The art of editing.

I recently took part in a creative writing workshop, as part of my mandatory curriculum at a London University. Although I write fiction since I was nine years old, I rarely thought about taking a serious course on it, as it is my personal opinion that one cannot teach writing. You can write, or you simply can't. And thus, I started this workshop a little skeptical, curious to know whether I was right or not. After all, we may all possess imagination, but the skill to put thoughts into words is not as easily acquirable.

I realised soon that rather than being a medium where people learnt how to write, it was more of an editing and self-editing process, all whilst being observed and judged by fellow peers. I say peers, but I often felt like I was sitting in a room with people who had never tried putting pen to paper. Albeit, it must not have been true, as we'd all picked out this particular course and it does involves reading and writing. Not to make myself seem Mary Sue-ish, but I consider years and years of writing proper experience for such an environment. Or at least a starting point.

My story for this project was in no way innovative or outlandish. It merely recounts the events in my character's life, allowing for some development and emotional impact. My editing process involved quite a lot, as I'm not very keen to hear criticism, but I knew I had to learn how to accept it and incorporate it in my writing mechanism. There is no journalist without critique, for sure. In the end, my story got edited for the better, although my characters ended up the very same way I envisioned them at first. However, it was the process I went through along with my characters that caught my attention and has me writing this entry.

I sat in a room with the same twelve people, for several weeks. I watched them come up with ridiculous ideas for stories, stuff with no substance or plots that needed serious work. Furthermore, some of the stories remained as non-lucrative as they'd originally been thought out, but that's beside the point. As we all sat there, Tuesday after Tuesday, criticising each other's work with no knowledge whatsoever of what it means to edit someone's work, I realised it's exactly what we do in life.

We meet someone and we instantly put them in a box, stereotyping them. It's the natural course of life, I suppose. It's what we did in my workshop. My story was about a lesbian couple whose love story ends on a rather painful note, due to traditions and foreign laws. It's meant to make people think that we can't stereotype simply because we don't understand. It got me labelled as the lesbian feminist who thinks it's wrong for women to fight against traditions, and also as a weird Eastern European because I chose to represent a legal process that most people never encounter. Not to mention I got told it's so much easier to write from a gay perspective. It really isn't.

It's odd. Sitting in a room with people you've never met before, listening to their critical remarks and realising they're not actually talking about your story, but you. Writing is personal, we all know this. But it doesn't have to be all we writers are. There is more to the writer than the writing in itself, and it would be nice if people remembered that before putting you in a box. They may confine you there forever.