A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with one of the fiction faculty members in my MFA program. Some of the second year nonfiction students have asked to switch advisers—something that sometimes occurs in all genres in our program. The instructor theorized that nonfiction students were more sensitive about their work because it describes actual events—reality—and is therefore more personal. This made me ponder if I react differently to critique of my fiction pieces than I do on my essays. What I found was the opposite of what the faculty member believed.
Our program requires all students to take at least two “out of genre” classes—one workshop and one form and theory. Currently, I’m in a fiction workshop where I read and critique my classmate’s short stories and two of my pieces go through the same treatment during the quarter. Our instructor is someone whose work I admire and he’s known in the program for doling out great tidbits of wisdom in his classes. So far, I’ve enjoyed just about every class.
There’s been a few of them though, where strange undercurrents between the fiction students have left me baffled. This is the third workshop these guys have together; they know each other’s writing extremely well and have studied the craft of fiction far longer than I have. Maybe they’re even a little tired of each other. Sometimes comments about a piece are delivered furiously, or another student’s question is shut down for being something the class has discussed “to death” during previous quarters. At the end of one of those discussions, I leave the classroom with a beginning headache and can’t wait to get home instead of our usual routine of a few beers at a local bar. My nonfiction workshops never seemed to have these strange twinges of anger in them.
Maybe it’s because of the strange dynamic of my fiction workshop, or maybe it’s because I’m more comfortable with my own nonfiction peeps, but I’ve noticed that I react more emotionally to the critique I receive of my short stories than my essays. I’ve tried to analyze why this is.
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When I write a short story though, I’ve made something new and am controlling the characters on the page much more deliberately. When someone critiques my creation, I react more emotionally because the world and people of my story is a direct extension of me—there’s a little bit of me in each one of them. If a character is said to not be boring or flat I project that to apply directly to me—my personality is also boring and flat.
When I talked about my first fiction piece being workshopped to a friend who’s a poetry student, she paraphrased someone whose name I don’t remember (a later internet search revealed that it might have been Tom Clancy): “the difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction has to be believable.”
Maybe that’s why I react more emotionally to when my fiction is critiqued. Maybe I’m actually hearing my fellow students saying: “I don’t believe you.”