A Case of the "What Ifs"

In a comment on the first post, Raven brought up an interesting aspect of any workshop:  The “What if” scenario.  She was speaking about workshop participants asking their teachers/facilitators a bunch of “what ifs” rather than trying things on their own, but the “what if” situation I want to address occurs when a writer presents his/her story or poem and in the process of critique other participants things like, “What if the main character was a woman?” or “What if this story took place on Mars?” 

The “What if” scenario annoys a lot of people.   At best, a “what if” offers a possible solution to a problem in a story or poem, at worst it’s a group of people altering/ripping apart an original story.   However, I think “what if” scenarios are an important part of workshop.  Why?  Because for me a workshop is a place where we make things, tinker with them, modify them, etc., therefore the “what if” scenario and all the discussion that comes after a “what if” suggestion is necessary to all that creation, because it pushes the writer to go to places previously unexplored.  That is, of course, if the writer wants to go there.

“What ifs” can be dangerous, because most of the “what ifs” asked in workshop don’t take into account the original intent of the author’s story.  Many people present “what ifs” because there is a problem with the manuscript that they cannot put their finger on, so they throw out a series of hypotheticals that may or may not help. For example, a woman once presented a story in class and half the class suggested moving a scene from the beginning of the story to the end, effectively making that scene the climactic point of the story and altering the theme/focus of the story.  There were some issues with scene placement in this story, but what was being suggested would have done damage to her original, unique story and would have effectively made it something else, something not hers.

That being said, “what ifs” can also be liberating and can take a story down a unique path.  I wish more workshops would encourage writers to explore “what ifs.”  Consider what Angela Carter (Fiction) had to say:  “In a way all fiction starts off with "what if," but some "what ifs" are more specific. One kind of novel starts off with ‘What if I found out that my mother has an affair with a man that I thought was my uncle?’ That’s presupposing a different kind of novel from the one that starts off with ‘What if I found out my boyfriend had just changed sex?’ If you read the New York Times Book Review a lot, you soon come to the conclusion that our culture takes more seriously the first kind of fiction, which is a shame in some ways. By the second ‘what if’ you would actually end up asking much more penetrating questions. If you were half way good at writing fiction, you’d end up asking yourself and asking the reader actually much more complicated questions about what we expect from human relationships and what we expect from gender.”—Angela Carter

Imagine what kind of stories we’d create if more workshops allowed time for a writer to explore “what ifs” or better yet demanded a writer explore a few “what ifs”?