One of the rules of the writing retreat I was just on was that people only share writing they’ve done during the retreat, and another was that you only give positive feedback on what people share. Nerissa explained the logic in gardening metaphors (her weekly writing groups are called “Writing It Up In the Garden”) – that when the plants are new you need to give them encouragement and space to grow, and only later do you get to the weeding and pruning stage. I understand the idea behind the approach, but it was definitely new to me. My favorite experiences with writing workshops before this weekend were Bob Franke’s songwriting workshops, that employ an almost opposite philosophy. As I’ve mentioned previously, Bob gives songwriting assignments and you have to come back the next time with a draft of a song. And although I simply find having assignments useful (and Bob gives especially perceptive ones), I’m pretty sure his logic in doing it is to give you material to work with that you’re not yet attached to, so that you’re actually willing to rewrite, fix, edit. (In fact, people’s unwillingness to engage in that kind of work with their songs is often the biggest problem in songwriting workshops; people want to impress the leader and so bring out their best material . . . but they’re so attached to it that they can’t work with the criticism, and so we never get to see the transformation that can be possible.) I find that editing part to be not only the most necessary part, but, in some ways, the most enjoyable. It’s great to get the beginning of a song out there, but it’s even better to do the shaping and honing and polishing that makes it truly beautiful. And in order to do that I need to know what’s working and what isn’t working. The best time to get that feedback is early on, before I’m too attached to any one line or phrase or even the whole trajectory of the song. In my own writing I weed and prune as I go – the one verse of the song I played the first night at the workshop this weekend was already heavily edited – it’s not free-writing (or free-singing; the melody itself is rarely exactly the way it started out, either). And, to use the garden metaphor to my own ends, it’s why you don’t wait to do the thinning of your row of plants until they’re big enough to be producing tomatoes or beans; at that point I am too attached to them to be willing to pull them from the garden. I suppose, though, that my seedlings might just grow really quickly and are ready for weeding and pruning early. Presumably you don’t want to weed until they’re big enough to even figure out whether it’s a weed or not, although I still find other people’s opinions on that determination useful. Here, though, only positive feedback. It’s certainly an encouraging approach, both for commenter and recipient (and, as I mentioned in the first post, makes it easier for commenters to feel capable of giving feedback). And I found myself using the comments received to make the same kind of weeding determinations I might otherwise have made (“oh; they all liked that aspect; that must not be a weed”), so in some senses it still served the same function for me. And I definitely came to appreciate elements of this approach. Giving only positive feedback to others helped me listen with an ear towards what works, rather than what doesn’t; presumably figuring out what works – and why – in writing is the most important part (and is actually the point underlying getting rid of the things that don’t work). As with the rest of the retreat (more on that in the next post), it let to a more relaxing and enjoyable attitude than I usually allow myself. Nevertheless, when I came home I played my new song for someone more accustomed to my general approach to writing critique, who asked “are you ready to hear suggestions?” I eagerly embraced them. And, as a result, my fantastic new song is about to be even better with a new bridge.