Writers Mecca

The 4 emotional stages of the Iowa Writers Workshop, summer session:

EXCITEMENT - there's always so much excitement to joining a new group, especially when I go to an exotic place like Iowa City!

HAPPINESS - downtown Iowa City is awesome.  Lots of restaurants, lots of cafes, several gyms, a few grocery stores, a great library with comfy chairs and all of it within walking distance of both the campus and my place.  And because Iowa City really is a writers mecca, there's this sense of being in a very special place.  I love that they have quotes of authors imprinted on the sidewalks and more bookstores than I can count.  Here, if you meet someone, there's a very good chance s/he is a serious writer and you can talk about the art and craft of writing to your heart's content.

DISAPPOINTMENT - our instructor is highly respected, absolutely adorable and lovable, kind, generous, funny and brilliant... but he doesn't say much in class.  There are no lectures, very few pearls of wisdom that get passed on to us, no real craft discussions.  He's an artist.  His discussions are esoteric and enigmatic and its up to you to fill in the gaps on what should be done to improve your work.

The students are the best group of writers I've worked with -- they're all talented and skillful with interesting voices.  But it's not the best group of critiquers I've seen.  I'm not necessarily talking about each individual critique, I'm talking about clarity and the need to get some consensus on the feedback so the writer can put weight on a particular issue.  With our group, it often feels that everyone has a different opinion on what should be done to take the story to the next level.  At the end of the critique sessions, I feel that the writers often walk away with a muddied picture of what to do next.

My last disappointment was that we only get two story submissions per student for the quarter.  I'm used to a much more intense workshop format.  At Clarion West, we wrote a story a week for 6 weeks and critiqued everyone's submissions every weekday.  It was intense and transformative.  I was hoping for something just as intense and just as transformative.

CONTENTMENT - I've now reached a good balance in how I feel about my time here. 

Although our prof doesn't say much, when my story came up, he caught me in the hallway before my critique and told me that it was "really amazing."  He also talked about my story for 30 minutes in our private conference and lent me 3 books on heroes, myths and feminist writing.  I still don't know how to improve my story exactly, but the fog is slowly clearing as I learn to interpret his enigmatic suggestions and allusions.  This is his style.  I've realized it's my job to fill in the blanks because it's my story.  And how I interpret his comments will be strongly colored by how I see my story.  I'm cool with that.

Re our critiques -- at first, I thought it was just luck of the draw that our group had so little agreement in our constructive feedback.  But now, I'm thinking that this may be normal at this level of writing.  It's easy to agree on what needs to be done when there are basic problems in a story.  But it's much harder to agree on what needs to be done to improve that last 10% - 20% -- questions of how you modulate the voice of your narrator, get your story to breathe, add more emotional weight to your ending and questions of whether this story needs any of these things in the first place.  These are very difficult questions and we're no longer talking craft, we're talking art.  And because we're talking about art, which comes from the heart and not from the head, people can get quite passionate about their opinions.  I've decided to stop focusing on how the overall picture is muddied and start focusing on how each person approaches a story.  They're good writers -- their instincts work for them and I can learn something by opening my ears.

Re the number of stories -- by great luck, it turns out that someone else in my class is also a Clarion West Alum.  Yay!  I was really surprised because Iowa is not exactly known for their speculative fiction, despite the fact that they had Kurt Vonnegut on their faculty.  Anyway, we've agreed to write a story a week and give each other feedback.  I'm also recruiting others to give me feedback as well, although I'll only ask them to read one or two.  I'm experimenting with each story.  The one I turned into class was my most experimental piece ever.  Wild and wacky and a blast to write.  The next one was a story that mixed a literary character within a genre story.  I was trying for emotional weight in a Twilight Zone-ish plot.  The one I just finished is my first hard science fiction piece wrapped in a light-hearted story.  My next one is going to be written backwards -- by envisioning the ending, then writing the rest of the story to get there.  Each has its own challenges and pleasures.  Each has its own volume of lessons for me.

ACK!  This entry is way longer than I expected.  I have a backwards story to write.  Happy 4th!

Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com/