[MUSIC] >> Welcome to week five. This week, we're going to talk about using those critiques that you've received and about sanding. That is working line by line, word by word on your manuscripts. We're also going to talk about something I call The Dear Workshop Letter, we'll get to that in a second. So, you've gotten those critiques back now and you'll have to decide how to use them. First of all, they're going to be some things that you want to use right away. Sometimes, they're going to be concrete pieces of advice that you think make immediate sense. Sometimes they're going to be maybe consistent criticisms or things that you didn't see before, but that you immediately agree with. I hope you won't get too carried away trying to integrate every piece of criticism of that you've received. Some of those critics are going to take the form of gaps that you hadn't seen before in the manuscripts. And by all means, you should use those as opportunities to grow the manuscript from the inside. Not all of the changes that you're going to be making as you prepare the final draft, of course, will be coming at the end. Sometimes someone might point out something in the middle say, something that happens on page five, an opportunity for a scene to expand a couple of pages right in there. Be sure to use those opportunities, as places for you to grow the story. Likewise, there are going to be some places where people might just have responded to a lack of specification. Maybe a lack of detail in a certain place. Now, let's think about advice or critique that you're unsure what to do about or even that you're pretty sure you want to dismiss all together. Well, I want to suggest to you, first of all, that you not dismiss anything out of hand. And that might be a little it hard to do, of course, because sometimes you might think his person just does not understand what I've tried to say. The thing that you've got to accept is possible is that they've read the story, as it's written on the page and you've communicated something that you didn't mean to communicate. So, how do you know whether to trust that critique or whether to let it go? Here's what I want to suggest. Try out the alternative. Let's say, for example, that a person thinks that one whole paragraph that you really love. Let's say, the person writing the critique thinks that whole paragraph can go all together. And you say, no, I love this, I'm keeping it. Well, you might try, for example, cutting that paragraph out and then reading the thing back over to yourself without the paragraph and just see how it sounds to you. In other words, articulate the alternative to yourself and think about the story as it would be in this alternative version. If, once you've gotten yourself to that point, you decide no, no, no, I like it better the way it was. Then by all means, return it to the way it was before, but the key thing is not to dismiss things out of hand. Bend your mind around the critique and see if you can take it onboard. Now here's another sort of a criterion, I think you might consider using in deciding whether or not to take certain kinds of change. If you have to say to yourself, well, I didn't quite see it this way, the way the critique criticized or the reviewer saw it, but I decided to trust her. I don't think that that's enough. I think that you should let yourself consider that the change. You have to make yourself the author of the change. If you can say, after the fact someone suggested this and I stole that critique. I stole that suggested change and I put it in the story, and now it's mine. It's part of my story and you stand by it completely. That's the kind of change that you do want to make. If you genuinely don't see the logic behind it, then you should let it go. So all of this might be a little bit difficult to manage, because you're going to have three different critiques and a lot of those things are going to be contradictory and it might be a little bit difficult to find a way of thinking about. So, here's what I want to suggest. Think of your peer reviewers, as your workshop. You might address their critiques in this way. Write a letter to them as a group. They won't see it, but write the letter out anyway as though, they were to see it. And address it, Dear Workshop: and then address all of your concerns in a free-form way. Saying, for example, when you said this, I totally saw. I totally saw the need for that change. I also felt that, that character was a little bit thin and I think I agree with you that I need to push. But when you maybe other reviewers said that the language there was too detailed. No, it's very important to me that the language be very detailed at that point and having thought about it. I'm going to put that aside. In other words, the letter is an opportunity for you to sift out all of your concerns and make some decisions. Remember, the most complicated intricate piece of writing and the most simple prosaic piece of writing, they have this in common. They are all, in a sense, a record of decisions. Innumerable decisions that the writer has had to make. The point of the Dear Workshop letter is to give you an occasion to make those decisions in a careful and mindful way. [MUSIC]
