I was in a writing class once where the teacher decided to do a sentence-by-sentence critique of the first of page a student’s story. The teacher had gone so far as to get an overhead projector so she could display the page and her many, many edits in a billboard-sized font for all the class to see. The gist of this exercise, as far as I could tell, was that the story wasn’t working at all, but that with some serious line editing it could be resuscitated and given narrative life.
It was brutal. Not one sentence escaped her editor’s pen. Every edit came with an explanation for why this word was wrong or that phrase was unnecessary. I didn’t think the teacher was being unkind, but she did seem to be making a kind of example of the student’s story: This is how not to write. The lesson, after all, was really not about the student’s story; it was about her sentences, her awkward, graceless, inexact sentences.
To be clear, I didn’t think the story worked at all, but I didn’t think the problem lay entirely in its sentences. The story didn’t seem to have a true center, and so I didn’t fully believe in the characters or their struggles. Though the student may have rewritten it many times before handing it in, it felt to me like a first draft, an idea still in search of its true direction.
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