"Sometimes art can be too personal."

Self-Portrait with Easel (1888)

A young man showed his student film to its first audience... and no one "got it." He thought he had been very clear in what he had depicted, but it turned out that too many of the references and required thought-connections were too closely tied to himself and his own particular ideas and experiences. Other people didn't see what he saw. "Sometimes," he said, "art can be too personal."

I wrote a short story last week that I love. The kind of story where you finish it and think, "This is so cool. I've really got something here. Revising? Pshaw. It's ready now!"

I gave it to a crit partner who has read my work before, who "gets" me, and who I trust.

She didn't get it. Worse, she didn't understand it. The ending flat-out confused her.

It's not ready.

Quite frankly, I'm a little bummed. I know that everything needs revising, and that writing is rewriting, but... yeah. I kinda hoped I'd gotten it flawlessly the first time around. And now I need to figure out how to translate that which is totally obvious to me into something which is comprehensible by people who, well, aren't me.

Recap of post for people who might not see things exactly the way I do: This is why you need a crit group or beta readers.

Hang in there, everyone.

How to waste everyone's time

I'm a day late on the collective discussions on whether anyone can be a writer, with enough effort. But that is, in fact, what I was planning to talk about today as I reflect on a writing class I attended earlier this week.

In the comments to yesterday's posts on the subject, I said that I thought that success as a writer required not only hard work and practice, but the right attitude. And in my opinion, this attitude is lacking among some of the students in my current writing class.

Two weeks ago there was a hint of bad things to come, when some of the students vociferously argued against the suggestion that we might want to do a little proofreading before submitting work to the group. Some of the pages that have been handed out were in bad enough shape that the typos were obscuring the text... it was difficult to tell which character was talking at certain points, or the mistakes in English grammar just made the piece exhausting to get through. One student, bless his heart, said that he was probably making tons of mistakes and would be happy to accept any edits on that front. He was ego-free and willing to learn. But others seemed to think that the simplest copy editing would impede their creativity.

Now, I realize that materials submitted for discussion in a writing group are, by definition, going to be rougher than materials submitted at the querying level. But when fellow students are having trouble reading your materials due to sloppiness in use of the English language and failure to run spell-check... well, what are you hoping to get out of the class, exactly?

Then this week, one of the writers kept arguing with us about his piece. He must have started a dozen sentences with the word "But..." and he repeatedly cut off the other students as they tried to talk about the pages he'd submitted. We thought the emphasis of the piece was Character X, and that he needed much more to fulfill that promise. He insisted that the piece was an introduction to Experience Y, and seemed incredibly frustrated with us for failing to comprehend that.

We kept coming back to Character X, because that is what he wrote about, whether or not it was his intention to do so, and he finally just cut us off. Forget the content, he said, what about the language? Okay, we started to talk about the language. Description Z was quite evocative. He then ignored that discussion, and wanted to know why no one had mentioned Sentence Q, which he found especially delightful.

Amusingly enough, I had noticed Sentence Q. I read it several times in fact, because it had confused the heck out of me, because it had nothing to with with Character X, Experience Y, or Description Z, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why it was in the story. Kill your darlings, anyone?

And I kept coming back to the same thought over and over again: what was he hoping to get out of this class? He clearly didn't want our advice, and he seemed really quite disgusted that we weren't providing him with sufficient validation. The fact that a dozen of us all had the same thoughts on his piece was of no apparent interest to him.

There's a reason writers are not supposed to speak when others are critiquing their work... because we can't go around to the house of everyone who reads our books, and tell them that they're not getting it, and here is what we really meant by that passage. When you put something on a page, THAT'S IT. If the readers take away something different than you intended, then you have to accept that interpretation or rewrite. Or, I guess, you could find a more like-minded audience, but then I have to come back to the question of why bother with a writing class? After all, it might not contain your perfect target audience.

If anyone from my writing class happens upon this blog... I'm not really trying to be nasty. I spoke out in class as much as I could to say some of these things: your readers are reacting to what you wrote, and telling us that we're wrong is not going to improve your writing or our understanding of the piece. So, please, think about why you're in the class. More importantly, think about why you are asking for class feedback.

If you want validation, go to your mother or spouse/partner. (And I do mean yours, because my mom and husband have never pulled any punches. Ha!)

If you just want structure and a reminder to write on a weekly basis, then by all means take the class, but don't hand out your writing to a workshop unless you actually want us to, you know, WORKSHOP IT. Don't waste my time and yours.

I'm heading back to my NaNoWriMo first draft now... and I'd like to add a caveat that I am not dumping on anyone who blogs their fiction or otherwise shares an early draft of their work with an unstructured writing or blogging community. We all know that such sharing is for fun and encouragement. No one's paying a class fee with an instructor for that, you know?

It's pretty simple -- don't ask for advice if you don't want it. And if you ask for feedback, and twelve people all disagree with you about what your writing means... well. Maybe you should stop arguing and start listening.

Finding a Crit group...

...because you don't want to hand your work to just anyone.

On Tuesday, a commenter asked for suggestions on how to start a local writers' crit group. I'll tell you my ideas, and then let other wise people add to the list in the comments.

Idea #1: Are there any local classes you can take? As I said, my current group is primarily made up of students who got along well together in class. But you don't need to like an entire classroom full of people in order to get a group started. If you find even one student who seems to "get" your work, or who had great insights, or who seems to be in a similar stage of the writing journey as you, why not ask that person if they'd like to meet semi-regularly outside of class? I have a particularly good rapport with one person from my group, and we have tried to do weekly meetings together in addition to our larger monthly group. Sometimes we discuss our works-in-progress, sometimes we discuss other books, sometimes we talk about publishing process, sometimes we review smaller sections of each other's work. (With a one-on-one thing, there's less need for a formal structure.)

Idea #2: Are there any local writers' associations? Boston is home to Grub Street, "a non-profit creative writing center dedicated to nurturing writers and connecting readers with the wealth of writing talent in the Boston area." They teach classes, they provide writing space, they host conferences, and they have a message board where writers can -- and do! -- post that they are looking for group members in a given geographical area. I've seen people building crit groups all over Massachusetts through this board.

Idea #3: Do you have a local bookstore? Indie stores are especially great as they often attract a certain writerly/literary community... the two in my area each have book clubs for readers, and regularly host author readings and signings. If there's a community message board in the store or right outside, that's an easy place to post an ad, but if not, go ahead and talk to one of the salespeople or someone behind the information desk. They might know of a group you can join, or at least have ideas about where best to recruit.

Idea #4: Craigslist. They have everything.

Idea #5: In November, it will be National Novel Writing Month again. That means that, starting in October, the forums will be buzzing again, and you can go hang with your regional group. Maybe they'll do some local meetups during November, and maybe you'll find some long-term writing partners.

It seems that crit groups have been on the collective brain this week: the agent blog at Crowe's Nest did a post on the Anatomy of Writer's Group yesterday, and today Sierra Godfrey talked about How To Give Someone Feedback On Their Story. I think I'll do something like a "seven habits of highly effective crit groups" in the near future, but until then, I'll simply say that if your crit group is not quite working for you? LEAVE. Say you don't have time, or that you need some space without outsider input for a while in order to strengthen your craft, whatever, but leave. If it's not fun, if you're not learning, if no one else "gets" your genre, if you're not comfortable with the group's discussion dynamics or style of critique, get out. Crit groups only work if they work, you know?

Does anyone else have ideas on how to find a local, actually-meets-in-person crit group?

My Writing Group

(Why, yes, I do think you'll be seeing more InkyGirl comics on my blog in the future, why do you ask?)

So, I mentioned yesterday that I had to read 50 pages of manuscript for my writers' group (yes, I did get it done on time), and one commenter expressed surprise at the volume of reading to be done, so I thought that today I would give a little summary of how my writing group functions, and how we found each other.

First of all, those 50 pages were in fact closer to 75 pages, but I shrunk the margins and spacing to save on printing costs. (I can't believe I'm running out of ink again.) This is because our group meets once a month, and reviews up to 100 pages of writing at a time. Originally, we thought that we might have a session split up between multiple authors (two writers with 50 pages each, for example) but so far it has been a one-session-per-author critique group. And it's working quite well.

There are no limitations on what kind of writing each person wants to present to the group. Most of us are working on novels, but we also have a memoirist, and someone recently submitted 5 short stories for us to consider, because she wanted help picking which ones she should submit to an MFA program.

There are no rules about how polished the work has to be in order to be submitted. I was basically done when I submitted my pages, and I was looking for assistance with my final polish. But yesterday we had someone who was in the very early stages of the work, who wanted creative feedback and guidance with character before he'd committed too much to paper. (Personally, I think that's extremely brave, and I hope he walked out of our session feeling encouraged and inspired.)

We call ourselves the Upton Street Writers... we were supposed to be named after the street where we host most of our meetings, but it turns out that we screwed up and got the address wrong. There is no Upton Street. But it sounded even better than the name of the real street, and we decided not to fix our mistake. Upton Street Writers. Dig it.

And how did we meet? The founding members of the Upton Street Writers were students in a local Novel Development Workshop. We were very lucky -- all of us were of a similar skill set and a similar state of mind. There was no one with irreparably bad grammar and delusions of grandeur, no one who thought s/he was finished learning, no one who felt the need to dominate every discussion. (I think we were assisted by the fact that the course required all of us to have a novel in progress, so that even those students who had very few pages to start out with were nevertheless quite serious about the endeavor.)

So we stuck together. We've lost a couple members when they moved out of the city for work/school obligations, but we've brought in replacement members who have been "vetted" by original members. Our original group was 9 people, and I don't think we'll ever want to go over 10-12, lest we lose our cozy vibe.

I now open the floor for questions and comments. Anything you want to know about my current writing group? Do you have a group yourself? If so, how many people are there, how often do you meet, how much material do you review at one time, and how did you find each other? Have you ever been in a particularly good or bad writing group? Tell us all about it!

(To see the original comic, complete with punch line, go to InkyGirl.com. And please also note how nicely I've coordinated these lemmings with yesterday's hamster.)