The day has come. Well, at least a couple days before has gotten here. Ethan, the instructor, invited us to do a pre-workshop informal Zoom so everyone can say hi.
I wasn’t supposed to be able to make it because I was scheduled to be flying late into the evening, but NYC airspace is so packed that it’s like cotton candy: it melts in the rain. My evening flights were cancelled, so my day ended hours earlier than it was supposed to. I take advantage of it and hop on Zoom.
Our pieces that we were having workshopped had to be in by the middle of May so everyone could have a chance to read them twice before the session started. That way we could hit the ground running and be ready for the close-read critique everyone would get on theirs. By the time of the Zoom informal meet, I’ve read everyone’s once and am halfway through the second reads, and now I get to put faces to names.
When I was starting in college, I had a world literature course with Bruce Weigl, a professor who had an astounding number of awards: nominated for the Pulitzer Prize twice (and a finalist the second time), two Pushcarts, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a partridge in a pear tree. He even has a Wikipedia page, but despite the glittering list of palmarès, he was a wonderful soul: kind, generous with his time and his insight, and a bright sense of humor.
Later in my college career, when I’d finished an A.A. in Spanish and psychology, at my next school I had a professor of linguistics that was a lot like the law professor from The Paper Chase. Classically educated, stuffy, brilliant, an eminent expert, and someone who piled so much work on you that he could make you hate the subject you loved.
So I’m wondering which kind Ethan is going to turn out to be. The answer quickly becomes the first, and after the quick hellos, I find out that not only am I in my first workshop ever, I’m in one that other people have been in before. Nonetheless, I’m a bit more relaxed knowing that I picked a good leader and was dropped into a good group.
So the first official day of the workshop arrives. It’s an easy introduction to the busy week to come: an hour-long welcome, introduction, and orientation. A couple of hours later, there’s an optional open-mic hour. I do it because I’m absolutely doing every single thing in the workshop, optional or not. I’ve never had a problem speaking in public, so I read the first 300 words of my first novel.
I learn quickly that, to my surprise, I’m really bad at listening to people read their works aloud. This isn’t a problem I’ve ever had before. Most of the videos I watch on YouTube are smart-people stuff, I love watching courses on MasterClass, and I never had a problem paying attention to lectures in college. I don’t know what the problem is.
I had the same problem the entire week, and felt dumber by the day because I couldn’t figure out how to make it go away. It’s not until it was over, with the time to reflect on it, that I’ve seen that I was so wound up with workshop energy that instead of simply listening, my brain would pick up on something and would go off on a, “Ooh, that’s lovely why didn’t I ever think of that” or a “I wonder where that came from” or a “Damn, that’s good let’s think more about that right now right now right now” rabbit hole. Then I’d miss a chunk of the reading while I reeled my brain back in, which required some reorientation, which then, as it happened more, would interrupt me with, “You did it again, dummy.” I didn’t expect listening to a reading to be an actual skill, but it is, and I sucked at it this first time. (Next year, I’ll know.)
First day over and now the real work begins. Every day was similar but different: 3 hours of workshopping plus one or more craft talks by guest lecturers. This meant that every day went from 9 a.m. until 8 p.m. or so, but with a large block of empty time somewhere in there.
Craft talks were on topics like how to know when you’re done, how to do research, and so on, but they weren’t the standard lectures you can find everywhere. They were done by the instructors or guests who specifically spoke about their own experiences, giving them a unique, tailored feel and making them more useful. One of them was done by a former YWW attendee who has gone on to publish several books, and one of the faculty reading sessions ended up being so well-received that it was published in Time Magazine later on.
The 3-hour workshop sessions followed a general pattern. The first hour was a quick writing exercise, then the next two hours were critiques of two or three of the pieces that were submitted to be gone over. We then marked up our own copy of the piece with our thoughts and emailed it to the person who wrote it.
When mine was up for critique, I got a pile of emails with a ton of comments: many useful, some not, some seeing things I hadn’t noticed. Some of my favorite parts of my piece were highlighted by many, and one of them was only noticed by one person. It was generally positive, but there was one person who viscerally did not seem to like the way I write. When I looked at their piece, I could immediately see why: this person writes in such a different style from mine that if I happened to pick up a book by this person at the bookstore, I’d immediately put it back down, and if this person was in a bookstore, they’d probably never even be in the same aisle mine would be shelved in. That’s totally fine. There’s room for more than one voice in this world. I didn’t take it personally, and I used it as an opportunity to look at my own work deeper than I would have otherwise.
The penultimate day, those of us who had completed manuscripts could get a short block of time to talk to a literary agent. That day alone could make up a post in itself, and it’s going to very soon, I promise.
In the evening of the big agent day, we do another reading session. Unlike the open-mic one, this one is mandatory and is shared with another workshop group, so you’re reading in front of and hearing from people you haven’t gotten to know over the last several days. I have a post with my own recording of what I read, and it went well, I think. Two of my favorite parts (and the ones that made my wife laugh when she was helping me rehearse it beforehand), the “husband and cabana boy” and “Fifth Avenue street cred,” were parts other people liked, too.
By the end of the week, I experienced a sort of time dilation that I’ve only had a few times in my life. All of them have been when I’m learning so much or doing so much or having so much thrown at me that every day seems so long, but the weeks seem to fly by. The first time I can remember experiencing that is summer camp back in seventh grade. The next (and biggest) time is probably Basic Training in the Army, where every day felt like a week and every week felt like a month, but wow, I did a whole lot of things I’d never done and never have since. Airborne school was like that, too: the first two weeks were an eternity, but jump week was a blink of massively-long days. In September, it will be 28 years, and I still remember it. My first YWW might be the same, too.
When it was over, we made arrangements to stay in touch. Sometimes those stick, sometimes they don’t. I know, for me at least, I want them to. In the last meeting, I told them how I felt about the experience by sharing a bit that comes from a place I’ve long since forgotten, but I’m pretty sure it was a Navy SEAL. He said something like, “If you want to be the best, go into a room full of people who are doing what you want to be good at. If you look around and think you’re the best one there, go into a different room, and keep trying rooms until you don’t feel like that anymore.” That’s how I felt every morning surrounded by these people writing great things and making amazing comments and observations. I could look around and see people who were fantastic everywhere I looked, and if you want to grow, you have to be in a planter bigger than you are.
I would say that writers are a weird bunch, but everyone’s weird if you look at them close enough. Fiction writers, though, are a special kind of weird because we make up lies and then try to get others to believe in them more strongly than reality. (What sets us apart from politicians is that we actually try to make our lies as good as possible and we actually care about making a difference in the world.) During YWW, I felt like I’d found my kind of weird, like the “Bee Girl” in the music video that gets laughed at in her bee costume but finds a meadow where a whole group of bee people frolic. For a moment, I was in that field.
Was it worth it? See you in the next part or you can catch up on the other parts here.
I’d love to hear from you!