What I Learned from my Writer’s Digest Workshop…

In case some of you weren't aware, I recently enrolled in a Writer's Digest online workshop.  It began October 4th and ended December 27th of 2012.  It was entitled "12 Weeks to a First Draft", and consisted of 12 assignments, each of 2- 2500 words, which were submitted weekly for individual critique by the instructor, a published career author or a literary agent.  In my case the instructor was Stephen Mertz, who has published over 30 books in his lifetime.  He just had his latest published in 2011 and confessed to being in the midst of writing his first draft of his next one during this workshop.  Each assignment was also accompanied by a weekly text based lecture, each of which dealt with a different aspect of writing your first draft, using To Kill a Mockingbird as a model.  This was not my first writing workshop, but it was my first experience with getting professional, individual, personal feedback on my original work. 

It was very educational.  The personal feedback was priceless.  I learned far, far more from Mr. Mertz's specific comments on each of my assignments than I think I have ever learned over the fifteen or so years I have been self-teaching myself the craft of storytelling.  It was a fast, crash course in insider noveling advice, and it was amazing.  Much like rereading the early chapters of my LOTR fanfic "The Wall that Fell", I could literally see my writing improving, except it only took a few weeks instead of nine years!

I thought I should go ahead and make an entry about all the things I learned, 1) to keep it fresh in my mind for the future, as a reference I can always come back to and 2) for any other aspiring writers out there who have not taken a workshop and would like to know what it's like, as well as get a few tips on what to look for in their own drafts.

So.  Things I learned during my Writer's Digest Workshop, both on craft-improvment and regarding this specific project:

1) I cannot write a first draft in 12 weeks.  Or a month.  I know some people can, and do.  But apparently that is not possible for me, and I'm okay with it.  At least not with this book.  It is an epic adventure tale, and is going to be much longer than 24k words (the workshop seems to be built around the assumption your draft will be no longer than the 12 assignments you submit) and much longer than 50k words (NaNo is built around that being your entire novel as well, but 50k words is about a third of my current project.  Maybe.)  As such, I submitted what I had, and sometimes skipped ahead to write important scenes that I wanted feedback on, then explained what happened in between in my assignment comments.  Mr. Mertz was perfectly okay with that and said he appreciated my explanations in the comments.  Next time I take a workshop like this, however, I want to have the whole first draft actually done, so that I can submit sections of it all the way through and get better overall feedback on the whole story.  So there's some advice for you, if you think you want to do something like this.  It would make me feel better if I could have had more input on more of the climax scenes, instead of just one small section which is all I had finished by the end of the workshop… and that was only because I worked way ahead!  This being said, Victoria Lynn Schmidt's "Book in a Month" is still and invaluable resource!  I used her planning to outline my novel before NaNo, which substantially sped up the writing process, and I will use her book again to prepare the second draft and make sure I add in the crucial elements she brings up throughout.

2) Don't forget character descriptions!  In the beginning of this workshop, I never described my characters.  I had never actually consciously realized that, either, until he pointed it out!  I believe this is to blame on fanfiction, because in fanfic, I don't have to go into detail about character descriptions, everyone already knows what they look like!  So I became description-lazy, I suppose.  In the beginning, I wasn't even sure myself what my human characters looked like, which is honestly really terrible.  After some thought and consciously paying attention when I wrote, though, I remedied this habit.  And after only a short time of inserting description, I now get a full physical and emotional impression of every character I bring in as soon as they appear on the scene.  It's very strange how quickly that happened.  But I'm glad it did!

3) Don't forget character tags!  This one is still hard for me.  Apparently, each character should have at least one identifying trait that you can mention every now and then throughout the story to help jog readers' memories about that person, or help them stand out, esp if they are a secondary character.  Could be a unique hair or eye color, a scar, some kind of tick, a facial expression, whatever.  Haven't quite gotten the hang of this one yet, but I've put in my revision notes to go over on the second draft.  I mean, I can understand making sure at least a few characters have a sort of tag mentioned… but for all of them… that might get challenging!  Of course… maybe it is more subtle than what I'm making it out to be….

4) Watch the dialogue tags.  I've posted about this one before.  When Mr. Mertz first called me out on overusage of dialogue tags, I realized that I HAD blatantly overused them in that assignment (the very first chapter of the story!), but I was reluctant to give up on them altogether.  I attempted to slip them in here and there in later assignments, but he still called me out on them!  Lol.  Eventually I came to notice them every time I wrote one, in which case I would stop (well, unless I was trying to do a word sprint for NaNo at the time, of course) and analyze its usage.  This is what I've come to realize about dialogue tags… they are a form of telling, not showing.  That is the bottom line, and the basis for the "rule" that says not to use them unless you are just using "said".  So I understand why Mertz kept pointing them out to me.  Essentially, they were me being a lazy writer, as much as it pained me to admit it.  😛  I realized, the more I caught myself writing them and worked on rephrasing them, that most of the time I could change the sentence around to convey the emotion in the words themselves, or in an action accompanying the words, instead of with a tag, and in other instances, the tag was just literally uneccessary, like overkill.  Instead of saying, "Deanne hissed through her teeth" I can say "Deanne said through her teeth", because everyone already knows what it sounds like when you talk through your teeth.  Using a tag in that case other than said is sort of like saying, "Woof woof! the dog barked".  Lol.  So I think finally I totally understand where Mertz was going with that, and why I've heard not to use them before.  I can say with some certainty I will never completely eliminate them from my work, but I can definitely say I've cut back on the use of dialogue tags by probably a good 90%!!!  And honestly, I feel like my writing reads better because of it.  Cleaner.  More professional.  Or something.

5) Don't get lazy with character description!  Saying something like, "Arrelious smiled that wicked smile" is a short cut.  It's technically that damn telling vs showing again.  😉  I need to SHOW his wicked smile, instead of just saying that he had one.  From the assignment feedback I luckily don't do this all that often, but it's still a flag I want to check on during the next round of revisions!

6) MAINTAIN THE SETTING OF SCENE!!!  Good grief.  If I had a nickel for every time I was told this…. *facepalm*  This is apparently my biggest problem area.  I do an excellent job of establishing the scene, but then tend to drop the setting once it's established in favor of dialogue and action etc.  Mertz mentioned on several occasions that I needed to keep threading the scene into the action or the dialogue in various ways throughout the entirety of the scene, and make sure to mention at least three of the five sense in EVERY scene, and follow those senses throughout.  I am not sure I have a problem with this in fanfic, as I just read a chapter of my ME3 fic "Promises" the other day and actually noticed how I maintained the setting throughout the scene.  So.  I think it probably has something to do with the novel being so new to me still, I get too excited to get to the good stuff and forget about where the hell they are.  😉  I think this will become easier in subsequent drafts as I become more familiar with the world and the characters.  Especially since I'm not even sure yet where all of the towns and landmarks are, what the weather is like, etc.  Still working out some of that stuff!

8) Avoid slow pacing by shortening paragraphs.  I LOVE this trick.  And it never occured to me before Mertz brought it up.  In the beginnings of my scenes I sometimes had a long paragraph which established the setting and what the characters were up to.  He suggested that in order to prevent the reader from becoming bored – or essentially THINKING they were bored because of the long paragraph – to simply break it up into several shorter paragraphs.  It was so crazy, but he broke it up to show me the difference and he was totally right.  I found myself reading the several short paragraphs much faster than the original long one, and it seemed to go by much more quickly and urgently vs the long paragraph even though they were the exact same wording!!!!  Insane.  But that's something I'm going to remember from now on, that's for sure!

7) The first draft should mainly be concerned with getting down plot and dialogue… and apparently I nailed that part.  😛  In fact Mertz mentioned a few times that my dialogue and plotting were so good he would have to instead focus on the finer details like the character tags and maintaining the setting in order to have anything to say!

8) My instances of high action are also great (when I consciously made an effort to maintain scene, mind you!) and he had no advice to give for those….

9) The characters, in his professional opinion, are endearing and entertaining and very interesting.  He believes Clara is a strong enough character to hold center stage for the whole book as the protagonist.

10) He agreed after I suggested it that I should restructure Act 1 to include less backstory and move that information to be told in tales as Clara and her group travels toward their ultimate destination.  He also agreed with my general story outline, saying that it fit with the standard three act story structure, which was what I was aiming for, so hooray!

11) He loved the premise of my novel and from what he saw of it over the three month workshop, believes it has strong saleable potential, especially if I work on all the fine tuning he brought up in his assignment feedback.  🙂

And there you have it.  As I said, this workshop was really priceless simply in the specific feedback I received on an individual basis, and even just in the fact that his positive comments did WONDERS for my confidence about this project.  I actually feel like I can query agents now with some iota of confidence that someone, somewhere will want it.  And that is saying A LOT.  A LOT.  Trust me.  😛

And with that, I bid you goodnight.

Happy Writing, everyone!