While writing workshops are a place to improve one’s
writing, even the most experienced students can have a difficult time seeking
progress over praise.
No writer, as far as I know, has ever submitted to a
writing workshop and in return been offered an award and/or publication. Polite, hopefully useful feedback, sure, but
turning in a rough piece only to be whisked off to fame, fortune, and prestige?
It doesn’t happen.
And it shouldn’t.
That isn’t to say that I don’t wish my FAU Community Writing
Workshop students to gain all the financial and social accolades in the world,
because I absolutely do. Between those
with decades of experience in journalism or speech writing, those with enough
genre knowledge to seemingly quote from every episode of Star Trek, and those
finding pen and paper as the tools for self-expression, I don’t doubt
the potential for success from any of them.
But that brings up a question FAU’s Creative Writing
Director Becka McKay asks all of her students: “How do you measure your success
as a writer?”
Rarely is the answer, “If I get a handful of ‘thumbs
ups’ from the random people I ended up with in my workshop, my writing life
will be satisfied.”
Most, if not all, writers know that the workshop is
the not the end goal. And yet,
submitting a work to a workshop and receiving more questions than praise, more
frustration than applause, or worse yet, a room full of booming indifference is
frustrating.
I discuss this trap with students on day one. Whether we’re strangers staring each other
down around a makeshift circle in-person, or we’re all debating turning off our
cameras on Zoom so no one judges our messy closets, we tend to be more
concerned with the immediate judgement before us than we are the grander scheme
of our writing.
What has been the solution, for me anyway, is to
specifically acknowledge the problematic nature of competition. I don’t know exactly how many students have
said, “I was a little worried about having my story workshopped after [that
other student’s] because of how good that story was,” but it’s been a lot of us.
That hesitance and worry tends to come from an idea of
“finding value” being the goal of the workshop.
A student is more worried about the opinions of their peers than the
fact that they are actively learning how to recognize better writing. The response could just as readily be, “I’m
so excited to hear how to implement the great things the previous story did
into my own writing!” That’s something I’ve never heard, but it so easily could
be.
The goal in any workshop needs to be progress. What I’m doing today will make me a better
writer tomorrow. If I’m competing with
anything, it’s the passage of time, and I want my future self to be better than
my present self.
In any workshop, the goal can and should be to find
out what each writer does well and how workshoppers can utilize the tools of
others in their own writing. Matt is
brilliant at figurative language; Chey is a genius at crafting scenes; Dan
writes the smartest/funniest dialogue; Ben’s king of line-level attention to
detail; Aidan’s images and artistic connections melt minds, etc.
No Community Workshop teacher can or should tell
students what it means for them to be successful writers, but what we can do is
help students find ways to answer that question for themselves and to become
better writers than they were when they began the class.
Justin Piesco is a third year MFA student in Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University. He has worked as a Writing Consultant at FAU's Center for Excellence in writing since 2014, and he has taught first-year English since August 2018. He enjoys teaching and writing as both provide avenues for the gaining and sharing of knowledge.
