a brief introduction
This semester, one of my assignments is to keep a weekly journal reflecting on my writing and the grueling workshopping it will be undergoing. In an effort to stay consistent, I've made this little page...! It may have been easier (and more genuine (?)) to keep in a physical notebook instead of typed out, but I thought it would be useful to turn the assignment into a more formal meditation I can look back on someday.
The right column shows entries by date, with the most recent at the top.
the first one
I turned in my first short story today! It's not done just yet (leaving that for workshopping), but it's gratifying to have something longer I can point at and say is complete. When I normally write short stories, they wind up being somewhere in the realm of 2.5k words long and rarely have clear elements beyond a loose plot; they're often studies of whatever feeling I was feeling when I was writing them (see: Carver essay...) and don't carry much by way of character, for example.
A lot of the time, short stories wind up being ways for me to process the world. That's alright and I wouldn't want to change that necessarily, especially because I don't believe all writing is meant to be polished or complete, especially if you're a self-defined writer; it's just that I don't want that to be all I ever write, which is the case, for now. I'm only able to write longer stuff once or twice a year. I feel I have all these big aspirations for the things I want to write and that they never amount to anything because I get caught on the mental roadblocks of How To Create A Whole Story. I have countless pieces left unfinished because the scope of them ran away from me, so I think getting this one done was good for me.
As I was writing, I tried to pay attention to how events escalated and developped. Reading it back, I was glad that it felt thematically sound (to me). I think it will really benefit from workshopping in that I still feel some parts of it are janky and the whole feels somewhat incomplete, but I am pleased with how this first draft turned out!
workshops o_O
First workshops are over! It was not as bad as I thought it would be because the format was pretty fair and I liked the element of discussion. I think when you're writing something, you get really in your head about it, so it's great to hear what other people think and not be able to add to the conversation. It gives you the oppurtunity to listen and absorb a lot of information and feelings in response to your work. I am scared about my own, though...
On the other side of the exchange, I appreciate the ability to be able to workshop other people's writing because of course it helps me think about how I could fix parts of my own stories, but also, it's really useful to be able to look at a work and identify what does and doesn't work about it, and how what doesn't work could be fixed. It's also fun to compliment people's writing! I think as I've been doing it, I've been able to see mistakes or "cheap tricks" (haha) I've used in my own writing, and learn the necessary language to communicate where and how that happens. It's different from editing work (your own or someone else's) because I find looking for things to workshop is a lot broader than looking for things to edit, even though there's a significant overlap.
the terror of short stories
My feelings on workshopping haven't changed much since the last entry, and I probably won't write about them further until my own comes around. I've been trying to edit my piece based on what I've seen in the workshops, which feels like cheating but whatever! I have no honour. I feel like the ending of my story is really janky so I'm glad for the oppurtunity to work on it some.
I've also been working on another, seperate short story, and it's going much smoother because of the one I wrote over the break. I feel like I really just needed to through the hurdle of writing that first one to sort of prove to myself I could. It's not easy-going or very fast by any means, but it's much more so than it used to be, and I'm more conscious of my strengths and weaknesses now. One big problem I have is that I'm incapable of working in drafts. I rewrite the same things over and over, and that's definitely not helpful. I've rewritten the opening paragraph to this story dozens of times and none of them feel right; I'm torn because on the one hand, the opening paragraph sets the tone of the writing process for me, too, but on the other hand, I don't only have this issue with that paragraph. I have one now I think is decent, so I'm going to try and leave it unchanged until I finish the whole story. I love editing but I hate saving it for last, even though that's the order that'll make it most useful.