I’m obviously far from the first to tackle this topic.  Dan Barden’s surly and funny “Workshop: A Rant Against Creative Writing Classes” in Poets and Writers Magazine  (which I discuss below) is a noteworthy article that describes the workshop conundrum….and here’s my take. 

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It was an intimate private workshop, just six students, and I was one of the two new kids. There were smirks. The woman sitting across the table glared as if I’d committed some major transgression, and it made want to take everything back, every word; but all I’d done was introduce myself.  

 

Not every workshop I’ve ever been in was a nightmare.  Writers workshops have a certain appeal as well as concrete benefits for the novice writer.  They address craft basics, often incorporate some limited literary criticism beyond the work produced in class (typically one novel or a handful of published short stories), and perhaps most importantly, they provide communal spaces for what by definition is an individual and relentlessly solitary pursuit. The latter is not to be underestimated or trivialized—workshops often provide novices with their first readers and fellow travelers on their writing journeys.

 

That being said, I can only think of one that actually benefited the piece I was workshopping. The  biggest problem with workshops in their traditional format is structural.  In a Lit class, the professor is the master of her domain, the undisputed authority on the curriculum who controls the classroom from beginning to end.  The workshop, on the other hand and as Barden points out, is more democratic in its design—although the teacher is still the expert (having published at least a book of short stories in order to qualify for the job) and the student has at minimum tacitly acknowledged that fact by signing up for the class to begin with, the curriculum belongs to the students: it’s their work and critiques, not the professor’s, which takes up the majority of the class time.  The teacher’s opinion may have more weight than the students’, the teacher may shade or correct or overrule a student’s critique, but ultimately the teacher in these workshops is reduced to an arbiter of these opinions and as such, just another writer with an opinion. And since the object of that opinion, no matter how well reasoned, is the generally middling to low quality of student work, its educational value is also dubious. What do you learn from an effective critique of crappy work? 

 

The  other issue is more sociological in nature.  As Barden points out, students get way too much attention for work that hasn’t earned it— and that attention goes to their heads. Inevitably, there are one or two students that come to dominate discussions (as happens in democracies).  Often, those same students are the ones who benefitted from some teacher affirmation and as such feel entitled to that domination. From there, a pecking order develops—on the next level are the sycophants who praise the dominant students’ work (whether deserving or not, quality is irrelevant) in the desperate hope that they receive some crumb of praise in return, then there are the outsiders who fight the dominant point of view, and finally the losers who all but give up and sit silently as they take it all in. In other words, middle school.  And the longer that workshop goes on, the more toxic the culture becomes. You’d think that an alert teacher would nip this sort of behavior in the bud but because the teacher is wittingly or unwittingly complicit and/or enabled the behavior to begin with, it’s harder to be aware of than you’d think. Cultures develop slowly and teachers become a part of them. 

 

Workshops have other flaws too, particularly when it comes to long form work.  Exposing a work in progress to criticism before it’s ready can do more harm than good.  It also happens to be very difficult to understand what the writer of a work in progress has in mind from only forty pages (which is typically what gets covered in a quarter).  Exposing the writer himself to critique can be harmful too — no one loves criticism, but a writer who hasn’t quite figured out where he’s going yet can be particularly vulnerable. 

 

Barden’s proposed solution to this conundrum is dictatorship:  to enforce his opinion on his class, to underline and enforce the idea that he’s the only expert in the room. While I agree that Barden’s approach is still preferable to the traditional Lord of the Flies approach, I can’t help but wonder: do writers actually improve through this process? Does one hammer make a stronger nail? Or is the best case scenario that the work really just becomes more palatable to the teacher? What happens when the student and the professor are an ideological or aesthetic mismatch? How would true originals, a young William Burroughs or Huruki Murakami for example, have fared in Barden’s workshop setting? 

 

To my mind, the real problem is larger than the one Barden identifies: the focus of the traditional workshop is on criticism; and while criticism necessarily plays a role in the creative process, it is not the process. Workshops may succeed in making writers better at critiquing bad writing, but does it make them any better at understanding how to improve their own? Generally speaking, even great critics make poor creative writers, and with good reason: critique is a left brain dominant process, while the literary writing that is typically the end product or goal of the workshop process ( as opposed to genre writing, much of which is also left brain dominant) is a right brain one.  Criticism also happens to be the perfect nutrient rich medium for creating or reinforcing a toxic workshop culture. 

 

So what’s the answer? We have to start by identifying the problem that the solution of workshops was invented to address.  How do you take a lover of literature (I’m assuming that most aspiring writers are) whose tastes are already largely formed (Gilbert Sorrentino, the experimental New York school novelist, used to say that by the age of twenty five we have already read everything that will influence our work as writers), and get them to understand how that literature operates at the level of its component parts?  The act is akin to reverse engineering a black box system, and the only way to do that is to broaden the purview of these workshops to include the entire creative process. Taking as a starting point the stereotypical brilliant novel: what did the novelist  accomplish in his work and how? What was the conceit and how was it executed? How do the scenes build? How does the style of dialogue fit the story? The same questions can then be applied to the student work, which can then be used to demonstrate the rewriting process. (Remarkably, given that even the name ‘workshop’ implies an apprenticeship of sorts, I have never had a teacher attempt to demonstrate any of these things). It should be noted that all rewriting involves criticism, but because of its temporality and practicality, it is criticism of an entirely different sort than the kind you find in a New York Times book review; e.g. this dialogue is expository (criticism), how do you rewrite it to get rid of the exposition? (process).  How do you handle entrances? Dialogue tags? The velocity of a scene? This is the kind of criticism a writer must learn to make of himself and engage with as he writes; as opposed to the very different kind of criticism leveled at by him by sniping students or a disenchanted teacher. By shifting the focus from criticism to process you also change the object, which is no longer on what the students have already written but how they’ll be able to write once they more effectively understand and are able to better engage in process.  And by changing the object, you also change the culture: students learn these skills together instead of in competition with one another. 

 

The most successful workshop I ever participated in was taught by Sorrentino. Sorrentino solved the workshop conundrum in this way: first, he had students read their work out loud; and then he used their stories as a springboard for discussing some issue of form that their work raised.  Reading out loud served the dual purpose of giving students the audience they craved while reminding them that words on the page are meant to be heard. Using the work as a springboard for a lecture on form also had a dual purpose: it served as a gentle pat on the head for some aspect well done while also reminding the entire class that there are novels that have accomplished feats that travel well beyond the boundaries of their paltry little stories.  It’s also very important to recognize what Sorrentino didn’t provide: a forum for student critiques. As a result, the culture was warm and supportive, the work improved, and the learning continued well beyond the last classroom session. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Sorrentino read every book every written  and that everyone already knew who he was and what he was about as a novelist; the students were primed to follow his lead before they ever signed up.

 

Beyond the Sorrentino model and short of proposing an entire format in this article, I’d say that  it should resemble an advanced math class where the professor works through and tries to solve Russell’s paradox (which may or may not be something that professors of advanced math do, I have no idea).  In trying to solve the insolvable, she demonstrates a mathematician’s thought process, her own fallibility in the face of an impossible problem, and her willingness to engage that problem regardless of her chances of success.  Isn’t this exactly what long form writers need to learn? A demonstrative model also has the benefit of being largely values free, in that it is not proposing or elevating a single mode or style of writing: conceivably, a student who writes genre and another more literary minded could benefit from the same lesson. All writing can be reduced to its component parts and how they function together; understanding and imitating accomplished works is always the first step towards learning to do it yourself.