Writing, Literary analysis, and praise

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I've always been an avid reader but I think I can be pretty dense with literature sometimes. I understand symbolism and things that follow some system or model, but I find it difficult to really get into literary stories - classic or contemporary. I'm in a writing workshop right now, but I'm not very good at giving feedback to my peers, because nothing comes to mind. I cant dissect a story and find the weaknesses.

I accept this defect. Maybe someday I'll be able to finish a book by Dickens or any of the Russians. I don't want to write like them, so it's not really a problem. But I'm beginning to see an unanticipated problem with my limited literary analysis ability. Strangely, I tend to get bothered when people praise my writing. Part of this comes from a lifetime of learned helplessness - I just feel like I'm such a failure at everything that in the odd moment when I get praise it must be for some ulterior motive (pity, for example).

But with my writing workshops, I get detailed feedback about the things that people are praising, so logically I'm beginning to believe they truly do like these things about my writing. In workshops, everyone gets a balance of positive and negative feedback, and I'm okay with the average level of praise, but some people will come up to me after class and tell me how incredible my writing was - so I'm talking about excessive praise here. So my problem is that I have a writing buddy who always praises my work to encourage me to continue. I get comments about some things I've written being brilliant and profound, and it's balanced with other feedback about "good, but you can do better" or "not your best" that makes me believe them. But it becomes a huge block for me. Because then I think apparently I've written something profound in the past and now I have to write something else profound. So when the words come out and they aren't profound I just give up.

I think I"m realizing the problem stems back to my inferior literary analysis skills. Some of my lines that people cite as their all-time favourites didn't necessarily mean anything to me. So how can I possibly know if/when I'm writing "profound" stuff if I don't even recognize it after people point it out to me? How can I get over my performance anxiety if I wouldn't know a strong performance if I saw it?

Most of my writing is poetry. I read a lot of the stuff and enjoyed a good deal of it but had no formal training in the discipline and invent my rhyme and rhythm schemes to please myself and fit the mood and subject. I took one course at NYU in New York City a few years back but the instructor merely vaguely analyzed a few of the most common poets which I had read while in high school so it was a total waste of time and money. Some people like some of my poems but very few say anything useful to me as to their quality or what might make them better so I am more or less on my own. I find it difficult to find new viewpoints or novel subject matter since I have no contacts with other poets or even many people and since am rather unsocial my output has dwindled ( I have written the better part of a thousand poems) and I would like to find some other related discipline to get me going again. Since I am also a graphic artist I am attempting to do a children's book with illustrations but it is difficult to get my teeth into it.

Hi Sand. I think it's great that you've invented your own rhyme and rhythm - that's perhaps one of the benefits of relative isolation, that eventually you may start to innovate in ways other people have never considered.

Workshops can be really useful and some can be a waste of time. It depends on the school, the teacher, the mix of students, and also what you want to get out of it at that point in time. Would you ever think about taking another workshop? I took an online one through Gotham Writers Workshop (they also offer poetry and other forms like children's writing, screenwriting, etc) and it was a good place to learn some theory (I've read a lot about theory over the years but the course notes still seemed fresh and provided new information) and to get some feedback on my work. Plus the fact that I didn't have to go in person to the class meant I could focus on what was being said rather than how it was said or worrying about the people around me.

It's not so much inventing rhyme and rhythm as catching an idea in flight that mates with an unusual or very appropriate succession of words. Then it's a matter of letting the arrangement. so to speak, grow a totality out of the same type of pattern. I also do creative graphics using the same approach where a random pattern of lines and colors catches my eye from a matrix of unintended visual patterns. These patterns can arise out of wild color splashes or from natural sources such as oxidized metal surfaces or patterns on sheets of plywood or bark or crumpled paper. Each individual, of course, will be captured by a different pattern and even I will see different patterns on the same surface over time. When a pattern is captivating enough I can emphasize it and wipe away distractions so it is generally apparent. The same can be done with stories where a detailed incident can be captured and some small but intriguing detail can enlarge and capture the whole movement of the story line doing unexpected and creative things one would never thought of otherwise. Likewise with a created character that can take over a story in an unexpected way. That's what makes creative work so much fun as you are never sure where the adventure will end up.
I am too limited in income and probably too old to get involved in formal training anymore.

I meant to say, and I should add, that I share your 'density' with trying to unravel some of the classics. I was pretty naive pretty late in life, and a lot of stuff went over my head, particularly with the added burden of the archaic language a lot of the so-called classics are written in. People talk about historical context, and I'm sure Shakespeare's stuff was top notch for his era, but frankly after wading through all those footnotes just to divine the meaning of a sentence, much of the literary value has been lost to me. I would rather chew over more recent examples of very good writing (one example, "The Naked and the Dead" by Mailer) than struggle with those Russian dinosaurs, even if they are worthy artifacts.

So I'm not the only one who thinks that their writing is overpraised? That's nice to know. Alot of my stuff I don't think is really spectacular, but a lot of people in my creative writing classes loved it.

Then again, I tend to be a bad critic. I really like a lot of the stuff other people write, so I may be overly hard on myself. Scheherazade, this may be your problem as well; that you are just overly hard on yourself. You don't always have to write something profound for your writing to be good.

I am not sure (since I have never attended a writing class) but I have a hunch that all it can give you is an understanding of what makes basic competence. What writing I have done I have tried to make competent but there must be much more if the process is to be worthwhile to both the writer and reader. To put it dramatically, the stuff must be pulled out of your guts, to embody not only economy and clarity but something original of your own that resonates with your whole being. If it makes you laugh or cry or see wonderful new things in the world it might do the same for someone else - which is the point of the exercise.

Writers are generally an egotistical lot, so if they are praising your work moreso than others, you can take that as a sign of your ability as compliments are hoarded for their private selves.

I sincerely doubt that writers are any more egotistical than anyone else. But they put their soul out there for anybody to take a whack at and really appreciate knowing somebody likes what they see.

I don't know - I've found some friends who are writers and this has hugely, hugely boosted my confidence in my skill. But even like.. 6 months ago, in a writing class, I would think if people were giving my piece a large amount of praise it would be partly (1) there are some praise-worthy elements to my writing, (2) the nature of the workshop is that you must give praise and criticism to everyone no matter the quality of their work, (3) they read my body language and I looked so timid and lacking in confidence that they made sure to give me extra encouragement. So I generally tended not to think a lot about the praise.

Then a few months ago I took another writing class that hugely shifted this. For one thing, my writing just suddenly started to "pop." I think I found my voice. The assignments were super-short and suddenly I was focused on writing really good prose, rather than just trying to get from A to B. Secondly, we workshopped these pieces anonymously - we didn't put our name on the piece, and everyone read it silently. In that class I got really, really strong praise for my pieces, compared to the praise that most of the rest of the class was getting, and I knew it was for my work and not out of pity for my lack of self-confidence, becase they had no idea who had written it.

So this is great, really encouraging to me as a writer. But after leaving that class I'm finding it hard to get myself continuing. My new classes don't have short, regular assignments. They want us to submit a complete story. So there's more investment in writing something that is 5-10 pages than in writing something that is 1 page. That means I have to try to find an idea that I really want to write about, rather than just writing a page and worrying about the idea as I go. So I felt like there was a lot more pressure to produce, and expectations that I would produce something great (because some of my friends from my last class have continued into this class). So now I'm blocked from producing because I don't think i can live up to the praise. When I sit down to start writing a 5-page story, it doesn't look all that great and I have no desire to continue. And because we don't have a mandatory assignment every 2 weeks, it's easier to tell myself, well, I didn't come up with anything great this week, so i'll just keep waiting until I come up with a great idea. Recipe for disaster,at least in my case. I stopped writing novels for about 10 years for that same reason... can't think of anything to write about so I'll just wait til the next idea comes along...

As I mentioned, I have done some writing but I am in no way a professional writer. Someone who takes it really seriously, according to what I have heard, sits down every day at a regular schedule and knocks out something every day. Good, bad, or indifferent, it doesn't matter. What matters is that you treat it as a profession and every day you go to work. Naturally, you turn out a lot of crap. But that's the way it is with all artists, painters, sculptors, musicians, etc. turn out tons of crap. But when you do, you can see it's crap and you look to how it should be done otherwise. And you take the work seriously and don't moon around looking for inspiration. There are millions of things to write about that you encounter every second. If you're serious. From a sneeze to a tsunami.

I'm the opposite. I can't find anything GOOD about most writing. I find most of it to be terrible and must restrain myself from being mean and honest to other writers, lol.