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When to Stop Workshopping

by Director

Beginning writers are always told about how important peer review, workshopping, and getting feedback is to their development. The emphasis on feedback happens for a reason–writing is a social act, and it is in understanding how it is received that we begin to see the patterns that allow us to gain better control over both the quality and exact implications of our messages. This is true whether you are engaged in creative writing, journalism, or research and practical writing.

What creative types have to deal with that sets us apart is simple: There are no clean templates or style guides for us. We can learn about genre, technique, and even story structure, but the exact shape of our plot has to be structured around the psychological reality of our characters. This magnifies the importance of audience feedback, because mere style is not enough to make sure we are understood. Narrative itself is rarely enough, and rhetoric, while it serves the needs of a story, is insufficient to make it whole.

Workshopping lets us see the balance of these elements, and to hear whether or not they are achieving the desired result. At the same time, though, feedback from an audience with little interest or investment in a particular style, technique, or topic limits the range of productive feedback we can receive. Consider seeking feedback in another form, either through a new workshop or through other kinds of channels, if you’re working with any of the following:

  • A workshop audience that is plainly uninterested in the genre or topic.
  • One whose background readings and/or writing experience makes them ill-suited to understand the techniques you favor.
  • A group of people who have reviewed this same piece in more than one previous incarnation.
  • Readers who do not reflect the target audience for your piece.

Local writing groups, online meeting spaces, and even blogging platforms like Tumblr can provide you with the keys to find your next workshop space, and programs like the Prague Summer Program for Writers exist to bring writers into new communities, where their work can connect with more diverse audiences, allowing them the experience of a wider reading. This, in turn, helps build up your own confidence in your judgment as it informs your base of knowledge about the way your work will be viewed by different kinds of people.

Poetry: Don’t Sweat the Technique

by Director

Many poets feeling their way around free verse find themselves trapped by its relative lack of constraint. That is to say, they find themselves using formal elements that the form lends itself to very well, and even perfecting them, while remaining somewhat dissatisfied with the musicality in the work. The result can often be frustrating, as these kinds of poems are gems in many ways, and often sound fantastic when read aloud while being elegantly pruned constellations of detail on the page.

Establishment and Improvisation

The key to making the musicality pop out of free verse is to establish expectations or ground rules in the opening stanza, and then to embellish and ornament them as you go. This can be by building up linguistic structures that follow familiar rhythmic patterns, such as an iambic flow or a meter that you can fold and manipulate as you go. Once the pattern is constructed, it can be imported into different techniques and rotated to provide opportunities for change. For instance, if you are running an iambic flow and you are looking to move into a new pattern, breaking your last foot of a middle line in the stanza where you make the change can allow you to pivot to the resulting accent pattern in the next paragraph.

Numeric progressions can also be a big help. Working in sets of three or four and passing patterns at points of change is a popular move in many kinds of performance poetry. For example, repeating a rhyme scheme four times before using four of the same accented vowels in a row to gloss over the fact that the rhyme scheme has been dropped, and then landing back into a new rhyme on the other side of the feat. By rotating these techniques in conjunction with each other, a polyrhythmic structure free of entanglement with absolute rules or form can rise out of the relative emptiness of a free structure.

Notation and Cadence

If you are looking to make a free style pop, one way is to commit to a line length that is measured in something other than simple syllables. Since musicality is the main organizing principle in this particular exercise, mine it for more ways to use the language. Constructing lines around length of delivery time, using punctuation consistently to notate measured lengths of pauses, and spacing the poem so that the distance between words reflects their relative lengths are all organizing principles that can replace the standard rhythmic and metric constraints found in traditional poetic styles with a more open-ended approach to structure, one that allows the poet to use the organizing principle itself as a way of establishing their skills to the audience.