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.

Teaching High School Students to Write Science Fiction and (Not Always) Blow up Their Alien Worlds

Teaching high school students how to write science fiction is exactly like reading science fiction; it’s fun and weird, but a lot of the time you’ll have to do mental gymnastics to figure out what’s going on. For the 2019 FAU SciFi Collab Lab, Christopher Notarnicola (my co-teacher) and I took the classic science fiction trope of a hive mind and used it as a lead into collaboration for a group of high school students to write works exploring the complicated and bizarre. As a class, we dug through classic science fiction writers like E. M. Forster, Ray Bradbury, and H.P. Lovecraft, as well as more modern science fiction stories like Mass Effect and Zima Blue.

We began the “collaborative” aspect of the workshop with exercises combining individual writings into collaborative pieces called “exquisite corpses.” These exercises were a low-stakes way for students to get to know each other and practice writing together.  Each student would write a single sentence on a piece of paper, then pass the paper to the next student.  We started with ten separate pieces of paper, then after each person wrote a line, they would pass it on. We ended up with ten odd and unique stories.

Our ultimate collaborative work came in the form of two (much more structured) short stories.  One was Red Alert, the story of a secret agent infiltrating a post-apocalyptic government in order to save her remaining family.  The other was Shmoppo: The Story of a Grumpy Hero, where the “Froppie” protagonist must survive strange and unpredictable weather.

Of course, no writing summer camp should exist without writers getting to put together their own solo works.  Each of our writers came up with grippingly weird characters and plots ranging from a superheroine in space fighting to find herself to anthropomorphic amoebas trying to survive a science experiment.

Throughout our time writing and analyzing works of the past, we viewed everything through the lens of craft, with discussion geared toward answering the question: how do you write good science fiction?

The trickiest thing about teaching high school students the answer to that question was getting them to acknowledge the narrative points that they took for granted.  For example, having a swashbuckling space pirate with the power to cause supernovas might sound cool, but unless she has human concerns like making sure her dog has food, or a fear to use her abilities because she once accidently destroyed a burgeoning planet with sentient life, the story is almost literally all flash.  Initially, nearly all the students were focused on an over-the-top power or “sciency thing,” while ignoring the element that makes readers care. 

So, my favorite writing element I worked to get them to consider was contrast, something they used to devastating effect.  We went through the first issue of Robert Kirkman’s “The Walking Dead” to see how the calm, (relatively) happy times make the forthcoming zombie apocalypse that much more upsetting. 

In one story, a student wrote about a hellish, fiery apocalypse (obviously, it was delightful).  We spoke about contrasting in more positive elements, so the student added a dream sequence of flowers in a meadow, a concert with glittering bright lights, and a white house in the country with a freshly cut green lawn.  Then she went back to killing off humanity.  Sure enough, her (still slightly worrying) story hit all the harder, and she was thrilled with it.

Effectively, teaching this workshop is just like teaching a first year ENC class but with students who all want to be there.  The happier Chris and I were teaching—the more we nerded out about the stories—the more comfortable the students were trying new things.  Craft was important, but this was also a summer camp, where the expectation is to have fun, so that was always our goal.  When in doubt, put on another YouTube video with Wall-E knockoffs racing through a meteor shower.  High school students love analyzing robots getting blown up.





Justin Piesco is a second 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.