s setting. There’s plot and structure. The sheer enormity of it should make us even wonder why the fuck we think we can do this in the first place. And of course, those are all choices we have to make. Talk about decision fatigue. It should make us all want to go to our closets and replace every item of clothing with a black turtleneck like we’re Steve Jobs. Undoubtedly, we’re going to leave something behind. We’re going to struggle with at least one of those infinite number of skills.
So, when I read through my classmates’s work, I could admire a particular turn of phrase, an evocative use of anaphora, a brilliant character beat, but what stood out was often a bigger picture problem, one that was too easy to forget. I would read a scene, and there would be moments of description, of action, of dialogue, of interiority, of exposition. It felt like a novel. But as I observed two or three characters just shooting the shit, I realized something. The vast majority of the time when I read a writer’s work and felt that something wasn’t working, it often boiled down to one simple question: “Why is this protagonist here and what do they want?” It was a surprising revelation, not because it’s a particularly profound question, but because it’s advice we so often get. Any time an agent or an editor offers generalized advice to new writers, this is the kind of thing you hear.
So what makes this a moment of learning for me?
I think it was in trying to articulate this problem that not only made me a better critic of other people’s work but my own too. I started looking at my own scenes through that lens.
I’ve been teaching composition for a long time, and it’s something similar to what I see with my students. They frequently spend so much time on the words and the structure of their essays that they forget their purpose. Their thesis is unclear or absent from the essay. The argument is never tied to the evidence. And reading the work from my classmates showed me how we can get so caught up in the weeds of sentences that we forget our main idea.
So my advice for you and myself is that when we sit down to write, we have to keep that purpose in mind—especially at the scene level. Why is the character here? What is their scene objective? What obstacles will they face in opposition to their desire? How does that conflict escalate and evolve in the scene? Does the character ultimately fail or succeed? And where does that lead the character next? Everything else is just icing on the cake. It’s vibes. It’s texture. They’re the last things that will fall into place. That sophisticated use of hendiadys can wait.
And I don’t think I would have learned this if I hadn’t had to communicate it to other people. Writing is thinking, no doubt. And I thought a lot about this over the last ten weeks, writing over 25,000 words of very specific feedback that I hope made a difference. But the benefit to me, through doing the work, is so enormous that my greatest regret here is that, what I’ve learned, what I feel in my bones about story now, is impossible to convey.