On Workshops

So in my college career I've been taking a few Creative Writing courses, because I can and it's awesome. I've had two CW classes, and one on CW and Publishing. All of them have been SO helpful, because of the guidelines that I've been given. One teacher I took had different "do's and don'ts" units on dialogue, creating characters, establishing setting, creating tension-- all different elements of a story. Before I had never really thought about those elements, I guess my unknowing mind thought that if I had a story to tell that people would want to read it. I was completely wrong. It's about how you tell the story that can make the difference!

But I digress. (Maybe I'll do another post about do's and don'ts.) What I really wanted to talk about was workshops.

In each of the classes that I've taken we've had to do peer workshops. Normally I'd be terrified of peer anything-- bad memories of peer-reviewed papers where semicolons get bashed-- but these were pretty good. My teacher for my CW courses really pushed for us to be specific with our critiques, to give examples of how it could be made better, etc, instead of just saying "Your dialogue could use work."

The only problem for me personally was the work that I was required to submit for these workshops. The work had to be a complete short story-- no parts of a novel or sections of a chapter. This isn't to say that those rules weren't broken by the occasional student, but after trying (uselessly) to help one peer with an incomplete work I tried to keep sending in complete short stories. As a fantasy writer, however, this is difficult to do. Keep a whole story within 7 pages, Times New Roman, double spaced? There's not a lot of space for world-building, plot, anything.

What essentially happened was that I got tips for the short story that I could sometimes apply to my novel (which, let's face it, is what I really cared about). A specific critique would sometimes get me thinking, Do I do that with dialogue in my novel? or Oh, bad character development... I did the same thing with that one character in my novel... or something along those lines. But by the end of the second CW class, I sort of began to dread workshops. I began to dread having to spew out some kind of story for credit, a story that I would never look at ever again...

My CW&P class started off the same way. I resubmitted the stories I used in the CW courses, altered them a little, thought about revising them to use in my novel (and rejected that idea every time)... And then I noticed a trend among my peers in that class: about half of them would bring chapter chunks to workshop, and when they did they really appreciated the critique we had. In fact, they got really excited about it. So I decided to step out of the boundary and submit a section of my prologue that I love but knew needed work.

That workshop is my favorite workshop to date. Although, the one that I submitted the opening part of the first chapter was really good, too... People read what I gave them, understanding that it wasn't a complete work, and would focus on how to help me make it better. It's an opening chapter- do we like the character? Is there desire? Is there tension? Is there a problem? Does the character react in a believable way to his/her surroundings? Is the opening description confusing? Do you need more tags in that dialogue section? These kinds of things were addressed in the workshop, and they really got my mind rolling. I knew, for example, that the opening chapter was weak, but I couldn't figure out why or how to fix it. One of my workshop peers nailed the problem dead on the head. Once he said it needed tension and to move faster, I instantly felt like he was right, and that it was the missing puzzle piece that I had been looking for.

So I still have mixed feelings on workshops. I definitely think they can go wrong (I'll never forget the incredible urge I had to punch a girl whose only critique was that every single dash I had used was apparently the wrong kind of dash), but I can also definitely see their benefit. Sometimes an outside perspective is really what you need-- and is way better than bashing your work with the hammer, hoping it'll still turn out ok in the end.