The Unofficial Weekend Writers Workshop: How to Read a Book

Whenever someone starts talking about becoming a writer, I feel as if I should hand out a warning label.  CAUTION: thinking too much about writing can affect your joy in reading.  

If you're lucky, your own explorations in text will only expand your appreciation for skills other authors bring to bear.  You'll read, and re-read, the opening pages of Lonesome Dove and puzzle at how effortlessly Larry McMurtry juggles shifting viewpoints.  You'll open Myla Goldberg's marvelous Bee Season and wonder at how deftly she manages four very distinct character all seeking the same thing in different ways.  If you are drawn toward non-fiction, you'll exclaim over Jon Krakauer's ability to write prose that is at once distracted and intensely emotional in Into the Wild.

If you're unlucky, all the books turn green.  It becomes hard to see anything other than the fact that other people are being more successful at this game than you are.  Worse, you can easily read a book like Goldberg's and think, as I have "how can she be so confident, so skilled, when this is only her first book?"  For this malady, there is no cure.

But if you're willing to risk this sickness, if you're willing to forget the dollars and the spotlight, and instead just fall in love with the words, come on in.

Last Time We Meet
It's been a few weeks since I called a meeting of this fish fry and marching band society.  I've been snowed under at work, so I hope you'll forgive me.

In our last gathering, I attempted to form up some writing groups from the folks who had submitted stories for comments.  I know from a couple of emails that some of these groups have formed up, chosen names, established a place to work, and started exchanging stories.  From other's, I've had no communication -- but I hope that doesn't mean that you've been lost in silence.  I hope it means you've been far, far too busy writing to bother filing a report.

If you're still looking for feedback on some story that you tossed into my well without ever hearing a splash, or if you failed to make a connection with other folks in your group, please leave a post and I'll try to mend past errors.

Real Writers Don't Move Their Lips
Now that at least some of you are formed up in writers groups (and I hope others are interested in forming one either on-line or off), I'd like to pass on a few things I've learned from participating in such groups myself.  Most groups don't last.  The sad truth of it is that most barely get started.  Folks pass around a few sheets hot from the laser printer, or files in some format that at least one member has trouble viewing.  Then comments come trickling back.  Some of them are good, but a lot of them strike the author as picky, or wrong-headed, or just a matter of opinion.  Somebody gets their feelings hurt, while more people are so worried about hurting anyone's feelings that they hold their comments to such a tepid level that they're worthless.  

I've seen this happen a dozen times, even in groups where most or all of the members were published authors.  Just because you've polished the keyboard well enough to get a few manuscripts past agents and authors doesn't mean you've managed to thicken up your skin enough to make it through an "attack on your babies" without getting your dander up.  

I was once in a group that meet once a week, in person, in the basement of the writer's homes.  The host of these meetings had, once upon a time, been named one of "thirty under thirty" by a literary magazine.  That is, he'd been called one of the thirty best writers under the age of thirty in the whole country.  The trouble was that by the time I joined the group, he was well over thirty.  In whispered conversations I was warned to never ask about the award.  This man had been wrestling writer's block for more than a decade.  For all my time in the group, I never saw a word of his writing.  The rest of the group contained one guy who hopelessly wrote and re-wrote the same story over and over, a woman who had engaged on a seemingly endless diatribe spelling out the dark side of a local charity figure, and a couple of people who, like me, schlepped in a short story every month or so.

This hapless group had done one of those things I hope you'll do with your group -- developed their own rituals.  Those rituals helped to hold the group together and gave a sense of process to the weekly gatherings.  However, in the case of this group, they seemed to replace most of the actual writing.  There was one thing this group did that I found absolutely deadly in any group where it has appeared: they read works aloud.  More on that later.

I dutifully attended this group for a couple of years, and I brought in stories that were no better than anything else dropped on the basement table.  I felt dissatisfied with the progress I was making, and not at all sure the group was helping, but I still didn't realize the group was completely broken until, almost by accident, I wrote a good story.

It happened that we changed churches, and started attending a UCC church with a young pastor fresh from a gig as a military chaplain.  One Sunday morning, he told how, while stationed in the Philippines, he had heard that a Japanese sailor, still hiding in the mountains, had surrendered.  Later, he got a chance to talk to the man, and the pastor's recounting of their conversation started all the gears in my brain turning.  That night I cranked out a story called "Scout's Honor" in which the members of a Boy Scout troop become convinced the United States has been invaded.  Despite every effort of family and friends, this small group of boys isolate themselves in the mountains and stays there until illness and defection lowers their numbers to one last holdout.  

When I finished this story, I knew there was something different about it that separated it from anything I had ever written before.  It took me a few read throughs and some editing to realize what it was: this story was good.  It had emotion.  It had good characters.  It had a tough, sharp twist at the end.  I ran off copies and hustled off to the writers group to see the reaction.  The reaction was to slam the story up, down, and sideways.  I was told that it was the worst thing I had done, that I should throw it away, that I should write more stories like the others I had run through the group.  It wasn't until that night I realized what I'd been attending wasn't a writers group at all.  It was a group for people who wanted to pretend to be writers, but who actually had no interest in writing anything to be seen outside that basement.

I left, sold the story, and kept on writing.  

But writing is a damn lonely business, and explaining anything about your work to someone who is not a writer is like trying to explain the workings of a three-masted schooner to someone who grew up in Iowa.  I missed the fellowship.  I missed the free copy-editing.  I longed for some good advice.

Fortunately for me, it was then that I lucked into another group, one whose rules I'll lay out in just a second.  I can't take credit for it, the group had already been cooking for better than a year when I joined.  I was only lucky enough to find them, and later we were lucky enough to find others.  And together we've cooked.

The name of the group is the Alternate Histories.  Of the original members Laurell K. Hamilton and Debbie Millitello are still hanging in there.  I think I'm next in seniority, followed by Rett Macpherson, Martha Kneib (Marella Sands), Sharon Shinn, and Tom Drennan.  When we started, there was one member who had sold one short story.  At last count, the group had sold more than a hundred novels and at least that many short works.  More than that, we've recently hit twenty years of meeting and working together.  So far as I know, that's a record unmatched by any other group.  Oh, and there is a web site out there, but that picture is hideous.

So how did we make it work?  Some of it was simply luck in having the right people in the group (you get Sharon into any group, and you're never going to have trouble with someone being prolific, and if you have Laurell's long-running popular series in the mix, the numbers are coming to come out pretty darned impressive).  We were also lucky in having a good mix of people who have complementary personalities and knowledge.  Mostly we got people who were willing to take it on the chin when there was a problem with their work, who were willing to listen to others, and who were willing to work hard on editing.  That part wasn't luck at all -- there's at least as many former members who didn't clear that hurdle.

Like the British constitution, our rules are mostly unwritten, but I'll try to get through as many as I can remember.

1. Everybody works.  There are no observers allowed.  Unless you're in mid-novel, a short work is due every other month.  And that "I'm working on a novel" claim will only take you so far.  If you're not working, find another place to socialize.

2. Treat each other with professional courtesy.  After twenty years, we've all become close friends, but to get there took consideration.  That means finishing your work two weeks before the next meeting and getting it to the others in time for them to read and make comments.  You can't expect good comments if you drop a story on people at the last minute, so don't.  Think of your fellow members as editors to whom you are submitting your work.

3. Finish you work before sending it to the group.  If you're working on a novel that's extremely novel, it's okay to run a couple of chapters past the group for a "does this work?" session.  Otherwise, finish the whole book before you ask for any comments.  Same for short stories.  Working with partials is always a problem, because any comment is likely to be met with "yeah, that's in the other chapters."  Just finish, then look at it.

4. Never ever read the work at the meeting.  Reading it aloud yourself before you send it out: good.  Reading aloud at the meeting: bad.  You will not be there to deliver it like a singing telegram when it reaches the agent or editor.  This isn’t a test of your dramatic reading skills, it's a test of your writing skills.  Don't get the two confused.  Besides, reading aloud is the surest way to slow any meeting to a crawl.

5. Bring lots of food.  After all, we're primates and we bond over food.  How mad can you get about the slicing and dicing your story is taking with a mouth full of lemon-icebox pie?  This rule is especially true if your group includes Debbie Millitello, who is the best cook on God's earth (yes, mom, better than you).

6. Seven is a magic number.  You can have a couple of people more, or a couple of people less, but if you stray too far you risk having your group form sub-groups or having too few people to get the ideas really cooking.

How to Read a Book
I realize that some of these rules don't hold up so well for online groups.  But even if you're only trading files, I'd encourage you to stick with the ideas here: get them out with plenty of time for reviews, and send only complete stories.  I'd also encourage you to find a way to have a regular "meeting," whether that's in a chat room or a conference call, rather than just letting comments come back in email one at a time.  Anything you can do to get your group kicking ideas around together is good.  And you can eat while you're meeting, too.

When you're going through work at your meetings, you'll be faced with the problem of how to deal with comments.  On short stories, there's nothing wrong with just getting right to the heart of it and letting everything pour out at once.  On novels, you'll probably need to do a page-by-page in which you advance through the manuscript until someone has a comment.  This is needed because not only are there lots of small comments on a novel that are easily ignored if you jump right to the end, but often those comments come together to make the case for the overall comments.
An Alternate Historians meeting often sounds like this:

"Okay, I have something on page thirty six.  Anyone have something sooner?

"Nope."

"On thirty six, Jim leaves his car beside the pizza place, but later he rides home with Sally."

"Okay, got it."

Repeat that kind of conversation about a hundred times if it's one of my books.  About six times if its one of Martha's or Tom's.  And about zero times if it's one of Sharon's.  No one writes a cleaner first draft than Sharon.

Don't bother with the trivial grammar points.  If there's something particularly tricky, or something that you're not sure about, ask.  (The Alternate Historians have epic discussions on grammar issues that sometimes run on for years.  I still feel comforted that C. S. Forester is on my side in the "under way" vs. "under weigh" battle, though every grammarian in the world is ranged against me, and though I know Sharon will eventually win, I have yet to strike my flag.)  Otherwise, just hand over the marked up pages.  Everyone does not need to hear about a dropped comma or misspelled word.  When we've been forced to deal with things online, we use a scheme that looks like 3.1.4 to point out errors, where the numbers are page, paragraph, and line.  There are probably better schemes, that's just ours.

Oh, but if a typo is particularly funny, be sure to share it.

Laugh a lot.  Eat a lot.  Get to trust these people.  If you don't, it's not going to work.  When your group starts to develop it's own language (ours includes "positron speech," "bother factor" and "dancing bear") and it's own (productive) rituals, you'll know you've started to gel.  

So go on now, and remember rule number one: everybody works.