Office Hours

The perils and blessings of the creative writing workshop

Q.

I'm currently in a writing workshop.  It's the second workshop I've been in.  While I love the friendships that I've developed in these settings, sometimes it seems to lack serious feedback because we are afraid of hurting each other’s feelings. The other drawback is that I start to hear my group's critiques in my head as I'm writing a story and freeze up.  So I would love to know your thoughts on writing workshops.  Are they the best place to get feedback?  What are your feelings about reading work aloud to a group vs getting pages ahead of time and getting critique?  

A.

I’m a believer in getting pages in advance and having some time to work with them.  When something is read aloud, there’s always a bit of grade inflation.  (You might have noticed this at public readings – there seem to be more laughs in that setting than there are justified by the text, probably a result of our natural sense of community). 

Anyway, at Syracuse, we leave ourselves a week between the time we receive a story and the workshop itself.  I encourage my students to print out the stories and read them in hardcopy form (my feeling is that the brain works on actual text better than it does on a screen).  I ask them to read the story once for pleasure and then again (at least once more) while making notes, suggesting edits and cuts, recording their reactions in the margin, and so on.  So, in the end, they give the writer the line-edited, marked-up version, plus a prose summary of their thoughts (this is meant to be 2-3 pages, no fluff or empty praise of the “Dude, you are really nailing it!” variety).

Which leads me to the part of your question about “hurting each other’s feelings.”  Part of the reason we allow that week is that it gives time for the following process to happen: 1) we have an initial reaction (“I loved this” or “I didn’t like it” or “Too slow” or “Too clever” or whatever) and then 2) we do a closer reading of the text to see, first, where these reactions occurred and, second, if possible, why they occurred. 

In other words, it gives the group a chance to go from a vague, potentially hurtful reaction to a specific, actionable one – a reaction so specific that it is felt more as factual observation than judgment (and is therefore easier to act on). 

So, if we read a story and think, “Hmm, this is boring” – well, that response helps exactly nobody.  (“Just make it…less boring!”)  On the other hand, if we get in there and do the work – identify precisely where our reading energy started to drop, and why – well, that gives the writer something to do (i.e., a specific place to make less dull.) 

But if we’re really doing the work, phrases like “boring” and “dull” are going to disappear.  Why is something striking me as “boring?” What seems to be making it “dull?” 

Let’s say that, for example, on closer reading, I notice that I am “bored” in places where the writer seems to be offering several, essentially identical, descriptions of something.  “Grace was tall; she towered above the other children; she was lanky and her head hung there above the heads of all the other kids in her class; she was so tall she reminded one of a giraffe,” and so on.  This is, yes, “dull” but as we look for a more specific descriptor there, “repetitive” comes to mind.  We feel inefficiency in that repetition. We also feel some slight condescension; the writer has neglected to do the work of choosing the best of those descriptions, say.  We feel that she isn’t really taking account of us; we feel ourselves separated from her, just a bit.  That writing is dull, it is boring (sure, we could say it that way)– but we might also, and more precisely, say that the writer has “overlooked the opportunity to choose from one of several very nice descriptions which, if done, would focus the passage and speed it up, in which case I would see Grace more clearly.” And this is true: if we decide to make Grace giraffelike, that’s one story; if we choose to say that she “towers over the other children” this introduces the possibility that Grace might “tower above them” in other ways as well.

An early creative writing workshop. Note the student in red, looking up at the clock. The person in the black cloak is saying, “I think, Gustaf, you need to tell more about the mother.” The one in blue is thinking, “Yes, thy sure do.” One big difference: in those days, a writer whose work was deemed unsuccessful would, after class, be stoned. This is still sometimes true even today: an unsuccessful writer sometimes, after class, will get stoned.

A critique that is specific like this is not only more workable, it tends to be kinder. (It’s the difference between, “Wow, you drive a real shit-box,” and “I believe your front driver-side tire could use some air.”

So, with respect to your group’s fear of hurting one another’s feelings, here’s something I’m sure about: as we learn to analyze and diagnose with increased specificity and precision, the potential for hurt feelings diminishes, because we are offering specific, actionable ways (easy ways, often, ways that excite the writer, once she’s made aware of them) to make the story better.  And who doesn’t want some of that? 

In this, we indicate that we are on the writer’s side, we are rooting for her and are glad to have found these small but definite ways to make her story better.  There’s no snark, no competition, no dismissiveness, nothing negative or accusatory about it; just the feeling that we, her readers, are coming together with her, the writer, by way of craft. We’re all on the same team, the team of art.

So: the more specific the critique, the less empty, hurtful judgment there will be in it.

I might also add that the want of specificity can manifest in either direction: critiques can be vaguely, hyperbolically positive, or vaguely, hyperbolically negative.  (“This rocked” is exactly as unhelpful to the writer as “This sucked.”) In either case, the reviewer has failed to do the hard work of putting some meat on the bones; has merely vaguely waved a hand at an issue.

Specific praise is a really helpful thing, in that it answers that nagging, perennial, sometimes desperate writerly question: “What, if anything, am I doing right here?” And again, compare: “Well, you’re totally nailing it, in terms of your flow!” with “Your transitions always leave me with an open question that very naturally propels me into the next section.”

Specificity is also helpful to stories that the group might deem “problematic” (sexist, classist, racist, etc).  Say a story feels misogynistic.  As soon as someone says that, the tension in the workshop goes up.  The writer feels accused.  What can he say in response?  (“No, it isn’t,” is about it.)  But if the reviewer has identified the exact phrase at which she began to feel the story as misogynistic, and points it out, well, now there’s something to talk about.  As mentioned above, under the right kind of editorial scrutiny, “misogynistic” will become…something else.  (“Misogynistic” is the first-order descriptor; we are seeking the (more precise) second-level descriptor, that allows us to understand this apparent moral failing in technical terms.)

That is: analyzing specifically, we will come to see that the feeling of misogyny is actually evidence of the existence of a technical flaw in the story, the correction of which, in turn, will produce an opportunity for greater beauty and truth in the story.

I think I’ve written about this here in Story Club before, and I know I’ve mentioned it in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (on page 246, to be exact)…but once, when I was teaching my Russian class at Syracuse, a student didn’t like the Gogol story I’d assigned because, she said, it was sexist.  I asked her to show us where.  She, wonderfully, did so (she had done the work): she showed us how, in one place, where a male character was humiliated, we went into his thoughts.  When a female character was similarly humiliated, the omniscient narrator made a cheap joke at her expense.  In other words, she showed us exactly where Gogol was reflexively giving his male characters a bit of extra consideration.

In this way, what had been felt as sexist (and was, in fact, sexist) got diagnosed technically, as an example of what we might call “narrative inconsistency.” And our collective reaction was not, you know, “Cancel Gogol!” but: “Isn’t it interesting and productive for us to now consider the unwritten story, the one that would have resulted, had that narrative inconsistency been addressed? What would reading that story have been like?”  Considering this collectively was a rich experience.  That story, we concluded, would have been a better story – would have done all the magic the story currently was doing, and then some, and would not have had that slightly baggy feeling (the feeling of unfulfilled potential) that accompanies narrative inconsistencies of this sort.

Again, the point here was not to discredit Gogol (a person of his time, after all, and a great artist, whose works, of course, were not all equally enlightened or great); the point was to enhance our understanding of our chosen form — to see, in this case, how “narrative consistency” might affect the final outcome.

So, we want to train ourselves to critique with specificity.  What did we feel?  Where did we feel it?  I’ve often had the thought that the best workshop response might just be a color-coded band in the margin: red for “GREAT ENERGY,” down the spectrum to white for “NOT LIKING THIS AT ALL.”  A writer, scanning that band, would likely know just what to do, because a writer has, just under the surface, a pretty good idea of what is working, or not, in her story. One of the benefits of a good, specific critique is that, if someone else says it, we suddenly can see it.

Finally, re your question about “hearing the group’s critiques in your head” – yes, that is a real thing, for sure.  On one level, it might be helpful (if their critiques are good).  But it can also be paralyzing. It can cause us to write cautiously, always splitting differences, explaining too much, anticipating blame, doing only what we know will work, and so on. And a good story, as we all know, comes from joy and overflow and might even benefit from a little recklessness, and the workshop format tends to make a person self-conscious (it is a committee, after all), especially if a person is a people-pleaser (which many of us writers tend to be). 

The workshop also works differently for, or on, different types of people.  Naturally quiet people tend to be overlooked.  Know-it-alls easily dominate.  People who are members of groups that have historically been silenced may find the approach uncomfortable.  Writers who are especially sensitive to criticism may find it excruciating.

I’m a big believer in the workshop model (having taught in this way for over twenty-five years now). I’ve seen amazing things happen in workshop - moments when a student’s understanding of her own work leapt forward, when our collective understanding of the short story did so. But I don’t feel a person should be perpetually in workshop. The two workshops I had as a grad student at Syracuse were plenty. There’s a time when we have to just…decide for ourselves and be o.k. with that, even defiantly o.k. with that.

The workshop approach is, in truth, somewhat reductive and logical, compared with the creative process itself; it doesn’t do a great job of taking into account the long arc of a story (the way “an error” might eventually come to be a fully integrated asset). In a workshop, we are, of necessity, reduced to talking and explaining, to literalizing, and this is, at times, beneath the dignity of the short story form. Over the long semester, not everyone will be reading and critiquing with the same level of commitment and, of course, no one is ever as committed as the writer herself.

But I’ve found that most people who level the traditional critiques against the workshop model (it cranks out the same type of story over and over; it would demolish stories that we now know are classics; it values bland realism, etc.) either have never been in a good workshop, or have never been in a workshop at all.

The main thing, in my view, is to continually be introducing the limitations of the format as part of the class itself.  As a teacher, I try to remind the group that the method we’re using is…just that. A method. A flawed method (like all methods).  You know: “What are we doing here?  And how are we doing? We know that talking about stories this way fails to do justice to the real mystery.  Are we overlooking or avoiding anything essential?” 

A workshop is only as good as the people in it, and to be really good, the workshop model itself has to be continually doubted and interrogated. A workshop is a tool. Teachers and students who do some thinking together about the natural limitations of the tool itself are going to be better served by it.

And, of course, the workshop is just one way to work with stories. It was, after all, invented (in the 1950s or so) as a way to institutionalize creative writing and as a way to get students and teachers paid.

It is an odd, flawed format in which to discuss a work of art.  But all formats in which to discuss a work of art are flawed.  If we keep reminding ourselves of this – well, we’ll be doing a lot of work right there to ensure that we use the method intelligently.

In other news, the publication date for Liberation Day (October 18) seems to be rushing up. I just made my final (final) small text adjustment, to the last story in the book, and am also starting to do some early interviews now and getting the tour schedule all figured out. You can pre-order the book here.

My good friends at Random House have been kind enough to come up with some pre-publication cards for the book, like the ones below — if you have any desire to see these and send them around, they can be found here:

https://randomhouse.box.com/s/i7xp8c0dib9o2hbgykr9a5ma9alrwg5r