Watching Twelfth Night, I thought digressions indulged, darlings pardoned, fourth wall shattered, this breaks a whole bunch of rules. But that’s self-interested and more than a little logically questionable because it assumes that everything a great writer writes is uniformly great.
Bad workshop advice–of which I got relatively little at Minnesota and plenty of elsewhere–is like bad parenting. A year after your last workshop, you have to shut and write what you think you need to write and if the rules of the workshop still trump the demands of the page and the character, that’s your problem for being a wimp. And here’s a thought: all the fine writing can make Shakespeare a little airy and brittle.
There’s a reason why so many of us recent MFAs are slow to share our work, especially in its early stages. You really need some time without the training wheels and spotters (and mixed sports metaphors).
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