From: julie@pascal.org   
      
   On Monday, June 16, 2014 7:41:23 PM UTC-6, Michelle Bottorff wrote:   
   > William Vetter  wrote:   
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   > > > > > Gosh, like, you never heard of it?  I thought all the cool kids knew   
   it.   
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   > > > > I don't think Tina is one of the cool kids.   
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   > > > Possibly not.    
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   > > > Or maybe she's one of the even cooler kids.     
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   > > > Usually when anyone mentions something like Turkey Lexicon here, or   
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   > > > anything like it, the purpose is to explain all the many ways in which   
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   > > > it does more harm than good.   
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   > > What I meant originally was that it doesn't matter what you define   
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   > > "levels" as.  There are people there who have lower levels of skill,   
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   > > lower levels of knowledge, lower levels of experience. We hope they can   
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   > > grow and learn and change.  We hope they can see other people making a   
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   > > whole catalog of mistakes and be able to recognize what they are.  Some   
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   > > of them can't, and they write the video game narratives forever, but we   
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   > > hope they improve and get to the level where they're getting rejected   
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   > > because the manuscript is Not For Us, and not because it's unreadable,   
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   > > or it's a Hitler is a Gandhi to the Jews in an Alternate Universe story.   
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   > Tina doesn't submit.  She's not intrested in getting published.   
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   > But I think Tina's problem with what you are saying, is mostly that you   
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   > were making it sound like these specific "levels" are things that all   
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   > writers go through.  When it's actually some of them are quite specific   
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   > to certain writers, and other writers never go there at all.  I'm pretty   
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   > sure you knew that, and it was all just a misunderstanding.   
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   > Personally, I made my first two sales first, and encountered the whole   
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   > workshop phenomenon afterward.     
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   > I did try it out, but as it happened, even my third sale ended up being   
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   > somethig that had not been read by anyone other than my husband.  By the   
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   > time I got it written, I was too close to the submission deadline for me   
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   > to be able to have it workshopped.   
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   > So nothing I have sold at pro rates was ever workshopped.   
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   > ...I *think* that's just a coincidence.   
      
   It might not be.   
      
   Not that workshopping (or classes or crits or any other sort of feedback from   
   others) can't be responsible for progress in craft and ability, but I've heard   
   enough published (and *well* published) authors caution against over-working a   
   story that I find    
   it easy to believe that for individual stories, the unworked one may well be   
   better than the workshopped one.   
      
   -Julie   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)