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.

A Happy Accident

There were four days before my community creative nonfiction workshop was set to begin when I learned that, due to unforeseen circumstances, I’d be taking on the community fiction workshop as well. At first this seemed like a daunting task. I had all of my lessons already planned out, my readings selected and ready to be photocopied, and they were all centered around—you guessed it—works and craft elements of creative nonfiction. This left me with two major questions I needed to answer in order to ensure that all of my students got out of the workshop what they’d hoped to: 1.) How am I supposed to fit fiction into the mix now with an already packed-to-capacity syllabus? And, 2.) Of all of the combined craft concerns of the two genres, which do I choose to focus on in the eight class meetings we’d have together?

The second question needed to be addressed first. Once I decided how to shift the focus of the class in order to encompass both genres, then I could worry about organizational measures. With six students in the class, that meant I could only afford to dedicate two of the two hour sessions to craft if I wanted to have enough time for all of my students to have two different pieces workshopped—which only seemed fair to me. A crash course in craft concerns was certainly in order, but which craft concerns should take the focus? Well, I would at least have to cover the elements of craft that are integral to both genres. This meant, for me: plot, characterization, setting, dialogue, point of view, and voice. On top of these, I’d have to cover certain elements unique to creative nonfiction as well. And so I chose to add truth and universality to the mix. No creative nonfiction class could be complete without a hearty discussion of the difference between objective and perspectival truth and how to handle weaving through both on the page. Universality, on the other hand, seemed crucial to bring up in order to avoid the awkward possibility of having to workshop 15 pages of Jane Doe’s private diary entries. “Your pieces should appeal to an audience broader than just you and your circle of friends and family,” I made sure to tell them straightaway.

With that, I added a few fiction readings to the list, photocopied them out, and the class had begun. Over the course of the workshop I found the amount of overlap between the two genres (even in terms of truth and universality, believe it or not) to be quite surprising. In fact, teaching the two genres together didn’t seem to muddle the concerns of either in the limited amount of time we had, but, instead, helped to illuminate the concerns of both in fascinating and beneficial ways. They reflected and refracted one another when they needed to, making for a swift understanding of the craft of creative writing overall. The other happy accident of the hybrid workshop was that it gave the students a chance to step outside of their comfort zones—an experience that I would argue is critical to the practice of writing. If I remember correctly, everyone in the class, whether they originally signed up for fiction or nonfiction, wrote one piece in each genre and I had the pleasure of being able to watch their writing improve and their appreciation of reading increase because of it.

Originally from Rochester, New York, Dustin J. DiPaulo is an MFA candidate at FAU. He writes creative nonfiction and music.