Tip: Workshops Are Not All Created Equal

One of you (Hi!) emailed me and talked a little about workshops, and I wrote back some thoughts. It occured to me they might be helpful to all folks contemplating taking a workshop or joining a writer's group, so here goes a lot of it again, plus more:

Ah, yes, workshops. Steve Kowit wrote a book called In the Palm of Your Hand - a very good sort of workbook for poets -- and he has this hilarious version of one of Emily Dickinson's poems after the workshop. Very funny.

The thing is that there can be good workshops and bad workshops. And even ones at prestigious conferences can be bad. It depends on the person leading it (usually an instructor), the chemistry of the group, their own experience and skills as critics, etc. Sometimes even the mood of the day or how tired people are. Or even one person in the workshop, who can have their own agenda, from promoting their own work to projecting their own issues onto characters in your story.

It's a good idea to try to look at the criticism you get objectively, and really try to look in your heart and ask: is that valid? Some may be. Some may not be.

Julia Cameron also has some good sections about criticism in The Artist's Way.Essentially she says that if it's vague and not something you can address, and just makes you feel lousy, odds are it wasn't good or useful criticism. But if if makes you say (after the first rude jolt): Aha! I see that, I can fix that -- chances are it was valid and useful.

I had pretty good experiences at the workshops at Warren Wilson, where I got my MFA, and also at UC Berkeley extension classes and UCLA extension classes.

Go for nurturing workshops where the person in charge makes it a priority to create a safe environment - not one that's a lovefest, of course, which would do no one any good, but safe. Thaisa once said that the best thing someone can do in a workshop is point out a "hole" in the work; not prescribe what to do about it, but just point out something missing to the author.

And also, if you're in a workshop, and you really don't like something you're reading of someone else's, try to find one thing you like. Just one thing. It may be the key into their work that will let you give them criticism that is truly useful.

And as you can imagine, I think less than zero of that macho kind of "we tear them apart to weed out the ones who can't take it - the ones who can take it are the real writers" crap.

And hang in there.

Still to come: some thoughts about plot which someone else emailed me about (Hi, Daria!) and a Halloween flash fiction about mummies. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.