Drop and Give Me 2,500
So this past weekend I was a participant in the Borderlands Press Boot Camp. Motivated doesn’t come close to describing how I feel right now. It’s more like I’ve come out of there having decided to accept Writing as my personal lord and savior.
It’s much too early to fully assimilate the lessons from forty-eight hours in that highly-pressurized bubble. But here are some of the initial discoveries that I have been able to process so far:
- The authors of the works that I thought were the best-written turned out to be the best company. In fact, I saw direct correlations among skill, modesty, generosity, and personality.
- It turned out to be a great field test of my thesis about taste, confidence, and condescension. The snarkiest critiques were from the writers whose self-assurance of their craft mastery was at the greatest odds with the quality of their written product.
- Holy shit, I really have found my tribe after all. But I don’t regret my previous self-imposed exile in the wilderness because it allowed me to first develop a healthy sense of what “being a writer” really means for me — a robust understanding of the difference between a writing lifestyle and a writing life.
Onward, writing soldier. The defeats and victories, struggles and successes to come will make for great war stories.
And deep thanks to the writers and instructors for their comradeship, insight, dedication, and decent Scotch.
Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything
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Tell us more about this experience. What were you workshopping? What kind of work were the other writers doing? Were there a lot of genre writers? I’m always spooked by writer’s groups and conferences after my collegiate experiences with genre writers (I like to write literary fiction and don’t think genre writers and literary fiction writers can really help each other out very effectively).
This sounds like an intensive workshop! I, too, would love to hear more about it.
I agree with Cheryl (through whose link I found your site): it is difficult to have, say, science fiction, mystery and literary writers all in the same workshop. The mystery writers tend (and I am generalizing, of course) to depend on plot and the logistics of detection, which can take away from depth of character. The science fiction writers have to expend so much energy on making the unreal plausible that, again, there is often little left over for depth of character. It is as if, the further out you go, the less deep you go. There are exceptions, naturally: Raymond Chandler and the Noir school could sometimes go deep, but they are more American Realists than mystery writers proper. Fantasy and Science Fiction are often disappointing to a literary writer because they deal with non-human problems, and literary fiction is usually anchored in the human world. Again, there are exceptions–Stanislas Lem, for example. On the whole, though, if you want to write literary fiction, it can be pretty dreadful and irritating to have to read workshop writings about fairies and unicorns, although the pieces may well be successful examples of that genre.
Neither of you would have found Boot Camp to be a good fit, then, because it was aimed at genres other than literary. There are probably similar programs for literary out there too.
About 40 writers were accepted based on quality of submissions. Half were short-story writers and half were working on novels. Four instructors for each category (in the case of novel, in which I participated, the instructors were two authors and two editors. I think it was the same on the short story side). We read and critiqued in advance all the works for our respective groups (either novel or short). The heart of it was a full day of rotating intensive critique sessions of five writers and one instructor at a time. Masochists, all of us. Also all-hands discussions and Q&As that went on until the wee hours, and a writing exercise wedged in there too somewhere. Lots of contact info exchanged, and we’re already e-mailing each other. It’s a nice cohort to have.
Sounds like a great experience. I think I need something similar!
It sounds like it must have been very productive. The contact with editors seems especially valuable.