From Words to Flash

These are notes for running a workshop

This evening I hope to illustrate that there's more to sentences than might first appear. Like stories, they can have tension and resolution, pacing and surprise. Getting a sentence right can take a long time but it's worth it - if an editor sees a bad sentence in the first paragraph, your script is likely to go straight in the SAE. We're going to look at words first, then try to calibrate our sensibilities by looking at good and bad sentences, then we'll try to assess some sentences before trying to write our own. At the end we might get as far as writing little stories.

As we'll see later, people disagree about the goodness of sentences. I'm going to focus more on form than content; I'm not going to highlight sentences for their wisdom.

Words

However complex the sentences, they're always made up of words, so we'll start by sensitizing ourselves to the building blocks though we're not going to focus on individual words today.

Ex 1 What are your favorite words (you may like them for their meaning or merely their sound). What are your least favorite words.

Dylan Thomas liked "drome". Some people don't like "garaged" or "to medal"

In poetry books you'll sometime see provocative lists of forbidden words ("shards", "gossamer", "fester", "frond", "lambent","shimmer" etc) but of course, it's not that easy. They say of weeds that they're only flowers in the wrong place. One might say a similar thing about unpopular words.

One way to try to improve a sentence is to replace some of the words by more interesting ones mined from a thesaurus - replacing "red" by "vermillion", "road" by "thoroughfare", "bird" by "lesser spotted warbler" etc. Alas, a sentence full of pretty words might not be pretty. One misplaced word, however interesting, might destroy a sentence.

Today I'm going to work on the assumption that "if you look after the sentences the words will look after themselves". If you want to see how tackle a sentence word by word, take a look at Jim Murdoch's blog where Jim Murdoch tells us how he spent 3.5 hours trying to get a sentence right, or look at the University of Rouen's collection of Flaubert's scripts

Sentences

Now we're going to study some sentences. First we'll look at the extremes

Bad sentences?

In "PN Review 185" Frederic Raphael spends 4 large pages attacking the prose quality of Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach". For example, he quotes his sentence -"Two youths in dinner jackets served them from a trolley parked outside in the corridor, and their comings and goings through what was generally known as the honeymoon suite make the waxed oak boards squeak comically against the silence", commenting "'Parked outside in the corridor' is another stock phrase, in which 'outside' is superfluous and 'parked' witless. The repeated use of the copular after the comma appends a tail too long to be supported, most of it ('comings and goings … generally known as the honeymoon suite … comically') redundant. Who cares what the honeymoon suite was generally called when we are already in it? If you use your imagination, you may guess that it had a considerably less brochuresque nickname among the staff, whose consciousness we are supposed to be sharing. Let it pass; what was comic about the squeak, if comic is right, has surely to be that someone - Florence, Edward, the 'youths' - found it so. In which case, in whom and how did the comedy express itself?" (p.45).

I've seen far worse sentences than that. Some of the ones below come from famous writers -

Ex 2 - Can you improve these sentences? Do any make you wince?

1. Having pitched the tents, the horses were fed and watered
2. Before describing what happened, the background to these events must be understood
3. What a beautiful sky, she thought to herself as she ran slowly along the narrow road.
4. More than one person lives in this house.
5. On holiday her car got scratched.
6. On a late winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
7. She wore a dress the same color as her eyes her father brought her from San Francisco
8. Craig stared into the mirror and squinted his eyes, for a moment he could almost see his brother staring back at him.
9. There were less people there than I'd expected.
10. Abstracting the face of the student from the file, the probationer took it to his superior.
11. He and his group swelled in number.

There's an old joke - "I know a man with a wooden leg called Jim". "What's the name of his other leg?". 1 and 2 are from "A Student's Guide to Writing" (Gordon Taylor). 6 is by Norman Mailer - first line of "Harlot's Ghost". 7 is from "Star" by Danielle Steel. The last two are from "The Afghan" by Frederick Forsyth

Good sentences?

Joseph Epstein chose this as the best first sentence in literature - "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Anna Karenina, Tolstoy). Fish's "How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One" (HarperCollins, 2011) doesn't mention this. He suggests that you use good sentences as models.

Ex 3: Study 2 of Fish's favorites "And I shall go on talking in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars." (Joyce) "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (Fitzgerald).

Here's one response to the Fitzgerald sentence: I love how it's so tantalizingly close to iambic pentameter - 5 iambs followed by 4 and 1/2.The cadence carries the reader forward in the first phrase with four staccato syllables. The choppiness of the second phrase brings the current's restraint to life, interrupting the flow of the sentence. The final phrase glides easily, but the missing twentieth syllable leaves the reader anticipating more. One can imagine the novel's last sentence repeating endlessly, beginning again where it left off. And of course that's the point. The art of the sentence is in its structure as much as its words.

How to study sentences

I think the quality of a sentence isn't as objective as the previous comments imply. Let's evaluate some sentences, learn how to talk about sentences. Punctuation is important, so we'll consider that too.

Ex 4 Punctuate and study this - It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

With this and similar exercises supply it without punctuation and get them to guess the author and add punctuation. This the first sentence of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"

This dates from a time when books were often read out. Punctuation indicated where to pause, rather than indicating logical structure.

Ex 5 Punctuate and study this - When they entered the room, he was very dead, maybe three or four days dead, since no one at the hotel had seen him around for some time

It's by Margot McCamley and it comes from Writing Magazine, May 2012. They have an "Under the Microscope" feature where they study the first 300 words of a novel.

Here are some suggestions by James McCreet

• Start with "He was very dead when they entered the room ..."
• "The sentence as it stands cannot use a comma before maybe"
• "quite halting and convoluted. This final clause overloads it with information when it needs to have impact and focus"

Ex 6 Punctuate and study - The April day was soft and bright, and poor Dencombe, happy in the conceit of reasserted strength, stood in the garden of the hotel, comparing, with a deliberation in which, however, there was still something of langour, the attractions of easy strolls

It's the first sentence of Henry James' "The Middle Years"

Note that there are lots of opposites. Here are some notes about it from "next word, better word" by Stephen Dobyns (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

• "James used these commas to call attention to important words, used them in fact as line breaks are often used in poetry", p.129
• "begins with an independent clause; the tone is straightforward and somewhat optimistic ... Rhythmically, we notice the clause is four iambs, which contributes to its lightness.", p.129
• "The second independent clause has seven commas, which ensures no consistent rhythm can be established. This rhythmic disruption, as it were, arises directly from the word "poor" ... Dencombe is "poor" because of his health, but also because he is deceived.", p.129
• "The modifying phrase between the subject, Dencombe, and the verb, "stood," the following dependent clause and string of prepositional phrases create tension by delaying verbs and direct objects, but they also in their progression and rhythm imitate the languor of Dencombe's thought [which] leads to a slightly humorous direct object", p.129
• "As with a classic Latinate sentence, James's second independent clause accumulates meaning until it reaches its most important words.", p.130
• "James's sentence keeps us from being able to anticipate its direction and controls the speed at which we read it, while the word "poor" provides us with suspense enough to care about that direction", p.130

Ex 7 Punctuate and study this sentence - There was a little stoop of humility as she passed through the door, into the larger but darker library beyond, a hint of frailty, an affectation of bearing more than her fifty-nine years, a slight bewildered totter among the grandeur that her daughter now had to pretend to take for granted.

From "The Stranger's Child", Alan Hollinghurst

Here are some notes - "humility" has rather quickly elided into "affectation," and the point of view has shifted by the end of the sentence, and the physical movement through the rooms accompanies a gradual inner movement that progresses through four parallel clauses, each of which, though legato, suggests a slightly different take on things

Note how these sentences have a shape - they have tension and release, the form of the sentence emulates the mood. They flow. But try this

Ex 8 Punctuate and study this sentence - Oddly enough, she was one of the most thoroughgoing sceptics he had ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make up to account for her, so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others), possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (more an exercise in punctuation). If you have the time, try this

Ex 9 Punctuate and study this sentence - No, I don't know them," he said, but instead of vouchsafing so simple a piece of information, so very unremarkable a reply, in the natural conversational tone which would have been appropriate to it, he enunciated it with special emphasis on each word, leaning forward, nodding his head, with at once the vehemence which a man imparts, in order to be believed, to a highly improbable statement (as though the fact that he did not know the Guermantes could be due only to some strange accident of fortune) and the grandiloquence of a man who, finding himself unable to keep silence about what is to him a painful situation, chooses to proclaim it openly in order to convince his hearers that the confession he is making is one that causes him no embarrassment, is in fact easy, agreeable, spontaneous, that the situation itself--in this case the absence of relations with the Guermantes family--might very well have been not forced on, but actually willed by him, might arise from some family tradition, some moral principle or mystical vow which expressly forbade his seeking their society.

Proust. Translation by C.K.Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.

Sentence length

These sentences are growing longer. Is there any limit?

• Jeet Thayil’s debut novel Narcopolis (ManBooker-shortlisted in 2012) begins with a 5 page sentence
• "The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (5 pages)
• Molly's soliloquy in "Ulysses"
• Jonathan Coe's novel "The Rotters' Club" (2001) ends with a 33-page sentence (13,955 words)
• Ed Parks' novel "Personal Days" ends with a sentence over 16,000 words long.
• "Dancing Lessons" (Hrabal) is a single 117 page sentence
• "The Gates of Paradise" (Jerzy Andrzejewski, 1960) consists of two sentences, the first 158-pages long and the final one 5 words.

Writing sentences

We get into habits when writing sentences. The next exercise strives to break those habits by varying structure while keeping the words the same.

Ex 10 Use the all the following phrases in 1st person, past tense sentences. No embellishments - just stick to the given information. "Jim", "purple armchair", "blow his tea cool" (or "blowing his tea cool", or "the better to blow his tea cool"), "talking" (or "talked"), "Arabella", " resigned amusement on her face" or ("an expression of resigned amusement on Arabella's face"), "walked into the room" (or "walking into the room"), "I saw". First write the sentence that comes most naturally to you, then try some variations

Adapted from an Emma Darwin blot post. Get people to produce sentences, then discuss the ones below

Here are some of the alternatives you could have produced. Which is best?

1. I walked into the room and saw that Jim had sat down in the purple armchair, the better to blow his tea cool and talk to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face.
2. Walking into the room I saw that Arabella, with an expression of resigned amusement on her face, was being talked to by Jim, who had sat down in the purple armchair the better to blow his tea cool.
3. Arabella had an expression of resigned amusement on her face, as I saw when I walked into the room, and was talking to Jim, who was blowing his tea cool as he sat in the purple armchair.
4. Jim was sitting down in the purple armchair and talking to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face while she watched him blowing his tea cool, as I saw when I walked into the room.
5. The resigned amusement on Arabella's face, as I saw when I walked into the room, was caused by watching Jim sitting in the purple armchair blowing his tea cool and talking to her.
6. Talking to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face as I saw when I walked into the room, and blowing his tea cool, was Jim, who was sitting in the purple armchair.
7. Sitting in the purple armchair I saw Jim, who was blowing his tea cool, and the resigned amusement on Arabella's face as he talked to her which I saw when I walked into the room.
8. Sitting in the purple armchair and talking to Arabella was Jim, blowing his tea cool, and I saw when I walked into the room that she had an expression of resigned amusement on her face.
9. Blowing his tea cool as he sat in the purple armchair was Jim, and I saw as I walked into the room that he was talking to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face.

Emma Darwin suggests that A good basic principle is to stick with the order in which your view-point-character perceives things, which is likely to be 1) in this example. 4) is an example of what I call 'zig-zagging', which starts a little way in and then jumps back to the beginning. Would your narrator take more notice of Jim or Arabella? Would s/he observe their emotion along with their action, as in 5), or only after a general survey of the room, as in 1)? 7) is a mess.

If you were allowed to use any words in this sentence, how might you write it? Perhaps you could hint that there's something about the situation that surprizes the narrator.

Short Fiction

If you go through each sentence in a story of yours, generating a list of alternatives and assessing them, it might take a while. Maybe it's time to consider shorter forms. There are many to choose from - memoes, recipes, adverts, anecdotes, lists, vignettes, shopping lists, etc. More recently there's "ketai fiction" (to fit in a text message), "Twitter Lit" (to fit Twitter's 140 character feed), etc. There used to be markets for these genres (fillers, Readers Digest). In his collection "This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You" (Bloomsbury, 2012), Jon McGregor has 2 stories that are fewer than 15 words long. Markets are re-emerging. Let's first try an easy genre.

6 word stories

How many words do you need for a story? 6 might be enough. Examples include

• For sale: baby shoes, never worn - Hemingway
• Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer? - Eileen Gunn
• Longed for him. Got him. Shit. - Margaret Atwood

Ex 11 Write some 6 word stories

Flash

What is Flash? According to the Bridport competition it's a maximum of 250 words that "contains the classic story elements: protagonist, conflict, obstacles or complications and resolution. However unlike the case with a traditional short story, the word length often forces some of these elements to remain unwritten: hinted at or implied in the written storyline." It overlaps free-form poetry at one extreme, and short stories at the other. Pieces like Forché's "The Colonel" have appeared both in Flash and poetry anthologies. Often the limit's more than 250 words - 1000 is common.

Here are 2 from the web

• Bedtime Story
  "Careful honey, it's loaded," he said re-entering the bedroom.
  Her back rested against the headboard. "This for your wife?"
  "No. Too chancy. I'm hiring a professional."
  "How about me?"
  He smirked. "Cute. But who'd be dumb enough to hire a lady hit man?"
  She wet her lips, sighting along the barrel. "Your wife."
  (Jeffrey Whitmore)
• The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door... (Fredric Brown)

Ex 12 Put people in pairs. Get them to think up a scenario where someone has to explain an awkward situation. Get them to write an Abcedarian, each person writing alternate sentences - begin the first sentence with A, the second with B and so on.

Impro comedians can do this on the spot

Conclusions

We've looked at individual words and how their energy can be harnessed in a carefully punctuated sentence. The structure conveys its own meaning, like a bass-line mood accompaniment to the melody of the words' meaning. Not all readers will notice this bass-line, but they'll feel it, and some editors will look out for it.

We've looked at what to avoid and emulate, how length and clause order can be varied. What next? As an exercise, print out a story of yours one sentence per paragraph and consider each sentence in isolation. Are they of similar length? Do they all have a subject-verb-object structure? After labouring so long over so few words, you may no longer have the stamina to write 3000 word stories. Don't worry - shorter stories will do!

• When a competition maximum word limit in 3000, don't forget that a 500 word story might win.
• You might be able to get your piece accepted as a prose-poem.

Finally - if nothing else, get the key sentences right!

Some URLs

• sixwordstories and narrative magazine's 6-word stories
• about long sentences
• about sentences
• a long sentence
• one-sentence stories
• a list of Flash outlets, sorted by word-length

With help from John Riley, Janice D. Soderling et al.

People who need people (character workshop)

In some types of prose, the author needs to know their characters well, so well that the author might recognise them if they saw them in the street. Today we'll try some workshop exercises on character development. We won't have time to produce any finished work, but maybe one or two of the characters created today will walk into your next story. We'll first look at a simple way to create viable characters, then look at character development in more detail.

First impressions, habits and surprises

Exercise 1 - Hi!

When new characters appear in some novels they're immediately described. Here are a few shortened examples from "An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" by P.D. James

• Leaming - "wearing a grey suit with a small stand-away collar which showed a narrow band of white cotton at the throat ... She was tall and her hair, prematurely white, was cut short and moulded to her head like a cap. Her face was pale and long" (p.17)
• Lunn - "stockily built young man dressed in an open-necked white shirt, dark breeches and tall boots ... large mud-brown eyes ... beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world. But their beauty emphasized rather than redeemed the unattractiveness of the rest of him" (p.22)
• Marklands - "All three reminded her of horses. They had long, bony faces, narrow mouths about strong, square chins, eyes set unattractively close, and grey, coarse-looking hair" (p.40)
• the Tillings - "strong dark heads held high on usually short necks, and their straight noses above curved, foreshortened upper lips" (p.72)
• de Lasterie - "an oval face with a neat slender nose, a small but beautifully formed mouth, and slanted eyes of a striking deep blue which gave her whole face an oriental appearance at variance with the fairness of her skin and her long blonde hair." (p.72)
• Stevens - "a stocky, bearded young man with russet curly hair and a spade-shaped face" (p.72)
• police surgeon - "a fat, dishevelled little man, his face crumpled and petulant as a child when forcibly woken from sleep" (p.182)
• Dalgliesh - "tall, austere ... over forty at least ... dark, very tall and loose-limbed ... His face was sensitive without being weak" (p.208)

How would P.D.James describe you?

Get people to do this on sheets of paper. Collect in results. Read a few out and see if people can guess who the person is.

Are all the senses used? Is it a good literary style? It's realistic in the sense that when you meet someone you might first recognise a face, a name, and a voice. But what then? How can you make your characters believable so that readers care about them? One answer is "make them like real people". But what are real people like? I decided to find out by going to the library. In the Cambridge central library there's a book called "Creating Fictional Characters" by Jean Saunders. Who is this Jean Saunders person? When I read that she's "written well over 100 novels ... She is also a frequent enthusiastic lecturer on cruise ships" my heart sunk, but actually the book's ok. She points out that for characters to be convincing they may need to be consistent (for example, their name shouldn't change during the story!). But she also has a section called "Unstereotyping the stereotype". People are a mix of the predictable and the surprising. The predictable features aid identification and empathy, making surprises possible. E.M. Forster wrote that "the test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way."

The next 2 exercises will focus on these issues

Exercise 2 - Habits aren't boring

P.D. James focused on faces - long, oval, spade-shaped, etc. Many of us do, sometimes at the expense of other features. A colleague at work has slight face-blindness. He says he's "very good at recognising people from a distance (from their posture / how they walk / etc)". They say that the blind have a more acute sense of hearing. He's probably got a more acute sense of mannerism. Writers need to develop a similarly acute sense. People's mannerisms help define them and can be used to develop a leit-motif - the way they keep fluffing their hair up, how they play with a pen. What to do they do with their other hand while brushing their teeth? When they talk on the phone do they doodle? What to they do while waiting in a supermarket queue? Who would never put their hands on their hips? Who often does it? These habits are often hard to notice and shouldn't be underestimated. You may only realise them when they're broken - an early signs of mental problems perhaps, those little things that can be so revealing to those who know.

Write down some gestural habits of people you know (you might be so used to them that you don't notice them?) or have seen on TV. What features might impressionists pick up on? They might be things that others do as well, or they might be unique. I'm interested with what sort of actions you come up with.

Exercise 3 - Quirks, Secrets and Surprises

You can try to make characters "interesting" by making them eccentric, but little quirks and secrets are more useful. A character's guilty secrets can bring a character to life. If you know a character well, you'll know these things about them.

What's in the zipped compartment of a character's handbag or wallet? What TV programs do they guiltily stay in for? What do they eat when alone that they don't eat with others? Which member of their family have they actually never really liked? What are your secrets? How do you give yourself a treat? List the answers (or those of a "friend"). Alternatively, write a paragraph or 2 (or a plot idea) about what happens when a person's secret is suddenly discovered.

Character construction and development

We'll take a break from workshopping for a moment to look at character development. What is a "memorable character"? When someone has "bags of personality" what does that mean? Jimmy Savile was described as a "larger than life character" - why? Who has charisma? Mandela? Hitler?

Here's one way to build characters up

• Create a scrapstore of bodyparts and behaviours - habits, quirks and facial features. This is something that actors do. Where can you go to pick up ideas?
  • Magazines - "Hello!" magazine
  • TV - Reality TV; fly-on-the-wall TV; The Fast Show; YouTube. Forget about plot. It might help to turn the sound off.
  • People-watching - remember, it's parts of behaviour you're interested in, not complete people.
  • Lifestyle consultants - they're the experts. Books like Edward de Bono's "How to be more interesting" offer tips
  Us writers are lucky - if we're attending a tedious business meeting or social event we can start people-watching, collecting material. If your spouse accuses you of ogling, reply that you're just doing research. If a workmate wonders why you're reading, "How to be more interesting" say it's not for you, it's for a character in your novel.
• Construct a character from the bits and behaviours. Avoid the temptation to make everything symbolic, to make everything fit neatly together. Barthes suggested that by adding details that are non-literary and arbitrary, with no symbolic value you can create a "ring of truth" - "The Reality Effect".
• The result might initially be a Frankenstein's Monster. Don't worry. Wait for a bolt of lightning to bring the character to life. Once the character moves, the useless bits will drop off as you re-write

You might feel that the resulting character's contrived but it works well enough for me! Some rough edges don't do any harm - they add to the realism. In my poetry book I've got deathbed scenes, etc. One reviewer said my stuff had the "unmistakeable authority of experience"; "The strength of the personae in the pamphlet is the thing that attracts attention" which is embarrassing because my stuff's all lies.

A character needs something that sparks them into life. An experience can be character-building, and they say "cometh the hour, cometh the man". The next bunch of exercises looks at situations, language and settings that can give birth to characters or enhance them. Remember, any advice you might give to a friend might also be applied to your characters, and vice versa.

Exercise 4 - Show not tell

Where do characters come from? Sometimes, especially in a first novel, they come from inside the author. Such characters can end up looking and sounding all the same. Characters are often copied from relatives or friends. This can be risky, even if traits are combined and genders changed (it's been claimed that "The Godfather" was based on the author's mother). Let's try an exercise on that theme

Think about your mother or father. Make a list of 3 qualities that describe him or her. Write a paragraph that captures some or all of those characteristics through significant detail. No word on your list should appear in the paragraph

Get people to do this on sheets of paper and swap papers afterwards. Get people to guess the qualities.

Exercise 5 - Tales of the Unexpected

You can find out a lot about people by how they react to unusual situations. Write a paragraph (a scenario plus plot) about a family member meeting a famous person unexpectedly. Alternatively, at customs they find something strange (not illegal or rude) in your character's luggage. Your character has to explain how it got there. Invent a scenario.

Exercise 6 - On the spot

Once you've created your characters you can develop them by interviewing them as if they were real. You can find some questionnaires online. Gotham Writers' Workshop offers a questionnaire with questions like

• What makes your character laugh out loud?
• What is her biggest fear? Who has she told this to? Who would she never tell this to? Why?
• Your character is doing intense spring cleaning. What is easy for her to throw out? What is difficult for her to part with? Why?

Suggest some questions that might provoke interesting responses.

Exercise 7 - What's in a name?

JK Rowling has revived interest in character names. Non-fantasy writers also need to be careful when naming characters. Invent a few names, or write your first reaction to one or more of these names. Which ones would you hesitate to go on a blind date with? Lavinia Blackmun, Wladziu Valentino, Sharon Smith, John Thomas, Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong.

Think up a character type and a genre. Now think up a name.

(Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong is Dido; Wladziu Lee Valentino was Liberace).

Exercise 8 - Scene, then heard

If you create sufficiently vivid locations, characters will emerge

Close your eyes. Try to imagine yourself in the kitchen where you grew up as it was then. Look around. How many chairs are there? Where's the tea-pot kept? (on the fridge on a knitted tea cosy). Where's the litter bin (by the back-door; it's a pedal-bin with a broken pedal). What's on the top shelves at the back? (spare keys). Now have your mother walking in as she was then. She thinks you're the home help. She asks what you're looking for. What would you say?

Conclusions

Once you've got a character, what next? Jean Saunders writes - "I sincerely believe that you must be prepared to love all the characters you create" but I think that's going a bit far. Alternatively you can

• treat them "like galley slaves" (Nabokov)
• put them in a room and wait to see what happens (Beryl Bainbridge).
• Fitzgerald, somewhere between the 2, said that "Character is plot, plot is character".

One tip though - don't do all the character development beforehand; leave some to happen during the story. The characters at the end shouldn't be the same as the characters at the start.

I hope you too have been changed a little by this evening.

See also

• Characterisation-in-action (Emma Darwin)

Genre and critiques

To varying extents, the formal features of genres establish the relationship between producers and interpreters. Alastair Fowler goes so far as to suggest that 'communication is impossible without the agreed codes of genre' [1]. It's difficult to separate Mainstream pieces from Genre pieces - the mainstream's only a loosely related mass of more popular genres. There are even people who look upon each piece as a unique sub-genre, self-defining a way in which it can be read. Genres make life tricky for critiquers though. Pieces by Agatha Christie or Robbe-Grillet don't have character development - should we worry? Plot-driven works like Harry Potter use character development as a filler between action scenes - is that better? Gertrude Stein's repetition and restricted vocabulary are part of her game. Were Hemingway's later mannerisms as vital?

Once you're inside a genre, sub-genres appear, sometimes replicating the genres in the higher layer. Within Science Fiction for example there's hard-SF (written by highly qualified scientists), speculative-SF (idea-driven), comic-SF, space-opera, "1984", "The Handmaid's Tale", etc. Each sub-genre has implicit rules and priorities - it's easy to pluck a paragraph from Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and enrich its variety of structure and vocabulary, but doing so may well be counter-productive. There's no reason why expert scientists should make expert SF writers, though as readers they're best placed to offer the kind of factual critique which fans will appreciate much more than the rewriter's literary suggestions.

In this context where do criticisms like "sloppy writing" stand? Van Gogh's a terribly sloppy painter compared to Vermeer, and Vermeer's a mess compared to some Hyperrealists. And yet one doesn't want "it's a genre piece" to be a license for any type of writing ("so what if my story has a few spelling mistakes - so has Finnegan's Wake"). The genre competence of an experienced reader needs to be both nimble and creative. To readers who've read Fantasy and Realism but nothing in between, a piece of Magic Realism may seem an unfortunate mix falling between 2 stools.

Criticising a text might be tantamount to criticising the genre, and someone with no previous experience of the genre will have a hard job. Genre-sensitive criticism (aware of, but not subservient to, the demands of the genre) tries to relate the piece to its genre, using terms like

• "Good of its type" - a description sometimes applied to a good example in an unappreciated genre.
• "Stylist" - a writer whose elegance of prose exceeds what the genre promises (Forsythe for his spy thrillers?)

Because of this genre-related complication, some critics try to focus on factors which are common across genres. "Well-written prose" may not be a requirement for swashbuckling SF but surely there are some standards which apply to many genres. However, the value of elegant prose in itself is contestable. We're used to the idea that dialog can legitimately contain errors - after all, we're only human. The omniscient narrator is just another voice, and it's a genre issue (rather than one of quality or sophistication) as to whether that fact should be hidden. One can "show the working" - in a sense, all narrators are unreliable. A work's uniformity of narrative mode (or point of view) is also used as a supra-genre indicator of writerly skill, as is the writer's ability to make all readers think the same thing, or the author's ability to carry out his/her putative intentions. These too are genre-bound concepts though, considered ideologically suspect by some.

John Hartley argues that 'genres are agents of ideological closure - they limit the meaning-potential of a given text' [2] . Key psychological functions of genre are likely to include those shared by categorization generally - such as reducing complexity. This is a price we pay when trying to communicate, but genres can play a role in innovation too (in "The Name of the Rose", perhaps), providing familiar ground for readers to stand on while they come to terms with the unfamiliar.

New genres emerge from old much as new species emerge

• Mutation - a variation on an existing genre: often a change in the proportions of the ingredients
• Combination - a fusion of 2 or more genres: magic realism for example. Some hybrids may be sterile.
• Arrested development (neotony) - e.g. a sketch treated as a finished work
• New habitats - a new media will encourage new or adapted genres

As usual, once a reader strategy is identified, writers will exploit it. Readers look for categorisations that increase coherence and satisfaction. Writers such as Borges take advantage of this desire, leading the reader into one genre-context before surprising them with another. More radical genre experiments abound - "The effect which many identify with the Postmodern is produced by defeating readers' generic expectations" [3].

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1. "A history of English literature", Fowler, 1989, p.216
2. "Cultural Studies (Studies in Culture & Communication)", O'Sullivan et al, Routledge, 1994, p.128
3. "The Ideology of Genre", Thomas O. Beebee, Pennsylvania State University Press. 1994

Psychology, Psychiatry and Writers Groups

The relationship between creativity and madness has long been studied, and creative writing is frequently used for therapeutic purposes. Both institutional and open-access writers groups offer further opportunities for patients and for researchers. An awareness of literary fashions and the current role of writers groups will help maximise the benefits.

Writers and the Self

Subconsciously or otherwise, people may read literature for psychological benefits. Zunshine (2006), Mar, Oatley, Djikic, etc suggest that reading fiction is a kind of simulation of social interactions. "After being given either fiction or non-fiction from the New Yorker, those who read the fiction piece scored higher on a test of social reasoning" ("The Psychologist", V21 No12, p.1030-1). Compared to the general reading public and even to other creative people, writers might have more need of these benefits

• "Nancy Andreasen has tracked 30 students from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. 80% had mood disorders (30% is average amongst similar people who are non-writers). 43% had some degree of manic-depressive illness (10% is average). 2 committed suicide over the 15 years of the study" ("Psychology Today", April 1987)
• "A great many writers find relating both painfully difficult and beside the point. The same qualities that make them writers - self-direction, independence, intelligence, skepticism, a love of solitude - also incline them in the direction of isolation, alienation and a carelessness about relating." (Maisel, 1999)

Writing may be a more useful form of simulation than passive reading, helping practitioners to

• analyse, prepare and anticipate human responses
• see other points of view
• create retrospective autobiographical narratives to analyse their past and plan behavioural reprogramming. Some writers create online personas, especially in the "fanfic" world - Fan fiction and its communities have long been of interest to academic researchers - see Henry Jenkins (1992)

Schizophrenia and depression are the mental illnesses most linked to creativity in the historical context (Schuldberg, 2001). He suggests that most often,

• artists who focus on emotions and feelings in their work are manic-depressive. Sass writes that poets like William Blake, Lord Byron, Shelley and Keats all suffered from manic-depressive illness
• artists who remove themselves from the world are more often associated with schizophrenia. Creative people with schizophrenia often experience a sense of alienation from the self, from their bodies and from the world. They become hyper-self-conscious but are able to step outside themselves, allowing a more cerebral form of creativity.

Some symptomatic mental traits could be seen as useful to writers, though the benefits tend to be specialised.

• Obsession - writers need to be determined and focussed
• Detachment; asocial distancing - writers need to be observers ("a poet even as falling down the stairs, will observe his fall" - Holub). A lack of empathy may assist observation. Also, staying away from people frees up more time for writing. Awareness of a lack of social empathy may result in compensating strategies - increased observation, etc.
• Asocial self-revelation/freedom - freed from the constraints of politeness and political correctness, writers might produce more interesting (or at least provocative) work. This could be another compensating strategy, hoping to encourage a response.
• Decontextualised (field-independent) thinking - randomness, chaotic/original thinking "outside the box", and finding unusual connections between things may help with creativity.
• Multi-level thinking - a characteristic of some schizoid thinking is the ability to see the underlying media without inferring meaning, seeing pattern as well as plot; noticing fonts, wordplay.
• Sensitivity - Highly Sensitive Persons and "neurotic" people might see things that others miss.
• Inhibition - excessive control may lead to an interest in Formalism and Oulipo
• Private language - Unusual forms of expression may result in interesting (albeit intractable) work.

The Writer in Society

"There have always been people in societies and cultures who have different experiences of reality compared with the majority, and there's always been an overlap between people who have those gifts, or insights, and people who are identified as suffering from mental illnesses" (Thomas, 2007). Social acceptance depends on the literary trends of the period. Some literary styles align with particular mental problems.

• Romanticism - trying to be at one with nature presupposes a split between the mind and the world
• Modernism - reading Sass's "Madness and Modernism" one might easily believe that modernism is dominated by schizoids
• Nouveau Roman - might suit the mind-blind
• Confessionalism - a school of poetry that merges well with therapy - easier to do if you don't care what others think of you, or the effects on family and friends
• Surrealism/Dada - these schools are based on random or subconscious images
• Ermetismo (Hermeticism) - a school whose poems were characterized by unorthodox structure, illogical sequences, and highly subjective language.
• Elliptical poetry (a term coined in 1998 by Stephen Burt) - "Full of illogic, of associative leaps, their poems resembled dreams, performances, speeches, or pieces of music"

Patients might consider themselves lucky if they're born into a era whose literary style matches their symptoms. Currently there's no dominant literary mode. The Web has helped like-minded people keep in touch, leading to a more fragmented literary scene where minority genres more easily survive.

Social Integration

If writers are going to support themselves by writing nowadays, they will need to teach, so social adaption is useful. It may also improve the chances of wider publication. The risk from the writer's viewpoint is that if (as Freud believed) their writing's a symptom, then it might disappear as they become more "healthy". Several normalisation options are on offer

• "Asylum" - rather than change the writer to fit society, new surroundings can be found to suit the writer. Some art colonies (and academic settings) are big enough to be self-contained worlds within which eccentricities are tolerated, even encouraged, creating their own norms that visitors adapt to.
• Borderline cases - those with borderline symptoms may be more strongly encouraged to tweak their style rather than adopt wholesale changes - e.g. writing a narratively normal piece with a mad person safely compartmentalised as the main character; normalising the appearance of their manuscripts and cover letters.
• Drugs - These may be offered to make life easier, but they may dull writing. Schuldberg suggests that drugs blunt the creativity of patients with manic-depressive illness more than that of schizophrenic patients.
• CBT - behaviour change (e.g. being encouraged to meet people) may take the edge off writing or use up time.

Some neurotic people have a high tolerance for loneliness, and may find writing a useful way to gain esteem while being alone. Socialising may not "cure" writing, it may merely take away the opportunities for writing, leading eventually to lowered self-esteem. However, socialising with writers is less problematic.

Writers Groups

"Seizing on a traditional trope of the poet as exceptional individual, certain individuals receiving health-care who feel themselves to be exceptional apparently adopt poetic discourse as part of that role", (Fiona Sampson, in "Kicking Daffodils", 1997). Some writers groups exist solely for people with diagnosed mental problems (see Survivors Poetry, etc). These and private study can help a writer's inner development, but before the writer emerges fully into society they can join a halfway house - a more public writers' group. The semi-structured discourse within a restricted domain coupled with tolerance of quirks makes such groups a welcoming environment. They range from one-off events to Master's degrees.

• Amateur - Local writers groups are as popular as ever. Some focus more on literary appreciation than production. Their repetitive, undemanding format offers newcomers the chance to hone social and literary skills prepared in isolation. They usually have annual membership fees. In the bigger cities there are performance venues too, with open-mike sessions. Weekend and week-long residential courses are increasingly popular.
• Academic - There are creative writing evening classes in most towns. UK universities are slowly catching up with their US counterparts (over 800 degree programs in creative writing exist in the States). Some are part-time with low-residency options.

Technical competence, commercial success, emotional authority and educational status all contribute to a complex web of interaction in a group. In an educational context the tutors have a potential conflict between academic assessment and encouraging self-discovery. Autobiographical writing is an exploitable grey area, especially when authenticity is considered a positive literary feature. "Creative Non-fiction" (encompassing autobiography and personal essay) is on the increase.

How writers can use a public writers group as a support group

At one writers group I attended in the 80s, a subset huddled at the tea-break who seemed to have little in common. I later found out that they'd all been to the same local mental hospital. Therapy professionals who recommend patients to go to particular groups should perhaps attend one first - their atmosphere can vary a lot. Some groups offer tea, biscuits and companionship with a stable membership, others are competitive hot-houses. Some benefits of using writers groups are that they're cheaper than evening classes, casual, less committal, and (as opposed to self-help therapy groups) the person is not stigmatised as a patient. However, the writers need to be self-analytical enough to exploit the benefits, and meetings can be rather unstructured with difficult members. Advice includes

• trying an online group first.
• being prepared to face robust criticism that judges commercial potential more than depth of insight. Nervousness is common when presenting work, and crying's not unknown.
• looking upon all expression (comments as well as explicit self-analysis pieces) as revelation. The more gestures, the more that's said and written, the more there is to analyse.
• monitoring how much you speak in proportion to how much others speak, and checking the proportion of positive comments you make compared to negative ones.
• playing the game of wanting to be a writer, wanting to be published.
• studying theory in order to defend idiosyncrasies on theoretical grounds. Finding an appropriate style. Finding role models. Mixing theory with person-centred comments.
• going to the pub with members afterwards to get more varied feedback.

How psychologists can use writers groups

Less well covered than links between creativity and mental health is the group dynamics of writers groups. It's a mutually beneficial topic. A university creative writing course might welcome multi-disciplinary interest from a psychology department, hoping to improve students' ability to benefit from (and run) workshops. Topics could include studying

• how a writer's style influences the type of criticism they offer, and how influential their comments are.
• how a person's psychological type affects their chosen genre - is fragmented work a reflection of, or reaction to, personality?
• how genre affect happiness/survival statistics - are confessional poets happier than similar people who don't write?
• workshop dynamics (the different types of leadership and dissent) and how groups reach consensus on a text

The morality of using a writers group in this way needs to be addressed. There are precedents (in literature as well as psychology - in the US particularly, writing tutors use teaching contexts as subject matter for their poems and stories nowadays), and the group organisers are often willing to volunteer. The organisers of writers group who I've met are used to one-off visits and bouts of strange behaviour.

References

• Richard M. Berlin (ed) (2008), "Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment and the Creative Process", John Hopkins University Press
• Vicki Betram (ed) (1997), "Kicking Daffodils", Edinburgh University Press p.261
• Stephen Burt (2009), "The Boston Review" May/June 2009
• Kay Redfield Jamison (1993), "Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament", Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
• Henry Jenkins (1992), "Textual Poachers", Routledge
• J.C. Kaufman and S.B. Kaufman (2009), "The Psychology of Creative Writing", Cambridge University Press
• Eric Maisel (1999), "Living the Writer's Life", Watson-Guptill, p.125
• Louis A. Sass (1992), "Madness and Modernism", Harvard University Press
• David Schuldberg (2001) Infinite Mind: Art and Madness
• Philip Thomas (2007) The Independent, Sunday, 18 March 2007
• Lisa Zunshine (2006) "Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel", Ohio State University Press
• The National Association for Poetry Therapy and the National Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy have information on training
• The UK's Poetry Society were/are involved with various projects - see their healthcare page.
• Survivor's poetry
• Inside the BellJar (a literary journal dedicated to providing a raw and honest insight into the complexity of mental illness)
• An investigation into the therapeutic benefits of reading in relation to depression and well-being

Mixed Reviews

How should one deal with reviews and critiques that don't all agree?

Books dealing with the issue

• Many years ago I.A. Richards wrote "Practical Criticism" (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929) in which he analysed the comments of a group of students who blind-read poetry.
• I think P. Hobsbaum in "Theory of Criticism" also covered this issue. He suggested that a good poem can support many interpretations (indeed, benefits from them) whereas a bad poem can't.

Critics vary because there are

• Inarticulate critics - people who can't find the right words for what they feel. I think in general critical language lags behind the works it tries to describe, but in any case, critics are more articulate in some areas than others (e.g. maybe some are sensitive to rhythm without having the terminology for it)
• Insensitive critics - Critics are likely to be more sensitive to some aspects of a work than to other aspects (and quite often they're more articulate about the aspects they respond to more strongly). When I use the word "sensitive" I don't mean just a traditional emotional reaction - people can be blind to form, the value of generative devices, etc. Critics may be unaware of their blind spots.
• Biased critics - Again, this is a limitation we all have to a lesser or greater extent. I think I tend to be a cynical critic: a shit-detector
• Inexperienced critics - It may be that better critics agree with each other more than worse critics do. Alternatively, "Lesser critics try to normalize, to chastise the poem for straying outside the expected parameters. Bad poets want to be certain more than they want to explore where a poem might be going" - Mike Alexander

A particular poem's best feature might be one that a particular critic's insensitive to but articulate about.

Comments vary because

• Some poems are prone to multiple-readings
• People misread poems or miss things (e.g. that the poem's an acrostic). People can correct themselves if they have a chance, and they should be given a chance (rather than being told they're wrong).
• People have different styles of commenting - I tend to deal with pattern before content. Others look for a human-interest angle first, etc. Some people ignore previous comments, others try to summarise views so far. Some people like saying the opposite of what others (perhaps particular others) say.

Convergence proceeds by

• Reducing the number of opinions. Sometimes a person's misreadings can be corrected, or minor differences ignored.
• Reducing the scope of differences - sometimes it's not the whole poem that attracts contrasting opinion but just a stanza (or final line)

In an interpretive community (a workshop) the various types of critic can be mutually beneficial - articulate critics can provide phrases for the inarticulate; the cynic can bring to light features that were overlooked in a gush of praise, etc. An online community is a miniature, accelerated version of culture at large.

Group dynamics has long been a subject for psychologists. Cults led by charismatic leaders (Jim Jones, Kuresh) might form one model for literary groups, as might self-help therapy groups. Obedience and conformance have been investigated. Some groups by their nature will contain people who dislike disagreement. Literary groups (like protest groups, etc) might attract those who are comfortable with lively debate - people join because they like being different. Asch's classic experiments have shown how easily people can deny the evidence of their own eyes when assessing something objective, submitting to the majority opinion. With poetry, where judgement is more subjective, more socially-defined, some people want the certainty that authority can provide, and trust the "leader".

Work has also been done to see how minorities can influence majority opinion. Flexible negotiation is best when differences are large. If differences are small, the minority often succeed best if they rigidly stick to their guns, though this risks accusations of dogmaticism.

A minority in a literary group can often hold views (about obscurity, obscenity, etc) which are held by a majority in society as a whole.

Another documented effect is that of "group polarization" where the group comes to an opinion that is in the same direction as the individual opinions, but more extreme (lingering self-doubts abated).

Online/Offline workshops

• It can be hard in a workshop context (especially amongst strangers?) to decide how to act upon contrasting comments. In a room it's easier to be one's own facilitator and to find out whether people in the light of the discussion have changed/converged their views.
• In an online forum one's never sure whether a critic has taken in what others have said. In a room, everyone hears all the comments and maybe there's more of a tendency to clump into factions even if there's no consensus.

How Facilitators can help

Though a diversity of interpretations is to be welcomed, it can be confusing. Facilitators can help by weeding out erroneous interpretations, consolidating similar interpretations, generalising interpretations, and trying to reduce the influence of egos on the course of discussions.

Richards (p.13) prioritised areas of interpretational difficulties as follows (note - the subgroups are mine)

• "Making out the plain sense", "Sensuous apprehension" - these concern recognition (we could perhaps add recognition of allusions to this). As Richards says (p.336) "Language is primarily a social product, and it is not surprising that the best way to display its action is through the agency of a group... We must cease to regard a misreading as a merely unlucky accident. We must treat it as the normal and probable event". By sharing perceptions a workshop can reduce the differences between members. The sooner this is done the better - sometimes a misinterpretation based on false initial perceptions remains even after the perceptions have been corrected.
• "Imagery" (especially visual), "Mnemonic irrelevances" (misleading personal allusions), "Stock Responses", "Sentimentality/Inhibition", "Doctrinal Adhesions" (e.g. the truth of political poems) - these concern reactions. There's more scope for individual differences. A workshop can help point out where reactions are idiosyncratic, but with these issues opinions can rarely be termed right or wrong. Much of the discussion is likely to be centred around these issues.
• "Technical presupposition", "General critical preconceptions" - Preconceptions lie behind the interpretations offered, and one of the benefits of workshops is that members can become aware of their preconceptions. But whereas people might in the course of a session change their opinion about an issue in the second subgroup, general preconceptions might take much longer to dislodge. The facilitators' aim is not so much to change preconceptions, but to challenge them enough for other preconceptions to be given a chance, thus widening aesthetic sensibilities.

Workshop poets usually want to know if their poem's any good and what parts they should re-write. A group can agree on the merit of a poem and which parts need work even if the members' justification of their opinions vary widely. In these cases facilitators can focus on outcomes.

Tact attacked

One of the more challenging problems that a workshop has to face is how to deal with poets who repeatedly present bad poems. The usual guideline is to be tactful. The benefit of this to the group is that it creates a more socially relaxed atmosphere, giving people a chance to learn in a supportive environment. The democratic, non-elitist mix of poets guarantees variety in the group. Tactfulness and honesty need not be at odds and after all, individuals can ask for honest comments either privately or to the whole group if they want. Moreover, newcomers to the group won't be scared away by fears of being adversely criticised. The guideline also makes it easier to stamp out gratuitous insults.

However, there are disadvantages as well, for the group and the individuals. To accurately express one's opinions is never easy, but to express them tactfully is harder still. In some groups even calling a poem bad constitutes a tactless insult. Tact too easily leads to bad poems being welcomed by

• Silence - soon filled by well-meaning comment from others
• Coded praise - praise that the inner circle know is derogatory (damning with faint praise)
• Diluted adverse criticism
• Hypocrisy - saying initially that it's ok then finding fault with most aspects of the poem.

All of these maintain the polite veneer. However the desire not to risk hurting the poet's feelings can spread beyond the lowest echelons. Reducing the range of critical comments can devalue the currency of criticism, producing wheelbarrows of "Great work!". Even if it doesn't, it leads to the strange situation of bad poetry getting fewer adverse comments than good poetry. The consequent development of false self-images and self-delusion can't be good.

Before we proceed further a distinction needs to be drawn between workshop comments and more academic criticism. The latter is concerned with quality for the benefit of buyers or readers, an exercise of comparing, contrasting and theory building. A workshop is in part a support group with improvement of the poem and poet as the purpose of quality evaluation, not the establishing of a pecking order. All kinds of people join workshops and for a variety of reasons. A workshop needs to decide how many of these reasons are within its scope to satisfy. Quality is not always foremost in the poet's mind. Catharsis or a political agenda may be more important to them. They may just want a shoulder to cry on. This variety is reflected in the response to deprecation. When a poem is adversely criticised

• the group may react to the critizer, rushing to the defence of the victim.
• the victim may have written a poem with sensitive personal content and may become very upset if their whole being is felt to be devalued.
• the victim may be unhinged enough to take obsessive revenge.

These are dangers that the workshop critic is more likely to encounter than is the academic critic because the risk of a poet identifying with his/her work is greater. Sometimes the critic makes such identification is more explicit. Of course, one should criticize the poem not the poet, but a consistent run of poems lead to plausible inferences. Also, while some good poets (e.g. Auden) can write awful poems, there are bad poems that only bad poets can write. Distinguishing between types of bad poems is a useful critical function. Sometimes the most direct way to improve the poems is to improve the poet. Perhaps they should be advised to take a break for a while, or read more, or think about why they write. It's even possible that the person might be more fulfilled in another field of creativity. It's worth taking the prospective poet aside to see how they feel about the comments their poems are receiving, because it's easy to miss the hints when they are presented through the smoke-screen of tactfulness.

I knew someone who did a 60 mile round trip each month rather than go to his local workshop whose tactfulness, he claimed, delayed his initial progress for a year or so. He was led to believe that the odd line or so needed tweaking. In fact, as he later realised, a radical overhaul was needed. He felt in retrospect that the people who at the time wrote better poems were getting direct, honest complimentary comments from him while he was getting watered down white lies, that he was not being treated with respect.

Some say that one should never discourage a poet: a poet might always improve, and artistic judgements may always be wrong - look at Hopkins, people say, look at Van Gogh! But both of these men survived discouragement, and if Van Gogh hadn't been discouraged from being a pastor, he might not have progressed as an artist. Workshop tutors (professional ones in particular) should bear in mind their responsibility to the person and not just the poetry in the same way as a good sports trainer would evaluate whether athletes are in the discipline that will give them the most fulfilment, though care should be taken when heeding the advice if the trainer gains financial benefit from a particular choice by the athlete. Money complicates things, something of which those who pay for writing courses should be aware.

Of course, if a poet knows that s/he is no good and still enjoys going to workshops, that's fine. Where would we be without Sunday joggers? The problems arise when they neglect their family or risk their health in the belief that they have a realistic chance of qualifying for the Olympics. There's also the risk of the bad driving out the good.

Tact is not the risk-free option that it's often assumed to be. It has consequences for the group but more seriously the lesser poets get less than a fair deal. They have as much right to honesty as anyone - it's wrong to equate naivity of poetry with emotional naivity. In the end, the decision whether or not to insist on tact depends on which poets (bad and good) the group wants to keep. Personality rather than quality is likely to determine who will feel uncomfortable enough to leave. Tact will hurt the listeners with delicate artistic sensibilities (because there'll be more bad poetry) and critical integrity (because comments won't be so honest). It will slow the progress of some beginners. It won't impress the newcomers who come expecting an honest evaluation of their work. It will protect the insecure and the egos of those who think they're better than they are.