Monkeys with Typewriters

groups can behave in very mysterious ways. I have witnessed a lot of writing workshops in my time, and there are two particular experiences that haunt me. The first was when a young woman read out a scene that was probably the best thing I’ve ever seen a student write. It was delicate, subtle and, well, it was art. Immediately the other students started questioning it. Someone didn’t understand the way the scene ended. Someone else thought it should take place in a different location. Someone else said they found the dialogue stilted.295 Barely anyone said they liked it. When I said it was excellent, a little wave of resentment went around the room. It took hours of tutorials to convince the student that the others were mistaken, and that the scene should remain exactly as she’d written it.
The other experience was quite the reverse. The weakest student in the room put up a piece of writing that she had obviously struggled with a great deal. There were many errors in spelling and grammar, partly because English was not her first language. As well as this, the writing was abstract, long-winded and boring. It would have failed, had it been handed in for assessment. The responses from the other students? ‘That’s brilliant,’ they all said. ‘Wow! I really want to read more.’ No one had anything bad to say about it at all. So I started pointing out the numerous errors as kindly as I could. I was very worried that this poor student would go off thinking that her writing was a complete success when it was in fact the reverse. What happened then? The other students began defending the work, as if I was being very mean about it. I was so confused by this that I immediately went and asked a colleague whether anything similar had ever happened to her. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it weird?’ This colleague and I have often since pondered what makes a group act like this, and all we can come up with is that they are trying to be kind and protect the weakest student from ‘getting into trouble’, but we don’t really know. Another interesting theory is that beginners in a subject often believe that anything they can’t understand must be of high quality and anything they find easy to comprehend must be of low quality.

What about writing groups? Unless you value them for social reasons, or unless you are lucky enough to have access to one in which people are working at an extremely high level, and are completely sympathetic to what you’re doing, I would avoid them. All too often the writing group can become more like a focus group in which a product is tested rather than a work of art produced.

When you’ve finished a first draft, what do you do next? The best thing is to leave it a few weeks (six is ideal) and then print it out and read it through thoroughly with a pencil in your hand, crossing out words, adding words and noting in the margins any new ideas or substantial changes you’d like to make. There will be a lot. At this stage you will think one of two things. If you have left it long enough, revisiting your work might make you feel like a genius, or at least quite good about yourself. Yes, I managed to do all this and I think it really works! But a much more common feeling is: This is fucking rubbish and I hate myself for writing it. There’s not much that you can do about this apart from hold your nerve and realise that everyone feels like this about their own work at some point. It’s normal.