good ideas...

You know that realization when you are critting someone and you go beyond the scope of their current work and you see the sort of film settle over their eyes and you know they won't ''go'' there and too bad. That happened in my nonfiction class today. The difficulty with participating in a workshop full of young people is that they don't have life experience and their grasp on history is iffy - so when someone old like me is in the room and I read what they wrote but KNOW that their explanation is merely their lack of research - that's fatal. Generally I shut up but today I offered them the means to take their essay beyond self indulgence. Too bad. Cool subject. ::sigh::

One of the things that seems to surprise my classmates is how much of their life they should research when writing. The idea that they are writing memoir seems to suggest to them that they are experts when this just isn't so. In one story the girl centers the story on a catfish alternately called a crawdad. Is it important? I don't know except to say that because it was called both names I wondered if it was a catfish. The detail in our world is important, at least to me as a writer. What happens is that there is a tendency to write against a blue screen. Vague surroundings are the norm.

The teacher - always comments on my specificity. I don't want my readers to be vaguely somewhere doing vaguely something while the protagonist has meaningful thoughts. The WHOLE story has to lift -

In any case, mostly I keep my mouth shut and practice exercising generosity of critique.