First writing assignment critiqued
I've already received my instructor critique on my first writing assignment. It was short. It was spot-on, I think... there isn't enough of the character's reaction in the text. The focus of the assignment was setting, and the feedback only said that I did great with the setting and criticized stuff that had nothing to do with setting. It was a valid critique, and I have nothing wrong with it in general. But somehow, I expected something more substantial for my money.
I paid $320 for a 12-week course of six two-week sessions. Each session, I get a reading assignment out of a published book ("Fiction Writer's Workshop" by Josip Novakovich), a "lecture" written by the course designer (not the instructor), a writing assignment, question and answer with the instructor, feedback from the instructor, and feedback from the other students.
Look closely at that, and ask yourself where the $53.33 worth of value is coming from? The course "lectures" are written one time and used for every class. I can find other writing students to critique my work at a hundred different sites on the net for free (and I don't put much stock in the critique of my peers at this point). So I'm pretty much expecting fifty bucks worth of critique from the instructor, and I was a little underwhelmed. (A simple view, but that more or less is the way it goes.)
I can drop out for a full refund within the next week, but I don't think I will.
First, the first assignment is kind of "soft". How much can you say about 500 words taken out of context, and not necessarily even part of a bigger story? In the later two segments, the assignments turn into "several connected scenes, 2000 words" and "a 3000 word short-story", so the assignments become more substantial. I expect that the critiques later in the class become more substantial as well, as we turn to issues of plot and characterization. This also opens up more room for discussion with the instructor.
I signed up for this class for primarily one thing... not the lessons and not even the instructor feedback. For the structure of regular deadlines. The fact that I paid for those deadlines make them more important, and I can't ignore them or casually drop out of the project because "it doesn't really matter".
I'm sure I'll benefit from the whole process... lessons, instructor and even peer feedback, and structure.
Now, if only I could figure out how to turn my one scene into a 3000-word story, it'll make this whole process a lot easier. The 2000-word connected scenes can be a sub-set of the 3000-word story assignment... so if I can take this scene, develop the characters and develop a plot, I won't have to do quite so much creative lifting. The hardest part of writing this first assignment was coming up with an idea for a scene (where setting was important)... once the idea was there, writing it wasn't so hard. Now if I can just figure out where it's all going. The next assignment requires writing two character sketches, so presumably I'm going to have to have two characters. I think this ghostship will be kind of dull with just one character anyway.
First writing assignment finished…
And I'm going to post it here. Oh, noes! I'm posting fiction to my LJ. I usually get peeved when people do this, so I will be not at all offended if you merrily breeze by without looking at my prose. Do not feel obligated to read it or comment on it... I only post it because I know a couple people will be morbidly curious. :)
If you do read it, keep in mind that the assignment is, more or less, "Write a scene in which setting is critical, and include a character to interact with it."
The moment I stepped through the inner door of the airlock, I knew something was wrong. The airlock door hissed shut behind me and I was greeted by silence. Where there should have been the hum and clatter of a busy station dock, there was nothing. I could hear the hum of ventilation fans, and the occasional creak of the station under spin stress, but I shouldn't have been able to. Those sounds should be masked out by the sounds of the loading dock crews, machinery shifting cargo, and the usual salty language that has been associated with sailing ships since sailing was invented. Salty language like the dock foreman would typically have applied to me for dawdling at the airlock. But the foreman's station was unmanned, and as far as I could see around the curve of the docking ring, not a man was in sight. The machinery was there, cargo lifters, crates bound for planet-side and distant ports, retaining nets holding most of it in place, all the paraphernalia of a busy port. But no people. The machines were all shut off, nothing was in motion.
It was then that I noticed the fine layer of dust over the counter of the foreman's station. No, not just the counter, there was dust over everything. The foreman's terminal, the coffee dispenser, the chair bolted to the deck, and the deck itself, all were covered in a fine layer of white dust. I know the daywatch dock foreman, and I'd be willing to bet that his crew scrubs down the deck with toothbrushes every morning. Yet now it looked like nobody had used the deck, let alone cleaned it, in years. Not a footprint or trail of any kind marred the surface of the dust, except for where I was standing.
The first thought through my head was "ghostship". The second thought screamed through my head, "biological contamination," and my heartbeat tripled. But a plague that took the crew fast enough to stop them from implementing quarantine lockdown would have likely left the foreman and crew dead at their posts, and I didn't see any bodies. I checked behind the foreman's station just in case, and was relieved to find nothing but a pair of mag-boots and a crumpled coffee cup. If the cause of this mystery was biological, it was too late for me anyway. I'd been breathing station air for minutes now, and had kicked up plenty of the dust.
I went to a comm station on the wall, more undisturbed dust and keyed up station central. After a moment, the comms computer let me know that station central must be tied up with critical duties and asked if I'd like to leave a message. So I keyed up emergency medical. Nothing.
I eyed the fire alarm box, a simple red lever button under a clear acrylic canopy, on back wall of the foreman's station. If there was anybody alive onboard, it was sure to get their attention. But it would throw the station into lock-down, sealing off each compartment of the ring. Inconvenient, to say the least. So I headed for station central.
Writing update
Okay, so I sat down to write tonight and in a short time I stripped out half of what I'd written and wrote a bunch of entirely different stuff. It's working much better and starting to come together. I've established comfortable starting and stopping points for the scene, and now I'm mostly filling in details.
I have no idea where I'd go with the scene if I wanted to turn it into a full story, but it feels like one of those things that would do well percolating in the back of my head... cargo pilot steps onto an orbital station to find the dock is deserted and everything covered in a fine white dust.
Oh, yeah... we got to nine students by the end of Saturday, so I'll be doing eight critiques every assignment. Five have introduced themselves so far, and the common theme is, "I'm taking this class to get me off my butt and working on my writing." Maybe we need writing circles more than we need workshops.