Workshopping for Writers

So you’ve taken the plunge: you’ve created an account, found a good word, and written your first limerick for the OEDILF. Here’s some of my general advice to new (and not so new) writers about the writing and workshopping process, and how to handle its occasional frustrations.

Don’t Let the Word List Hold You Back

Our Word List isn’t perfect. Depending on how recently a letter group was opened up, you could be looking at what’s left after hundreds of us have written thousands of limericks on the choicer words.

If you’ve never heard of a word you see there and can only find confusing or unclear dictionary definitions, avoid it, at least until you’ve got the hang of writing definitional limericks. That doesn’t mean you should only tackle simple words (which can sometimes be difficult to define, anyway)—they can be as challenging as you like. But if the words mean something to you, you’ll write more interesting limericks about them.

We have people who’ve written hundreds of limericks on astronomy, others who’ve written hundreds on plants. I’ve written dozens of biographies of artists, and limericks on a lot of Australian words. What’s your main interest? Can you find a glossary or specialist dictionary that relates to it? Do any of its in-range words give you ideas?

Get It Into Shape

I cover the ins and outs of rhythm and metre, definitions, punctuation, grammar and writing to surprise elsewhere. So you’ve read all of that, and written your heart out—now what?

Try to submit your limericks when you think they’re as good as they can get: that is, in a condition where you would happily press the RFA button. I keep text files of drafts of my limericks, which I work on until they’re ready. Telling yourself “it’s just a draft, I’ll let the workshop fix it” is tempting, but it’s better when editorial input consists largely of “here’s an RFA”. Even then you’ll find yourself revising and modifying your limericks in response to editors’ comments, but your OEDILF life will be much easier; you’ll get a reputation for quality work, people will enjoy looking at it more, and you’ll get more and faster RFAs. And the critiques you do get will be about the heart and soul of the piece, rather than the nitpicking over small details that can so easily wear one down.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the forum on the limerick form, its limitations and possibilities, and where we can take it. It brings with it certain constraints: not as much as a haiku, but still some. That doesn’t mean that you can’t bend the rules, but if you do so repeatedly, especially within the same piece, you’re going to produce work that doesn’t sound right to most limerick readers, which in an OEDILF context means having a lot of the same back-and-forth discussions with editors again and again. None of us would deny that such submissions are poetry. But poetry is a broad church, and can embrace a lot more flexibility of form than its doggerel offspring the limerick.

Note, too, that if you enter too many new pieces too quickly without getting enough approved, you’ll run into problems. After a certain point the OEDILF system will block new submissions until a quarter of your backlog has been approved. If you have a big backlog of unworkshopped pieces, editors might assume there’s something wrong with them, even if there isn’t.

Be Open to Suggestions

If you want to get the most out of the OEDILF, avoid setting your Workshopping Preference to the strictest possible setting (“Point out what needs to improve and offer hints—a word here and there”). In most cases, useful editorial comments go beyond the level of “hints”. You’re saying that you want us to leave your work alone, yet are asking for our approval; basically, you’re saying “don’t do anything but applaud”. We will, if we like your piece well enough; otherwise, there’s not much we can do until you ask us to.

Often, pointing out “what needs to improve” is indistinguishable from an editor’s point of view from offering rewrites. If you have to walk someone through the finer points of their limerick, it can be hard to do so without specifying actual alternatives. An editor might say “you need to improve the metre, hint hint”, and the author might then rewrite the whole thing and leave it just as badly off as before; then the editor says it still needs work, and the author tries again and again to the point of frustration.

Or an editor might say “you need a word other than ‘pyjama’ in L3”, and the author might work through a thesaurus’s worth of alternatives, one revision at a time, sending alerts to every editor who has commented on that piece each and every time.

Now, this author might basically be doing fine and be able to figure it all out for themselves with just a hint or two; or they might not; or they might be getting there in the end after a few tries, but showing increasing frustration every time they have to revise their submitted pieces. An editor encounters all of these responses, from all sorts of contributors.

If you were an editor who had to divide your time among the many workshopping tasks and forum discussions on offer at the OEDILF, let alone writing new limericks yourself, where would you expect to rank commenting on a problematic limerick, the author of which you don’t know well and who has said “hints only”, thereby running the risk that you might misjudge what level of hints they’re happy with and say too much, or that your hints will be too vague and they’ll get fed up with the back-and-forth, which in either case might result in them storming off in disgust (or more likely disappearing without fanfare) so that all of your time was wasted?

Most longstanding contributors to the OEDILF have their workshopping preferences on the most generous settings. Being open to suggestions doesn’t mean you have to follow them, unless you’re trying to please your audience—the same audience who are making the suggestions. After all, if you don’t care what that audience thinks, why should you care what gets approved and what doesn’t? Why post anything at the OEDILF at all?

It isn’t easy to reconcile a wish for your limericks to be entirely your own work, to the extent that you want only hints about where to change them, with our workshopping process. No editorial process works that way, really, as it’s a lot easier for editors to be explicit about suggestions than to be guarded and indirect about them. We may offer “just tell me what’s wrong” options in our author preferences, but they really only work when an author’s natural writing style is already a good fit with our collective expectations.

Keep Irritations in Perspective

All of us get irritated by workshop comments from time to time. It’s a particular hazard for the occasional visitor; even if your work only gets one annoying comment a month, if you read your comments all in one hit once a month you’re guaranteed to feel annoyed every time you visit the OEDILF.

We do our sub-editing collaboratively in conversation with the authors partly to keep our promise that authors have final say over the form their limericks take. That’s an unusual promise by print publication standards, and has resulted in an unusual editorial process, which can be intense at times. But giving authors the final say is an important aim for a voluntary project.

“Final say” doesn’t mean we’ll approve whatever you finally say, though. If an author keeps a piece in a form that can’t get enough RFAs, it will stay tentative. Deciding how much you’re willing to modify your work to get more RFAs is up to each author. That may or may not include following grammar and punctuation suggestions. With so many editors there’s inevitably some debate over the precise requirements of English grammar and punctuation, and we allow room for regional variation as with spelling and pronunciation, but it isn’t totally capricious.

The OEDILF is really only half about the accumulation of limericks; the other half (or two-thirds, or three-quarters) is very much about workshopping together, and all of us teaching each other how to improve our limericks. We’ve all been through it, and we’ve come to expect it of each other.

Someone who doesn’t want other painters adding brushstrokes to their work isn’t going to sit very comfortably in that kind of environment. The lone painter faced with the way we operate has to ask: do I change my approach to fit into their culture, or do I go my own way? The former choice was right for me, but for others it won’t be.

Inevitably, from time to time one editor will suggest one sort of change and another will suggest the opposite. We’re all individuals with our own views about what works. That’s why we have the multiple-RFA system: to give us limericks that work for a decent spread of people. As you get more familiar with different editors’ styles, you can form your own opinions about which align best with yours and which don’t. You’ll still get different voices chiming in from time to time, though—that’s the beauty of the system. It keeps us all on our toes.

Sometimes editors will back out of workshops if they feel that staying in them wouldn’t be fair to the authors, themselves, or other OEDILFers. Authors sometimes dig in their heels over points of definition and expression, as is their right, just as it’s the right of editors to disagree. But when a workshop becomes an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, nobody’s going to enjoy the experience.

Which leaves the ball squarely in the author’s court. What do you want out of the OEDILF? That’s a question that each of us has to answer for him- or herself. If you want us to approve all of your tentatives, then occasionally you’ll have to compromise. Nobody has got all their limericks approved without compromising, sometimes more than they would prefer. It’s part of the game. We have the editors we’re dealt: we can’t force them to like our work if they don’t. If you want to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, the onus is on you as author to create work that appeals to them.

If you have evidence to support your point of view on the validity of a definition, or some other aspect that’s a sticking point for your editors, bring it to the workshop as soon as you can. If you anticipate there will be problems and have already formulated your response, add a comment to that effect as soon as you’ve posted it. A workshop is like a play: even if it isn’t brilliant from Scene One, the first act has to be promising enough that people want to stick around. If your first act drives some of the audience away at interval, it’s no use introducing a scene that might have kept them there had it been in Act One; they’ve gone, so they won’t see it.

Everyone who comments on your limericks has been through the approval process at least twenty times, many of us hundreds of times, and none of us got there without the occasional disagreement. Try to keep your powder dry for the big battles and not flare out over an occasional comma. We’d like you to go the distance and become an OEDILFer with hundreds of approved limericks too. If the process still doesn’t feel acceptable after a few months, c’est la vie—but give it time.

You’re Doing Better Than You Think

Until my first WEAP, I had only a partial idea of how I was doing in relative terms, even after six months at the OEDILF. Sure, I’d racked up a hundred approved pieces in that time—out of 340-odd. So I figured that I was getting it right 30% of the time plus some unknown percentage, which I estimated to be maybe another 30%. By “getting it right”, I mean “appealing to the OEDILF audience”—of course it felt like I was getting it right for me, or I wouldn’t have posted the things.

It turned out I was doing a bit better than that. After an intense WEAP week of editing and rewriting, 98% of my submissions were approved. A year later I reached 500 limericks with everything approved; three years after that, 1000. Nowadays, most of our active contributors have low backlogs of tentatives.

Once you figure out how to write OEDILF limericks and how to work with OEDILFers, it isn’t as hard to get it right as it might first seem. It takes work, but generally it’s enjoyable work. Don’t give up too soon.

Reworked from forum and workshop comments from March 2005–December 2006.