First rule of writers’ club…
In my early days with Southwest Scriptwriters, I attended another group that workshopped sitcom scripts. By then well-used to feeding back in writing workshops, I offered a few thoughts on the sitcom in hand. Hot on the heels of my observations, the session leader rushed to assure everyone that my remarks were ‘in no way personal.’ Naturally, these assurances had the opposite of the intended effect, with me wondering in what way my comments on the need for some improvements in the script’s characterisation could be construed as ‘personal’, and the writer, no doubt, feeling that he’d been somehow slighted.
What I learned from this experience was that a writers’ group should resemble Fight Club[1] in the sole respect that the group must not talk about the group. Feedback needs to be as second nature as the famously unconscious process of riding a bike — overthinking either is likely to lead to accidents. For this reason, I swatted any discussion developing at Southwest Scriptwriters along the lines of, ‘What we do here is…’ Such discussions within the group are not useful, interesting nor to the purpose. Introspection distracts from the task at hand and leads quickly to a sense of aimlessness, futility and despond. It’s also monumentally off-putting for newcomers who arrive hoping for lively, well-informed discussion with others who are actively engaged in the writing process and find instead a collection of individuals squabbling over how to go about having that discussion. Utterly stultifying — the group must not talk about the group!
This is not to say that there isn’t a place to review and reflect on how effectively feedback sessions are working, but that contemplation of this kind should not go on at the sessions themselves. The Southwest Scriptwriters management committee has frequently monitored and discussed the current mood of group meetings throughout its history and endeavoured to introduce measures to temper or stimulate the prevailing atmosphere. I understand anecdotally that the group gained a local reputation for dispensing tough criticism and I’m sorry if we’ve proved unable to address this. We have always been aware of walking the line of constructive criticism and have done what we can to keep to this path. The difficulty is that the most fruitful feedback is often the hardest to hear and so, while this needs to be communicated supportively, it does need to be communicated otherwise the feedback offered is worthless.
Don’t bring your ‘baby’ to writers’ group
It’s important to recognise that feedback is a two-way process. If there’s an etiquette around giving feedback, there is a concurrent one in receiving it. No matter how circumspect, sensitive, and astute a writers’ group is in giving feedback, determination on the part of the recipient to take some kind of offence leads inevitably to toxicity.
One of the most significant advances you can make as a writer is learning to achieve a critical distance from your writing. Maintaining a strong emotional attachment to your words in the form in which you first set them down is a tyro’s error. You might well have fought long and hard to produce an initial draft, but this process has been only the opening battle in your struggle toward a saleable or producible work, and the sooner you accept this unwelcome truth, the better.
The consistent metaphor that inexperienced writers apply to their work is that it is their ‘baby’, and, as it’s their ‘baby’, everyone needs to understand how upset they’ll be if their literary progeny is criticised. It would, of course, be an evil individual who peered into a pram at an actual infant and declared, ‘My, but that’s a plug-ugly kid!’ And it would be a twisted writers’ group that did the figurative equivalent to a fledgling writer’s work, but it’s essential to recognise that it’s unreasonable to ask others’ opinions of your writing and expect them to coo over it as they might a newborn.
Although I dislike it when it’s used in attempts to force favourable responses, I find the ‘baby’ metaphor stands up well when considering how writers need to nurture their writing. Yes, it would be inappropriate to heap criticism upon an infant in a crib, but this is a mere faux pas compared to any parental attempts to confine their child permanently to the cradle. Parenting is a primal form of feedback necessary to bring a child to maturity. Withholding this contact in a moribund effort to preserve a child in its nascent state will rightly draw the attention of social services. Writers who ‘baby’ their work cling to it in a way contrived to stifle any chance of its progressing beyond their deadly embraces.
Learning to let go of your writing sufficiently to allow others to help you get some perspective on it amounts to a reprisal of a primal psychological crisis. Parental responses during Freud’s anal stage of psychosexual development[3] are fundamental in determining whether a child will develop neuroses around performing bodily functions. This early experience is recalled by an incipient writer’s discovery of what is appropriate to present to peers. The reactions of those peers are likely to determine, at least in part, the beginner’s future attitude towards writing. In a symbolic parental role, a writers’ group needs to be encouraging enough about early efforts (which may prove to have many strengths) to ensure a continued output, but critical enough to inspire improvement.
Southwest Scriptwriters was usually able to recognise a writer’s stage of development and give appropriate feedback. The collective intuition stalled sometimes when experienced writers struggled with the criticism the group deemed relevant because they too find this part of the writing process challenging. The more potential there was in a piece, the more ideas the group had about progressing it. A surfeit of feedback was, then, a compliment — although it might have felt like a backhanded one — and a writer’s best response was to take time after the meeting to digest this deluge and select from it the thoughts that seemed most insightful to apply in rewriting. Those who grow as writers use criticism to drive their creativity.
Notes and references
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