In the past 24 hours, I've received two emails - one from a Clarion instructor, and one from a fellow workshopper - both with very similar requests: that I not make too many changes in my last story, "The Four Hundred Thousand". It's only coincidence - I doubt most of the class even remembers the story, let along wonder what I'm doing to it. However, it does bring up an interesting topic: when you have 23 individual critiques of one story, how much of the story do you change based on those critiques? And how much do you let the Clarion instructors influence your revisions?
For both "Take Your Daughters to Work" and "Jetsam", I'll be honest: I ended up taking the comments of one instructor and applying them to the stories. While many of my classmates and the other instructors had very valid criticisms, they were all so different from each other, that I eventually realized I had to pick one critique out of all the others - otherwise, I'd still be revising, trying to fit in everyone's comments. The fact is, though, there will always be people who don't like my work, or think I should have done "X" where I did "Y" - and a few instructors felt that one or both stories should be trunked, that they were complete failures on every level. But you can't please everyone, so pick and choose the critiques you think are best for the story, and forget about the rest. I decided that the instructors who wanted the stories trunked had valid points to make, but that I still wanted to see if I could get them published. In the case of "Take Your Daughters", I and the instructors who loved the piece were right. In the case of "Jetsam", the instructors who thought it was unpublishable may be right - time will tell.
In the case of "The Four Hundred Thousand", I've had a bit of an easier time, because most of the criticisms focused on three very specific parts of the story - I'll call them "father", "syringe", and "ending". As each person in the Clarion workshop gave me a 1-1/2 minute encapsulation of their critique, I wrote down key points in a notebook. Time after time, I wrote "father", "syringe", and "ending" - the three parts/subplots of the story that everyone agreed (including myself) needed to be fixed.
However, when I got the written manuscripts back, for the most part all 23 had very different individual micro-level editing comments on the pages. Some people loved the title, others hated it. Each person had a different view of how the first paragraph should be written - a few people rewrote/reworded the first sentence for me, others rewrote the second sentence, and other rewrote the third. The fact is, I can't accept everyone's criticisms - it's not possible to rewrite one sentence according to three or five or seven very different opinions, and satisfy everyone. So, I ended up picking only three full manuscript critiques to use out of the 21 critiques of the class, and set the rest aside. (And no, I'm not going to say whose critiques I decided to use.) I also put Holly Black's and Kelly Link's in the pile of "to use" - so I ended up with five critiques in all. That's still a lot, though - Holly and Kelly give extremely thorough comments throughout the piece, in addition to overall criticism.
Next, I set all those comments aside, and just read the story. I didn't pick up the pen, didn't make notes - I only read it for pleasure. That said, I noticed right away which parts I wanted to change, which sentences fell down, what areas really worked. I set it aside for a day, then came back to it, and read it again. This time, I took notes, both on the actual pages, and in a MS Excel spreadsheet, where I listed all the things that I felt needed to be changed. In all, I listed close to a hundred things - ranging from little tweaks of logic in single sentences to full revisions of characters. Now as I'm going through the story, I'm inserting in new material, taking out old, and only occasionally referring to the five manuscript critiques that I've chosen to use. I won't use everyone's suggestions, but it'll be helpful to have dissenting opinions in front of me as I revise, if nothing else as a reminder that I don't have to please everyone. This story is not for everyone, no story can be. Not even Harry Potter. :)
This all sounds like a lot of ripping apart, of turning the story into something else - and possibly ruining the very thing that made so many people like it, which I think is the concern of the emails. And yet when I finish, not that much will have changed. The style, voice and tense won't have changed, and the plot is exactly what it needs to be - that is, the journey of the protagonist is fixed, because it works. A few subplots - the "father", the "syringe" - will be revised, but won't deviate much from where they are now in terms of how many words are devoted to them in the piece. The "ending" will be lengthened and "plumped up" slightly, to make it stronger. But any Clarionite who reads the story post-revision won't think that the original story was butchered. I'm not ripping it apart. I'm mending a few cracks, then I'm polishing.
I suppose I should say what the story is about - not a lot of people read this blog, so up until now, I haven't bothered. But I should probably give a small synopsis for the few of you who weren't at Clarion. The story is science fiction, and it's based on an idea I got for a poem exercise that Joe and Gay Haldeman gave to the class. We each had to pick a theme out of a hat, and then a poetic form out of another. I got "Shakespearean sonnet" and "future war". Well, I freaked: what the fuck do I know about "future war"? I've never written sf, I don't know anything about science or the military. Yeah, much freaking.... Then I realized that I needed to approach this not from "what science do you know?" but "what kind of people do you usually write about, and how can they can be placed into a science fiction setting?" Because, it's about the character's journey, I reminded myself. If you can find the right character and the right journey, the right science for the story will come to you. Well, I write about young women, about transformation and sexual awakening, and that frightening, sorrowful moment that exists between leaving childhood and entering adulthood. So, I said to myself, what could a young woman at that momentous cusp in her life possibly contribute to a future war....?
:)
For both "Take Your Daughters to Work" and "Jetsam", I'll be honest: I ended up taking the comments of one instructor and applying them to the stories. While many of my classmates and the other instructors had very valid criticisms, they were all so different from each other, that I eventually realized I had to pick one critique out of all the others - otherwise, I'd still be revising, trying to fit in everyone's comments. The fact is, though, there will always be people who don't like my work, or think I should have done "X" where I did "Y" - and a few instructors felt that one or both stories should be trunked, that they were complete failures on every level. But you can't please everyone, so pick and choose the critiques you think are best for the story, and forget about the rest. I decided that the instructors who wanted the stories trunked had valid points to make, but that I still wanted to see if I could get them published. In the case of "Take Your Daughters", I and the instructors who loved the piece were right. In the case of "Jetsam", the instructors who thought it was unpublishable may be right - time will tell.
In the case of "The Four Hundred Thousand", I've had a bit of an easier time, because most of the criticisms focused on three very specific parts of the story - I'll call them "father", "syringe", and "ending". As each person in the Clarion workshop gave me a 1-1/2 minute encapsulation of their critique, I wrote down key points in a notebook. Time after time, I wrote "father", "syringe", and "ending" - the three parts/subplots of the story that everyone agreed (including myself) needed to be fixed.
However, when I got the written manuscripts back, for the most part all 23 had very different individual micro-level editing comments on the pages. Some people loved the title, others hated it. Each person had a different view of how the first paragraph should be written - a few people rewrote/reworded the first sentence for me, others rewrote the second sentence, and other rewrote the third. The fact is, I can't accept everyone's criticisms - it's not possible to rewrite one sentence according to three or five or seven very different opinions, and satisfy everyone. So, I ended up picking only three full manuscript critiques to use out of the 21 critiques of the class, and set the rest aside. (And no, I'm not going to say whose critiques I decided to use.) I also put Holly Black's and Kelly Link's in the pile of "to use" - so I ended up with five critiques in all. That's still a lot, though - Holly and Kelly give extremely thorough comments throughout the piece, in addition to overall criticism.
Next, I set all those comments aside, and just read the story. I didn't pick up the pen, didn't make notes - I only read it for pleasure. That said, I noticed right away which parts I wanted to change, which sentences fell down, what areas really worked. I set it aside for a day, then came back to it, and read it again. This time, I took notes, both on the actual pages, and in a MS Excel spreadsheet, where I listed all the things that I felt needed to be changed. In all, I listed close to a hundred things - ranging from little tweaks of logic in single sentences to full revisions of characters. Now as I'm going through the story, I'm inserting in new material, taking out old, and only occasionally referring to the five manuscript critiques that I've chosen to use. I won't use everyone's suggestions, but it'll be helpful to have dissenting opinions in front of me as I revise, if nothing else as a reminder that I don't have to please everyone. This story is not for everyone, no story can be. Not even Harry Potter. :)
This all sounds like a lot of ripping apart, of turning the story into something else - and possibly ruining the very thing that made so many people like it, which I think is the concern of the emails. And yet when I finish, not that much will have changed. The style, voice and tense won't have changed, and the plot is exactly what it needs to be - that is, the journey of the protagonist is fixed, because it works. A few subplots - the "father", the "syringe" - will be revised, but won't deviate much from where they are now in terms of how many words are devoted to them in the piece. The "ending" will be lengthened and "plumped up" slightly, to make it stronger. But any Clarionite who reads the story post-revision won't think that the original story was butchered. I'm not ripping it apart. I'm mending a few cracks, then I'm polishing.
I suppose I should say what the story is about - not a lot of people read this blog, so up until now, I haven't bothered. But I should probably give a small synopsis for the few of you who weren't at Clarion. The story is science fiction, and it's based on an idea I got for a poem exercise that Joe and Gay Haldeman gave to the class. We each had to pick a theme out of a hat, and then a poetic form out of another. I got "Shakespearean sonnet" and "future war". Well, I freaked: what the fuck do I know about "future war"? I've never written sf, I don't know anything about science or the military. Yeah, much freaking.... Then I realized that I needed to approach this not from "what science do you know?" but "what kind of people do you usually write about, and how can they can be placed into a science fiction setting?" Because, it's about the character's journey, I reminded myself. If you can find the right character and the right journey, the right science for the story will come to you. Well, I write about young women, about transformation and sexual awakening, and that frightening, sorrowful moment that exists between leaving childhood and entering adulthood. So, I said to myself, what could a young woman at that momentous cusp in her life possibly contribute to a future war....?
:)
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