Over at Grantland, Kevin Lincoln makes a deft observation about the current (sorry) state of Hollywood’s output, which has gone from “tight, gapless screenwriting” to scripts focused on world-building, sequels, expansion, rebooting—in other words, franchising.
Most screenwriters are essentially world-builders, and the nature of screenwriting is to create a universe in which these characters live, so that’s really exciting for screenwriters … it’s this weird blend of wanting to create the best two-hour movie you possibly can and having to sort of function as a TV showrunner, charting out the whole series, even though as a screenwriter, you’re only going to get paid for that one movie.
I have some interest in how Hollywood screenplays are crafted. (Truth be told, I’m more interested in how three-act scripts are structured, Hollywood or otherwise.) What concerns me with Lincoln’s article—beyond the ouroboros death-spiral that is the quality of Hollywood filmmaking today—is how this world-building dynamic is present in fiction too, particularly ebooks, a universe I’ve been wading into over the past twelve months.
If you search Amazon for independently-published novels labeled “contemporary” or “literary fiction,” you’ll discover your options are limited. (Or, if you’re like me, you might say “the field is wide open.”) Genre fiction is a another story. Science fiction, mystery, fantasy, dystopian YA, romance (and so on) are well-represented in the world of independently-published ebooks. Over-represented, maybe.
Some see that as a knock on the quality of independent electronic-only publishing, but the same situation is found across the publishing spectrum. Hardbound, paperback, big name New York publishers, small press publishers, even vanity presses—genre outnumbers the contemporary/literary world by an order of magnitude. (At least in the realm of books. By my reckoning, literary magazines outnumber genre magazines by two orders of magnitude.)
Someday I’ll write up my thoughts on genre fiction, but for now I’ll say that I don’t see the above situation as a problem in particular. I would like to see contemporary and literary fiction better-represented in the world of independent publishing, but I’m just one voice in a sea of many.
Three acts? Or three (or more) books?
My problem is where August’s observation about screenwriting intersects with independent publishing. Having spent a bit of time searching blogs and so forth for tips on breaking into the world of ebooks, I’ve again and again seen two connected strategies emphasized: world-building and sequels.
Group photo.
What’s that mean? Build a world, a big world, and explore it over the course of several books. This strategy has been the cornerstone of comic books (“the Marvel Universe“) and genre fiction (“A Lt. Detective Malone Mystery”) for decades now. Hollywood is finally waking up to the possibilities. And so are ebooks.
The ebook marketing wonkthink goes something like this: Write a catchy, addictive first novel that introduces your main character, builds the world, and stocks it with complementary secondary characters to be developed later. Give the first ebook away for free. Then write sequels that continue the story and develop your pantheon. Progressively increase the price of your ebooks as the series grows. When you’ve published the last ebook in the series—or reached a natural breathing point—package them together as a “boxed set” (there’s no box, just bits) and price it higher still.
Done right, the individual ebooks may be priced from free to, say, $4.99. The boxed sets can be sold as high as $19.99—the cover price of a physical book in a physical bookstore. With Amazon’s KDP Select, the author pockets 70% of that $20 purchase price. Not bad.
That’s the theory, but are sequels and world-building producing great reads? I’m not a connoisseur of modern genre fiction so I can’t say. I’m curious what hardcore genre fans think. Personally, I recall in my teenage years picking up Book One of various science fiction series only to discover its entire purpose was to introduce characters and describe the world’s physics and technology—in other words, sell me on buying the rest of the series. No thanks.
I know this: I haven’t gone to a movie theater in years simply because I can’t stomach what Hollywood is shoveling out the door these days. (This comes from a guy who grew up collecting Avengers comics and praying for a movie version.) They’ve rebooted Spiderman three times. “With great power comes great responsibility.” Yeah, got it.
Does it work?
Looking over Amazon’s Kindle Top 100 (paid ebooks, not free) and mentally discarding editions released by major publishers (and therefore available in paper form), I do see a number of independent ebooks that are part of a series. However, they’re all the first volume in the series (save for one boxed set selling for $0.99). I estimate two possibilities, and they’re not exclusive:
The authors are selling the first book but failing to maintain readership throughout the series.
The authors are big enough names they can sell the first volume rather than give it away for free.
In other words, I can’t tell from this limited data set what to make of this situation. I will say it’s tough as hell to crack the Kindle Top 100, so kudos to the authors. Also, this exercise of mine is rife with problems, so don’t let it stand as the final word on anything.
Note that I’m not terribly interested in the profitability of this world-building strategy. I’m more curious how other writers attract—and keep—the attention of readers. Do you really have to write a multi-volume genre series to succeed? I hope not.
I love the idea of tight, gapless screenwriting. I love even more the idea of tight, gapless fiction. For whatever it’s worth, that’s what I’m trying to do here.
See the Introduction for more information on “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books.” The current list of reviews and essays is located at Continuing Series.
Early one August morning in 2011, I set off for Dresden. I was lodging at a surprisingly spacious budget hotel located in what was once known as East Berlin. I showered, snagged a Brötchen from the breakfast table downstairs, and rode public transit to Berlin’s central train station, the Hauptbahnhof.
The Hauptbahnhof was a modest-sized transportation hub with a grand planar green-glass facade and crystal strands of staircases and escalators within. A number of national and international rail lines passed through the station on all levels.
In contrast to its modernity, the area surrounding the Hauptbahnhof appeared bombed-out. Weedy lots and half-built (or half-demolished) concrete structures of uncertain purpose surrounded the station, even though it was located in the dead center of town, and not the outskirts where this sort of thing might be excused.
In 2011, dereliction was not unusual in the eastern reaches of Berlin. The area that was once West Berlin was clean, modern, bustling—as sleek and efficient as the capitalism it had boasted of to its neighbors during the Cold War. What was once East Berlin was largely a patchwork of low-lying buildings, many redolent of America’s 1970s aesthetics bereft of its most garish extremes. Anything not man-made was lush and overgrown from the humid summer. (Berlin, my travel guide explained, was built on a swamp.) Buildings with blasted-out holes in the plaster stood here and there in East Berlin, the rubble having been hauled off but the damage not repaired. As I learned from the natives, Berlin was still recovering from forty years of Communist rule, where counterrevolutionary ideals like aesthetics and grounds-keeping were not prioritized.
Having visited Munich a few times, I would bet a stein of beer that the meticulous, efficient Bavarians would never have allowed for this situation to sustain. For any undeveloped lot, the Bavarians would have installed a beer garden or a park or some nice shopping. Munich is the neighbor who keeps their lawn trim and packs away the Christmas decorations on Boxing Day; Berlin is the family with the half-built additions and a porch painted a color intended for the whole house, but Dad never got around to finishing the job. It’s for those reasons I found what was once East Berlin relaxed and livable.
Having visited my favorite beer garden in all of Europe the night before, I didn’t wake quite early enough. I missed my train to Dresden by precious minutes, in part due to being lost in the Hauptbahnhof‘s Escher maze of escalators. Running up to the platform for Dresden, the train chugging eastward, I wondered if this was a bit of Vonnegutian fate, the kind of nondescript event that leads to major ramifications for the character later in the book.
Literary tourism
My visit to Dresden bore some emotional weight. It would probably be my only chance to see the city Kurt Vonnegut wrote about so prominently in Slaughterhouse-Five.
Literary tourism is a recurring compulsion in my life. I’ve sought out Hemingway’s Key West house and the six-toed cats who drink from an old bar urinal in the garden; Henry Miller’s ramshackle Big Sur cabin, surprisingly spartan for a hedonist; Beowulf under glass at the British Museum in London, a city practically designed for literary tourism, right down to the pub reproducing Sherlock Holmes’ parlor; even Mark Twain’s cabin in California’s Gold Country where he reportedly penned “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”. Literary tourism has even made its way into some of my stories, in particular “A Concordance of One’s Life”, and to a lesser extent Everywhere Man.
With only one more free day in Germany, I woke the next morning even earlier and made it to the Hauptbahnhof with time to spare. As my train left the platform, I was treated to the very European experience of an Italian family arguing with the unflappable German conductor over seats, some business about assigned seating and Second Class. As English was the common language between the two parties, I was able to follow the argument. The conductor eventually conceded and moved on, leaving the Italian family to overtake the compartment. The mother pointed out to me that there wasn’t enough room for all of them, and so I moved to the next compartment.
The train ride from Berlin to Dresden took two and a half hours. If I’d traveled the day before, I had planned to find a cheap room to crash in for the night. Now I had to make the same return trip in the late afternoon via the last train out of Dresden to Berlin.
“Ah, God,” says Bokonon, “what an ugly city every city is!”
I was curious to see what had sprung up in Dresden’s place after the end of the war, after the firebombing. I was also curious how Vonnegut’s book was now received by the city. I had it in my mind that Slaughterhouse-Five was a literary gift to the City of Dresden, a rather lengthy handbill proclaiming to a cold and unaware world the war crime they’d suffered. Much like my trip to Hiroshima, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Everything I’d read about both cities focused on one subject: utter destruction.
I wondered if there were Slaughterhouse-Five tours of Dresden. If I ran a Slaughterhouse-Five tour of Dresden, I would dress up like Billy Pilgrim and pretend to be unstuck in time. I would start the tour with this:
“And now our tour concludes. So it goes.”
And end the tour with this:
“Welcome! My name is Billy Pilgrim. Today I’m your guide for the Slaughterhouse-Five tour. On your left is our first sight…”
For all my planning back at home, it never occurred to me to attempt to locate the actual slaughterhouse Vonnegut and the other American POWs huddled in during the Allies’ firebombing of the city, safe while Dresden burned to nubs and ash. I assumed (wrongly, it turns out) that the slaughterhouse had been demolished after the war. I focused on the city center itself rather than striking out to the industrial areas in search of the structure that saved Vonnegut’s life and changed American postwar literature.
On the last leg of my train ride, two young women joined me in the compartment, college-aged summer hitchhikers making their way across Europe. They hauled mountaineering backpacks with sleeping rolls, enough gear to scale K2. Minutes before the Dresden station, we struck up a conversation. They were from Switzerland.
“I’m American,” I introduced myself.
“We know,” they told me. Whenever foreigners know my nationality it’s a little discomfiting, like meeting someone who can read my thoughts.
They told me they headed to Amsterdam. When they said “Amsterdam” they giggled between themselves.
“I’m going to Dresden,” I told them.
“Why?” they asked me, honestly perplexed.
Anatomy of a church
On my walk from Dresden’s station to its Old Town I passed a reminder of the city’s time under the German Democratic Republic. A broad mural spanned the second story of an otherwise unremarkable building. In the town I grew up, such a building would have been the advertising offices of the local newspaper or something equally mundane. This is what I expected to find in Dresden: postwar Socialist-drab architecture erected in a hurry and on the cheap.
The building was forgettable but the mural was not. Like so much social realism to come out of the Communist bloc, it features idealized caricatures of workers—women in head scarves, men in Trotsky hats—raising their sickles and rifles in a show of unity. The mural stood over a wide walkway, where it could be admired as easily as it could be ignored.
Once past the mural and its uninspiring canvas, I discovered Dresden was not ugly. In fact, the city was charming. Although seventy years had passed since the firebombing, plenty of time to rebuild, I did not expect to walk into such a minute jewel. With East Berlin as my primer to post-Communist Germany, I presumed Dresden would be a place of unkempt parks, weedy lots, and an opera house or civic chamber destroyed by the Allies and left as rubble with a statue before it memorializing the carnage.
Strange then to see Dresden work so hard to appear as the city it was five hundred years ago, more medieval than mid-century. Its stout Old Town proudly exhibited a collection of limestone spires and copper-green cupolas. In the Middle Ages, labor was cheap, free when pressed into service by the Church. In the 20th century it wasn’t so cost-effective to refurnish a city to its fifteenth-century original without making do with mass-produced raw material—the financial temptation to erect a Disney reproduction of the original must have been great. There was nothing fake or inauthentic about Dresden’s Old Town as far as I could see.
The rebuild was so complete, so meticulous, at first blush I wondered if anything remained to mark the firebombing that melted this city down to hot rubble in 1945. I found one, a block of permanently charred masonry standing in a cobblestone platz before a stunning Baroque church, Dresden’s Frauenkirche. A wordless plaque indicated where the block had fallen from the cupola above during the firebombing. In the human anatomy of the Frauenkirche, the masonry block fell from its heart.
(I know now that many memorials for the Dresden firebombing exist, some in the city and others elsewhere in Germany. Some only exist on the Internet as frameworks for remembering. I didn’t visit Dresden to search out statues and plaques and modern art commissioned by governmental panels, but I did expect to more of these markers than I encountered.)
Hundreds of miles from the Berlin swamp, Dresden offered a cloudless temperate day, the air off the river smelling fresh. The church platz was ringed by bistros lively with business. Vendor carts served cold beer as fast as mugs could be filled. Standing aside the masonry block and surveying the scene, I developed a theory: Dresden understood that remembering is different than never forgetting.
Of course
My own failings hampered my time in Dresden. I don’t speak a lick of German. Unlike Berlin, where an English-speaker can manage thanks to a mostly-multilingual population, few people in Dresden spoke my native tongue.
Rendered all but mute, I pointed to the beer tap when I wanted a beer, pointed to the menu when I wanted a brat, and did my best to pronounce Bitte? and Danke schoen for everyone I had dealings with.
At one of the beer carts off the church platz I met an English-speaking couple. Not only did they speak English, they were American. I did not ask the obvious questions. With a beer in hand and the sun on my back, I was incurious to know where they were from or who employed them.
She was talkative. He seemed totally uninterested in conversation. She asked why I came to Dresden.
“Slaughterhouse-Five, of course,” I said. That “of course” made me out as a snoot.
She searched the air above her. “Is that a book?” She asked her husband if he’d read it. He murmured “Never heard of it” and drank more beer.
I told her she probably read it in high school. She couldn’t remember.
Fox tossing
When I asked why they’d visited Dresden, she explained it was a layover on their bus trip to Amsterdam. She giggled when she said “Amsterdam.” His attention never left his beer.
“Have you visited the castle?” she asked me. Their package tour included a ticket to Dresden Castle, now a museum. “Their king was the King of Poland. Twice.”
“Augustus the Strong,” her husband said, still not looking at me.
“Why was he called ‘the Strong?'” I asked.
“Because he was strong,” the husband said. “He could dead lift hundreds of pounds.” A bit excited, he finally turned on his stool to face me. “And he was a master at this game called fox tossing.”
“What’s fox tossing?”
“You throw foxes as high into the air as you can.” So animated, his beer was sloshing.
“Dresden?“
I trudged back to the train station passing the workers’ mural once more. Now I saw how out of place it was in Dresden, this relic of propaganda today apropos of nothing. Like Communism, it was not erased and it was not forgotten, nor was it intrusive or even damned, but simply left to be, a curiosity.
On the train ride back, I experienced a conversation I would have twice more in Berlin, all with Germans. When I mentioned visiting Dresden, the Germans’ response was always “Why?” They expressed in their best English that Dresden was a boring town with nothing to draw a tourist, especially one who’d traveled so far.
I asked each if they’d heard of Kurt Vonnegut or Slaughterhouse-Five. None of them knew of him, which wasn’t terribly surprising. I don’t read German novelists, after all. The name confused them, though, since Vonnegut is distinctly Germanic. I assured them he was American.
I told the Germans Vonnegut had written one of the greatest English-language novels of the past hundred years. “It’s about Dresden. He was there during the firebombing.”
Only one of the three knew of Dresden’s destruction. (They were younger than me, I should add.) All were bewildered at the idea of a novel about Dresden—”Dresden?“—especially a novel important enough to be taught in American schools and universities.
It floored them. “You’ve read a book about Dresden?”
Imagine the situation reversed. Imagine learning that every student in Germany read a novel about one of Bokonon’s ugly cities: Illium, or Bakersfield, or Walla Walla, or Duluth. Imagine if Germans eagerly traveled to Duluth because it was featured in a popular novel. Duluth?
The second bewildered German I encountered—”Dresden?“—sat across from me. We were at a picnic table in my favorite beer garden in all of Europe. It was muggy in Berlin and nine o’clock at night, strings of light bulbs threaded through the tree branches. When I arrived at the Hauptbahnhof, I went straight to the beer garden.
We were joined by an American who’d emigrated to Germany to marry. He had a wife and a child, and had carved out a rather enviable life in what was once East Berlin. The first time we met he told me he never wanted to return to America.
“What are you two talking about?” He had brought us fresh mugs of beer.
“He went to Dresden today,” the German told him.
“Sure,” the newly-minted Berliner said as he distributed the beer. “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
Tonight a new television series premieres on the Sundance Network, Deutschland 83. My cable package doesn’t include Sundance, so I won’t be able to watch the show in its first run, but so far I like what I’ve read about it. More than that, it’s exciting to read about its premise and development, as much of it reminds me of the impetuses that drove me to write Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People.
The Cold War
Deutschland 83 and Edward Teller Dreams are both Cold War stories featuring individuals caught on the front line of a war that had no front lines. For Deutschland 83, the main character is Martin Rauch, an East German Stasi officer sent to West Germany under cover. For Edward Teller Dreams, teenager Gene Harland is the son of a nuclear physicist tasked to develop the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a pie-in-the-sky system to deter nuclear attack immediately dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics.
It can’t be overstated how permanent the Cold War appeared in 1983. The idea that in six short years the Berlin Wall would fall, taking with it the Soviet Union and much of the Eastern Bloc, was so unthinkable it wasn’t even contemplated by science fiction or Hollywood. They preferred to traffic in darker visions of Soviet domination, films such as Red Dawn, the Russians’ technological superiority in The Hunt for Red October, and 1983’s nuclear-scare TV sensation The Day After. Even MTV got into the act: 1983’s pop hit “99 Luftballons” was about toy balloons starting World War III. Every Child of the 80s remembers Reagan and Chernenko boxing it out in Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1983 video for “Two Tribes”.
With each passing year of nuclear stalemate, the saber-rattling rhetoric, and the occasional act of aggression that had to be negotiated down, the Cold War increasingly looked like Orwell’s vision of perpetual war. Of course, that comparison suggests the Cold War was ginned up to control populations rather than being a legitimate stand-in for irreconcilable differences between nations. Personally, I think it was a bit of both.
The birth of the modern era
I was also surprised to read that Deutschland 83 is set in “1983, the birth of the modern era”. Although I chose 1983 for Edward Teller Dreams because it coordinated with the year SDI’s development started, in earlier revisions I dabbled with setting the novel later in time, in 1984 or even 1985. The more I researched 1983, I realized I had to set my novel in that year and none other. (I’ll discuss more about this in a future post.)
Retailing in 1983 for $9,995 ($24,000 in 2015 dollars), the Apple Lisa mysteriously failed to capture the public’s imagination.
The developments in 1983 belie the stereotype of the Reagan years as drab, conservative, and conformist. In hindsight, the 1980s were remarkably dynamic, with 1983 perhaps the most so. SDI, Apple’s Lisa (the first personal computer sold with a graphic display and a mouse), the first reports of the AIDS virus and the solidifying of the gay rights movement, even the birth of the Internet on January 1st (the story’s more complicated than that, but roll with it). 1983 was more than an eventful year, it was a prescient year.
(And it was a great time to be alive if you were a reader: The Mists of Avalon, The Robots of Dawn, John Le Carre’s Little Drummer Girl, and Walter Tevis’ The Queen’s Gambit were all published in 1983. The Color Purple was published the year before. William Gibson’s Neuromancer would be published in 1984, following six productive years of groundbreaking science fiction short stories.)
Even in the context of the Cold War, 1983 may have been more consequential than 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In March 1983, Reagan declared the Soviet Union to be an “evil empire” and authorized the development of SDI, “a shield, not a sword”. In August the Soviet Union shot down civilian jetliner Korean Air Flight 007 and ignited an international uproar. All of this, as well as forty years of East vs. West posturing, culminated in the Soviet Union almost launching all-out nuclear war in November when it misread an American troop exercise as first-strike preparations. This series of “isolated” events—microaggressions on the macro scale— were not easily contained via formal diplomatic channels. They were exactly the type of unchecked escalation feared the most during the Cold War.
Writing into near-history
Publishers ask you to list two or three genres to help categorize your novel. While every author feels their novel transcends such pedantic pigeonholing—only partial sarcasm there—I’ve usually selected “historical fiction” for Edward Teller Dreams. It’s a problematic label, however, and not because I’m being snooty.
The term “historical fiction” evokes costume drama and so-called simpler times of clear-cut morality and rigid social standings. Most historical fiction book review web sites will only consider work that’s set at least fifty, seventy-five, even a hundred years in the past. Edward Teller Dreams is set thirty-two years ago (and was less than twenty years in the past when I first started writing it). Even with all I’ve described above, it’s hard to say the world has changed that much. I readily admit there’s more similarities between 1983 and 2015 than there are differences.
But even in writing this one novel I uncovered a number of obstacles with setting a story in near-history. I suspect the writers of Deutschland 83 faced them as well. Show creator Anna Winger says “The great privilege is it’s living history. People are still around and they want to talk about it.” I would say this privilege also nods towards its challenges.
In interviews with authors who pen historical fiction, there’s much discussion about research, authenticity, understanding the period, understanding moires and daily language, and so forth. Some historical fiction authors even go so far to dress in period clothing to better understand their subjects. Me? I threw on a T-shirt and a pair of corduroy jeans and—voila—welcome to exotic California, 1983.
But I’ll go to go out on a limb and say writing near-history is equally challenging to writing “real” historical fiction, and maybe more so. Ask someone what they think of the 1880s and you’ll receive silence, or maybe “I don’t know, why do you ask?” Ask someone what they think of the 1980s and you’ll get an earful. To retell near-history, you’re confronting people’s personal memories as well as the collective memory of our recorded culture.
I don’t think Edward Teller Dreams is a bold stab at righting some historical wrong, or a rewriting of the past to spotlight silenced voices. It doesn’t sound like Deutschland 83 is out to serve historical justice either. I do feel there are many stories of that era—of every era—that, if taken at face-value and told in good faith, will alter our understanding of history as well as our present. To retell stories from the 1880s is fine, but to retell the state of the world of the 1980s is to challenge our perception of the world today.
Back in December I asked “What happened to Longform.org?”, a longish complaint about the changing course of my favorite curator of long-form journalism. Although I concluded that post with the tepid threat that “maybe it’s time for me to find a new curator,” I confess I never actually turned my back on Longform, the premier aggregate of long digital content on the Web. A few other long-form journalism aggregators have sprung up in Longform’s jostling wake (most notably, Longreads), but none have approached the ubiquitous or success of Longform. My hunch is that for an online magazine to get one of its articles listed by Longform is like hitting the daily trifecta at the track—a fat guarantee of tens of thousands of additional pairs of eyeballs being driven to the magazine’s site.
Today I noticed on Longform’s front page something new, that scourge of journalism, the advertisement masquerading as a hard-news essay, the puff piece known colloquially as “sponsored content”. Lodged between a New Yorker essay on euthanasia and Sarah Wambold’s reportage on natural burials in a Texas grove—make of that what you will—Longform dropped into their feed sponsored content from Hewlett-Packard, “Five Huge Industries That Never Saw Disruption Coming”. While the advertorial doesn’t shill HP’s hardware or services directly to the reader, any company established in the data services industry—or any company worried about being thrown aside by upstarts on their heels—is a bread-and-butter client for Hewlett-Packard, and so it’s in HP’s interest to appear as a high-tech sage, the rare Silicon Valley company with eyes on the horizon and not next quarter’s bottom line. “Five Huge Industries” paints HP as sitting in just such a tantric pose. Longform marked the link to “Five Huge Industries” as sponsored (and thankfully didn’t include it in its RSS feed), but the fact remains that the aggregation site is now using its linking power to send their readers off to corporations that have paid for that privilege rather than earned it through great timely writing.
I’m unsure if this is the first instance of sponsored content appearing under Longform’s lighthouse banner, as I’ve not followed the site terribly closely since I posted that first complaint six months ago. Linking to sponsored content is not an egregious sin or some tainting of hallowed journalist ground. I do know that sponsored content is not a good sign for anyone (including myself) who would like to see more diversity and greater breadth in Longform’s selections.
In 2013, gimlet-eyed media critic Jack Shafer wrote a great piece on sponsored content (known as “native advertising” in the business) and how it inevitably infects the reputation of even the most sterile news source:
If, as George Orwell once put it, “The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket,” then sponsored content is the meal so wretched that even pigs will reject unless sugar-frosted. The average sponsored-content page pits the advertiser against the publisher; the former attempts to make his copy and art look as much like conventional news or feature copy as powerfully as the latter pushes back as hard as he can to preserve “editorial integrity” without forfeiting the maximum fee. It’s common for both sides to come away from the transaction feeling soiled and swindled, but, hey, that’s the nature of most advertising.
I’d say this applies as much to a digital aggregator like Longform, which drives readers to other web sites via links and clicks, as much as it does for a traditional news site, where the advertiser’s content is integrated alongside actual content.
In my last post on writing workshops, I discussed the Iowa format and three alternatives to it: Liz Lerman’s critical process, Transfer‘s submission evaluation, and playwriting workshops. Thinking about those alternatives led me to come up with a hybrid that I hope makes the fiction workshop more constructive.
This hybrid isn’t merely a group discussion structure, it’s a collection (or, less charitably, a grab bag) of suggestions for organizing a workshop. It’s geared toward informal peer workshops rather than academic settings, but some of its points might be useful there too.
I’ve grouped this grab bag into three sections:
Organizing the group,
managing manuscripts,
and the group discussion itself.
Organizing the group
Define the goals of the workshop
For some, the primary goal of a writing workshop—perhaps the only goal—is to make their fiction publishable.
For others, a writing group is a place to receive direction and encouragement toward completing a larger project, such as a collection of short stories or a novel.
Some attend a workshop for the camaraderie, and to maintain a semblance of a writing practice in the face of hectic modern schedules.
Others write for themselves (or a small audience) and have no broader ambitions of mass publication.
For some people, it’s a combination of these things, and maybe more.
In my experience, almost all who attend a workshop go with the goal of eventual publication. But even if everyone agrees on that goal, it only raises more questions: Published where, and for what audience? Can any member in the group really claim knowledge of when a story is “publishable”? (And is there a difference between “ready for publication” and “publishable”?) Genre writers add a monkey wrench to the mix—someone who aims to be published by Tin House, The New Yorker, or The Paris Review might not the best arbiter of when a hard-military science fiction novel is ready for shopping around.
(Really, editors and publishers are in better positions to decide if a story is publishable or not. I was once told a story was unpublishable and weeks later landed it in a highly-regarded magazine.)
Liz Lerman’s process has some applicability here. As a baseline, agree that everyone in the group has an opinion of successful versus unsuccessful fiction, “success” being related to the quality of the work and not who might or might not publish it.
Also agree that everyone in the workshop is attending to make everyone’s fiction more successful, not merely their own.
How a writer uses that successful fiction—publication, independent distribution, blogging, or simply personal satisfaction—is the purview of the writer and not the group.
Agree what’s expected of each member
Most people join a workshop thinking they know what’s expected of them and everyone else. Rarely does everyone truly agree on those expectations.
On a basic level, people should understand they’re expected to
read the manuscripts presented to the group,
formulate some manner of thoughtful response,
regularly attend meetings,
and engage with the group discussion.
I’m not a big fan of merit systems, but some groups use them for motivation (such as “you must attend three meetings to submit one manuscript”).
Additional expectations are discussed below, but the point I’m making here is to verbalize (and even write down and share) these expectations. If you’re organizing a workshop for the first time, you might use the initial meeting to allow everyone to air what they expect from the others. Coalesce those points into a list that’s distributed to all members. Differing expectations can lead to headaches later.
Cover the workshop’s agreements with each member
For each new member, go over the group’s structure and policies and goals with all the other members present—in other words, don’t do it privately over email or the phone. This ensures that everyone’s on the same page. It also refreshes the memories of long-time members. Avoiding miscommunication is incredibly important in a workshop group.
Stick to your workshop’s structure unless everyone agrees a change is necessary (or, after a vote).
Don’t make exceptions. Exceptions kill the group dynamic. People begin to see favorites even if no favoritism exists. Remember: This is a peer group evaluating peer writing.
Manuscripts
Enforce page count and style
The era of the 25-manuscript-page short story may be receding (I wish it wasn’t), but that hasn’t stopped writers from penning them. The problem with bringing so many pages to a workshop is that people are bound to skim long work. That means they have less understanding of the story and are less qualified to discuss it. The peer pressure to discuss it remains, however, and so people will, leading to poor results.
I’ve brought in long work many times to workshops. In almost every instance I’ve heard comments (or outright griping) about the length. It seemed odd to me that writers would complain about having to read a measly 25 double-spaced pages, until I reminded myself they’re reading work they probably would not pick up on their own.
I’ve also noticed my shorter work almost always received higher-quality reads and discussion.
Some groups limit submission length to 20 or 25 pages. My suggestion is to go further and require manuscripts be no longer than 10 or 12 pages. Yes, that means having to split long short stories into two or three segments, but the writer will get a better read of those segments. Chuck Palahniuk’s writing group in Portland has such a page count restriction. Its members seem to have done fine by it.
Page count restrictions require basic, common-sense manuscript formats. Make it clear: Double-spaced, 1.5″ margins, 12-point Times New Roman, or whatever format your group decides.
I’ve seen writers game the manuscript format to subvert page counts. Don’t stand for it.
Agree on the role of manuscript edits
A lot of people in fiction workshops think there’s big value in marking up the manuscript itself. In the past, I’ve had manuscripts returned to me so marked-up I didn’t know what to make of them.
Readers drew lines like football plays over my pages, instructing me to cut sentences, split or combine paragraphs, rearrange scenes, and so forth. One workshop reader circled every instance of “has”, “had”, “is”, and “was” to alert me of my overabundance of passive voice, even where no passive voice existed. Others marked words wc (“word choice”), inserted and struck commas, semicolons, em-dashes, and so on.
Drawing attention to typos and misspellings is hard to argue against. Yes, if you see one, go ahead and circle it—but that’s gravy. Indicating confusion (“Who’s saying this?”) or highlighting passages that pop off the page have utility as well.
I’m arguing against line edits that are a matter of taste or philosophy. Telling me I should
replace words not in the reader’s vocabulary,
never use passive voice,
only use “said” or “asked” as dialogue tags,
drop all semicolons,
strip out all adverbs, and so on,
are not the purview of the workshop reader. I would also argue these comments are counterproductive to a quality workshop experience. Too often the editorial mark-ups are writing lore masquerading as received wisdom (and usually associated with a well-known writer who purportedly counseled them).
On the flip side, I’ve encountered workshop peers who expected line edits, to the point of chiding some of us for not pointing out a typo he made. This attitude is counterproductive as well.
Assume everyone in the group is a capable writer. You are responsible for the fine-detail work in your manuscript, not the group. The workshop’s purview is to locate broader issues in the story and illuminate paths forward for your next revision. Workshops are not editorial services for you, the writer.
My experience has been that people who make fine-detailed edits to others’ manuscripts are expecting the same in return. When they don’t receive them, feelings begin to bruise and grudges are harbored. Notions of equal work loads and reciprocity is a major source of fracture lines in a workshop. (What’s worse are workshop members who don’t offer detailed proofreading of others’ work—but expect it from everyone else. Oof.)
If your group thinks it’s the purpose of the workshop to offer editorial changes, then make it an explicit policy. But I would suggest against it.
Agree on genre
Some fiction workshops will accept creative nonfiction, but rarely poetry or plays, if ever. Some will only accept fiction of a certain length (for example, no microfiction or novels). Some are for science fiction or mysteries, while others are open to all subject matter. I won’t argue one way or the other, but like my other suggestions, make sure everyone in the group is aware of the restrictions. For example, I’ve witnessed sparks where one member kept bringing prose poetry to a fiction workshop.
Agree on readiness
Some people will balk on this next point, but I’ll draw a line in the sand: The group should agree that the workshop isn’t there to critique first drafts. First drafts are too undeveloped and scattered to be productively critiqued in a group setting. Does it make sense to use other people’s valuable time to inform you of your first draft’s (usually obvious) problems? Especially when first drafts stand a high chance of being abandoned by the writer?
Likewise, late drafts are usually too set in concrete to receive any help from a workshop. If you’re unwilling to make substantial changes to the story, then asking the group to find its weaknesses is wasteful. (Never bring a manuscript to a workshop expecting unconditional praise. It never happens. Never.)
My rule of thumb: Workshops should be seeing stories after two or three drafts (or edit passes) and not after six or seven drafts/edit passes.
Some groups allow submitting work previously read by the group. I would add the proviso that the work must have received substantial edits since its last go-around. Other groups may prohibit it or require full agreement before accepting previously-seen work. As before, don’t make this up as you go. Choose a policy and stick to it.
No one should ever submit a published story to a workshop. Yes, people do this. (One possible exception to this rule: The story is up for republication and edits are requested by the publisher, i.e., it’s being anthologized.)
Formulate a written response format
Some groups may forgo written remarks, especially if the manuscript isn’t handed out ahead of time. Otherwise the response format should be agreed on by everyone.
I don’t mean page length (“one page single-spaced”), I mean what questions should be answered in the written response. It doesn’t have to be a fill-in-the-blanks approach. You could simply have a list of questions and ask each member to verify those questions have been answered (in one way or another) in their written response.
My suggestion? Use Transfer‘s system. Each reader writes on a 3-by-5 card a 1–2 sentence reaction to the story and uses the remaining space to describe its strengths and weaknesses. Use both sides of the card. Then the cards are read to the group verbatim. Readers will learn not to use the watered-down language so often found in a full-page responses (“I really like this piece,” or “This is strong.”) From there, launch into the general discussion.
If a 3-by-5 card seems too small a space, choose a longer format, but I still propose a length limitation to elicit thoughtful responses.
I’ve become convinced that the real magic in a fiction workshop lies in the discussion, not the written remarks. By giving each person only a sentence or two for strengths and weaknesses, the discussion can zero in on those thoughts and use them as a springboard for exploration.
The group discussion
Read the story aloud before discussing
As mentioned in my prior post, I noticed in playwriting workshops how reader-actors became invested in their characters. For fiction, even with an eight-page limit, it would take too much valuable group time to read aloud the entire manuscript.
What’s more, fiction is an inherently different experience than theater. A person reading a story aloud will not become as invested as an actor reading their part from a script.
Still, I’ve been in groups where a paragraph or two of the story was read aloud before the discussion, and it did seem to help. Getting the story into the air brings the group together around the manuscript. Everyone is hearing it one more time—the language, the setting, the narrator’s voice, the dialogue.
If your group meets every other week, it’s possible a few people haven’t read the story in ten or more days. (It’s also possible some read it in the Starbucks around the corner fifteen minutes earlier—there’s not much you can do about that.)
The writer shouldn’t read their own story aloud.
Keep the discussion to what’s on the page
Discuss the story as it’s written. Avoid peripheral issues (such as ideology or personal viewpoints) and comparisons to other work (other authors, television shows, movies, and so on).
Personal viewpoints are a good way to poison a discussion. Saying things like “I would never choose what the character chose here” isn’t useful. A better question is: Would the character choose what they chose? Everyone holds a subjective internal logic. Most of us hold several subjective internal logics. Does the character’s actions match their internal logic(s)? Was the suspension of disbelief lost?
While comparison to another work may seem harmless (“Your story reminds me of Mad Men“), popular culture is a kind of safe zone for people to retreat into. Pop culture will also derail a workshop discussion. When the harmless comparison takes over, all discussion becomes re-framed by it. Instead of discussing the story, the group is discussing how the story reads in light of this other work or issue. (“Mad Men focuses on women in the workplace. You could add more of that.”) The story becomes secondary. This is unfair to the author, who has brought their work in to be critiqued on its merits and weaknesses.
Workshop formats (including Liz Lerman’s) will often declare that readers shouldn’t make suggestions without the writer’s permission. This baffles a lot of people; if I’m not making suggestions, then what I am here to offer? Unearned praise and tender nudges? (Liz Lerman is not advocating either of these, I’m pretty sure.)
Rather than distinguish between suggestion and not-suggestion, I say keep the discussion to what’s on the page. Staying close to the page means, for example, suggesting the writer remove a spicy sex scene because it’s dragging down the story. Suggesting the writer remove a sex scene because that would make the story suitable for young adults—a hot market right now—is straying from the page. Both are suggestions, but the latter is not the purview of the workshop.
Maintain a discussion structure
The Iowa workshop format usually runs like this:
Each reader gives a broad reaction to the story.
A general discussion opens between the readers, with the writer only listening.
The writer asks the readers questions.
Lerman’s approach is more involved and (as I discussed last time) more difficult to stick to, but it has some nice features worth including. For example, a workshop could be structured as so (incorporating some of the suggestions above):
A portion of the story is read aloud by one of the readers.
Each reader in turn reads their written remarks (or a summary of them) aloud. (This makes the 3-by-5 card approach more desirable.)
General discussion by the readers. Keep the discussion to what’s on the page. Start with strengths, then move to weaknesses and confusion in the story.
The writer is offered an opportunity to ask questions for clarification and prompt for suggestions.
The writer summarizes what they’ve heard by naming new directions they plan to explore in future drafts.
If the group is open to re-reading work, the writer can announce what changes they intend to make before submitting it next time. (This is probably more useful in a graded academic setting.)
This is not radically different from the Iowa format, but by specifying the goals of each step, they aim to direct the group’s energy toward better revisions and, hopefully, better writing.
Appoint a discussion leader
In academic settings, a discussion leader is naturally selected, with usually the teacher or an assistant taking that role. In informal workshops, the leader is sometimes the member who first organized the group, or has been around the longest. Otherwise, workshop groups will often lack any formal leadership.
Recognize the difference between an organizer and a discussion leader. Organizers solicit for new members, remind everyone when the next meeting will occur, arranges for a location to meet, send emails and make phone calls, and so forth. This is all important work (and harder than it looks) but it doesn’t imply that the organizer should lead the group discussion.
I suggest rotating the role of discussion leader around the group. Round-robin through the members, skipping writers when their manuscript is under discussion. (The writer whose work is under scrutiny should never be the discussion leader.) Or, if multiple writers are “under the knife” at each meeting, let the writer not under discussion lead the group, and then switch the role to the other writer.
Discussion leaders should monitor the group dynamic and gently remind people what stage they’re at, to keep the discussion on-track. Have leaders bring a watch to track the time and make sure everyone (readers and the writer) have a chance to speak. Make sure everyone knows that the leader has the right to interrupt someone if they’re going on for too long or taking the discussion down a hole.
The problem with round-robin is that some people simply aren’t good at this kind of role. (On the other hand, some people are too good at this kind of role.) This is where everyone has to step up to the plate—to rise a little to the occasion.
I’ve heard writers express disdain for discussion leaders, or any manner of hierarchical organization. I would love to agree, but experience has taught me otherwise. There’s tremendous value in having someone appointed to direct the flow of the conversation and cut it off when it’s deviating from the agreed-upon format. I’ve witnessed a few situations where such a leader could have saved a group discussion, and even the group itself.
If you’re organizing a workshop, or are in a workshop and looking for positive change, I hope this ignites ideas and discussion. If you use any of these ideas, let me know in the comments below or via the social networks.
In one of the books funniest scenes, the two apathetic rebels stage a sit-in protest for the lack of school pride at their High School. But it’s not a throwaway scene: in this novel, every scene illuminates, tells a joke, develops characters, and moves the plot forward, and big changes for Gene and Gwen hinge on that protest and its repercussions. But the broader and more subtle work being done in that scene is what makes Nelson’s book so effective and moving: Gene and Gwen are children of Baby-Boomers who decades before put flowers in their hair and “changed the world” and continued to congratulate themselves for doing so and who all of a sudden became middle management protecting the status quo they now had a vested interest in.
The workshop is so pervasive in the writing world it’s been converted to a verb: workshopping. Although workshops occur in disparate settings (academic, informal, living-room writing groups—whatever), a fiction writing workshop usually operates something like this:
A writer distributes their story or chapter to the rest of a group ahead of the meeting. Each workshop member reads the story on their own, away from the group. Each member writes a critical response, usually one page single-spaced. Often readers will mark up the manuscript as well: spelling, grammar, word choice, typos. They’ll highlight passages that are interesting or vivid, cross out passages that seem unnecessary or inappropriate, write question marks near confusing passages, and so on.
Then the group meets. The author quietly sits for twenty to thirty minutes while a half-dozen or more people critically pick apart what may be the most heartfelt and personal story he or she has ever written. The author is forbidden from speaking during this time. The discussion almost sounds as if the author is not present. He or she listens and takes notes while the rest of the room casually dissects hours, maybe tens of hours, of work. Just about any critical opinion that jumps to mind may be aired without fear of crossing a boundary. With the right people, it can be ruthless.
After the discussion, the writer may ask the group questions, and the session concludes.
Although I don’t know how this style of critique developed, I’ve often heard that it originated at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and so it’s called the Iowa workshop format. For better or worse, the Iowa model has become the platonic ideal of the fiction writing workshop.
For my purposes, the history of the format is not really important. It’s been handed down to us and dominates the critical process for fiction writers. It’s used in practically every living-room writing group and creative writing course in North America, from weekly adult-extension classes to top-tier MFA programs.
The format is not set in stone. I’ve seen a couple of home-brewed workshop formats, and even endured a writing group that made up the rules as it went along. Some established groups have a formal structure, but often it’s assumed everyone “knows” how to workshop. It’s rare to see the workshop where the group’s goals were enumerated and agreed upon by everyone.
A lot of time in writing workshops and a lot of negative experiences in them have led me to consider alternatives to the Iowa format. I can name three worth examining.
Liz Lerman
The most widely-used alternative to the Iowa workshop format originated in the world of modern dance. When a workshop organizer hands out their Xerox-of-a-Xerox-of-a-Xerox of Liz Lerman‘s Toward a Process for Critical Response, the phrase “dancing about architecture” leaps to my mind. I don’t mean to sound unfair—Liz Lerman’s critical format is so well-known and widely-used, it’s left the world of dance and crossed to fiction (and perhaps other arts). Obviously there are people other than myself seeking alternatives to the Iowa format.
I’ve enrolled in a handful of workshops where Liz Lerman’s process was used. In the first session, the leader selected workshop members to read aloud each section of Lerman’s process while everyone else followed along. Then the leader went over Lerman’s technique in detail, firmly and thoroughly discussing each stage, reiterating its emphasis on decorum, and above all its notions of fairness and neutrality.
For a fiction workshop, Lerman’s critical process structures the group discussion like so:
The readers state what was “working” in the story.
The writer asks question about their story. The readers answer the questions without suggesting changes.
The readers ask the writer neutral questions about the story.
The readers ask the writer for permission to offer opinions of the story.
Lerman’s process is designed to avoid confrontation at all costs. I would also say Lerman’s process requires a strong leader to guide the discussion along—a situation more suitable for an academic situation than a writing group of peers.
Unfortunately, the few groups I’ve been in that used Lerman’s process degenerated in a similar fashion. The first one or two sessions would follow Lerman to a T, but inevitably transgression of the format crept in. People would start questioning if they were “allowed” to say what they want to say. By the third session Lerman’s process all but disappeared from the radar screen. Steps got skipped. One stage would bleed into the next. Time ran out and the process cut short. (You need to go through each step for it to be worthwhile.) Sometimes the workshop turned into a pillow fight…the pillows filled with broken beer bottles.
I’m not blaming Lerman for this situation. Overall, her process is a positive one that emphasizes constructive criticism and neutral questions to give the dancer—or writer, or painter—a grab-bag of vectors for the next iteration of the creative process.
It’s just that I’ve never seen Lerman’s critical process consistently applied in a fiction writing workshop, academic or informal. Lerman’s process requires everyone to agree to it up front. Many people don’t, silently or verbally, either due to confusion (“Is this a neutral question?”) or rebelliousness (“I’m not here to sugar-coat my opinions”). Like so many group activities, if everyone doesn’t buy into the ground rules, problems sprout up.
Transfer magazine
One of the most positive workshop experiences I’ve enjoyed was as a staff member of Transfer magazine, a publication of San Francisco State University’s Creative Writing department.
Transfer used a blind submission process which solicited manuscripts from the student body. Manuscripts were distributed to the staff (20 or so students) who read them on their own and prepared note cards. On each card they described the story in objective terms and listed its strengths and weaknesses.
There’s only so much you can write on a 3-by-5 card. That limitation forced the staff to think hard about what they wrote, particularly since they might have to defend it later.
In group discussion, each story was evaluated in turn. The note cards became a launching pad for the discussion. The story’s author was not present, of course—editors and staff could not submit work. With the author’s name unknown to everyone present (including the editors), the discussion was remarkably fruitful and civil. Many of the manuscripts were teased apart by the group, revealing details and forces within them no single person had noticed on their own.
I’ve thought a lot about how to borrow some of this magic. There’s obvious problems with migrating this process to a standard fiction workshop. Even if the story’s author was asked to leave the room during the discussion, those present would know whose story was under the knife and that their remarks would eventually wind up in the writer’s hands. (Transfer‘s evaluation was not shared with the story’s author.) Anonymity fostered healthy discussion at Transfer, something not easily replicated in a weekly writing group.
On the other hand, the note cards and their space limitation garnered thoughtful responses from the students. The discussion, not the written responses, was where the real critical value lay. Most fiction workshops treat written vs. discussion as a 50-50 split. After Transfer, I’m not so sure.
Playwriting
Playwriting workshops have been another source of remarkably positive experiences for me. The differences between playwriting and fiction workshops are so marked, the first time I took a playwriting workshop I assumed it was a fluke of nature—a fantastical intersection of an energized instructor, great personalities, and wonderful writing. It was all those things, but I’ve enjoyed similar good fortune in the other playwriting workshops as well.
Unlike most Iowa-style formats, scripts are not distributed ahead of time in a playwriting workshop. Scenes are brought to the group and handed out on the spot. The playwright selects her “cast” from the other writers. The scene is performed cold, sometimes sitting at the table, sometimes using one side of the room as a makeshift stage. There is no blocking, no dramaturgy, no Method acting, but of course everyone gets into their roles a little.
The shock and delight of fiction writers attending their first playwriting workshop.
The toughest part for me, as a fiction writer, was this part of the process. Public speaking is difficult enough; acting is painful, and I know I was hamming it up. It’s common for dedicated playwrights to take acting lessons, and many of them did my scenes great justice.
Once the scene is acted out, a general discussion follows. The discussions are rarely structured, nothing as formal as Lerman’s process. If there is structure in the workshop, it’s the leader asking “What’s working here?” and then “Okay, now where is it stumbling?”
Yet there was an extraordinary amount of generosity in those sessions. I never saw the backbiting or sniping that pokes its nose into fiction workshops. The energy level of playwrights is something to see—people eager, anxious even, to help the writer refine her work from something struggling to something great.
There are cultural differences between the world of fiction and the world of theater. Fiction writing is romanticized as an isolated act, and there’s truth in that. Plays are collaborative efforts, from start to finish, and it shows in a playwriting workshop. There’s also the stereotype of personality differences: fiction writers as introverts, theater folk as extroverts. But there were other fiction writers in my playwriting workshops. They shined too. It was the process, not the personality.
Reading a script aloud, cold, and in a performative manner engages everyone in the room. Too often in fiction workshops I’ve received written comments that were scribbled on the last page of my manuscript like it was a cocktail napkin. If the comments were assembled that sloppily, I can only imagine with what impatience my story was read.
Acting through a script makes people pay attention. It creates stakes in the room—the group feels they’re a part of the work, rather than exterior to or above it. The actors make special claims to the play, speaking up about their character’s motivations, speaking about their character in the first-person (“At that moment I really wanted to tell her what I knew”).
Again, like Transfer, I don’t know if this easily translates to the fiction workshop, but it’s worth knowing there are workable and practical alternatives to our age-worn practices. The question is how much of this magic can be adapted into a workshop process that has been pounded into place. That’s what I’ll discuss in my next post.
Dustin Heron, author of 
