What do you want people to listen for when you read your writing? What do you listen for when someone else is reading? In our everyday lives we listen to each other’s stories and respond by offering a parallel story of our own. We don’t listen for how the story is told. We don’t listen for the ingredients that make it funny or a good character description or the suspenseful pacing. In the best writing workshops we listen in the way we want to be listened to. We want responses that are most helpful to us as writers. The quality of the listening, therefore, is different from swapping news of the day around a kitchen table. For me, listening with the heightened sense of entering someone’s created universe is what creates not only the safety of a good workshop, but the possibility for everyone to go for broke in whatever way they like in their writing. I count this kind of listening as the deepest element of what we do in our shared exploration of perfecting our craft. From my experience this is a unique skill that requires practice, which is why I don’t ask workshop members what they like about a piece of writing. I ask What is working? If a listener responds that they like a bit of dialogue or the way a landscape is described, it probably makes the writer feel good. But that good feeling lasts about a second. The liking doesn’t give the writer anything more to work with. By offering a writer a reason that an element of their writing is strong, it reinforces what’s effective and encourages the writer to build on that skill. Listening for how a piece of writing is put together and how those ingredients combine to make us feel sorrow, intrigue, worry, or joy, is noticing craft. As writers, our job is to notice through heightened listening how our fellow writers achieve what they set out to achieve. Attending to each other in this way helps all of us move more deeply into our writing because we are more deeply heard.
With joy in our words,
Maureen
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Upcoming Events
August Retreat: Hawley Massachusetts August 5 – 8, 2018 https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/
Weekly Workshops: Ten-week Sessions, Thursday evenings, Friday morning. Beginning September 13 & 14, 2018 https://www.writingfulltilt.com/workshops/
February Retreat: Malibu California February 4 – 7, 2018 https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/
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