Not this, but that

Anita Shreve, E. Annie Proulx, Bram Stoker and Thomas Hughes have all had their peer reviews. There is good work going on everywhere - as you'd expect from such a competitive course. But I've been getting increasingly frustrated by these workshops. They go on for too long, at the expense of the opportunity to pick Louise's brains. We've all got a great deal to offer, but Louise is the one who's made it. Louise is the one who's living where we'd all like to be. Louise has been where we are now, and is able to translate her own experience into useful anecdotes, examples and advice. In comparison with Louise's lectures, the peer reviews are of limited value. We were critiquing John Irving last night, and almost ten minutes of an all-too-short two hours were spent debating the first name of one of the characters. Names are important - of course they are - but it reminded me too forcibly of a workshop session on another course, at which the work under discussion involved a character starving herself to death in a car. The writing was powerful and incredibly accomplished. The writer had asked the group to address some specific questions, and yet the session was dominated by three of the group banging on about the make and model of the car.

I freely admit that I don't enjoy workshop sessions unless they're with a small group of people who have deliberately elected to work together. For me, the value of the peer assessments this term has been to bring smaller groups together who are beginning to meet outside of the course. What I hope more than anything is that Louise will let the peer reviews go next term in favour of lectures, visits and writing exercises. If the reviews are to continue, I'll have to track down a half-hour glass.

The supremely efficient Ali gave me a recording of the session that I missed  - I had to be struck down with lergy on the one evening that there were no peer reviews, on which Louise was due to lecture about character for two hours. 

The more I write, and the more I fail, the more published and unpublished work I read, the more I realise that what other people think of your work is the least important thing about it. Writing that would be dismissed out of hand by every writing student on the planet gets published and makes a mint. Great writing gets published too. Other great writing doesn't get published. Some rubbish doesn't get published. There is simply no correlation whatsoever between the quality of the work and its chances of publication. Therefore, the only possible way forward is to write your story as you and you alone wish it to be written, and to be as unprecious about it as humanly possible.

And so I must stop, and get on with writing my story in the very small amount of time I have to do so.