Composing by Committee

Something most of us don't want to do, and (I think) a problem when you have a genuinely multivocal workshop and a writer who tries to trim (or pile on sail) to every shift of the prevailing winds. So - when discussing your own writing, when to listen to your readers and when not? And what to do if you're listening?

Okay, I suppose beginning should start with ends: know/choose your purpose(s). Know what your writing (the action, secondarily the actual product) is for, while avoiding sour grapes, or fear, or false modesty, or daydreams extraneous to why you're sitting at the keyboard - why are you writing? And this may not be a static thing - you may scale back, or wildly expand, or simply shift what you want to do, and that may even come in response to comments from your readers. You might even recognize that perhaps the compatibility of a Pynchon homage and your mother loving the book exists only somewhere over the rainbow, and you'll drop one or the other. But as long as you're still writing, it's still a matter of what you want to do. After you're done, of course, readers will do whatever they want and can with it, towards their own purposes.

Your readers don't need to share your purposes, or even know them, to say something valuable - or to say something that sparks something valuable in your own mind. The odds do go up if they want what you want, or a decent reps of the audience - if any - you have in mind.

Thinking of my favorite experience of this type, with my litficky "Third Law of Thermodynamics", with three other people, two of whom had no strong interest in lit journal type writing. But they were interested in the story and prodded at an odd point - a break in the fourth wall, until I saw that I should move it, so that it not only played the essetnially moral purpose I intended, but also acted as a structural transition - like Mendelssohn decision to move the first movement (sonata-allegro form) credenza of the E minor Violin concerto from its customary place at the beginning of the coda to the joint between the development and recapitulation - where it DID something other than be pretty. (Those of you who are pretty do not need to follow Felix's example. Pretty, in the flesh, really is enough.) Anyway, a earthshattering half an hour discussing it. Never bothered to send it out afterwards, though.

What made it interesting was my original First Reader - he wanted me to get rid of that section entirely for the simple reason that we had gotten too old for public self-mutilation (and because he didn't want to break the story" "let her live", he said, refering to the narrator.) But me and Brecht, hey! While it hadn't been planned when I first wrote the story, it became the point.

Anyway, never foreclose revelations by saying that no matter what, you're not changing a word. You cannot dull the infinite surprises the universe can offer; you can only close your eyes to them.