Australia, redrafted

I workshopped Australia for creative writing this week, which led to a temporary crisis of confidence in all my abilities to do anything.  Not because the feedback I got was especially bad - it was mixed, as feedback always is, and should be.  But just because having people pick your work apart piece by piece is an uncomfortable experience and I think mainly my crisis was about putting myself in that position, and whether I want to.  Workshopping this year is very thorough, which is great, but means you can never escape from the interrogation of your work.  Every word is questioned and all in all it's a process that ends up making me feel like it is just an impossible task, writing.  Every word could be a different word, and it's so easy to just go on gut and not really, REALLY think about what I'm saying, or whether I've already said it.  It is impossible to be objective about your own work.  So there is the great benefit of workshopping - you get a whole bunch of different objectivities, different opinions, different ideas.  It makes you realise where you've been lazy, or just a bit stupid, or blind.  But the upshot of that, and the downside, is that it suddenly seems impossible to trust myself to write anything at all without second, third, tenth opinions.  Because even if I go through a poem a hundred times there are always things I will miss - things I don't even realise are there, things that feel integral to the poem because the idea occurred simultaneously with another and it seems inconceivable to remove one part of that.  Repetitions, duplications, inactive words that aren't really saying or doing anything.  It's so hard to pick those things up.  I can go back to poems I wrote years ago and suddenly see really obvious things that need changing.  Sometimes.  But just as often I'm so used to the poem being that way that it is almost impossible to reduce it back to its constituent parts and remember that this word may always have followed this word, but it doesn't HAVE to, it just always HAS, and that's not the same thing at all.  Kind of like de Saussure's theory of signifiers and signified -we're tricked into thinking a bottle has to be called a bottle, but of course it doesn't, it just always has been in our experience (presuming one is a native English speaker, obviously).

ANYWAY, I took on board some of the feedback, and redrafted a punchier version:

The Outback

            or, The High Road (Part Three)

after the fire –

even after all other

metal was smelted –

there remained an Aga

and a garden gnome.

after years and distance

have burned the sinews

that link us, my love for you

perseveres – incongruous as a

cooker in the wilderness –

and beside it, that guardian gnome

making sure nobody takes it away.


The problem is, that as soon as I change something I become riddled with self-doubt - how do I know the changes are better than the original?  Once I start thinking about that I want to quit acadaemia and work in Asda.


Also, I've noticed an uncomfortable truth.  Or at least I find it uncomfortable.  There is a great disparity between the analysis of published texts and the analysis of our own work.  In universities, I mean.  The general idea behind studying literature seems to be to talk about its good points, how wonderful it is, and not even question whether actually it might be a bit shit, or this line doesn't make much sense, or this is a bit of a cliche.  We just take it for granted that because someone decided they wanted to publish it, it is 'good'.  This goes for the academic and creative courses.  It makes me want to bring in a piece of work by someone else to workshop just to see what happens if people think I wrote it.  Workshops are focused on being critical.  Fair enough.  We also give positive feedback where it's due.  BUt if other writers are looked at, it is overwhelmingly to talk about how great x, y, or z is.  And yet I think a lot of what is written isn't that good.  I'm not saying that my writing is any better, but it's funny how there is an assumption that if it's published, it's perfect.  It makes it seem like there is some pinnacle of achievement to be worked towards, but there isn't.  The idea that just because for some reason a writer became canonised, highly regarded, or even just published, that means there is no room for improvement, is clearly not true.  But because as a student you are never asked to address what is not so good about a piece of writing, other than one's own, it feels like it is an impossible task to reach that level of achievement until you have rooms full of people talking about nothing but how great your work is.  Which, again, is plainly false.  Opinion will always be divided.  I dislike probably 90% of the poetry I read, however 'good' it is, and if you asked me to, I would happily pick it apart.  I'm sure a room full of people analysing a piece of writing by an anonymous writer who turned out to be a famous one would find plenty of points for criticism or alteration.  Because in a sense, writing is never finished, and we all have ideas about what we like, and what we want from a piece, and even if we can appreciate the merit of something we won't really think it is good unless we like it.  Which depends an awful lot on our own tastes and less than you would think on the talent of the writer.


I'm not sure what I'm trying to say really.  Perhaps just that it's hard to gauge where you're at, if you're an unpublished writer who never submits work to competitions, journals, &c., if the only context in which your work is received by others is a critical one, and yet you see a lot of work that you don't personally think is that good being celebrated because it's proved its mettle by getting published.  We're supposed to think that texts we study are good, and we're supposed to think that 24-year-olds who study creative writing are shit.  But Keats was 25 when he died, and he didn't 'study' creative writing, he just wrote, and a lot of what he wrote was rubbish, but some of it was good, and it's been so long that people have been thinking it's good that no-one bothers to think about whether it isn't.


Argh.  I'm not expressing myself very well.  And I did put myself in this position, of studying writing and having my work picked apart by word vultures.  So I'm not exactly complaining, or saying it should be any different, just observing the bias and contemplating it.  Mainly just because it's demoralising to hear people big up stuff I think is shit and tear down what I've written, because even though I know it's just opinions, and everyone's is different, and that's all fine and everything, it just makes me feel like my work must be shittier than a sewer with diarrhoea.  Which perhaps it is.  But whether it is or whether it isn't is kind of irrelevant, because feeling like it's shit is the problem, and that doesn't have anything to do with whether it is shit or not.