MFA Monday: Conflicting Critiques

The first assignment due this week includes a submission of writing to be critiqued by a group of fellow writers.  I'd like to say this is no big deal to me. I've been in a critique group for over three years, and we do this all the time. I'm used to having my work shredded and put back together with bleeding red pens (figuratively, of course, since it comes back in a Word document with Track Changes that can be red, blue, green, or, my favorite, purple, depending on the critiquer).

I wasn't worried. Which should have been my first warning sign.

The MFA workshop consists of students in all levels of the program, meaning I will likely be in a group that is not only first semester students, but second, third, fourth and possibly graduating students as well. Because of this, there isn't the demand to send in just the first pages of what you're working on. A fifth semester student who's been doing this two years probably isn't going to keep sending in the first pages of their novel over and over again. The only requirement is that the piece you submit be better than a rough draft that doesn't know where it's going, but is also something you want to keep working on (as opposed to something you've already published). 

So I contacted my trusty critique group (my 4Corners gals) and asked: Do I send the first pages, which is what I'll eventually submit to an agent, and work on making that the best, or do I send in what I consider my very best (or favorite) chapter in order to put my best foot forward? If this submission is what an advisor will read to judge whether or not they want to work with me, I want to send the best, right?

My gals said yes, without a doubt, send the best you have.

So then I sent those pages to them to make sure they were polished enough to submit. (I know, they've been saints about this whole process with me, and put up with my endless questions and submissions in my panic that I'm going to humiliate myself in January when I begin the residency).

You know what? About half said they LOVED the submission and DEFINITELY send it in, and they CRIED through it and it was so POWERFUL!!!!!! And the other half.... said, eh. This is a bit confusing. And overwritten. And detached. And not the best thing I've seen from you. Maybe send in the first pages instead.

Yeah.

My guess is that if you are a writer and you have a writing group, this has probably happened to you too. Different opinions about the same piece of writing.... some love. Some loathe. Some want you to keep it, others think it needs an overhaul. What one person thinks is brilliant and genius, another thinks is confusing and obscure.

And this is the nature of writing. Because this happens even in published works. Look at Stephanie Meyers and the Twilight series, just as an example. Big name authors have come out criticizing the quality of the writing, and yet it's spawned a world-wide fan base of people that absolutely love it. Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer for The Road, which is widely acclaimed, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why. That is one book not up my alley, so to speak.

So what do you do when you place your writing in the hands of people you trust to tell you the truth, and then you get such widely differing opinions?

Listen to them. Read the comments. Try to set aside any defensiveness and see if there is something valid about what everyone is saying. Then follow your gut.

YOU are the writer. YOU alone can make the decision on which side you land. Those people who read and critiqued are not wrong, but they are opinions, not fact.

What did I do? I let the comments gnaw at me and plant seeds of doubt, made me change my mind about what to submit, and worry that nothing I wrote would be good enough. And then I read. A lot. And I realized that many writers in my own genre write that way. That I really still LOVE that section of my book, and that it's that way for a very real purpose.

No matter what I choose to submit - the first 15 pages or a chapter out of the middle - there will be students there who will tear it apart. Gently, hopefully, but all the same... this is their job. To tell me what works and what doesn't. And I'm guessing that there will be more than one conflicting opinion there. What one person likes, another won't. If this book gets published, it will be like that in the big world too. Some readers will like it. Others won't.

Maybe one of the greatest lessons we can learn as writers is to let that be okay. To know who we are, and what we write. To have found our voice and know it is our very own, not subject to the whims of every comment, every blog posting, every book on writing, every author's writing that we admire.

We should listen to others. We should get critiques with open minds.We should recognize that not every reader will love the way we write. But know who you are as a writer. Embrace your voice, even if not everyone else does.

The Rejection Slip

If you've ever submitted your writing somewhere - to an agent, publisher, magazine - you've probably gotten a rejection or two along the way. That's the nature of a business where tens of thousands of people are trying to stake their claim in a very small market.

There's really no way to make that rejection not sting. To have someone say that your work is not what they're looking for, not good enough, not ready, hurts.

But this week Robert Peake, a poet and the new Senior Poetry Editor of the Silk Road Review magazine, found a way to use his experience with rejection himself, and his beautiful command of language, to weave a rejection that just might sting a little less.

You can read the whole post here, but here is the jist of it:


Rejection Slip

I’m sorry for what you lost. A friend. Or your belief in the world as a safe, sane place to live. My stamping a red “rejection” on the blood-specked page you sent to me is hardly the response you deserve. Find someone who sees the poem you will write twenty years from now, on the selfsame topic, that brings us to our knees. Never let that person go. Cling like a barnacle. Cleave also to the belief (which is true) that because you can be hollowed out, as with an ice-cream scooper, by the poems in dogeared volumes on your shelves, that someday, someday, you will have that effect on another. Today it is not this poem. Today it is not me. Though I refer to your piece by its assigned number when delegating to a subeditor the task of contacting you, consider this now my most personal attempt at reaching back. I’m sorry. I live here, too. This place overwhelms my instruments also, pegging the needles of sorrow and beauty on the gauge at the center of my chest. I decided, like you, long ago, to learn the device’s more subtle measures, no matter how often it surged and blew. Keep learning. Note by note. In the future, I will not have to look for you to know you have revised your fate. You will send this message back to me. It will not bring me comfort, even as now I am sure you are not consoled. But maybe this will encourage you to shovel coal into anger’s furnace, and ride upon that heat to a better poem. I do not like this any more than a natural disaster. Yet I must believe that Nature loves us in her way. Go write. Go write some more. Be gorgeous, despite it all.

All I can say is Wow.

MFA Monday: My First Semester Book List

One of my first assignments for grad school is choosing 20 books for the coming six months. At this point, I have little guidance as to what to choose, which I can only guess is because they want students to choose books that most closely relate to what they want to learn and study, and how they write. Or it's a test to see what kind of idiot I am.

The funny thing is that it felt like a test, and because of that, it became an extraordinarily difficult task. Every time I'd start to add books to the list, I'd think, "But I know about this book, which means it has to be pretty mainstream, which means it has to be more commercial fiction, which means probably not as worthy of a writing program, which means the faculty is going to look at this and laugh at me and think I'm a hack. I need books I've never heard of!"

And the conundrum, of course, is how to add books you've never heard of.

In the end, I tried to make a good mix of classic and contemporary, of best-sellers and award winners, and the books I chose all fit into the three challenges I face in my next writing project: multiple first person point of views, multiple story archs, and foreign setting.

So just in case anyone is interested, here's my tentative list I've submitted to the faculty:

Books With Foreign Settings:

1.     Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

2.     Bend in the River (V.S. Naipaul)

3.     Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)

4.     Three Cups of Tea (Greg Mortenson)

5.     Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

6.     The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien)

7.     Out of Africa (Isak Dineson)

8.     Dream of a Blue Room (Michelle Richmond)

Unique 1^st Person Narrative

9.     The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (Mark Haddon)

10.  The Art of Racing in the Rain (Garth Stein)

11.  The Help (Kathryn Stockett)

12.  Room (Emma Doaghue)

Weaving Multiple Plots and Characters

13.  Bel Canto (Ann Patchett)

14.  Sarah’s Key (Tatiana de Rosney)

15.  Love Walked In (Marisa de los Santos)

16.  Plainsong (Kent Haruf)

One of the above with medical issues as key plot:

17.  Middle Place (Kelly Corrigan)

18.  Cutting for Stone (Abraham Verghese)

Also, I'll add in a couple books on the craft of writing, but I haven't chosen those yet.

I'm so excited about this list! I hope my advisor approves it without me having to tweak it too much.

For now, I'm still plowing through about two books a week by Pacific Univ. faculty members. They are such amazing books. I finished Live Through This, by Debra Gwartney, and it's burrowed into my brain so deep I find myself talking about it constantly, to anyone who will listen. It's her memoir about the years her two teen daughters ran away from home to live on the streets. Harrowing, sad, gut wrenching... a fabulous book.

Right now I'm reading The Lonely Polygamist, by Brady Udall. Another fantastic book. He is a master of writing about sad and desperate people with just a touch of irreverant humor that makes the misery totally bearable, and sometimes laughable.

What's on your reading list?

You Are More

I've spent the last eight months living with this novel I tentatively named PRODIGAL, and it took an appalling amount of time for me to really connect with the main character. When I wrapped up revisions last week, though, I cried writing the last scene, and I realized that somewhere along the way, I'd fallen in love with her. She became real in a way that I was sad when she was sad, and joyful when she triumphed.

She is the kind of character that changes. Those are my favorite to write, and while I knew this is what I was setting out to do, it was an entirely different thing to watch it unfold as it did. She starts out wounded, a victim of childhood abuse and neglect, betrayed by everyone she dares to love or trust, until she runs away to find a new life. In her new life, she makes herself what she wants it to be.

And in writing, I think initially I thought this was her rebirth. She left, and she made a new life for herself. But as the story developed I realized this isn't at all what happened. She left, and this new life was just a cover, a way to ignore the things of the past. She ran away from not only her home, but herself.

And in coming back home, she finds herself again. She grapples with the choices made by others that scarred her, and the choices she made herself that nearly destroyed her. She finds herself with new choices, harder ones, ones that require her to redefine what love is, and what family is, and what home is... and who she is.

This week I heard this song, and it immediately made me think of her. Here are some of the lyrics:

"There's a girl in the corner With tear stains on her eyes
From the places she's wandered And the shame she can't hide

She says, "How did I get here? I'm not who I once was.
And I'm crippled by the fear That I've fallen too far to love"

But don't you know who you are, What's been done for you?
Yeah don't you know who you are?

You are more than the choices that you've made,
You are more than the sum of your past mistakes,
You are more than the problems you create,
You've been remade."

Watch the chalkboard. It's incredible. And see if you don't see yourself in there somewhere too.

It's November... You Know What That Means...

Yeah. It's National Diabetes Awareness Month and in less than three weeks my first big assignment, including my writing submission, is due to Pacific U.

What? You weren't thinking the same thing??

Okay, I'll admit... It's NaNoWriMo, and I'm not doing this... again. I've thought of it, but somehow November never works out in timing for me to start and write a full novel. Last November, my debut Some Kind of Normal was going through it's final, final checks and getting ready for publication. I spent all my time reading through the book blocks. The November before that I began my querying for that book, and querying was a full-time job that month.

I have legitimate excuses, for sure, but I admit also that I'm secretly pleased I had great reasons not to try to write 50,000 words in a month. For one, I think it just sets me up for failure. I don't write fast. I can't even write badly fast. The words just don't come that fast. I get spurts of great productivity, but they usually come later in the book, when characters are fully entrenched in my head and scenes are unfolding.

Also, no matter what time of year it is, family always comes first. And family tends to get sick in November. And sick kids don't make for great writing days. And Christmas is around the corner, and plans need to be made and executed for that, or I might just go crazy in December. The more I get done this month, the more I can enjoy the holiday season - and make it special for the kids - without stress. (Okay, I'm still working on this one, but I swear one year I'm going to master the no-stress holiday season!)

Finally, writing, I've figured out, has to be a lifestyle. Tayari Jones wrote a great post at SheWrites about NaNo, comparing it to a crash diet. You work like heck to fit into the size smaller dress in a few weeks, but in the end, you end up going back to your bad habits and not being able to maintain it because it wasn't a life-style change. That's what writing is to me: a discipline and a life-style that I choose everyday to do, not 50,000 words in a month but in a few hours a day, consistently, every day, week after week, month after month.

I'm certainly not saying NaNo is bad for everyone. I think it's a fantastic tool to jumpstart projects, and enthusiasm in weary writers, and to build a community of like-minded, like-motivated individuals. It's just not for me.

So are you joining the writing frenzy this month, and why or why not?

While you comment, I'm going to go celebrate National Diabetes Awareness Month by chowing on my kids' Halloween stash.

I'M DONE!!

I was going to write a post last night with a picture of Sarah Palin's house and the title, "I can see the end from my house."

Corny, I know, but I kept thinking, for the past week, I could see the end of this book. Not the 12,000 word original ending that I cut, but the new end. The one with the new timeline and the better conclusion and the tied up relationships that will leave the reader satisfied.

Well, a better ending anyway. One that felt like an end.

I knew what I wanted it to be. It was all written in my head. Getting the words on the page, though, was an entirely different matter. I struggled to make it just right.

But tonight I finished. I typed the last words and I knew: they were the perfect last words.

It isn't the end, of course. It's never the end until the book is in print; there will be one more good polishing run through and the critiques of my fabulous writing group to take into account. This will be the first submission I make to my MFA program, which means there will be revisions from that as well.

But I'm done with the good draft. The one that works. The holes are filled, the character's journey's complete. It feels... right.