She’d never experienced anything so glorious. She had no idea what had happened, but the next time she was to host the Brownie troop she’d said, “Brownies, you’ve got to try this heating pad!” They did, and after that every troop meeting was at her house.
“It was like Sex and the City for seven-year-old girls,” she said. “For the first time I was the most popular girl in school.” She beamed proudly. “And everyone wanted to be my best friend.”
That’s until the day her mother came home from work early and caught them all with the heating pad. Her mother sent the other girls home. “She yanked the cord of the pad from the socket in the wall,” the woman told me, “and she beat me and beat me with it. The whole time demanding, ‘What kind of a dirty whore did I raise?’ and ‘How dare you do such a filthy thing?’”
The woman confided, “I haven’t had an orgasm since second grade…but if you can stand up and tell your story about jerking off with a carrot in your ass, then maybe I can go back to my mother and talk about the heating pad…maybe I can use that story instead of being used by it.”
I wanted to correct her. “Hey, lady, the ‘Guts’ story didn’t happen to me!” But who cares? Writing isn’t about looking good. The point is to give people permission to tell their own stories and exhaust their emotional attachment and reaction.
Beyond testing a story’s appeal and resonance, crowd seeding provides you with bigger and better examples that illustrate the same dynamic. Remember, Minimalism means saying the same thing a hundred different ways. My Squeegee Sharpener memory is cute, but it was the bait that attracted the steam bucket story, the gelatin story, the surgeon’s story, and ultimately the French veterinarian’s dead horse story.
Perhaps the best aspect of crowd seeding is that it allows a writer to work among people. So much of this job is done in isolation, whether alone with a pen or keyboard, or alone on a stage, or alone in a hotel room. It’s always a joy to just introduce an idea and listen as other people perform. My degree is in journalism. I lack imagination, but I am a good listener, and my memory is decent. And for me writing fiction is about identifying patterns common to many, many lives.
So if you were my student, I’d tell you to go to parties. Share the awkward, unflattering parts of your life. Allow other people to share theirs, and look for a pattern to emerge. Process: My Kitchen-Table Master’s in Fine Arts
Tom always said that 99 percent of what any workshop does is give people permission to write. It legitimizes an activity that most of the world sees as pointless.
Every Thursday at Tom’s ran the same course. We’d meet at his house at six in the evening. He’d ask each of us how we were, usually using the third person. Asking Monica Drake, “How is Monica feeling this week?” Asking me, “What’s going on in Chuck’s world?”
We’d socialize and Tom would share about his own week. He was a living, breathing author, and we craved his stories about book contracts and movie options. Just having Tom present made our own dreams seem possible.
The socializing allowed for stragglers to arrive. He’d give a lecture on some aspect of writing, like “horses” or “monkey mind versus elephant mind.” Other times a guest writer would stop in and give a talk. This could be Peter Christopher teaching us to “submerge the I” or Karen Karbo telling us that a gun is never just a gun. It has to be particularized. She gave this lecture after hearing me read the first chapter of Fight Club, so I went back to The Anarchist Cookbook and found the details about making a homemade silencer, and my resulting gun worked infinitely better to establish my authority.
With all the students accounted for, Tom called for pages. It was the chorus we used for decades, “Who has pages tonight?”
A student had to bring printed copies for everyone to read as the writer read the work aloud. Part of this practice came from Lish’s workshop at Columbia. It’s agony to read your work and hear where it plods along. Part of reading aloud came from Tom’s training with the Bowery Theatre in New York. There is no more honest feedback than laughter or groans or the motionless silence that genuine tension creates. That, and reading aloud prepares you for eventually reading in public on a book tour.
Listening writers would jot notes in the margins of their copies. After the reading, people had the opportunity to respond. Opinions were only useful if they came with a suggestion for a fix or if they praised a specific aspect. Cross talk was discouraged because we might spend all evening trying to dominate each other. As we became trained in Tom’s distinctions—big voice, on the body, horses, sous-conversation, manumission—it became our language for evaluating a piece.
For the record “sous-conversation” (or subtext) refers to the message that’s submerged in the actions and dialogue of the scene, the hidden extra meaning. Tom’s use of “manumission” meant the grace with which your sentences carried the reader forward without disturbing the fictional dream. To demonstrate this, he’d cup his hands and tilt them as if gently passing a small object back and forth between his palms. A good writer must gently pass the reader from sentence to sentence, like a fragile egg, without jarring the reader out of the story.
The last to respond to student work would be Tom. He could always say something generous.
Always present was a good-natured sense of competition. If Monica made everyone laugh, I’d be determined to make them laugh harder in the week to come. Cross-pollination always occurs in a
