The Community Writing Workshop

 

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.