“I think you’re holding back a bit here?” Emma said, a look of concern flashing in her eyes as she spoke.
Time to workshop! It was a moment I’d been eagerly waiting for. We were split into groups of four, taking turns to read each other’s work. And because I juggle a day job, various side hustles and a freelance arts career while being neuroatypical, finding the time to prep for scholarly reasons proved impossible. Instead of writing a fresh piece, I brought in “Writing 102”, which some of you on this mailing list may have read.
“OK. Yep,” I acknowledged, thumb stroking my chin. Before this, we’d read Emma’s piece on her lazy “mum bun” that read like she had Mamamia.com.au in her top 5 most-visited websites.
“It’s a bit… intense? I’m not sure why you’d want to mention your relationship with your family at the beginning. And I don’t want to seem petty, but I’ve marked some bits where I thought maybe the language was a bit odd,” Agnes said, her brow furrowed as she circled some words with a black felt pen.
“Also, I don’t know why you’d use the word ‘arrogant’… it’s ok for us writers to be arrogant?” she continued.
I sighed audibly. “I didn’t mean that matter-of-factly. It was tongue-in-cheek.”
Another Concerned Look, then silence on my part. What else could I say? I didn’t think I was trying to be “intense” so much so as I’m generally pretty flippant about things most people parse as “bad” or “sensitive” topics. Maybe attribute it to finally having the ability to make sense of a lifetime of trauma.
“How very interesting! There are so many ideas you’re pursuing with this. But you might want to give it a little bit more breathing space,” my teacher said, looking at me curiously. She’d marked paragraphs she liked with double ticks, which felt nice, like I was being validated by the Institution.
Then came the twist: “Who is your imagined readership?”
I frowned deeply, having never considered that question before. Abruptly caught in a spot, I flailed my arms around. The white women tittered, making me feel even more like a hapless clown. “Do I need to have one? I’m not exactly writing for anybody,” I managed after a few seconds.
“Well… you do. It’s up to you to figure that out.”
The course was moving along, at a speed that felt slightly more satisfactory. The lecturer brought up “the situation” and “the story” again, this time citing Vivian Gornick extensively, like we were expected to know who she was. A new classmate was also present: a 40+ white man who wasn’t at the first class. When asked to introduce himself, he went on a long rambling tangent in a broad ocker accent about how he had always wanted to write a book since he was 18, but it wasn’t until his girlfriend recently asked him about it that he realised he had to make the book happen—”Shit, I forgot!” The Dungeons and Dragons aspiring Game Master was absent.
We went on to discuss creative non-fiction texts we like. I didn’t offer anything because I dislike speaking up in group situations. Someone mentioned one of Helen Garner’s pieces in The Monthly “about a Sudanese woman”; another brought up an Alice Fraser radio essay on having a parent with multiple sclerosis and being a carer for them. Someone else mentioned a story about an Amazonian lily in Diggers Magazine.
Afterwards, our teacher proceeded to use this opportunity to read out two separate excerpts from different books, so that we could learn to ascertain its tone. One turned out to be from Karl Ove Knausgård’s A Death in the Family, which she said she didn’t finish reading, and which was “unlikeable” and “very hard to read” because of its grim tone and long sentences. The other book (The Tattooed Flower) was by a Melbourne author I hadn’t heard of before named Susie Zale, which she raved about for its intimate voice. I thought briefly about subjectivity and taste, and whether that’s a good indicator of “good writing” as opposed to “bad writing”. Who gets to decide?
Continuing to speak about voice, the teacher asked us to consider three things: 1) how close or far we want to be from the reader; 2) how we imagine ourselves in relation to the story, and 3) how we want to tell the story. She expressed her distaste with the quest to “find” the writer’s voice, “as if it’s some mysterious Easter egg” that causes someone to be magically able to write.
“You can be really playful with it. And sometimes you have to trust your subconscious voice to write the story,” she let on.
That made a lot of sense. It’s funny how much we absorb as readers, in terms of writing rules and styles. But until you have these things spelt out for you in a learning setting, it’s still a new level you have to unlock.
The teacher went on to warn us to be careful with using adverbs, i.e. words ending with -ly. According to her, if you can use “debated” instead of “fiercely argued”, or “arduous” instead of “extremely hard”, your writing will be all the better for it.
Four days later, I met up with Marisa again. As our usual haunt was closed on Sundays, she suggested a bar in a hotel that was reminiscent of the Overlook in The Shining. As I unpacked my laptop, I tried not to think about Jack Torrance slowly losing his mind as he pretended to work.
We debriefed about the previous lesson. Marisa laughed a lot as I regaled her with my memory of the workshopping experience, and responded that what I wrote was probably so outside of their lived experiences that all they could do was react the way they did. It was simultaneously heartening and saddening.
“Maybe they want to pull you back!” she scoffed.
She asked me what the next workshopping activity was. I said it was to write a short piece or paragraph describing in detail “a thing you’re good at”.
“OK, what will that be then?”
“I don’t know. I’m good at changing a bike tyre. Drinking? Maybe I’ll troll them.”
We went through more of my previously published articles. It was reassuring to know that I was good at finding a hook. But longer pieces still tended to ramble.
I asked Marisa for her opinion regarding subjectivity and personal taste, briefly describing the Knausgård/Zale comparison. Looking thoughtful, she again dispensed more sagely advice: “Taste defines a canon. It also decides who gets to constitute it.”
**
This week’s recommendations:
Max Read’s thought-provoking essay on the rise of “busybody journalism”—
“[…] the outcome is less the kind of clarity or edification you associate with good journalism than the heightened anxiety and fear you associate with a good crime drama.”CRITWorks’ Twitter
Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite piece on the few books which have defined him in life—“It is important for me to remember, especially now, that criticism isn’t an act which should be born out of a desire to take someone down. Criticism, at its best, is an act of care.”
This interview with Thuy On in Liminal Magazine—“[...] just because you may have had an interesting life doesn't mean you can write about it in a compelling manner. Navel-gazing done correctly is as much an art form as any other genre.”
Sarah Nicole Prickett’s breathtaking treatise on the colour she dubs “pill yellow”—“Does this color have some kind of problem? As an emoji, it’s the two-fingered peace sign, the sign of breeziness and passive-aggression, used to indicate that everything’s chill, that no one cares, or both.”
Rafeif Ismail’s elucidating Homeland, Heartland—“How do you live when you’re caught between a land that does not want you and one that is now unknown to you?”