The next was a peer workshop that focused on literary fiction (and I’m a fantasy writer) so I ended up trying to write for them instead of for me and so hated my writing and stopped writing for another three years.

Now that I live in a non-English country, I’m involved in the Forward Motion forums and take the occasional online course on improving one particular skill or another.

I’ve never been happier about my writing or about my chances to get published.

Thanks for this installment! (and all the others, of course!)

Not extreme at all. Write the story, mail it BEFORE you ever think of attending a workshop with it. Then, when your story is being worked over, learn to write the next story better. You can’t fix a story from a bunch of want-to-be writers giving opinions. Just learn what you didn’t do correctly, that you agree with, on that last story and then write the next one better.

What I discovered is that workshops and even stuff I agree with was often wrong, very wrong, and editors bought stories with all those “mistakes” I made.

I use workshops to learn how to write the next story better. Nothing more. Never to fix something. Follow Heinlein’s Rules at all times.
Cheers
Dean

There are a couple places in your post where I can’t tell if you’re taking a slightly more extreme point than you actually hold to make a point. For example, I think there will be times when there is something wrong with your manuscript, and following a workshop’s advice on that manuscript will make it better. For example, if multiple people independently agree that a plot point is unconvincing, it’s worth your time and effort to thinka bout what they say. Would you agree?

I like your suggestion to pick up good tricks from other writers (but that’s the premise of my own blog, so I may be a bit biased here )

There is a weekend worth of responses to your question. My first suggestion is to make sure you understand copyright as best you can, with such books at the Copyright Handbook as a start. Copyright is what you actually sell (license, actually) and it can be divided into a thousand different slices, all sold on their own. Above you are asking about negotiating a contract over what certain terms mean. First off, understand that all contracts, no matter your level, can be negotiated. And if you don’t like the end result, you can always just say no and walk away. I have done that from many, many contracts over the years, right from the beginning. No one is forcing you to sell a right you don’t want to. That simple.

If you ask for a right to be kept and the magazine or book publisher says no, then you have a clear choice to make. But never go into a contract assuming it is set in stone.

As for which rights are valuable and which aren’t, my opinion is that they all are valuable and you should only sell what the magazine really needs, nothing more. If they have an overseas edition to their magazine, then they need that right. Having an option on anthology rights doesn’t hold that right, just use the term “nonexclusive” in there and then you can sell it and they also retain the option to use it, usually for extra money. Lots and lots of ways around things, which means as an author, you need to go study contracts and copyright. Everything is negotiable. Always remember that, and if they say no, you can always walk away. Hope that helped. This is a huge, huge area.

Cheers
Dean

I don’t currently have access to workshops (I live outside of the U.S.), but I completely agree with this account. There are a few I would attend if I had time, but I can’t imagine the number of writers that are fooled one way or another into believing that they are great or bad, depending on the opinions of their peers. A real writer (someone who will ultimately be successful) isn’t going stop writing regardless of criticism or praise from peers, so I think it’s mostly money unwisely spent.

I think the best workshops are run by professionals, and not by the people attending.

Great stuff, Dean, keep it coming!

(smirk)

I think many writing workshops end up like poorly managed 12-step programs.

Ergo, they become peer-lead entities unto themselves, never really getting the participants to a state of functional health, but instead prolonging the participants’ time spent in a state of dysfunction.

One of the reasons I quit the sit-down workshop I did in Seattle in 2002 was because a) nobody in it was publishing anything and b) some of them had been that way for more years than I’d been trying to get published, total. As in, they’d been stuck as aspirants for decades.

One day I sat up and blinked at how odd it was for me to seek “writing health” in a group whose key members hadn’t been “healthy” (ergo, selling or sold) themselves, nor were even close to same. And had been that way for much, much too long.

In the end, there was a kind of fatalistic cloud which hung over the group. Too many people who had been trying for too long without getting anywhere, such that the commentary and the mood was laced with negativity. Not in-your-face negativity, no. More like the kind of subtle, sour taste you get when you go to a nursing home: all the people there, just waiting to die.

Twenty years ago, Dean and Kris had me do a monograph for their Writer’s Chapbook Series (Writer’s Notebook Press, Pulphouse Publishing). It was entitled, Workshops: The Minefields of Science Fiction.

Dean just said pretty much everything I said in it, but better and more to the point …

Steve