Thursday 24 March 2011

All about workshops

I really hate workshopping.  It’s an essential part of that whole ‘being a Writah, Dahling’ thing, I know, and would definitely be incredibly useful IF it was not for the fact that almost everything I workshop I write hurriedly, while hungover, and for the express purpose of having something to workshop.  I thought it was about time I committed an act of embloggination about creative writing, so this is my general workshop experience.

Here I am, sitting awkwardly in Kennedy Hall watching my class try to think of something nice to say about the piece I wrote in two hours yesterday morning, while a badger or some similarly smelly and long-clawed mammal tried to claw its way out of my skull.  It’s a crappy section of ‘Something longer’, I’ve told them, although it isn’t.  It’s two thousand words of vague rubbish, bashed out to fulfil a deadline and largely written in dialect because, as I may have mentioned, I was hungover when I wrote it.  This class is full of very clever, very serious Writers, so I can’t show them what I’m really working on (Zombie Werewolves of Devon (in corsets) vs the Ninja-Spartans (who, after being defeated at Thermopylae, ordered a consignment of eye-patches and became pirates)).  Incidentally, can I put brackets within brackets?  It’s a punctuational point which has been bothering me for some time, and if anyone knows the answer I would greatly appreciate their input.  Anyway, back to the workshop.

Someone, probably Gretchen, says something incredibly clever and pertinent.  I nod, and say I will work it into the redraft.  I wonder how I can apply it to Zombie Werewolves.  There is not much space for metatextuality in Zombie Werewolves, but I am sure I can shoehorn it in there somewhere.  The great JB nods.  He is very keen on metatextuality.  He tells me that I was clearly trying to make a cunning metatextual point here.  I say that that is absolutely what I was trying to do, and I am glad he picked up on it.  You can’t argue when an eminent novelist like JB tells you what you were trying to do with a piece, even if what you were trying to do with it was fill a side of A4 with Times New Roman.

 Someone clears their throat and starts to say something about the protagonist, but I am not really listening.  I am busy working through a knotty plot problem, to whit; if it is not rape when the victim is dead, would it technically be rape if a werewolf forced himself upon a zombie?  I have concluded that it would not, and am considering the implications for Spartan piracy if lycanthropy is a sexually transmitted disease when I realise that everybody is expectantly silent.  A question has been asked.  I do not know what question, or who by, but I must answer nonetheless.

“Oh, you know”, I say, “this is an early draft so...yeah”.  A useful phrase, that I have discovered to be the ‘That would be an ecumenical matter’ of creative writing. 

It is at about this point that I usually decide that I should probably contribute something to the class, and manage to alienate everyone within a ten foot radius by saying whatever is on the surface of my brain.  Yesterday I casually remarked that British people generally have the idea that Americans cannot do irony, thereby unintentionally and unthinkingly insulting over half the class (who hail from the USA).  I decide, sinking red-faced into a slump within my seat, that next time I will write a properly thought-out and intelligent piece, with good description and shit, that will repair the damage because it will be tailored to the class and make them approve of me.  Then I go and get drunk to aid the necrophilic lycanthropy writing process, and forget all about it.

3 comments:

  1. Heather, I have been meaning to ask, what exactly is your masters in? I thought you were doing something academic. But I read your blog and you had a creative writing tutorial. Either A. Not everything on the internet is true, or B. I am not infallible. Can you think of a third way to save both mine and your integrity? That would be truly creative.

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  2. If you take the rules of mathematics then it is perfectly acceptable to use brackets within brackets; separating terms in an expression in order to complete distinct calculations in a desired order as opposed to letting them run figuratively amok is done in exactly this way. Now you just need to find a valid reason for applying this to Writahdom.

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  3. Suky, I would not dare to suggest that you are not infallible. I am, however, doing a masters in creative writing. I can only assume that you were testing my by stating that you were wrong. I hope that I passed the test by continuing to believe in your omnipotent powers!
    Simon, you lost me at 'mathematics'.

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