In Defense of Creative Writing Workshops: Not Evil, Just Misunderstood
As Americans we’re often so focused on product, the end-result of whatever we’re working on, that we lose sight of the fact that the process itself has inherent rewards and value and is worth thinking about. One such process is the much-maligned creative writing workshop.
There’s a lot of talk out there about writing workshops, which tend to both A) invite a lot of criticism, and B) persist as a relatively effective model of creative writing education. It reminds me of Winston Churchill’s observation (likely cribbed from E. M. Forster’s What I Believe) that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.
One criticism of workshop comes from the perspicacious Francine Prose, who once noted that she’d never understood the idea of a writer sitting silently while her work is being torn apart, and then afterward is expected to say “thank you,” presumably instead of storming off in a huff or throwing things.
Another point of criticism of workshop, voiced by Junot Diaz and Viet Thanh Nguyen among others, is centered on the idea of being misread and the deleterious effects of that misreading on the person being workshopped. Various causes for being misread might include identity differences, educational differences, bad taste, lack of literary experience or savvy, or just plain laziness.
Underlying such critiques is the wish to be part of a world where readers have no biases, and where readers share similar political philosophies, educations, and work ethics. Such readers are always sensitive, hardworking, and attentive, assiduously studying every single manuscript submitted.
Good luck with that.
It’s worth noting that in the non-writing workshop world, when you submit your work, to editors, MFA program applications, publishers, agents, contests, what you typically get is silence, or a couple of diplomatically worded pablum sentences that mean “No,” or the rare “Yes.” And that’s it.
Hardly ever do you get a reason for the reaction, or a detailed readback and discussion of your work with line-edits and a letter pointing to specific passages with suggestions. That kind of response is golden, generous, and pretty commonly found in writing workshops.
In workshop, people have devoted valuable time to read and consider your words that are on the page, divorced from the ideas about it in your head. They’re trying to make sense of their own reaction to it in detail instead of just leaving you a quick Amazon review or Facebook post or a form rejection email. And so, it seems to me, that the proper response for their efforts is thank you.
Even when the responses given are flawed, erroneous, or biased, I think it’s useful to know how your work might be understood by another live human being with flaws and vulnerabilities and shortcomings and busy lives, you know, the kind of people who actually pick up books in bookstores and often put them down for no other reason than because they just fucking feel like it. (Imagine an author arguing with someone who’s bought her book and has chosen not to finish it!)
My work has on more than occasion been “misread” in a workshop. And in my experience as a writer, I always think a misreading, even one committed out of laziness or bias, is valuable and worth paying attention to. After all, no one ever had trouble understanding that War and Peace was about Napoleon and not Hitler invading Russia.
If you haven’t been clear, maybe it’s because of some moral failing on the part of your reader. Or maybe it’s because you haven’t done enough work to make your work clear to a variety of readers. Or maybe you’re writing your work for a specific audience and simply don’t want to be understood by everyone, and you are just fine with that. If that’s the case, isn’t it better to test your mettle in a workshop than when your work appears in the world where it can be torn apart anonymously on social media?
All this said, a workshop can be dangerous to your mental health if you walk in without a plan. As Ann Pancake so wisely observes in her article on how to receive and sift through critique in workshop, the very worst time to make any decisions about what to do with a manuscript is in the immediate aftermath of that workshop. And yet we feel a temptation to do just that. Why? I think it’s a symptom of what Steven Pressfield in The War of Art terms as “resistance.” Not the Trump kind.
What does Pressfield mean? When we’re critiqued, our ego or sense of self is being attacked. James Baldwin says that the danger of hearing an opinion you hadn’t considered is that you lose your previous story of who you are, your very identity. And so your ego, like any other creature whose existence is threatened, rises up to defend itself. It whispers to your mind the best advice possible to preserve it — and in the process hurt you, thank you very much. Pressfield points out that it’s the same reflex that if you’re dieting, for example, suggests, “Come on, have that extra piece of cake,” and then later, when you’re unhappy about the scale, that same reflex that told you to eat the cake says, “You idiot, why did you have that extra piece of cake?” The ego will literally say or do anything to you to ward off taking in the words you are hearing, the words that threaten to change your self-perception.
So one of the favorite ploys of the ego in a writing workshop is to “defend” against the critique that’s just been given. And sometimes it feels oh so right. Yes, I’m sticking up for myself! Yes, I’m defending my grand artistic vision against these barbarians who don’t get how brilliant I am. If only I could show my work to that mythical other select group of people who would know and approve of what I do almost on instinct. They live in the land of Utopia. Now if I could just find that land on my GPS…
Therefore, my advice is that after being workshopped is to say thank you out of self-interest. When we defend rather than say “thank you” — and another way of saying “thank you” by the way is to ask questions that seek to understand others’ reactions to our work rather than offer defenses — we diminish the value of simply trying to hear and understand what’s being said to us. And then later in our rooms when we want to revise our work and we’re stuck, we feel like shit. And when we show our work again, and get the same reaction to it, we wonder, why does this keep happening to me?! For that, you can say thank you to your ego, but not to the workshop, because you didn’t hear, not really, what they actually had to say in that room. You heard a version of it, true, but the message was muffled, distorted by the waves of internal resistance.
Also, it’s a good idea to say “thank you” because when we defend it has a sinister effect on the other participants in the room. It makes them critique more cautiously the next time our work is up for review.
Hey, ego works both ways. As a reader, I don’t have time for the pain. I don’t want to be castigated for my response to the work in question, to be told I’m just not smart or sane or sensitive enough to have the right response to that work.
Just as we writers all want to have the artistic freedom to write in whatever way we want, so too as readers we need that same artistic freedom to respondto the work in whatever we want, but only so long as we can point to something specific in the work that causes that response.
If I as a workshop reader am not allowed to have that kind of freedom, then I’m less likely to want to invest my time and effort in carefully reading the work and more likely to invest my time and effort into reading the writer. As in, “Gee, last time person X had such a visceral reaction to what I said. I don’t want that again. How can I change my reaction to one that will make person X react calmly next time?”
Of course there’s a double irony in this egoic reaction. First, because the ego has succeeded not only in trying to soothe the ruffled feathers of the writer but also in manipulating the responses of the workshop readers so the writer gets less value out of the experience. And second, because this gambit rarely works. No matter how much we’ve tailored our responses, whether consciously or unconsciously, to soothe the person being workshopped, an overly defensive writer still reacts the same way to our critique: defensively. And so our discussion is all the poorer off for it on all sides.
Listen, no one has argued or ever should argue that writing workshops are perfect, just as human beings are not perfect. But what they can and consistently do deliver is a way to understand how our work is understood and misunderstood by other real readers, and not utopians.
