why I shouldn't do workshops

[ritaxis]

I am writing this so I will remember. I shouldn't do workshops because all the standard things that people say at workshops do not help me write better stories, they baffle me, they annoy me, and sometimes infuriate or depress me. I don't actually agree that all novels ought to have the same exact structure: nor do I believe that the reader needs to know everything the novel's going to tell them in the first ten pages. I don't believe that the first chapter ought to resolve the story's major problems or even necessarily lay out the whole problem. I don't believe that the reader necessarily has to know the whole of what the main character wants by the end of the first chapter.

And furthermore, if a person is adopting an air of authority, and projecting a wave of dislike, while using awkward set phrases to tell me to write an entirely different story from what I have in mind, I'm just not going to profit from it. The basis for the person's authority? Having attended workshops. The wave of dislike apparently deriving from not liking the subgenre in which I'm writing? Maybe?

But that's just the specifics of that workshop. I don't think I profit from any workshop anyway. I think I need to stop attending them and get feedback in other ways. It's not like it's a major activity of mine anyway. I've tended to do one every five or six years.

Yes, I do realize that my specific complaints could easily be said in those words by a person who had written a meandering, irrelevant, confusing, and unengaging first chapter, who is resistant to good advice. But whether my writing is like that or not -- and I dearly hope it is not (I'm not a reliable judge as I tend to think everything I do is crap no matter how much I also think I am on to something) -- the advice was useless. Nobody's going to improve their book by trying to jam all that in there. It would leave nothing to develop, no conflicts to resolve, no plot.

Anyway, my new writing vow: no more goddamned workshops.

Comments

[kiya]

I had similar issues with the creative writing type class I took before they threw me out of college. Though they were aggravated by the fact that I was apparently the only person in the room who did fantastic fiction of any sort?

The professor thought I was great, the other students found me incomrpehensible.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Exactly!

Workshops' one benefit, perhaps, is creating a bonding experience so those who were in it while working to finish a book and get published, once published, can form a writers' clique and puff each other -- and their brand of writing, whatever it may be.

Before all that though, they haven't yet published, are trying to figure out how to write a book, so why should one think they know what they are talking about.

Also, the one benefit? It also mean having one or two members around which the others bond to make their scapegoats for all their own insecurities. After all, workshops are hierarchal systems (even if they say, like Clarion they are not), so somebody must be O-U-T .... The one exception is probably the Taos Workshop, but that's for pros, mostly.

Love, C.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I think highly-trusted beta readers are invaluable, but after a certain point workshops just seem superfluous at best, unless it's related to a form or genre you're just starting out in or revisiting after a long while.