Ted Sturgeon used to refer to something he called the spaces between the lines. A reader may see only a blank after the period of one sentence and the capital letter of the next sentence, and move right past it without any awareness that it might represent something more than just that, a gap between sentences. By contrast, to the writer it may be a lacuna, a place where something used to be, or a chasm that may have required weeks, months, or years to jump across. The reader might never know of that additional significance. It is something for the writer to know. And, perhaps, the writer’s confreres.
The between-the-lines chasms within my fiction are features I have shared with members of a number of writing workshops. Not all authors find it useful to their process to offer up their works-in-progress to critiques. I am not here to question their choice. Authors compose their material in their own way. “Whatever works” is the right mantra. But for me, workshopping is vital. It’s as essential as practice is to my karate regimen. It is how I get better.
Not all workshops are equally worthy. My non-sf college fiction-writing classes may even have set me back. Some, though, are exceptional. So it was with the group I was part of from late 1988 until the summer of 1993.
We called ourselves the Melville Nine. The number was an inside joke; there never were nine of us. We aimed for ten and went as high as fourteen. “Melville” was chosen both for its literary connotations and for the site we most often met, Janet Berliner’s elegant fourth-floor condo on Melville Circle in Richmond, CA, right on the shore of San Francisco Bay. Its members, mostly professional writers, at various times included Joel Richards, James P. Killus, Risa Aratyr, Ron Montana, Lisa Mason, Martha Soukup, Grania Davis, Lisa Swallow, Marina Fitch, P.D. Cacek, and Lori Ann White.
Our schedule was monthly. I never missed a meeting. From those colleagues, I got brainstorming, refinements, confirmation, inspiration. Sometimes a draft changed radically as a result of this feedback. Other times the influence was modest but still I still felt “in the game” to be offering up my material and finding that it was already pretty much ready to go.
Janet Berliner in her condo at the table around which our workshop discussions happened.
The Melville Nine workshop died unexpectedly. In the spring of 1993 we were proceeding as vigorously as ever, our membership straining the capacity of Janet’s two-bedroom condo—and then, poof. After the May meeting, Janet took advantage of what seemed to be a dream opportunity to live on Granada in the Caribbean, and when that worked out less than perfectly, she put down roots in Las Vegas. P.D. Cacek relocated to Colorado. Several others dropped out for a variety of reasons. (I hasten to add that those reasons did not include personality conflicts. We were a harmonious group.)
By 1994 the remnant consisted of just me, Risa, James, and Joel. (Eliot Fintushel joined us in 1994, but only stayed six months—his work proved to be so incapable of being analyzed that it served little point to critique the manuscripts.) The nature of the meetings, which slipped to considerably less than monthly, was so changed we gave ourselves a new name, the Will Write For Food workshop. The last meeting was about 2007, by which time Jim was confronting with the cancer that would bring about his death the following year.
That gradual slow-down aside, it was the 1988-1993 period that remains most vivid in my memory. There was nothing quite like hearing Janet and Joel go at it, the former singing the praises of style and character, the latter championing strong plotting and originality of premise — sf being superior to fantasy and horror, in his mind. I miss the quiet enthusiasm of Bill Noble, a naturalist and a UC Berkeley professor who had a knack for illuminating the virtues of manuscripts the rest of us more-often-published members found wanting. I miss the charm of Janis Lonnquist, another of our then-unpublished members, a broadcasting colleague of Ron Montana who has since gone on to sell many scripts. Janis could be counted on to give feedback that sounded as if it were coming from a careful reader, not a jaded fellow author. I miss watching as Trish Cacek bloomed from a raw beginner into something special—I for one was not surprised when, in the first few years after she had moved on to Colorado, she won the Stoker and then the World Fantasy awards for her short fiction. To this day I can picture what sort of arguments and suggestions, praises and complaints would have come from the mouths of that particular gathering of people, and its absence of those observations cuts deep. Things happen. Circumstances change. But when they do, it doesn’t always seem like progress. Sometimes, in the fact of it, I think to myself that it would be so sweet if things stayed the same.
