Sillybean

Monday

My first group critique. I felt horribly unprepared because other people had written or typed a page or two of notes. I told myself I’d do this for the rest of the critiques during the week, but I never really did – I made notes on the manuscript itself, which seemed a more direct way of pointing out problems. Jim Macdonald, our group leader, asked us to expand on comments like “I wanted more detail here.” I learned from this group that when I feel that way, it’s not necessarily a lack of detail that’s the problem. In this case, we wanted to know more about the death of a minor character in the middle of the story. The real problem turned out to be that the character should not have been so minor. The fact that we wanted to know more about her was a clue that her role should have been much stronger.

Jim Macdonald’s lecture on plotting. Ever wonder how a story is like a lemon pie? Or how playing chess can teach plot? Jim can tell you. I feel that I learned from this lecture, but it was mostly abstract and I really couldn’t tell you exactly what I got out of it, except this: do not kill off your secondary characters without good cause. They can be extremely useful later in helping you get out of sticky situations. Keep them around.

At noon we made a trip to the grocery store, where I was horrified to learn that things cost twice as much on the island as they do in Texas. I stocked up on sandwich fixings and snacks, since dinner was provided by the VP staff. This turned out to be a very good plan.

I have no memory of Monday afternoon. I had no one-on-one sessions, so I had free time on either side of the Collegium. To improve on situations like mine, it is suggested that the one-on-ones be scheduled back to back, followed by the Collegium. We like this idea. Dunno how the instructors feel about it, but the rest of the week’s schedule changes.

Monday night I went out to the beach with just a couple of people. I can’t remember the last time I saw so many stars. And the jellyfish… they defy description. Photos won’t do them justice either, even if they do turn out, but I’ll try anyway. (Coming as soon as the film is developed.)

Tuesday

My second group critique. This novel, IMO, should have started with chapter 3. It was not at all the kind of book I generally like to read, so critting it was quite a learning experience. It wasn’t until the second reading that I realized I was bored because the first two chapters were full of background info, and things didn’t start happening until the third one. Dunno if the author agrees with me there.

Jim Kelly’s lecture on the life cycle of a story. This dealt mostly with business-y things (reprints, having a literary executor to deal with rights and reprints after you’re dead) but also included lots of creative stuff. The story idea drawer, where you toss the random things you’ve scribbled down and let them play together in the dark for a while before you come back to see what they’ve spawned. Jim’s article on Monsters talks more about this.

My first one-on-one, with Steven Gould. I went in as a bundle of nerves, but I relaxed more and more as I realized that all the problems he was pointing out were ideas that I’d originally planned to put in the story but had tossed out for various reasons as I wrote it. Fixing these will be easy; all I have to do is go back to my old notes. Well, the nudity scene has problems. But we figured out how to fix that too. (Picture me scribbling madly on my poor, abused manuscript.)

After Collegium it’s time for Pizza and Shakespeare. We’re reading Henry IV part I aloud, assigning different parts to different people. This is very similar to how we studied Shakespeare in my high school, and I’ve done this play twice in college, so I zoned pretty quickly. My role had no lines until Act IV, anyway. The highlight of this evening was one-writer-who-shall-remain-nameless’s performance as Falstaff. Stage direction: “he drinks.” Someone hands her a bottle of wine – coincidentally labeled “Sack” – and she takes a swig. By the end of the play, she is rather tipsy, but is doing a fine job in the role. We tease her for the rest of the week. “She drinks!”

After Shakespeare we learned to play Thing. Thing is a little bit like Mafia, based on the movie “The Thing.” I’ve read the short story, so it makes perfect sense. The game is addictive, and will keep unwary workshoppers awake long after they should have gone to bed, or gone to read the stories they’re critiquing first thing in the morning. (Guilty look.)

And then a naked woman screamed…

Wednesday

My third and final group critique of someone else’s work. I really like this story; the narrator’s voice sounds a lot like my own internal dialogue during my more depressed moments in college. The only problem is that it’s too long; after the group agrees on a revised length, Jim M. turns to the author and says, “By Friday.” Eep! Glad that wasn’t my story.

Debra Doyle lectures this morning, “This Sentence Goes Clunk.” She talks about things like loading only one part of the sentence, and not burying the important information in a subordinate clause. One weird idea at a time, one flashy vocab word at a time. (There are some words that should be used only once per book, they stand out so much.) Another law agreed upon by most instructors is this: You get one exclamation point per book. Use it wisely. We also discussed how to control pace by adjusting the level of detail. (Hint: if a train is rushing past you, you probably don’t have time to read the small print on the cars.)

By Wednesday we feel as though we’ve been here for a week, and yet we don’t want to admit that the workshop is halfway over and soon we’ll have to return to the real world. We’d rather stay in Writing-Land, where we don’t give a shit about the news (and in fact we hardly notice that we haven’t watched TV in several days).

Also by this time, we’ve soaked up so much publishing gossip (mostly in Collegium) that I could hardly tell you all the Silly Writer stories I know. But there’s more to come… so much more…

Thursday

I have numbed myself into not worrying about my group grope by playing endless games of Thing the night before. I stumble into the common room only to discover that, as usual, Teresa is ten minutes late. Eventually we begin. One of my critters isn’t familiar at all with the Regency period, so he lets me figure out where I’ll need to fill in a few things for others like him. The next reviewer points out lots of micro problems that had somehow slipped past me. (Blush.) She also points out some POV shifts that I wasn’t quite aware I’d done. And the third reviewer finds every inconsistency with the setting, every slip-up in details, every stretch of the reader’s disbelief – so much so that when it’s Teresa’s turn, she basically says “Yep.”

We’re running late, so I don’t get a chance to explain that I forgot to rewrite the ending before I submitted the story. No one seems to have noticed that the ending was written for a different version of the story, back when there were different themes. I don’t know if this is good or bad.

Today is Teresa’s lecture, so we scramble back to the common room. (Not that they’re going to start without her.) Teresa has so many interesting things to say that I wish I’d had a tape recorder.

Here’s a freebie. There are four ways books fail: surface problems, deep structure problems, misconceived book problems, and exposition problems. The last one is the only one that really can’t be fixed, since the solution is to write different words in a different order.

We get to hear lots of bad cover letter stories. “I think you’ll find that this book is better than the usual tripe Tor publishes.” Wow.

Thursday night my roommate and I decide to try the inn’s restaurant. I discover that I’m allergic to mango. Sigh.

We go to see the jellyfish again, this time in a great big group. I find a flat rock and lean back on it so I can stare up at the stars. This spot is amazingly beautiful. Several people saw shooting stars here and there, and most of us happened to be looking up when a huge one with a long, flaming tail crossed the Milky Way above us.

Friday

No more group critiques, no more scheduled one-on-ones. We start with a Collegium and then it’s time for Steven’s talk about mental hygiene for writers. Did you know that some writers actually keep their own books bookmarked on Amazon so they can go check their rankings periodically? Apparently this neurosis is so widespread that someone has written a Windows program that sits in the system tray to keep track of the rankings. One of our workshoppers knows an Amazon employee who once explained how the rankings work. (Everyone perks up, including the editors.) (I’m not sure I’m remembering the exact process, but here goes.) The rankings are NOT cumulative. Amazon tracks sales for one week at a time. The rankings are based on how well a book did THAT WEEK. If some guy in Omaha bought six copies of your book last week, that book probably did pretty well in the rankings. This week, however, now that those six sales have dropped off the radar, your rankings are in the toilet.

This system is wonderful, I’m sure, for keeping track of the “bestsellers updated hourly” list on Amazon’s front page… but as Teresa points out, it’s a recipe for madness among writers.

The point of Steven’s talk is to ignore the petty distractions. Amazon rankings, so-and-so’s latest deal in the Locus report, Joe got invited to be on a con panel and I didn’t, and so on. All of this is destructive and distracting, and most of it has no bearing on reality.

After lunch it’s time for Patrick’s talk on The Industry. This was one of the most educational discussions I’ve ever heard. I learned how mass market paperbacks started out, how they got into grocery stores, why they’re no longer sold the same way, and how the rise of the neighborhood Barnes & Noble saved the genre’s ass.

That was pretty much the end of the workshop. Any more, and our brains would have melted from information overload. I was still thinking about Patrick’s lecture when I got on the plane the next day. I’m still mulling over what I learned last week, and I’ll probably be pulling those lessons out of my memory when I’m fifty and I have a story that goes clunk.

Go. Apply.

Read other VP5 reports:
Erin Cashier Denton
Scott Janssens