Why wouldn’t you want to be addressed directly as you in a workshop if you didn’t have a problem with it?
Yesterday, I mentioned you-ing — of which that opening sentence is a small example.
Jane V Adams (author of the Moments in Time Substack) commented:
I kind of get this. I’ve been to workshops where tutors have used this technique, but why wouldn’t you want to address the writer as ‘you’? I’ve always found it a bit strange, as if I’m suddenly invisible.
This is a central question, and one for which I have (I hope) a good answer.
The most important skill any writer can learn is to read their own writing as if it were by someone else.
For a long time, I used to be annoyed at myself, because — if someone asked me to quote something I’d written — I couldn’t remember it. (Hey, give us a poem, Tobes.) I now realise that this bad self-memory is a gift.
The ability to forget previous drafts, and come clear and clean to what’s on the page, that makes me more like a first time reader than by rights I should be.
It has a downside, too. Because it can make it appear, so rough is my knowledge of what I’ve done, that I’m not the right person speak to about it. I sometimes feel this myself. Can’t the real author come in and finish this thing?
I’ll repeat:
The most important skill any writer can learn is to read their own writing as if it were by someone else.
This means that they are much better able to judge when or whether the reader needs this or that piece of information. That the character has blue hair; that the character will be murdered. If you are constantly juggling the effect of previous drafts, you’re likely to end up facing a mind-scribble of half-obscured possibilities. Despite what Microsoft Word and Scrivener can do with having sentence-variants in view, a writer risks confusion if they work on a palimpsest rather than a plain text document. Confusion and depression — how will I ever get through this? Flicking back and forth between multiple and single versions might be ideal, for some, but the closest a writer can ever come to our beautifully ignorant first readers is by returning to a text that does its very best to look like the pages of a finished book.
No artist can be inside their audience’s heads when they read, listen to or look at their latest piece. A composer can sit in the front or back row of an enraptured or restive world premiere audience. A sculptor can stand off to one side, and look at people’s faces as they catch sight of, approach and discuss a new piece. The closest most writers come to this, outside of a workshop, is seeing someone reading their work on a bus, train or plane. She’s reading me, yes, but is she smirking or smiling, is she leaning in closer or easing her spine?
The creative writing workshop is the best device that writers have managed to come up with for positively estranging themselves from their work.
It is a horrendously anxiety-provoking privilege to be able to listen in on a conversation — critically sophisticated and passionately supportive — that is focussed entirely upon not who one is but what one has made.
To go back to Jane V Adams’ question, it should be even more extreme than you being invisible, it should be that you’re non-existent. Meaning, that you can’t defend your work and you can’t answer questions about it. And that the people discussing your word choices and plot decisions try, as much as possible, to go along with the fiction that you’re no longer around.
What is said in your absence is as close as you’re going to get to what goes on in a well-disposed reader’s head.
The discussion moves forwards, or gets stuck, in ways you couldn’t have predicted and from which you can’t help but learn — really fast, really intensely.
During my MA at the University of East Anglia, one short story of mine was workshopped by eleven other writers, six of whom felt so strongly negative or repulsed that they said not a word.
I learned more from that awkwardness than from the more flowing and positive discussions of my other stories.
Did I want to risk being that polarising a writer? Yes, I did.
On the simplest level, too much you-ing can make a nervous or insecure writer feel personally attacked. Avoiding you-ing has a transforming effect. Attack becomes engagement, criticism becomes insight. Yes, they can see their story could have done with being less expositional, but they knew that when they handed it in. The workshop is painful but useful confirmation. They can go away and start work on a new draft.
After being workshopped, it often feels like a lot more time has passed since finishing the draft of a story than actually has.
This is why although there are no short cuts, there is — with workshopping — faster progress. The months a writer, by themselves, needs in order to gain distance on something they’ve written are reduced to minutes.
Joyously excruciating minutes of self-absence.
Y’know.
I’m bad at reading my own writing as though it’s someone else’s, so am always looking for ways to trick my brain. Best approach by far - thus far - is transferring my text onto my Kindle, where it appears between other books, formatted like any other book, and something shifts.
I didn’t know how to respond to that question in the previous post--I did, but I didn’t want to write up an essay as a comment! Thanks for your follow-up to it. “it should be that you’re non-existent.” I believe the more one learns to revise, the more this non-existence becomes visible. I firmly believe the best writing comes from some place beyond us--in good and bad writing, the “auteur” is visible on the page.