Sunday, March 25, 2012

Advanced Creative Writing Reminder

Tomorrow is the final visiting writer. I have a health insurance meeting to attend and will likely be late, but I will be there and would like to see all of you there.

Remember that we will be writing letters to each of our writers being workshopped for this week and for last. Writers, I will expect you to keep track of the notes you receive.

Also, I want to be sure that these workshops are giving you all that you need from them. In the interest of dong that, I will be asking that there be a designated scribe for each person being workshopped. This person will note what is being said during your workshop and will note ALL that he or she is able to capture (or quickly summarize) of the conversation.

It has been my experience that we all experience something that I call "workshop ears" during our own workshops and that leads us to hear all of the negative comments only, even neutral comments become negative comments and constructive criticism gets heard as mere criticism. We rarely hear the good things and tune in very closely to those things that we hear as harsh or negative. I want to be sure that we serve one another well by noting all that is good and accomplished as well as what might need to be reconsidered.

Beyond any of that, the most valuable thing you can learn from how a roomful of readers, each with very distinct libraries, read you is that only some of them will ever be your kind of reader. That doesn't mean that there is no value in being read by those who read other types of things. It means that you get a variety of vantage points and those are always valuable, even if only to show you how ONE person might read what you wrote.

No comments:

Post a Comment