Creative Writing Education

So, ~133 thousand words later (or more if you count cuts and rewrites) I completed the novel! That was an accomplishment in itself and maybe the most important one. After all, I thought, the goal was to write a novel, not necessarily get it published. However, what drove me to completing this novel was the fact that I thought (and think) it was important. Important enough to try hard to get it published.

I had quite a few people review it, starting with friends that were quite positive even while providing some small number of critical comments. Then I graduated to acquaintances and finally to a local book club. As I advanced into people that knew me less, the criticism grew. The people that made it through the first half-dozen chapters read the entire thing and really loved the story, the plot, and the intriguing idea behind it. But, getting past my writing style proved difficult.

While I was doing that, I also took an on-line class from Writer's Digest. It wasn't an earth-shattering class, but it, along with the reviews, did teach me that there was another level of depth in writing. While my story was great, my "craft" was not.

I decided to go to school to take my writing to a new level.

There are hundreds of on-line programs nowadays in creative writing - and it is very difficult to tell which ones are any good. Given how prevalent they were, I decided to try to go local (to Colorado). There seemed to be two programs with reasonable reputations; one at Colorado State University and one at the University of Denver. The problem with the CSU one was that I had just missed the deadline for the following fall program and they only accepted applications once a year. That meant it would be over a year and a half before I began. Being an impatient person what it comes to making progress, I couldn't accept that. DU on the other hand accepted applications any time and I could start that spring/summer (a few months hence). The cost was similar with most of the universities I looked at, so that was not an issue.

I ended up going with DU and started in the summer of 2010. At this point (spring of 2012), I am almost done with the program. It has been a fairly good program. There are certainly some classes that are less useful that others and the "adviser" is so rigid as to be not only useless, but damaging. But, most of the classes have been useful and I do feel like my writing has improved tremendously.

Reviews

As I began to think this could actually work (once I had written a scene suggested by the protagonist), I started looking for some people to review it. I had been talking with my kids about the book for a year and a half and one of them in particular, my 12-year-old daughter, was particularly interested.

I thought, why not, and let her review the first few chapters. I was quite surprised at how thorough she was and how many constructive comments she sent back my way. I remember sitting in a Barns & Noble one evening with her telling me what was wrong with a particular chapter I had written and I couldn't help but smile. There I was, a 40-something-year-old father being corrected, rather adamantly, by his (at the time) 13-year-old daughter. It brought tears to my eyes.

After she started reviewing the chapters, I found two adults, one an avid reader and the other a Jew (by heritage, not religion), at work to review them as well. So, I had three reviewers who received the chapters as they came out. Of course that took the next year and a half.

Then, once I had a completed novel, and had rewritten the first three chapters at the initial reviewer’s insistence, I started looking around for more reviewers; this time with specific intent (subject matter experts, various religiosity (since this is a novel about Christianity), age, gender, reading habits, etc.). I wanted feedback from various types of people to see how they would react and what they thought of the characters.

After revising for all of the comments I received from the various reviewers, I had a book club here in town review it en masse. That was the most difficult. Book clubs are notorious for trashing books, and they didn't disappoint. The first words by one of them were something like "I couldn't get past 90 pages it was so poorly written." So much for all my work with other reviewers…

After getting past the initial really-negative comments from this first guy, it got a little better. Many of them agreed that it got better and better as the story went along and they really liked the second half of the book. I wrote down two pages of single-line bullet points from all of their comments. Some of the comments were about writing style and were things I had already seen and figured out from having read some books on writing fiction. Others were interesting in how they perceived the story and the characters (e.g. there wasn’t a consensus on who the protagonist was, which was a surprise to me since I thought it was pretty clear).

The review was disheartening, but an important step. It taught me, if nothing else, that I had a ways to go to hone my writing skills. I had accomplished the first part of what books on writing say: "just write." Now I needed to fine-tune the art of writing.