The Lighthouse Writers Top-Secret Blog
All the latest news, ideas, and opinions from Denver's Independent Literary Center: lighthousewriters.org
When a workshop is not just a workshop
This week, I had to do something I didn’t really feel like doing. I’ll admit it: It was going to the first session of a four-week workshop at the Lighthouse on point of view, led by the inestimable Rebecca Berg.
I had wanted to do it, let’s be clear, and I knew I’d want to do it again. But you know that feeling, just after a quick dinner, when you have to haul your butt out of your chair, get back in the car, and go? And you’d rather just lie on the couch reading a book or maybe catching up on important current affairs programs, such as “Project Runway”? Yeah, that feeling.
But I hauled myself out the door. Embarrassingly, I almost yawned a couple of times in class, not from lack of interest, but rather from too many sleep-deprived, late-working nights in the past two weeks. At this moment, I’m a bit overwhelmed with life’s responsibilities—work, family, volunteer commitments, another intense workshop, and of course, writing a book. Yeah, that feeling.
Rebecca talked us through our readings, through the gist of the class, and shared a surprise from an early master of POV rule-breaking (who was it? Ernest Hemingway!). The discussion was interesting, but afterward, I didn’t linger for post-class chit-chat. I was exhausted and had promised myself to go straight home to bed to make up for that sleep deprivation. That was nice, I thought. I’m not sure how much I got out of it, though, or how it’s going to apply to the memoir I’m writing.
I crossed the street briskly and opened my car door. What would it be like if my first memoir—the one I ponder revisiting after I finish my current project—had a different POV for each of the main characters? I figured I’d just note that thought when I got home. I climbed into the car and fired up the engine. I sat at a stoplight, waiting for a pedestrian, waiting to turn left.
Hey, I thought. I wonder if … and like a thunderbolt, I had a new idea for the second chapter of my memoir. (The chapter where my self-critique of my first draft was: “Revise! This sounds like a story someone’s boring grandma would tell.”) I mused all the way home, grabbed my laptop when I came in, and started jotting the first few lines. An hour-plus later, I had 600 words, and the next day I had churned out eleven pages, moving gracefully* from POV to POV with renewed energy for trying to show a story that thus far has been drily didactic to tell.
Has this ever happened to you? When you just showed up at a workshop, or a class, or a writing group, or your page for that matter, seeing it as an obligation more than a joy, and then blammo! everything changed? It’s happened to me too many times to count.
Because when is a workshop not just a workshop?
Every time.
*Please, let me sustain this illusion until I reread the draft.
alison barker
Aray
andreadupree
Catherine Wallace Hope
danmanzan
denverdiatribe
Jason Heller
jdiegofrey
Karen Palmer
lauriesleeper
megnix
mjhenry
Nick Arvin
Lynn Wagner
William Haywood Henderson
susannadonato
tqtyson
As a fellow POV workshopper, I completely agree. I was dead stalled in the middle of several not-at-all interesting stories and now I find myself trying new things, new voices and actually liking the stories again. Also, I’m reading more carefully, looking for those little clues that the narrator might be someone different than first imagined. It’s fascinating and definitely invigorating.