Like First Grade, Only Suckier
This morning, while I was out buying shampoo, I ran into my aunt Rose and her granddaughter Aubrey at Target.
Aubrey is six and has just been released from the hellfires of first grade, and she’s pretty adamant she won’t be returning for grades 2 through 12.
My conversation with her went something like this:
Aubrey: She made us write one essay every week! They had to be 3 pages long! All of them! IT MADE MY HAND HURT!
Me: Essays aren’t so bad.
Aubrey: YES. THEY ARE.
Me: Well, think of it this way. If you do the essays, eventually you’ll graduate, and then you can do whatever you want.
Aubrey: Can I stay at home like you?
Me: Sure.
Aubrey: (quiet for a moment) What do you do at home, anyway?
Me: I’m a writer. I write stories and books and things.
Aubrey: (contemplating) So…do you have to do three pages a week?
Me: It’s not really set in stone, but I try for around 50 pages a week.
Aubrey: (horrified) Do you get a grade?
Me: Well, sort of, I guess.
Aubrey: When you get something wrong, does your teacher make you do it again so you can fix it?
Me: Yes…
Aubrey: Do you ever sit out recess so you can do your work?
Me: Yes…
Aubrey: DOES IT MAKE YOUR HAND HURT??
Me: Yes…
Aubrey: Wow. Your job SUCKS.
Live Versus Online Writing Workshops
In September 2008, I attended a live workshop taught by the incomparable Mary Buckham, who is funny and wise and can hammer a concept home without hurting a girl’s head.
Bolstered by the terrific day I spent surrounded by a mix of writers and a really cool RWA chapter, I plunged into the world of online workshops, because 2009 was The Year We Buckled Down and Became Serious.
The one thing I can say I definitely learned is … there is a big difference between online and in-person learning.
There is quite a bit of cost and organization involved in holding a live workshop. A chapter needs to decide if a topic and a speaker can bring in a crowd and enough revenue to cover the costs of the workshop and possibly a little extra for the chapter’s coffers. Event planning is not for sissies. You need to find a venue that can hold up to however many an instructor lets you know she can teach, is in an accessible location, has adequate parking, and (hopefully) can provide catering for your guests – all for a reasonable price.
A chapter banks on the instructor being a draw, and usually those instructors don’t come cheap. Even if one will teach gratis, there are always travel costs – airfare, rental car or a driver, lodging and meal costs. And you’d feel badly, putting up your guest in the Bates Motel, so it should be a nice place.
Marketing is essential – you need to let people know who is teaching amazing course, and convince them they cannot afford to miss it. A paper invitation sent to chapter members will cost postage, but a better alternative is an announcement on both the chapter website and the instructor. Sending an email notification to a select mailing list with permission to forward to others is a great way to get the word out. Letting other writing organizations know about the class isn’t a bad idea either. I don’t write horror, but I’d love to attend a workshop taught by Stephen King and I’d be first in line to sign up for one.
Once all the logistics have been handled and the attendees are seated in the audience with pens at the ready, the class is a go, and the chapter has done its part. It’s all up to the instructor then.
That’s where I find both the chapter and the instructors fail in online courses.
An online course is far cheaper than a live workshop, $25-$30 for a month-long course rather than $100 for a live daylong workshop. Whoa, bargain, you think. I can learn at home wearing my jammies at any hour of the day, rather than dressing up and traveling to a workshop.
But you get what you pay for.
Since an online instructor will not need to travel and a chapter won’t have to organize a venue and catering, the costs are –or should be- dramatically less. A chapter usually uses Yahoo Groups as a venue for the workshops, as it is free and simple to use. A moderator, usually a chapter member, is assigned to the class to make sure the attendees are able to use the site without a problem. If you experience technical difficulties, the moderator is the person you need to coordinate with to help you get past them. The moderator will liaison with the workshop instructor and attendees, welcoming everyone, letting them know workshop etiquette, and reminding them about the course length and using files. Materials are usually posted in files on the site, which is only open to the group for a certain length of time – usually a week – after the class.
A workshop – live or online – is only as good as the chapter hosting it and the instructor teaching it. If you’re looking to broaden your knowledge and you have the choice to go to a live workshop or attend an online course, my advice is to go live.
Live Workshops Pros and Cons
Pros -
Since a chapter wants warm bodies, they will do more to get people in. I have attended workshops where there are very good door prizes, goody bags on your seat, fantastic raffles, and ceremonies honoring members for various good deeds and accomplishments.
There’s nothing like an instructor looking at your work and saying, “This is where you need to concentrate. Try this and see what happens.” Usually what happens is magic. Suddenly, your conflict is solid and your hook is strong.
You meet some interesting people, who then become friends. Or if not friends, become characters in your future books.
Cons -
The food always seems to be the same quality as a sports banquet. Decent, but nothing you’d go back for seconds. Perhaps that should be a pro – live workshops help you stick to your diet!
I never win the vacation getaway door prize.
Online Workshop Chapter Failure I Have Experienced:
1. Clumsy payment/class inquiry methods. PayPal is fast and easy to use. However, the chapter member who is collecting the monies may not look at her email for a few days. So while your fee has left your PayPal account, you’re hanging in no-man’s-land, waiting for a course confirmation and instructions to begin. Yes, everyone has a life and things happen, but if you volunteer to run a workshop, you have accepted that task. Get to it. Leaving people hanging for days is bad PR for your chapter and a sign of things to come. If something comes up to prevent the chapter member from handling her responsibilities, a substitute needs to be found to keep the course on track.
2. The moderator has no idea how to use Yahoo Groups, or possibly her computer in general. If a person can’t send or receive messages on the site, there a few things to try to help (changing settings, for instance) or if the problem is beyond the moderator’s ability, contacting Yahoo for assistance, and in the meantime, making sure the student can receive the materials via email.
3. In that same vein, a moderator should be able to assist the instructor with putting materials in files so they can be accessed easily. A large Word document can take a long time to open, whereas if it had been converted to HTML, it would pop open in a second. A student looking for a previous lesson would be able to find it without resorting to scrolling through back posts.
4. The moderator has no interest in the course. No, she’s probably not getting paid for moderating, but she did volunteer for the job, so there’s no reason to ignore students and forget to post instructions for use.
5. This is the biggest chapter failure of all. Not vetting the instructors properly. So-and-So may be this member’s BFF, but she has never been published. In fact, she has never even submitted anything for publication, nor has been around the publishing industry, so she has no credentials and no business teaching a course on a subject named “Pitfalls on the Way to Being Published”. An instructor should have an understanding of the subject they’re teaching. I wouldn’t mind seeing industry references to back them up.
Online Workshop Instructor Failures
1. When a chapter lists the class description you have given them, please follow it. For example, if you’re going to teach secrets of prolific writing, please do so. Share tips and techniques. The students are there because they paid money to learn something. It’s not a commiseration fest. Teach what you promised everyone you would teach.
2. Not being prepared. Lessons need to be planned out and ready to go. A syllabus is very helpful to students. I have attended two classes where the instructors didn’t start on time due to not being prepared. It shouldn’t take three days for the actual teaching begins, regardless of whether or not the class begins on a weekend.
3. Losing control of the class. Welcome questions, but remind people to stay on topic. It’s not wrong to tell a student, that’s an excellent question, and I’ll answer it during the second week of the course when we’re covering that topic. If a discussion gets out of hand, bring everyone back on course with a reminder of what the topic is. If a heated debate breaks out and degenerates into a catfight (as entertaining as it is for the rest of us) let the moderator know (so the offenders responses will need to be approved before posting) and tell the offenders to take their fight somewhere else. If one student insists on monopolizing the course, let her know she needs to throttle back and let others speak up. We’re assuming she is there to learn as well, not teach the course – otherwise, she would be listed as the instructor, right?
4. Losing Interest at the halfway point. Four weeks is a long time to try to hold people’s attention. If the instructor is bored two weeks in, what hope is there for the students? If you’re bored with your subject, you probably shouldn’t be teaching it.
5. Do not self-promote endlessly. Yes, you’ve written a book and its been published. The moderator would be a sweetheart to mention it when she introduces you. Don’t drag your book into every conversation you have with the class. That’s a sure way to lose sales. Also, if someone mentions they purchased your book, tell them you hope they’ll enjoy it. Don’t say, “Thanks for the sale!”
6. If you won’t be around for a certain time period, please let students know – once. Jamming up a class’s email with 50 identical messages of “I’m on my Blackberry and I’ll answer your question when I get home!” is not the way to teach. One message of “I’m sorry but I won’t be able to answer any questions until after 7PM tonight” will suffice. We understand you’re a busy person. The 50 Blackberry messages just make you look self-important. Which, of course, you’re not. Right?
In closing, for every workshop I learned something useful, I wasted time on two other bad ones. One step forward, two steps back.
And the best writing advice I ever heard came for free, from Nora Roberts. I’ll paraphrase: “Sit your ass in the chair and write.”
Jinky’s Tips on Writing Well (or at least on writing better-ish)
My office is a wreck and I realize now I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with this effing drywall, so … while I get back to it, here’s a re-post of something I wrote years ago:
Jinky’s Tips on Writing Well (or at least on writing better-ish)
Recently, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people who want advice on writing. This amazes me, because though I do write for a living, I’m hardly qualified to give advice on the matter. I’m a high school drop out from Tennessee, for Pete’s sake. The last English teacher I had believed in the Rule of Wagon: If you can’t pronounce a word, replace it with “wagon” and move on. Why? Because nine times out of ten, he didn’t know what the word meant, either.
So instead of posting a bunch of nonsense about the “right” way to write–since there is no such thing–I’m going to post a bunch of nonsense on how I do it, and leave everyone else to work out their own kinks. Here goes:
Write what you want, and cut it in half. A book (or an article, or an essay) should tell a story in as few words as possible. Sarah’s hair might be the color of sunset on a fresh autumn day, but who cares? She’s blonde. Move on.
Get in there! Sometimes detachment is a good thing. But unless you’re trying to convey it to the reader, it’s pointless. You are the judge, jury, and executioner. If you say something happened, by God, it happened. So don’t leave it up to debate.
GOOD EXAMPLE: The man stepped out of the car.
BAD EXAMPLE: Sarah saw the man step out of the car.
Your protagonist should always be smack-dab in the middle of the conflict, whether she realizes it or not. She should never appear to be watching from the sidelines unless there’s a damn good reason for it.
(And FYI, there’s never a damn good reason for it.)
Know your characters. Know who they are, what they look like, and where they come from. Know their quirks, annoyances, and turn-ons. Know the kind of milk they buy, their favorite flavor of ice cream, and whether or not they’re allergic to bees. Chances are none of that stuff will ever come up. But in case it does, you won’t spend half a day debating over whether or not Sarah can eat clams without her tongue swelling up.
Plot a course. Your story should be a sight-seeing adventure. Know your destination, and take your time in getting there. Make some stops along the way. Throw in subplots, speed bumps, and oodles of conflict. Keep notes, timelines, and post a storyboard above your monitor. Write an outline. It’s pretty hard to get writer’s block when you’re following your own Idiot’s Guide.
Fuck formatting. It’s the computer age. No one gives a shit if you write in 12 pt. Times New Roman, double-spaced, with a one-inch margin on all sides. Seriously. If writing in a purple Comic Sans font gets your groove on, then by all means, have at it. No one will ever know.
(Edited to clarify: the above applies to writing and editing, NOT for submitting.)
Remember the rules. Know the basics. Questions end with question marks. Capitalize the first letter of a sentence. If a paragraph takes up four pages, it’s too friggin’ long.
Break the rules. Be creative with dialect, sentence structure, and punctuation. Find your style, and stick with it. Don’t worry about what your English teacher from ten years ago told you about how many sentences a paragraph should contain. Trust your inner editor and go with the flow.
Make it snappy. I’m not going to wait around some ninety-whatever pages for something to happen. You’ve got two pages. That’s it. Introduce me to the main character, show me a little conflict, and give me some dialogue. Otherwise, you’re going right back on the shelf, and my money’s going elsewhere. So get to the point, and do it quickly.
All first drafts are shit. Don’t toil over a word or a sentence or a paragraph. Write it all down, and edit it later. And then when you’re done, edit it again.
Lie, and lie well. It’s not enough to tell a good story. You have to tell a good story, and make people believe it. The page is your best friend, your therapist, your life coach, and your priest. Tell it things you would never tell anyone else. The secret to a well-spun fabrication is to make it eighty percent truth.
Read what you write. Read what you don’t. Read everything. Reading and writing go hand in hand. If you’re a writer and you’re not reading, you don’t have what you need to do your job. Simple as that.
Write what you read. Don’t cater to a certain genre (like Chick Lit or Mystery) because it’s selling well, or because you want to be the next [insert favorite author's name here]. Chances are, it’s not going to happen. Which brings me to . . .
Don’t compare yourself to others. Not your friends, your family, your arch-nemesis from high school, and definitely (this is very important) not other writers. Find whatever it is that works for you and embrace it, polish it, make it your thing.
Don’t underestimate your readers. We’re smarter than you. If you know a word, probably we do, too. And if we don’t, we can look it up. We readers don’t need much hand-holding. Give us the structure and we’ll fill in the rest.
And with all that said, don’t feel compelled to agree with every little thing a writer says about writing, especially this writer. What’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily good for the gander, and to be quite honest, half the time I think we’re all full of shit, anyway.
