People were getting the hang of workshopping. As a class consisting of individuals who were all only starting to experience this properly, the palpable sense of apprehension leaked from the previous week to this one. The three white men were, of course, the ones who were more ready to produce their writing, while everyone else (eight white women, and me) hemmed, hawed and giggled as to whether their output was considered “good”.
“This is slightly embarassing but…” Emma started.
“Sorry, I wrote this an hour ago,” May pleaded.
Deirdre giggled for a minute then decided she “just couldn’t, sorry.”
“Uh… here goes,” I said.
Our prompt was to write a paragraph vividly describing an activity we were good at. Despite joking to Marisa last week about wanting to write about drinking, I chickened out. I wanted the class to take me seriously. I’m good at cooking, changing a bike tyre, organising data, taking my medication and reading. Out of all these skills, I thought that two of them would confirm racialised opinions about me, one would seem like I was deliberately being precocious, and the other would mark me, again, as “being intense”. I decided to go with the bike one.
There was no critique this time. The teacher and most of the white women marveled at my tyre-changing skills and said the writing followed the prompt. The anthropologist dude gave me a brief once-over but remained silent. Ocker Accent fella beamed and bellowed, “good on ya!” A feeling of pride washed over me, but lurking underneath that was a dollop of shame.
That said, there was hardly any critique when other people workshopped their paragraph, its intention probably a mere feel-good exercise. Maybe to rid ourselves of “impostor syndrome” or something. We moved on to discuss point-of-view in writing, which our teacher explained was “a device you can use to try to influence how your reader responds to the material.” There are five kinds:
Omniscient: this is when the narrator knows all the thoughts, feelings and actions of all the characters
Third-person limited: this is when the narrator knows only the thoughts, feelings and actions of ONE character, and other characters are described using pronouns
First-person: this is when the narrator tells the story from THEIR OWN
perspective, i.e. anything that falls under “I”Objective: this is when the narrator tells a story without stating more than what can be read between the lines in the action and dialogue; the narrator is a detached observer and doesn’t disclose anything
Second-person: this is when the narrator tells a story using the word ‘you’
Much to my surprise, this break-down was extremely vital. I’d learnt of these techniques in high school English classes before, but not how they could be used to influence a reader. Would you prefer to show, rather than tell, or vice versa? Perhaps you’re interested in manufacturing a remove between the writer and reader (in which case, second-person works). How much do you want to emphasise, or leave up to the reader’s inferrence? To be authoritative, mysterious, doubtful or giving? It was possible, our teacher noted, to flit between modes to suit the atmosphere of the writing. Generally however, a piece below 1500 words shouldn’t deviate too much. I thought about what constitutes “long-form” writing now, and the gentle pendulum between a full-length book and a readable online essay.
Always trying to play devil’s advocate, I raised my hand and asked if there could be such a thing as no point-of-view—a mode I think I sometimes use to deeply interrogate something.
“I’m just about to get to that, actually,” she responded, smiling.
She proceeded to read aloud a short essay titled Life Story by David Shields, whom I remember her quoting in the first lesson. It read like a bunch of Chuck Palahniuk aphorisms put together by a Twitter bot, with lines like “Screw guilt. I’m Elvis; kiss me” and “Life’s a bitch and so am I. Beyond bitch.” It ended with “Choose death.” Some of the white women giggled. Ocker Accent fella roared. Anthropologist dude pursed his lips, looking stern—as did I.
Perhaps no point-of-view was truly the white bro’s crutch! And I’d fallen into that hole again, I thought.
Our teacher, still smiling, said that there were many experimental forms of writing which employed that technique.
“It’s ok to do something non-traditional, if you think it would suit your writing. Most readers like to figure things out for themselves. The task of figuring out what’s going on is what gives the experience of reading depth and intellectual pleasure,” she mused.
Time to move on. Going back to the subject of showing vs. telling, she asked us for suggestions on what we thought would mean “showing” in a piece of writing. The class agreed that facial expression and voice were big ones, followed by body movements and posture. There was also the point of incongruous body language, which our teacher wrote as “Opposites Attract”, and “Personal Distance”, which illustrates what a character does to increase or erase a space when they take part in a conversation.
We ended the class by being assigned another writing exercise for the next lesson. This time, we were to write a short piece about someone we admired deeply, focusing on ‘showing’ and not ‘telling’ why we admired them.
“Try not to make it a hagiography!” our teacher warned. “Even people we admire are flawed.”
(**Note: I didn’t meet up with Marisa this week as we were both occupied with National Young Writers’ Festival. Our meetings will resume next week.)
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This week’s recommendations:
This extremely heartfelt essay-letter by poet Max Ritvo’s friend Elizabeth Metzger, on putting together his posthumous collection—“Max’s project was clear: to imagine a world without him. As he writes in the title poem, “If no one is there to correct your imagination how is it not the world?”
This interview with Jenny Zhang in The Matador Review—“I know that all moments are ephemeral, and I don't want to tether my identity as a writer to something real, something that will eventually betray me. It seems like eternal validation will always betray the person that's hanging themselves on it.”
Sarah Miller’s simultaneously candid, snide, dark and effusive piece in Popula that uses The English Patient and film reviewing as a launchpad to critique capital-W Writing, job security, faux-progressivism, capitalism and more—“Each week that passed I wrote something amazing and nothing happened, so I dug in and wrote harder. I thought I was trying to get somewhere. I thought there was somewhere to get. I had no idea that what I was experiencing was being a writer, and that no matter what happened, good or bad, I would feel exactly the same way forever.”
This review by Claire Cao on Ling Ma’s (in my opinion, incredible) debut novel Severance—“The act of severance is never clean. It’s a world-ending act; a traumatic excision of familiar connections and deep-rooted ways of life. It leaves wounds that refuse to cauterize, sprouting new flesh that melds grotesquely with the old.”
This interview with Eloise Grills on The Wheeler Center blog—“I think a central part of being a published writer, and pursuing publication, and allowing your stuff into the world is that you have to let go a bit of something ever being perfect. And I try not to look back too much. Once I’m finished with a project, it’s behind me, and then I have to move onto the next thing. Like a shark, if I stop swimming... something bad happens.”