This month’s b.read.crumbs post by Julie Herman, which you may find in the original on her website.
Writing Workshops
Writer’s workshops can be gold mines for inspiration about your work in progress — or they can stop you in your tracks. I’ve been in both kinds, and the former is one reason I keep going back for more. The workshop pictured above was my last one as a student at Vermont College of Fine Arts and it was perfection in every way.
So what elements of workshop bring me inspiration? The ones where people give me actionable, specific information about what is and is not working in a piece.
For example, the first workshop I did at VCFA was fraught with anxiety. I knew no one. I’d written something so different from my usual prose that I had no name for it. (Turns out the scenes were in vignette format–who knew?) But I had inadvertently made a big mistake in character development. While I had a protagonist who was like enough to me to be something I could write with authority, I had used jargon to denote the race of a secondary character, and made her mysterious and a little scary. There was a lone writer of color in that workshop and it fell to her to remind me that this could be harmful to those who read this work. I had made this lone representation of the diversity inherent in our world Other. Once pointed out to me, I too saw how harmful this could be, the marking of difference as dangerous, scary: Different with a capitol D.
It was hard to hear. Including a diverse cast is important to me, and I wanted to do well by all the characters in my story. But this was clear advice, given gently, with the clear intent to help me do better. So I listened.
What a gift that comment turned out to be. Painful, surely, in the moment, but also a comment that helped me grow.
What then about this particular experience could have gone better?
- I myself could have looked more critically at the work before I submitted it.
- The workshop leaders did not address this point, leaving it to the lone student of color in the room to give me advice. I do not know if I would have reacted differently to a faculty critique rather than a fellow student critique, but think for a moment about that woman. Writers of color are often the only people in the room who look like they do. Our business is growing more diverse, but it has certainly not arrived at a place where workshops even approach the diversity that is present in our general population. Is it fair to make that person “take” other students’ ignorance or worse to make them responsible for advising us on how we can do better?
- The workshop was run under the model first conceived in the Iowa Workshop, which leaves the author under a cone of silence while the commentary is given by the other workshop participants, this left me with no chance to ask for advice that I knew I needed coming in to move forward with this piece. (That said, I learned a great deal from what the folks said worked well and did not work well.)
- I gave some advice to other participants that I have since realized came directly from a lack of experience with a demographic depicted in the sample pages from the author. My comments were not helpful, and may well have been hurtful. I could have thought more about what direct experience I had vs what else might be true.
Three Good Things:
What can you do to help make workshop better for all concerned?
Here are three resources that have changed the way I give and receive critiques:
Matthew Salesses’ book CRAFT IN THE REAL WORLD gives a model that allows for more author involvement in the process, centering the work and the craft elements used rather than the audience opinions.
Alicia Rose Chavez’ book THE ANTI-RACIST WORKSHOP: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom gives additional terrific tips on how to include all writers.
And last, but not least is Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. Liz is a choreographer, but her advice crosses the boundaries to all of the arts quite well.
Happy Writing!
You can read previous issues of b.read.crumbs here.
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