q:

is there anything more sickening than workshopping a story that isn't ready?

a: no.

...

i finally started writing a new short story. it's been since may 2005. that's four years. that is a long fucking time. i'd done some productive revision work, so it's not like those were four utterly wasted writingless years. but still. 

the story idea started with an anecdote from october 2004. then i graduated and totally freaked out (hence the not writing) and my friends who graduated were also freaking out and i decided to turn the anecdote into a story about graduating from college and freaking out. the way you freak out when the basic structure of your life as it's existed for 18 years is taken away - this is ordinarily (from what i've seen) not a very ostentatious thing. you don't commit yourself to a mental institution (though my friends and i talked about it) or anything dramatic like that. it's just a big change and loss and it corresponds to other big changes and losses, like home hasn't felt like "home" in so long that you can't even pretend to be comfortable there anymore, or your parents are totally over the empty nest shit and actually get out of the house and pursue new interests instead of always being around ready for you to visit, or you have no idea how to pursue work in your "field" so you take some crappy job barbacking or waiting tables or being a landman and you numbly go through every day trying not to think about the future because you have no idea how anything works or how anything good will ever happen. this is the year that you drink too much every night at the same shitty bar with your also-scared-to-death friend. this is the year that you do a lot of things that you'd always thought were a hallmark of bad judgment but you have altogether stopped caring. etc etc etc.

so obviously i think the story of what happens when you graduate and have no idea what happens next is a worthwhile story to tell. writing it is hard because the mood is sort of listless or numb or apathetic, and if you're not careful you run the risk of making the reader feel listless and apathetic about the story rather than empathetic toward the character.

but writing it is also hard because damn, four years is a long time without practice. when i finished LSU i was in a really good place with my sentences and avoiding dialogue ruts and i was having fun playing with voice and point of view. i was never at a loss for a story idea and once i settled on what i wanted to write, it took less than three weeks to get a really polished first draft that i was totally happy to workshop - and i mean three weeks where two of them were spent procrastinating.

so here i am trying to write this story and not feeling like i know how to write anything at all. the first five pages took months to write and it's because i hated writing them. i was bored, the story was boring, it wasn't good writing, it was way worse than how i used to write. writing one line of dialogue was excruciating and then the whole thing was dialogue because that's what i do when i don't know what else to do. so then i'm mad about being back in the fucking dialogue rut. 

but i basically kept my head down and pushed forward. i haven't revised the beginning. it's all just how it came out, which is to say, the style is uneven and largely pedestrian, the protagonist isn't well-drawn, the scenes are weirdly proportioned, there's whole swaths of the story that are totally dull, the analogies are cliched. the story is full of problems.

at this point, though, i'm aware in a broad sense of what these problems are (the broad sense being the only sense that exists for a story in this rough of a draft) and i just want to fucking finish. i just want to get all the way to the ending that i have in mind and then see what i've got. this is not the way i've ever written before. it used to be that every sentence of the story had to be as perfect as i could make it before i could move on to the next sentence.

i used to envy people (boys, usually) who would come to workshop with a bunch of shit on a page, just a huge mess, and didn't seem worried. there was so much going on in their drafts and their stories weren't coherent but i felt that they ended up with a lot to play with in revision. i felt like my stories, in contrast, were clean but limited. i envied their freedom.

not anymore! workshopping a hot mess of a story is fucking miserable. writing a scene that you hate because it's boring and having people tell you, "i don't know, that scene was just....boring" - it totally sucks. i fucking know it's boring! i know it isn't good yet! don't talk to me like i don't know the story is a hot mess! 

except that's the point of workshop, to tell the writer what the problems are. at my workshop in amherst last week, the professor noted that you shouldn't give a draft to anyone until you don't know what to do with it anymore. i concur. when i'm done with a draft and i know it's not quite working but i don't know why - or even if i think it's working but other people don't think so - i am so willing to have people point out every little sentence they don't like, or gesture that annoys them, or whatever. i actively pursue aggressive critiques on drafts that i'm done with. i find it super helpful.

i just don't like it on drafts that aren't ready. this draft was not ready. the narrative wasn't even finished.

but. i wrote ten pages in less than a week, which is way better than five pages over several months. and as fucking annoying as it was to get comments tonight which are largely unhelpful because they reference problems that are largely obvious to me -

well, for one thing, about fifteen percent of what was said did help me figure out why i've got the story set up like i do, and how i'm going to refine it -

but mostly - i just don't give a shit. the character seems unlikable? you don't know why the mom is there? you think i added too many components to the story? i don't care right now. i'll care later. right now i just want to keep pushing through.

i suppose that is the most important thing.

Comments

[Rikki]

Haha, wow, I think we had the same workshop experience. I learned SO MUCH about my approach and about why I'm a constipated writer. We should get together.