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Valuable References for Fiction Writers

This list includes a basic handbook (Burroway’s), practical guides (the Lodge and Forster), and informative, provocative writing about writing

• Donald Barthelme’s Not Knowing
• Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House
• Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext
• Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life
• Robert Boswell, The Half Known World: On Writing Fiction
• Catherine Brady’s Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction
• Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction
• Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium
• Anton Chekhov’s letters (available in several editions)
• Stephen Dobyns’ Best Words, Best Order
• Stephen Dobyns’ Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry
• E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel
• John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction
• A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft
• David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction: Illustrated From Classic and Modern Texts
• Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature and Strong Opinions
• Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story
• Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners
• Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
• Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style
• Joan Silber’s The Art of Time
• Debra Spark’s Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing
• Sarah Stone and Ron Nyren’s Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers
• The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work
• Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
• James Wood’s The Broken Estate
• Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary
• The Paris Review interviews

Valuable References for Poets

• Marianne Boruch’s In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations
• Stephen Dobyns’ Best Words, Best Order
• Carl Dennis’ Poetry as Persuasion
• Tony Hoagland’s Real Sofistikation: Essays on Poetry and Craft
• Poets Teaching Poets
• Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art
• Michael Ryan’s A Difficult Grace: On Poets, Poetry, and Writing
• Ellen Bryant Voigt’s The Flexible Lyric
• Alan Williamson’s Eloquence and Mere Life: Essays on the Art of Poetry

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Reading Like a Writer: A Guide to Annotations

By Peter Turchi

One of the best ways to learn the craft of writing is to study the work you admire. The key is to truly study it, rather than simply admire it. To put it another way, the key is to read like a writer, not (merely) like a reader. To truly understand how a piece of writing works, or even how one small part of it works, it’s important to articulate your observations and understanding carefully, in writing.

An annotation is a brief analysis of a piece of writing intended to help the writer learn about some aspect of craft. Annotations are meant to be practical; they should be written from a writer’s perspective, and they should directly serve the development of your own work. This Guide focuses on annotating fiction, but the same approach can be applied to poetry, nonfiction, plays, screenplays, etc.

Where to Start

Start with a craft topic suggested by the work, such as
An element, technique, device, or choice obviously essential to the story* (*used throughout to mean short story, novella, novel, chapter, excerpt, etc.)
An element, technique, device, or choice that is unusual in some way, or
An element, technique, device, choice, or effect that is either puzzling or for some other reason interesting to you

OR

Start with a craft topic suggested by your own work, and look to see how that element, technique, device, etc. is used in the story you’ve read. This can be
Something you’ve been working on in your own fiction or having trouble with,
Something you’ve been hesitant to try, but feel you should attempt
Something you’ve been using almost out of habit, to the point that you worry you’ve neglected to examine all its possibilities
Something that came up in a discussion of your fiction and seems important to pursue

OR

Start with a craft topic suggested by a class or lecture or by an essay about writing (or even about something analogous to writing), and work to understand how the story you’ve read illustrates or demonstrates what the lecturer/author said.

For example:

1a) You’ve read John Updike’s “A & P.” You realize that one of the story’s strengths is the way that it is grounded in setting—not just in a grocery store, but in an A&P near the beach as seen through the eyes of the teenaged narrator. So you ask, “How does Updike use concrete detail to convey setting and atmosphere—and, simultaneously, to characterize the narrator?”

1b) You’ve read Alice Munro’s “Monsieur les Deux Chapeau.” You notice that the sections of the story are not in chronological order. Upon closer examination, you notice that the first and last sections aren’t simply a frame for a story set in the past, and you can’t see a simple pattern to her movement through time. You ask, “What is the effect of Alice Munro’s manipulation of time in this story? Specifically, how does it influence our understanding of the main characters and their dilemma?” Or you ask, “How does Alice Munro move so nimbly and unpredictably through time without confusing her readers? Specifically, how does she use transitions, repetition, and temporal markers to help the reader?”

1c) You’ve read Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter.” You notice that there are several different story lines, that they all involve the same characters, they’re all set on the same night, and they contradict one another—that is, they can’t possibly all be happening, but none of them are presented as dreams or imagined actions. You say to yourself, “This is puzzling; it’s also interesting.” You begin your annotation by asking, “How does Robert Coover effectively orient the reader and guide her through multiple competing story lines?” or “How does Coover make sure we notice that his story’s many story lines are explicitly contradicting one another?” or “How does Coover use sex and humor to guide us through what could be a perplexing mess?”

2a) You’ve written a story about a man who loves his wife and children, who is good at his work, volunteers at a literacy center, and is much admired by everyone, including your readers. In your story, a co-worker gradually persuades the man to betray his wife and children, embezzle from his employer, and steal the wheelchair out from under the elderly woman who has struggled to finish reading The Bridges of Madison County with his assistance. The problem: your readers don’t believe that the good man on the first page has become the deeply flawed man on the final page. Happily, you’ve read Anton Chekhov’s “Lady with a Pet Dog,” a story about a married man who enjoys adulterous flings, but who discovers true love when he meets Anna, the lady with the pet dog. You realize that one of the great challenges for that story is to persuade readers that Gurov, an apparent cynic, can in fact be moved by relatively naïve Anna. So you ask, “How is Gurov’s character established, and how does Chekhov persuade the reader that he is vulnerable to change?” Or you ask, “What are the significant steps in Gurov’s transformation? Where do they occur?” Or, more specifically, “How is Gurov’s transformation played out over each section of the story?” Or you ask, “How are narrative commentary and access to Gurov’s thoughts combined to create our understanding of him?” (For an even more direct analog, you might examine Chekhov’s “Misfortune.”)

2b) You feel limited by the first person/second person/limited third person/omniscient point of view. You know other writers have used it masterfully, but you feel you’re forced to stay too close to the main character/too far from the main character; you feel you can’t create complex and dynamic secondary characters. You annotate an appropriate story to focus on its masterful use of that point of view.

2c) You’ve become oddly obsessed with the way you account for the passing of time. You feel you’re constantly writing sentences that begin, “Later the same day…,” “The very next morning…,” “Wednesday of that same week…,” etc. You ask yourself, “What other ways are there to account for the passage of time?” You search through the story you’ve read, looking for alternatives.

OR

While everyone tells you that “said” is “invisible” in passages of dialogue, you can see it in yours, and it bothers you. You wonder how other writers attribute dialogue—what verbs they use and where they place them. You also wonder what some of the options are for indicating the identity of a speaker without providing an attributive. You go back through the story you’ve read to see how the speakers of dialogue are identified.

2d) A teacher, editor, or fellow writer suggests that you tend to explain too much in your stories—that you provide more information than is necessary, so the stories lack tension, suspense, and provocative mystery. He quotes Chekhov: “The art of boring people is in telling them everything.” He says something about the Modernists, then something about omission and mystery in Hemingway. You hunt down “The Killers,” and find the story—in which two men enter a diner and say they intend to kill one of the regular customers when he arrives, the customer never arrives, and the men leave without killing anyone—strangely satisfying. You wonder, “When can a story successfully fail to resolve its apparent plot?” You ask, “When and how do the terms of ‘The Killers’ change?” You ask, “How does this story get away with omitting so much of the information about plot and character that we typically provide?” You pore over the story again and again, searching for clues, documenting your investigation.

3) You recall hearing someone say that dialect conveyed through misspelling is irritating to read, and should be avoided. You recall this because you’re reading The March, a novel by the very famous E. L. Doctorow, and you notice that he uses misspelling to convey dialect, particularly for the character Pearl. But as you continue reading, you notice that as Pearl moves among other characters, her voice changes, as does Doctorow’s representation of her dialogue. Beginning with the general advice you heard, you write an annotation investigating how Doctorow uses diction, sentence structure, and yes, even misspelling, to convey Pearl’s speech and its changes over the course of The March. To do so, you select three distinct, contrasting passages of dialogue from the novel.

Or,

You read Susan Neville’s essay “Where’s Iago?” (in Bringing the Devil to His Knees) in which she discusses the usefulness of a villain in stories. She writes, “Iago is the character or force whose function in the plot is to see or at least to sense [the] fault line, to insert himself within it…to become like water finding a fissure in stone and settling in, causing the stone to crack.” Reading this, you recall someone saying that your characters tend to be nice people, and that you seem to want to protect them. To see for yourself how Iago characters work, you examine Mark Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” and John Cheever’s “The Five Forty-Eight.”

Or,

You’ve read James Wood’s essay in The Broken Estate in which he says that a successful piece of fiction must allow itself to be brought to completion by the reader, and it reminds you of Chekhov’s famous statement to a friend that “You are right to demand that an artist take a conscious attitude to his work, but you confuse two concepts: resolving a question and posing a question correctly. Only the second is required of the artist.” You examine Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” to see how that belief is put into practice.

Or,

You read something in
Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them or
Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction or
E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel or
Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners or
Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story or
Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life or
The Story Behind the Story or
Anton Chekhov’s letters or
Donald Barthelme’s Not Knowing or
John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction or
David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction: Illustrated From Classic and Modern Texts or
Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium or
Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer or
Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style or
Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House or
Debra Spark’s Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing or
Virginia Wolff’s diaries or
an interview in the Paris Review or
one of Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures on literature
that seems enlightening, insightful, provocative, surprising and—the bottom line—potentially useful, and you look to see how that craft-related insight might be applied to a specific story in order to further your own understanding.

Once You Have the Topic and the Text

Read the story at least three times.

The first time, you’re simply reading for content and first impressions.

The second time, you should read more narrowly, focusing on those passages—words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, scenes—that seem most directly relevant to your topic, and most likely to illuminate it. You’re looking for passages that illustrate your topic. In many cases, you’ll want to demonstrate either progression or variety; this requires carefully selecting enough illustrative passages to demonstrate the progression or variety, without turning the annotation into an enormous list, or repeating yourself. In most cases, three or four passages will be sufficient; in some cases, one is sufficient (if, for example, you’re examining how the terms of a story are established in its opening paragraph, or how plot, meaning, and character are resolved in its final paragraph). You might underline or highlight the most apparently useful passages, but it can be even more useful to write or type them out.

At this point you have a topic and relevant excerpts from the text. The next step is to analyze—to attempt to understand and explain—those passages. Keep in mind that an annotation can record the act of exploration, or the process of moving toward understanding. You need not assert knowledge you don’t have; you should feel free to pose questions, so long as you try to answer them.

It may be easiest to think of analysis in terms of a few simple steps:

• Describe what you see.
• Explain the local effect of what you see.
• Explain how that local effect serves one or more of the story’s larger goals.

If the passage you’re analyzing is difficult or complex, or if you’re studying a small scale aspect of craft (say, the rhythm of the prose in the closing paragraphs of The Great Gatsby), it may be useful to devote much of your time to the description (the diction, syntax, sentence length, placement of clauses, dominant sounds, etc., of those closing lines). If the local effect is fairly explicit, it may be more useful to spend most of your time considering how the author’s choices serve the larger story. When in doubt, looking at less material more carefully will always be beneficial.

As you analyze the chosen passages, relationships among them will emerge. You’ll become aware of different levels of distinction. An analysis of one passage might refer to another; and by being aware of these relationships and by consciously creating transitions, you can discover the best order for your examples. A common mistake is to simply track an aspect of craft—say, description of setting—from the beginning of the story to the end, when a more illuminating organization would emphasize the most significant descriptions, or the changes in setting, or the story’s repeated use of certain descriptive words or phrases.

Before you consider the annotation complete, you should read the story a third time, both to see if you’ve overlooked anything and to see if the conclusions you’ve drawn still seem to be in harmony with the actual text.

Varieties of Annotations

None of this is meant to be restrictive; you might very well discover other effective approaches to generating topics and to composing annotations.

Annotations can be formal—written in the third person, with formal diction, for a larger, unidentified audience of Interested Others—or less formal—written in the first person, more conversationally, essentially for yourself. A wide range of approaches is acceptable. If your annotations tend to be informal to the point of imprecision, or if they turn into reviews, you might need to steer toward formality; and if your annotations start to become academic papers, literary criticism, or something else not clearly linked to your concerns for your own work, you may need to try a less formal approach, possibly even explicitly discussing the relevance of the annotation to your own current fiction.

On some occasions, it may be appropriate to write an annotation that is largely descriptive, or one that looks something like a list, or catalog—say, a discussion of various types of surprise, from syntax to plot, in Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation.” On other occasions, it may be appropriate for an annotation to be an argument. An “argument” in this context is (most often) not an attack against a certain choice or strategy in a particular story, but a reasoned defense of a thesis (for instance, “In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes expository paragraphs that have the vividness and emotional impact of scenes,” or “John Updike’s Rabbit is Rich is built on a handful of carefully paced extended scenes that allow him to convey unusual amounts of exposition”). If your annotations tend to be general, or superficial, or if you tend to make sweeping judgments, you may need to attempt to suspend judgment entirely and concentrate on looking at the text more closely, describing what you observe more precisely. If your annotations are merely descriptive, or if you simply ask questions, you may need to turn your questions into thesis statements and to support your theses.

In the great majority of cases, your annotations will focus on a single craft topic in a single short story, novella, or novel. In some cases it may be appropriate to examine a craft topic in two stories, or at greater length in a novella or novel.

At some point you might try annotating one of your own stories, to help you become a more objective reader of your own drafts.

Common Problems

Some of the most common errors in annotations are:

• The craft topic is not clearly stated or defined.
• The craft focus is not sufficiently narrow.
• The annotation does not investigate its stated topic in sufficient detail.
• The annotation does not cite specific passages/examples from the text.
• The annotation consists largely of plot summary.
• The annotation is primarily about theme or meaning.
• The annotation lists examples, but does not provide analysis or comment.
• The analysis is not clearly expressed.
• The annotation emphasizes opinion, or the passing of judgment, without sufficient supporting analysis.
• The annotation is not clearly organized.
• The annotation contains numerous mechanical or grammatical errors.

If you find each annotation is taking you many hours, keep in mind that:

1) Annotations do not need to have, and in most cases will not have, secondary sources. You have no responsibility to read other work by the same author, to acquaint yourself with the author’s life, to read reviews or criticism. While all of that can be interesting, and even useful, an annotation is based on your own close reading. (If, however, you find yourself uncertain how to frame your topic or thesis sentence—if you’re unsure how to define the element of craft you’re examining—you might refer to a handbook, or to an essay on fiction writing, in order to adopt another writer’s definition of “structure” or “unreliability.”)

2) It doesn’t matter if other people already understand the thing that you’re trying to understand. Your job is not to add to the world’s collective knowledge, or to think of an annotation topic no one else has ever written about. Your sole responsibility is to add to your understanding of how to write a story, and to articulate your discovery.

3) Annotations should be narrowly focused. While the story you’re discussing may be fascinating for many reasons, you need to examine only the single craft topic you’ve selected.

4) You do not need to summarize the story, or to pass judgment on it.

5) While each annotation should be effectively organized and clearly expressed, there is no need to revise it dozens of times, the way you would a piece of fiction. Annotations are meant to be functional. Save your hard-earned prose for the fiction. That said, keep in mind that imprecision, abstraction, and vagueness can be contagious, and could spread to your fiction.

A Very Limited Beginning of a List of Possible Annotation Topics

Keep in mind that the best topics are the ones that you feel directly address issues for your own work, and that address significant, even masterful exemplary texts.

• The effect of point of view in X.
• The use of interior monolog in X.
• Shifts between point of view characters in X.
• Shifts in narrative distance in X.
• The distinctions between the narrative’s perspective and the first person narrator’s
• (or third person pov character’s) perspective in X.
• Narrative intrusions in X.
• Dramatic irony in X.

• The balance of scene and exposition in X.
• The effects of active verbs in X.
• Diction in X.
• The effects of sentence structure/sentence rhythm in X.
• Effective repetition in X.
• Parallel structure in X.
• Tension and surprise in the syntax of X.
• Compression in X.
• The effects of sentence variety in X.
• The use of intentional clichés in X.
• Wordplay in X.
• The effects of adjectives and adverbs in X.
• Irregular punctuation in X.
• Lyrical flights in X.
• The use of figurative speech in X.
• The absence of figurative speech in X.
• Modulation of tone in X.

• The evolution of characters in X.
• The gradual revealing of character in X.
• The influences of secondary characters on the main character in X.
• The influence of minor characters on plot in X.
• Counterpointed characters in X.
• Consistent inconsistency and surprise in characters in X.
• Multiple perspectives of the main character provided in X.
• Variation on stereotype in X.
• The effectiveness of character names in X.
• Surprise in characters in X.

• Plot twists in X.
• Multiple plotlines in X.
• Unresolved plotlines in X.
• Effective variation on a familiar plot in X.
• Linearity in X.
• Foreshadowing in X.
• Tension and suspense in X.
• The control of mystery in X.
• The controlled release of information in X.
• Effective use of scenes in X.
• The use of space breaks in X.
• Omitted scenes in X.
• Effective use of extended dialogue in X.
• The use of half-scenes in X.
• The relationship between setting and character in X.
• Effective use of epiphany in X.

• Characterization through dialogue in X.
• Tension between the said and unsaid in X.
• Conflict conveyed by characters saying “no” in X.
• Jargon, slang, and technical vocabulary in X.
• The use of foreign words and phrases in X.
• Conveying foreign-ness in English dialogue in X.

• Descriptions of faces in X.
• Physical descriptions of characters in X.
• The creation of atmosphere in X.
• Description of setting in X.
• Description filtered through POV character in X.
• Conflicting descriptions in X.
• Generic settings in X.
• Accumulating descriptions in X.
• Energized description in X.

• Use of a dominant image in X.
• Patterns of imagery in X.

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Making the Most of a Writing Workshop; or,
Out of the Workshop, Into the Laboratory

By Peter Turchi

Just about everyone who has participated in a writing workshop has horror stories to tell: stories about rude behavior, harsh comments, savage “advice,” someone trying to dictate how someone else should write, writers in tears, writers enraged, or friends who feel obliged to “defend” each other’s work. Several decades ago, Flannery O’Connor—a survivor of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop—wrote,

More recently, in his book Narrative Design, Madison Smartt Bell wrote,

The challenge facing every writing workshop, then, is to serve the writers involved, and to somehow avoid the serious dangers and common flaws of group discussions of art-in-progress. A workshop should be as useful as possible to as many of its participants as possible as often as possible. Ideally, everyone will leave the room each day more excited about writing than they entered it, with new ideas to apply to their writing. Those ideas might be ideas for a particular story, but they might also be ways to think about fiction—lenses that can be useful when looking at drafts.

Writing workshops are, as anyone who has experienced one quickly realizes, curious. Participants are often encouraged to see the workshop as, well, a workshop—a place where things are made. But if Santa ran his workshop like a writing workshop, nobody would get any toys, ever. None that worked, anyway. And the elves would not be singing. Stories do not get written in workshop.

The writing workshop is sometimes presented as a place where you can bring a draft of a story, or an excerpt, to a group of fellow writers who will read it carefully and help you see where it’s working effectively, where it isn’t, yet, and how you might improve it. It’s a time-saver, and a way to get new ideas when you’re stalled, or at a dead end. That’s the idea.

That assumes a story is a like a car and the workshop is your friendly neighborhood service station. But this analogy is deeply flawed. When you take your car to a service station, the assumption is that the car was working just fine, then it wasn’t, and that it can be repaired, or returned to the state it was in. But the story you submit to workshop wasn’t working just fine; if it had been, you wouldn’t have submitted it. Also: when you take your car to a service station, while different mechanics may offer different diagnoses, they aren’t likely to tell you that your Honda Civic should be a tractor, or that it would be more interesting with fewer windows. (“Spare me,” your mechanic says. “Four doors, steering wheel on the left, rubber tires—have we not all seen this a million times before?”) You and the mechanic share an understanding of what a Honda Civic is, what it can be, and what it isn’t. The writing workshop is less like a service station than it is like a place to bring cars that fell off the assembly line, or, more accurately, cars that are still being designed. For all you know, the 12-page story you bring to workshop might turn into a novella, or a chapter for a novel, or you might end up using a few of the characters in something altogether different. And even if it remains a 12-page story, it will change in ways that are by no objective standard “right,” the way a Honda Civic can be made right; your 12-page story means to be unique. So the writing workshop is not a place for repair, or correction.

The writing workshop might more accurately be likened to a laboratory, a place where hypotheses are tested, where experiments are carried out, where there are sometimes explosions, where fruit fly colonies hatch unexpectedly, where people stand around, staring intently at experiments in various stages, rubbing their chins, saying things like “Hmmm,” and “I don’t know,” and “What if we try this,” and, “Now that’s interesting.”

In many writing programs the workshop takes the place of classes, so the work submitted serves largely to trigger discussion and instruction regarding various aspects of craft. That tends to make the workshop like a medical theater, where the would-be doctors are intent on procedure and technique but not, particularly, on the patient. This use of the workshop to prompt lessons on craft may be one reason that, as many people have noted, workshops often seem intent on finding fault. It’s also worth noting that finding fault is relatively easy; if nothing else, we can always see what a story—even a great story—might have done, but didn’t. Madison Smartt Bell says that when we prepare for a workshop discussion, we feel obliged to find something wrong, and if we don’t, we feel we aren’t doing our job. Once we find something wrong, we’re relieved; we can tick off a draft’s shortcomings, then move on to the next one. We approach preparing for workshop as a task to be completed. And that’s why it’s possible for workshops to feel redundant, and tedious, even depressing, when instead they should inspire us.

Workshops depart from the ideal in other ways. Because the work is evolving, it can be tempting to mistake its most effective passages or elements for its most important ones. But we’ve all written stories that had wonderful moments early on that had to be cut from the final draft, appealing characters who turned out to be distractions, clever sentences that turned out to be too clever and, we later realized, stolen from someone else. Conversely, a draft’s “failures”—inconsistency in voice or point of view, an unaccountable leap in time, an overly-long scene, extended attention to a minor character—may be the very things in the story that are most promising. You’ve probably written drafts with one goal in mind, only to discover something much more interesting that you hadn’t foreseen, hadn’t predicted. A draft’s apparent “failures,” or ruptures, might indicate where the story is breaking free from your misguided plan. A good workshop, rather than “fixing” the “problem,” will help you see that you’ve stumbled onto something worth exploring.

If a workshop seems to be, with the exception of “your” time, for the benefit of others, and if preparation for workshop seems like an obligation you have to fulfill so that, in “your” time, the rest of the group will give you something—which is to say, if the preparation for workshop and the group discussion don’t somehow serve the development of your fiction, something is wrong. So the question to keep in mind, always, is “What can I learn from this draft?”

I don’t mean to imply that every draft is a jewel in the rough. Some drafts, we all know from experience, are a mess. Some trees in the forest need to die, fall, and rot, to nurture the others. But somewhere in the combination of recognizing what the work is, considering what it could be, assessing what’s effective, determining what isn’t yet effective, and posing possibilities for the work’s evolution, we should be able to learn something. Like those laboratory scientists, we should study and contemplate, rather than rush to judgment.

How do we do this?

Like scientists in the lab, we work to identify what we’ve been given, then we work to identify its parts and how they function. Our particular interest is in what’s functioning effectively and why and what is functioning less effectively and why. We need to exercise judgment, even as we recognize that our judgment may be flawed and that the evaluation of art is subjective. There are bound to be differences of opinion, differences of interpretation; that’s why it’s especially important that we base our statements on the evidence in front of us. Our goal is to consider how the piece in front of us might serve its intention most effectively—not to “fix” the story or chapter, but to suggest possibilities for it based on what the author has set into motion. If this goes well, we all leave the room with new ideas.

When you look at your own drafts, it’s best not to say, in any narrow, limiting sense, “How can I fix this?” but instead to say, “How can I improve this?” or “How can I build on this?” That’s the attitude to bring to a workshop: What is this? What’s most interesting about it? What are some exciting possibilities it suggests for the next draft? You can’t expect anyone else to tell you how to finish your story; but you can expect others to offer ways you might further investigate what you’ve set into motion.

In preparing to discuss work in progress by others, you might reflect on your own answers to the following questions:

1. What do you hope to achieve when you commit a first draft to paper?
2. What sorts of goals do you set yourself for a second or third draft, or whenever you approach revision?
3. How do you know when a story is finished? (Do you tend to think of stories in terms of plot resolution? Character exploration? Theme? Making a statement?)

These are important questions not just for the obvious reasons—that they help us to define our own practice—but because they can help to guide our analysis, including the sort of analysis we do for workshops, our responses to work in progress. If we ourselves don’t tend to write stories to Send Messages, and if we don’t tend to think of a story of our own primarily as an expression of a theme, maybe we shouldn’t assume that everyone else in the room does. On the other hand, if we’re interested in more than plot, we might consider that our fellow writers aren’t simply concerned with plot, either. And if we sometimes write drafts not knowing where they’re headed, we should allow that other writers work the same way. The draft we’re examining is likely to be one step in a path of discovery. Before we can hope to describe the intention of a story we read, we need to be aware of our own intentions—at least, our conscious intentions—for the work we write.

The first step in preparing to discuss another writer’s draft is to try to identify the work's intention. This is much more challenging than it might sound. It’s difficult to truly suspend our own tastes; it’s also difficult to identify with any confidence the intention of a work that isn’t fully realized (especially since the author might not have a clear intention, yet). But we need to try; and we need to be patient in doing that before we start talking about any specific scene or character or line of dialogue or description. (Far too often, workshop discussions are devoted to a few details at the expense of the whole.)

It’s often best to begin by describing the work. That description has to move beyond the obvious; it should be craft oriented; and it should help you recognize the work’s intention. In some cases, a summary of action might be called for—if the action is complex or unclear. Sometimes the group can avoid long stretches of confusion by clarifying a few simple things at the start. But the description must also be analytical—a recognition of the whole, and an identification of its most significant parts.

One of the most useful things a workshop can do for the writer is to reflect the intention of the work back to her. It is of course helpful to give the writer suggestions for developing the work; and it’s useful for every writer to learn to diagnose the ailments of a draft that falls short. But falls short of what? If the conversation doesn’t begin by trying to recognize the work’s intention, there’s a great risk that the suggestions offered will be suggestions for ways to make the story what the speaker thinks it should be, or could be, or might be.

When we talk about describing a draft’s intentions, we aren’t trying to read the writer’s mind, or guess what she was thinking. Rather, we’re describing what the pages we’ve been given appear to be trying to do—and we should support that conclusion with evidence from the text. Because unless this articulation of the work’s intention is done carefully, thoroughly, any criticism—or praise—of specific parts is irrelevant. While readers might agree that a particular description is “hysterically funny,” a particular scene “shocking,” a particular character “familiar,” it’s impossible to say whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing without having considered the work’s intention. For example: “So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past” is a world-class last line—for The Great Gatsby. It would be an awkward last line for Moby Dick, and it would be an absurd last line for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The margin comment “Great line!” is not useful without consideration of the context—which is to say, the work’s intentions.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but another reason it’s useful for readers to articulate the apparent intention of the work is so that the author can hear it. Ideally, the majority of readers will describe something like the intention the author had in mind. But often, due to the fact that work in progress is either insufficiently focused or not fully considered, different readers will have very different understandings of a work’s intention. This is good for the writer to know. And then there are the times when readers will be affected by the work in a way the writer hadn’t anticipated, but which seems worth pursuing. Our intention for a piece of writing isn’t stable; in fact, when we set out to write a first draft, we may have no clear intention in mind. As we revise, our intention may become more clear, but it is also likely to change, even drastically. Your goal in a workshop, then, should be to help the writer understand what a thoughtful reader sees on the page. This is why it’s important for everyone to prepare for workshop by describing the intention of each piece, and it’s important for the author and for the group to hear multiple expressions of a work’s intention.

Sometimes, in preparing for discussion, you may find yourself with questions you can’t answer. That’s perfectly fine. Other readers may have answers; or, perhaps even more profitably, the entire group may need to grapple with difficult questions.

After identifying what the work seems intent to do, it is valuable to discuss how it goes about doing that. Eagerness to get to specific examples sometimes leads the group to discuss the writer’s formal choices too hastily. It’s both important and useful to identify the formal means of the work in front of us, the aspects which seem to have been emphasized or which seem most important. Some of these aspects of craft in fiction are:
Structure, Action (events, story, plot), Character, Setting, Imagery, Point of view, Form, and Language. A discussion of intention may eventually include theme, or meaning, but that isn’t usually the best place to begin the discussion.

Not all aspects of craft are equally important in every story; so it’s our job to identify and focus our attention on those aspects that seem most important to the particular piece.

We can say the story is in the limited third person, that it opens with exposition and is built around two long scenes, we can say that the events are strictly chronological but the character’s thoughts include flashbacks, we can say that the writing is colloquial and seems to represent the character’s voice, we can say that the setting is a generic suburb in an unnamed part of the United States, and so on. But the crucial thing to get at in discussion is the relationship between those “formal choices” and the work’s intention. So it may turn out that the fact that the story is essentially chronological is of no particular consequence, and neither is the fact that we don’t know what state we’re in. Alternately, you might decide the fact that you don’t know what state the characters are in is essential. If we were discussing Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” we might decide that ambiguity of setting, among many other ambiguities, is a crucial choice, one that clarifies the work’s intention.

Because so many group discussions of drafts turn into fault-finding missions, the next step should be to consider passages, devices, and choices that seem most effective in pursuit of the work’s intent, or “core.” Many workshops do this only hastily, even as an afterthought. There are several reasons for this. When we talk about what’s working, we tend to identify very specific details—a sentence, a line of dialogue or description, a character’s gesture—rather than an aspect of the work. The tendency is to praise the sentence or line or description (“I loved that!”) and then move on. But it is important to recognize general choices that are serving a story well—say, it’s modular structure, or its internal clock—even if that aspect of the story isn’t working perfectly in every detail. Recognizing effective passages or choices can also be difficult because it’s harder to explain why something that works works than it is to discuss why something that fails fails. “I know my Honda Civic isn’t working because when I turn the key the engine won’t start. I have gas in it, so I suspect the problem is the ignition, the battery, or the alternator.” The problem is easy to investigate, even if it turns out not to be easy to solve. It’s harder to explain why your Honda Civic is running; it just is. It’s running because it’s running. It’s supposed to run. When your car is working well, you don’t think about it. Somewhere, though, designers, engineers, and mechanics gave a lot of thought to making your car run well. As writers, when some part of a work in progress is working well, we must consider why.

Our obligation to identify and discuss those passages, devices, and/or choices that seem most effective in pursuit of the work's intent should not be confused with the social urge to “say something nice.” There is no need in workshop to “say something nice,” and sometimes the gratuitous “nice” comment is more condescending and disrespectful than thoughtful consideration. There is, of course, also no need or reason to say something not nice. We’re scientists in the laboratory; we’re trying to learn. While we should be courteous and respectful toward one another, our assessment of the work should be as objective as possible.

Now we come to the point where far too many workshop discussions begin (and, in the worst cases, end): identifying passages, devices, or choices that seem at cross-purposes with the rest of the work, or not as fully realized, clear, detailed, or graceful as they need to be. Identifying those aspects of the work that are not functioning clearly or effectively or persuasively is absolutely useful, but it is only one of many parts of the conversation; and because it is the easiest part to indulge, we must be wary of allowing it to dominate, at the expense of our other responsibilities. When discussing a draft’s shortcomings, contradictions, missed opportunities, etc., it is important to keep in mind that we aren’t passing judgment on a final draft; our goal, always, is to be constructive.

With that in mind, we can speculate about changes or additions—again, though, not to satisfy our own taste or preference, but in light of the work's deepest purposes. We may be tentative about this, for fear of being “prescriptive.” But if we remember that our task is not to “fix” the story, or to tell the writer what to do—that our job, now, is to generate ideas and options—we won’t “prescribe” but suggest. For ourselves, we can generate all sorts of possibilities from the story in front of us; for the writer and the group discussion, though, we should restrict our suggestions to those which seem most clearly related to the work’s apparent intention.

So. Prepare for discussion by

1. Describing the work, with the goal of identifying its intention
2. Identifying its parts or aspects and how they function with relation to the whole
3. Assessing the effectiveness of the parts (concentrating first on strengths, then on weaknesses)
4. Proposing new possibilities, keeping in mind the work’s apparent intention and concerns

At one point in the film Rivers and Tides, landscape sculptor Andy Goldsworthy says, “When something collapses it is intensely disappointing…each time [the sculpture collapsed], I got to know the stone a little bit more. [The sculpture] got higher each time, so it grew in proportion to my understanding of the stone. And that is really one of the things my art is trying to do, it’s trying to understand the stone. I obviously don’t understand it well enough, yet.”

The purpose of a writing workshop is to work together, as a group, to pursue our understanding of the craft of writing.

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The Virtues of Obsession: Where We Dwell

By Peter Turchi

I’d like to begin by reminding you of an Emily Dickinson poem 

I fully intend several meanings of that word “dwell”: to abide in a place for a time; to remain in, as a permanent residence; to occupy or inhabit; and to spend time on, or linger over.

 

Over the past ten years or so I’ve had the opportunity to do some work with a visual artist, Charles Ritchie, who also happens to be Assistant Curator of the Department of Modern Prints and Drawings in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

If you were to see his work, you’d most likely see his prints. But by far the greatest quantity of work is in his journals. While, like any artist, he sketches, and does studies, he also creates fully realized work in his journals and they don’t often leave his house. Charlie also makes drawings, but in part because he spends so much time on them, he doesn’t generally sell them, so those aren’t typically in circulation, either.

All of which is to say, the great majority of his work is private.

 

When we speak of entering an artist’s world, we refer to a place both related to and distinct from our world, or what we might be inclined to call the world. We see his or her work and recognize it as part of a particular universe of the imagination, one consisting of all the stories or songs, or images he or she has provided us and, around them and between them, other stories, songs, or images we create for ourselves by looking through the lens the work provides. In that way, Charles Dicken’s world is larger than the sum of the stories and novels he wrote; as is Jane Austen’s, Ray Carver’s, Alice Munro’s, and so on.

Charles Ritchie’s world is, largely though not exclusively, his house and the part of Silver Spring, Maryland, that he can see from it. Whether we have actually set foot on Lee Street or not, we recognize the place. It is rendered in some instances with such realistic integrity that we might, at first, wonder what there is to be found there beyond what we already know. We must readjust. We shift our focus, first straining to see what we think we’re looking for, what we think we want to, or need to, see; then, relaxing, we accept limits to our perception, limits to one kind of knowing. As we do, we are given a gift of new vision.

For a large part of his career, Ritchie has recorded a few simple objects  dozens, even hundreds of times. They include the houses and trees he can see through his windows; those windows themselves; a streetlamp; an astronomical chart; a vase; and a few chairs. The repetition of Ritchie’s personal icons compels the viewer to look more closely at these objects of his fascination. They also hint at one source of tension: the juxtaposition of familiar realism with less immediately evident formality. While at first glance the images may seem reassuringly representational, Ritchie’s work is tightly bound by constraints.

For one, as I’ve said, he limits himself largely, though not entirely, to what he can see from his home studio. This is an explicit example of creating art based on where we dwell Ritchie’s primary sub1ect is his suburban neighborhood and the changes that occur over time one day to the next, one season to the next, one decade to the next.

Another constraint: he works almost exclusively in black and white. (“Contrast and atmosphere can accomplish so much on their own,” he says. “Why encumber them if it’s not necessary?”).

A third constraint: With the exception of his self portraits, his work depicts no living creatures (“too loaded,” he says). Even some of his self portraits don’t appear to depict any living creature. His likeness is usually obscured, barely visible.

Fourth: In many of the journal images and prints, he relinquishes detail; like Chekhov and Hemingway, he believes in omitting as much as possible. For that reason, he often depicts objects in fading light. (“Night filters things out,” he says, “it creates powerful negative space. I’m fascinated by empty space and the spirit of things.”)

Finally, Ritchie’s images are executed on a scale so small that, no matter where they are displayed, they are essentially private, available to one viewer at a time. Many of his images are no larger than a postcard. He says his goal is to offer the viewer “an invitation to crawl into an intimate yet immense universe.” As when we nestle into a novel, when we view Ritchie’s work, his world becomes ours.

 

Ritchie’s concentrated range of images is evidence of an artistic obsession, one increasingly at odds with the pace of modern life. None of us can observe the entire world this intently; daily we find ourselves paying partial, casual, or superficial attention. The naturalist E. O. Wilson, whose work began when, as a boy, he became fascinated with fire ants, has said that even today a biologist could make a career from exhaustive investigation of the life forms at the base of a single tree. Similarly, Ritchie’s art is a reminder of the power and the value of a narrow focus, and deep contemplation. like Thoreau’s writing about Walden pond and Wordsworth’s poems about the English lake district, the work encourages us to rediscover the virtues of a meditative relationship with our world.

We’ve all heard possibly been given the advice “Write what you know.” But that’s dangerous, as it implies that one knows quite enough. And while it may be true, as William Maxwell said, that at a very young age he had all the material he would ever need as a writer, having that material wasn’t enough; devoting obsessive attention to it was what yielded So Long, See You Tomorrow, among other books. So the better advice might be, Know what you write. And know it as deeply, as comprehensively, as possible. Another way of putting this: dare to be a specialist, in the sense of the term meant by Vladimir Nabokov when he said, “Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects.” Nabokov  like Ritchie, like Thoreau, and Wordsworth reminds us that the more we know, the greater our sense of mystery.

The obsessive gaze is often linked to obsessive process. Nabokov wrote his novels on index cards, essentially drafting, revising, and polishing them sentence by sentence. Ritchie lives with his images; he worked and refined one drawing, called Twilight, for over ten years. And while a hasty observer might think he recreates “the same thing,” he has no interest in reproducing images; on the contrary, like other visual artists before him, his interest is in variation, and what even very subtle variations might reveal. As a result, he has extraordinary patience with what other people might call “mistakes”; he tends to pin them to his wall and stare at them for a week, a month, even longer. The mechanics of printing introduce variations an artist can’t entirely control   the physical realities of paper, the way ink and watercolor are absorbed by fiber, and the way the human hand can’t reliably execute the brain’s exact intention, all lead to what we might call accidents, but Ritchie calls opportunities. One of his favorite words is “possibility.”

There is no shortage of examples of writers obsessed with their material; William Maxwell is one, Whitman you’ll recall that he continually revised Leaves of Grass, essentially making a book of his life’s work another. Marianne Moore published her poem “Poetry” in six different versions ranging from three lines to thirty nine. Tim O’Brien is, I believe it’s fair to say, obsessed by the effects on the individual of war in general and of Vietnam in particular; also with the challenge of knowing anything with certainty. John Updike was obsessed with marital politics, and with particularly American themes. As readers, we’re glad Mark Twain kept yearning for his youth, so kept re expressing it in Tom Sawyer, in Huckleberry Finn, and in Life on the Mississippi. We’re glad Faulkner invented and kept imagining his unpronounceable county  we may even be glad, for the poet if not for the person, that Emily Dickinson didn’t leave home.

To write about where we dwell, then to truly dwell in our work is to favor intense contemplation, the penetrating gaze. We may find our obsessions thrust upon us, or we may feel we choose them (the difference may be whether we feel confined by them or enraptured); in either case, they provide useful constraints, helping us to focus our interest and attention. So: if you believe yourself to be obsessed in your work, congratulations.

But perhaps you don’t believe yourself to be obsessed, at least not fruitfully so. Perhaps, instead, you’ve looked at a draft of a new story only to find it feeling familiar   or you’ve given it to a trusted friend who says, “This is like that story you showed me last year, except this time the sisters are cousins. Which, come to think of it, is a lot like your story from two years ago, where the sister characters are the two neighbors.” As your friend goes on, excitedly making connections, explaining how every story you’ve ever written can be boiled down to yet another depiction of your relationship with your sister, you begin to despair.

But take heart. This sort of reductive reading could make anyone’s work look bad. From this perspective, Cheever wrote about suburban alcoholics, Jane Austen wrote love stories, and Shakespeare should have tried writing at least a few poems in free verse. No, rather than despair when we fear we’re repeating ourselves, we need to investigate further. We need to work to recognize the difference between repetition and meaningful variation. We need to commit to an intensity of gaze that will allow us to see beyond what we’ve already apprehended. Our obsessions and constraints define us. We must cultivate them. Remember Emily Dickinson:

This cultivation is not necessarily as easy as it sounds. One challenge is that we might not recognize our deepest obsessions. Another is that our obsession may be not a matter of content, but some aspect of form or style. Milan Kundera tells us that when a critic pointed out that he tended to write his novels in seven sections, he seized the revelation as an opportunity to further develop his structural inclinations.

A larger problem may be that we don’t typically think of obsession as something that can be willed. To be obsessed is to be possessed, consumed, overtaken despite ourselves. Can artistic obsession be learned, or taught?

In terms of content, probably not. What we can learn, and can teach, is to dwell in our work. To dwell   to reside   to inhabit.

This means consciously working to resist the temptation to keep moving, to get through a piece, to reach the end. This may never have been a popular notion among students of any kind we are, most of us, eager to achieve mastery, to see results, to move forward and deliberately dwelling may seem like a particularly antiquated notion now. Much in our world emphasizes speed faster connections, faster movement, faster responses.

To learn to dwell in our work is to use drafts to explore, with the understanding that our movement toward the final draft of a story or poem or novel is not only likely to but should ideally include not only lateral movement but backward movement, and circular movement, and movement we can’t confidently describe. Because to insist to ourselves that each draft carry the work toward closure is, necessarily, to limit the possibilities. Every choice must then at least seem to be an improvement on what’s currently on the page, part of a straight line progression, rather than an alternative to what’s on the page, movement within a larger plane.

I recenly tested this notion with graduate students. In a course they enrolled in with the understanding that we would be reading and discussing examples of various formal possibilities, I asked each of them to choose a piece of theirs that they would rewrite several times over the course of the semester with the understanding that the story would almost certainly not be finished by the end of the semester and would, most likely, be disrupted, disturbed, possibly even destroyed. This was not a proposition they were prepared to embrace with enthusiasm. Each new draft they did had to meet certain requirements. Each draft involved severe disturbance of the previous draft. Each draft required the writer to invent new material. At the end of the semester, none of the stories were finished and in many cases, the final draft of the semester was not the most promising draft. (“Progress” is rarely as neatly sequential, or as recognizable, as we might like it to be.) But virtually every student said that she or he had a new sense of possibility for the work   and that, rather than being sick of the stories, they felt motivated to continue with them. That’s particularly notable because many of them, wary of the assignment, had intentionally chosen stories they felt were badly flawed, even, in some cases, stories they had given up on.

The key is that dwelling is not the same as standing still. Emily Dickinson didn’t just stare out the window all day. To dwell is also to occupy, to linger over. I’ll offer one final example from another field entirely. You may have heard about this  a team of biochemists recently decided to enlist the help of non scientists to solve a very complicated problem. Their goal is to learn about proteins, and even to create new proteins to fight disease. The problem is that while proteins form according to certain apparent rules, there are so many potential combinations and arrangements of components that not even high speed computers can efficiently consider all the possibilities. Protein creation is a story with infinite possibility, and no clear path to the end.

The biochemists enlisted help to turn protein creation into a video game. The game is called Foldit, and you can google and download it in a matter of minutes. The website includes some introductory information, but no background in science is necessary one only needs to understand a few basic rules to the game. The user the player is then invited to solve a series of puzzles, which progress in difficulty. The puzzles are designed to teach the user protein building strategies, and the puzzles are constantly revised in order to do that more effectively. Think of those puzzles as lessons and exercises in craft. Users can then move on to more complicated tasks, competing with players around the globe.

There’s an entertaining Youtube video about some of the thousands of people who play Foldit  people with no background in science. The game’s originators flew twenty or more of the top players to gather, because, they said, it turns out that most of the game’s best players were better at creating proteins than biochemists.

News stories about Foldit tend to say that the game is enlisting laypeople to help create proteins and potentially cure diseases but that’s not quite accurate. As the site itself explains, what the game is actually intended to do is to collect information about how people address the problem of solving protein making puzzles and then to build those problem solving strategies into the computer programs currently being used.

A video game, then, is being used to cultivate obsession. In a similar way, we can train ourselves to write for the rewards of a single draft, to explore the possibilities of a sentence, to admire the subtle but significant variation in a constellation of characters we’ve seen in our work before. And in this process of dwelling, of sustained contemplation, we are likely to find, as TS Eliot so famously told us,

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