Workshops like last night’s writing workshop made the 6 hours of driving from Seattle to Portland and back worthwhile. Maybe my happy mood was because both Sean (my carpool partner) and I had our pieces workshopped by Chuck Palahniuk and the eleven other members of the group. Maybe, it was because the level of writing was good enough to get past the words to the stories. Or maybe we were finally getting to know each other. Only one piece (by a newcomer) confused me. But even then, his story was helpful in illustrating Chuck’s comments.
Some of the lessons I got from last night:
1) When we looked at the newcomer’s story, Chuck asked, “Who is the Narrator?” What did he mean by that? It took me a long time to be able to separate out the writer (me) from the narrator (the person telling the story) and the story itself. In the same way I got to know my fellow writers in Chuck’s workshop, every time I meet a new person on paper, even an imaginary one, I’m a little suspicious. When I read a new story, I ask myself, why should I listen to this narrator? The narrator’s choice of words tells me how he is connected to the story and the main character.
Elaborate images, shocking details and “writerly” words tells me the narrator is trying very hard to be a writer. It’s like meeting a guy with perfect hair who wants to tell me a story about a carpenter. I’m distracted by the story teller’s hair and I don’t believe his story. But if the narrator uses words that bring me close to the character, and he mentions intimate details like: the carpenter’s scarred hands, his dirty nails, and unique carpenter experiences, this tells me - the narrator knows this guy. Using my silly hair analogy again, it’s like meeting a guy with sawdust in his hair telling me about a carpenter. I’ll believe him and I’ll be interested in the story.
Just because the story takes place in a fantastic world doesn’t mean the narrator has to use fantastic language. If the main character is an angry young hoodlum, the narrator has to show us this world using the angry young hoodlum’s words, not the fantasy writer’s vocabulary. I want to know the main character’s story, not just be engulfed in strange, fantastic words and images.
2) Chuck suggested adding pathos to the narrator’s description of the main character. By this, I understand him to mean the reader has to be able to know and feel more than the narrator and the characters in the story. Krissy shared a story about a girl who believes she is a Queen in a rollerskating rink. Unusual details and shocking acts pulled me into the story. But without some connection to my world, it felt like a fantastic fairy tale with its own rules. I couldn’t tell how much of the story is honest or real.
Chuck mentioned a book “Slaves of New York” which he read long ago but still felt moved by. The way the narrator described the main character’s pride in her terrible job allowed him to feel the pathos of that character’s situation. He could place the character and her self-delusion inside his understanding of New York city. I imagine it’s something like reading a story about a happy child describing the bicycle her father got her … four months after her mother died. The child’s happiness feels much more poignant set against my knowledge of the death of the child’s mother. Even if the child never realizes the full extent of the tragedy, I can.
3) In my story, the main character Goro performs onstage. Chuck suggested Goro’s success would be more meaningful if he completely “lost his power” onstage rather than slowly gain the audience’s trust, step by step as I showed in my story. Allowing Goro to be completely vulnerable lets the reader enjoy his final success much more. Readers are bored or uninterested in accounts of how a character succeeded i.e: “Character A worked very very hard over many years and became a successful (fill in the blank).” So what? That’s a lecture and no one is interested in being lectured. In a good story, readers need to be engaged with the character first before they will follow their story.
But just showing character A failing is also not meaningful. A friend of mine showed me her story that starts off with a terrible accident the young narrator experiences. But my thought was that I wanted to know a little bit about the young character before the accident. Otherwise the story felt like I was driving by a terrible car accident on the highway. Scary, lurid and shocking but not very deep.
I’m sure the others got more out of yesterday’s workshop. I don’t intend to summarize Chuck’s workshops, just focus on a few points that resonated with me. That way, I hope readers will get something useful out of these posts.
My carpool partner Sean says he will use last night’s feedback to rework his story, tell it at the Hindsight Story Telling session on Monday night, then do a final revision before he submits it somewhere. He asked me how I got my short story published by a literary magazine. That will be the subject of my next blog post: How I submitted a short story for publication.
I revised my story and I am pleased with how it turned out.
I find myself looking forward to reading it every week. I also look forward to hearing the next story you bring to workshop.