Workshopping, And Why Don’t I Do It?

I’ve spent the last hour typing in some notes from my original laptop.  At the time I bought the Macbook I was switching between LSB and PageFour faithlessly and the dossier files in LSB cannot be imported into, well, anything else.  I had popped them over to PageFour so I grabbed them and entered them into Scrivener.

Most of the missing files were for Wolf Killer.  And wouldn’t you know it, typing in those dossiers got me all a’twitter for that story again.  Not that there isn’t much work to be done, but it made me want to get back in there.  Must … focus … on … Spirit Cat.

Course, they are both modern fantasy.  There’s always the temptation to work on another project when you get stalled on the current one and for some writers that does work.  Would it be easier to do that with another modern fantasy, or would I get confused?  I alway thought that having a secondary project that was very different might make the head-space transitions more difficult.  Anywho . . .

Today’s Question: Workshopping and Why Don’t I Do It?

I’ve had a membership to the Online Writers Workshop for nearly a year now.  There’s a monthly fee and I lurk on their mailing list, reading what I can of the voluminous output of the members there.  I chose the OWW for two reasons.  One, it has a fantastic reputation.  Anyone who’s been in it has nothing bad to say and many writers go on to sell.  Two, I thought I’d be less likely to wall-flower if I had to pay for it. And it’s crit-for-crit, where members are expected to critter the works of others to be eligible to post new material to be critiqued.

Have I critiqued?  No, terrified.  I critiqued something on Forward Motion before joining up to OWW, and found it useful, but haven’t yet tried to do so for OWW.

Have I submitted?  No, terrified.  Every newcomer gets enough points to post a first work but more than that you have to pony up the crits.  I haven’t even used the one gimme post yet.

Have I even introduced myself on the message list?  My gut instinct is ‘no’ and even if I did, I haven’t made a peep since then.

I know.  Sad, eh?

Besides finishing what I start (something I am making progress on), critiquing is the next step in this whole process.  if I don’t get feedback now I’m not going to know whether or not what I have has even a hope in hell of being publishable.   And by not critiquing, I’m missing out on the opportunity to learn from others.

When I sat in on a Sudbury Writer’s Guild meeting not this fall but the fall of 2007, I inadvertantly sat in on a critique session.  While I had nothing to contribute myself, I was able to quickly read the submissions in the sub-group I’d sat with – and I couldn’t get over how helpful it was!  You know the piece of advice, show don’t tell and start the story in the right place?  There was a piece, about ten pages long, where the first three quarters of the story was all back story, all told to the reader.  It was all set-up for the one and only real scene where everything happens and that set up could have been artfully inserted into the actual scene with little telltale comments, compact touches.  It was as clear as day.

So why don’t I do that now?

It’s fear – base, unimaginative, naked fear.  I’m terrified that at best I’ll have nothing helpful to say about the piece while at worse I’ll post a piece that will be ripped to shreds along with my confidence and be told I have no business even trying.

Now, I know my words aren’t gold.  Odds are really good a post of mine will just sit there, unnoticed.  Odds are also good I’d start out writing a bunch of really lame critiques.  And odds are, I’d slowly get better.   And that’s what I have to do, take the fear out of the equation, make the posting and the critiquing something dispassionate and scientific.

But I would love to hear from some stranger who has nothing to gain and nothing to lose, “Yeah, this needs work, but you’re not crazy.  You can do this.  Keep trying.”

That would mean the world to me.

What do I have to do to fix this?   I have to post something – anything – January 1st, 2009 to OWW.