Office Hours

On the Workshop Process

Q.

Perhaps you’ve addressed this before and I’ve just missed it, but the question occurs to me now that you’re back in the rhythm of the school year. This practice of noticing-reading that we do with published works in Story Club, is this what you encourage your students to practice when they workshop or give feedback on each other’s drafts in progress? If so, would you be willing to talk a little about how that works? If not, would you be willing to talk about what your philosophy of student workshopping is?  When I was in my MFA, sometimes workshop was electric with learning, and other times it felt like the biggest waste of everybody’s time — even when facilitated by the same instructor. I wasn’t tuned-in enough at the time to figure out what made the difference, but now I’m wondering if it was about whether we brought our most curious, humble, noticing selves or our most grumpy-hungry-overtired selves to reading each other’s work. Maybe my fundamental question is: How can I be a more generous, helpful, honest, humble reader of other writers’ work-in-progress?

A.

This is a deep topic and one dear to my heart, so I think I’ll answer this below and in a second post next Thursday.

Let me start by saying that a workshop is a weird way to talk about a work of art.  The workshop was basically an economic construct back at the time of its inception – a way for student writers and published writers to get paid.  And it still is that: a strange-fitting jacket writers use to stave off the cold, but one that also chafes at times.

It’s imperfect, in other words – a too-blunt tool for a very fine job.  So, we need to be humble, and constantly remind ourselves of the tool’s imperfection and that, as much as the tool can sometimes help, it can also do real harm.  (Not everyone responds positively to being critiqued in this group way; some people feel silenced by it, or unfairly dominated.  A group of people, no matter how well-intentioned, can never do the work of the writer’s subconscious.)

But if we make assessing the format part of the format (by, for example, asking questions like: How are we doing so far?  What are the limits of our method? Have we said enough about this story? Would the author like to weigh-in/redirect us?) we can go a long way toward minimizing the harm and increasing the benefit.

Having said all of that…

In a perfect world, in my view, what the writer would receive from the workshop would be a real-time record of the reviewer’s reactions: a color-coded band along one margin, with (say) “Green” meaning, “Loving this, right with you,” “Yellow” meaning, “Still in, but with some reservations,” and “Red” meaning, “Sorry, you’ve lost me, I feel like putting this aside.”

The theory is that, provided with this sort of feedback by the workshop, the writer would gain an idea of what was working and what wasn’t. Often, the writer, at some level, already knows about the iffy zones in her story and (importantly) also already has some idea of what to do about them.

I’ve had this experience: someone reads my work, reacts with a “meh” to one part or another, and I suddenly realize I’ve know that part was “meh” all along - and the person doesn’t have to say another word.

Just…let me at it.

But, since this color-coding technology doesn’t exist (yet), I encourage my students to come as close as possible to mimicking it, by: reading the story once, for pleasure, then going back through it a second time, line editing and annotating, as precisely as they can, where the inflections in their reading energy occurred.

The goal here is to provide a report of how engaged they were in the text – where the text pulled them in and when it pushed them out.

We don’t have to prescribe any fixes.  Of course, sometimes we can’t resist, and we do prescribe, and this can he helpful, if only to help us be clear about what the perceived issue is. (I find myself doing this especially when a bit of text isn’t clear - I’ll sometimes write out a few different possible versions, so the writer can see what it is that I’m having trouble understanding.)

But the core idea is: the writer’s subconscious has been hard at work on this story for many months and still is at work on it. So, any advice we give is likely not as good as the solution the writer will eventually find on his or her own, through revising.

During workshop, the main goal, always, is specificity.

As much as possible, one’s notes should be grounded in a particular place in the text.  To say, “This story is slow,” is one thing; to say: “Just at this point (page 5, paragraph 3) my reading energy dropped slightly,” is much more valuable.

As we’ve talked about here before, there are ways that, as we comment, we can drill down into more and more specific expressions of what we’re feeling. “I’m lost,” can become, “I seem to be confusing Natalie with Sally,” can become, “In this line, Natalie uses the phrase, ‘and all that’ and then, just below, Sally uses that same, somewhat distinctive, phrase - any value in editing one of these two usages out?”

And specificity should be the goal whether we’re praising or criticizing.  A vague bit of praise is no more useful than a vague critique.  To say, “Loved this!” or “Really admired the overall flow!” helps exactly no one.

Whereas, if the reviewer can identify a positive thing about the story and articulate that praise precisely, this is a real gift for the writer, because it tells her what she should feel good about/protect/nurture in her work.  It tells her what she should do more of. Rendered precisely, praise can tell her which writer, at her best, she is.

(I sometimes assign my students to write a blurb for the story we’re doing that week, the more precise the better. The implied charge: tell me what makes this writer special.)

Imagine getting a comment like this: “I love the way the voice changes subtly on page 2-3 to indicate the character’s increasing agitation.  This really told me something about who she is. This is exactly where I get the sense that you are ultimately writing about this character’s better nature coming to the fore.”

A writer getting a note like that is not only being told that she’s good, she’s being told how and where she’s good.

So, I like my workshops to start out with a period of (precise, specific) praise. 

This does a couple of things.  First, it helps the writer be open to the suggestions and criticisms that are coming; it’s a way of saying, “Yes, this story is working, in the following ways.”  And once we assure the writer of this, it’s natural for her to want to hear how she can take this already wonderful thing and make it even more wonderful (more like itself). 

The second thing it does is to underscore a very important truth about high-level works of art: the strengths of the work and the “flaws” that are evident in the draft-in-progress are interrelated and are both aspects of the writer’s talent and therefore we mustn’t treat anything in the story as an error, or a misstep, or a regrettable “issue.” 

Editing a story is not a matter of excising “problems.” 

It’s much more interesting than that.

I wonder if some of you might want to share your experiences workshopping or being workshopped? What was the best day? The worst? Any interesting approaches, things to avoid, transcendent moments? What was the biggest learning experience you ever had in a workshop?

The workshop is, of course, for better or worse, the dominant way that we teach creative writing in America - so this might be a cool opportunity to talk frankly about it among ourselves.

I’m writing this Wednesday night from my hotel room in San Francisco and I have an early flight to Portland tomorrow – so I think I’ll pause here.

Next Thursday I’ll pick this topic of the “there are no problems” approach to workshopping. I’d also like to discuss something I’ve taken to calling “avoidance moments.”

Thanks to all of you who came out to San Francisco City Arts and Lectures event tonight - a series that is truly a national treasure. Story Club was well-represented, and I loved talking with the amazing Alexis Madrigal. The series has a pretty incredible lineup this year, if you find yourself in the Bay Area.

Also, I had the privilege of appearing on the Booker Prize Podcast the other day. We talked with the hosts, James Walton and Jo Hamya, about what it was like to win the Prize, and the writing of Lincoln in the Bardo and Liberation Day, and, of course, process. You can hear the episode here. The Booker Prize is also very active. on Substack (“Long reads, original video, exclusive interviews and much more from the world's greatest writers of fiction”), and that can be found here.