Category Archives: The Writing Life

The Writing Workshop: Does It Work?

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In this blog, I’d like to continue the conversation about how we give and receive feedback on our writing by discussing one of the most common methods out there: the workshop. Here’s how it often goes:

Each week one or two members of a writing group hand out copies of a story or poem to be workshopped (we even have a new verb) at the next meeting. During the week, members of the group read the writing, make comments and prepare to give suggestions for revision. At the following meeting, the writer remains silent, listening and jotting down notes on the group’s reactions. Usually the leader/teacher of the workshop (if the group is a class) adds comments, guides the discussion and tries to pull together the threads of the reactions so the writer has some clear direction for revision. Then the writer supposedly hurries home to revise the piece. At this point, the familiar scene breaks down because a successful revision, or even the desire to work on a revision, doesn’t always follow the workshop process. At least for me.

The workshop method is appealing because, according to its proponents, it allows for multiple responses to a piece. Yet workshop members often give their attention primarily to the comments of the teacher, who is usually the most experienced, or extensively published, writer among them. Or sometimes one member of the group takes the lead and dominates the conversation, while the others follow and add their comments to that one voice. Sometimes there is a disagreement over what should be done to make the piece better.

The little comedy sketch I posted by Mitchell and Webb condenses the workshop method into a two-person scene.  (See “Write This: Mitchell and Webb.” http://youtu.be/sifESist1KY. Posted on 10/30/12.) Webb, the critiquer, expresses multiple takes on a single piece of writing while the writer, Mitchell, sits silently (or almost, he tries to make a few comments but is over-whelmed by the power of Webb, the person behind the desk.)

So while her piece is being discussed, the writer is supposed to be silent, not say a word. Again proponents of the method say this is the way it is in the real world when the writer is not available to the reader to explain or respond.  Yet the readers of a piece in a workshop are not the same as the readers of a published piece. After a few cursory comments about the strengths of a writing, these workshop readers are usually given the task of finding what is wrong with the piece and are rarely as accepting as those who read a published story or poem. One time I took a short essay that had already been published to a workshop, by the time I left I wondered how it was ever published—there were too many things to be fixed! Also the whole method creates an adversarial framework, so that if the writer is allowed to speak she could become defensive trying to explain why she wrote the story the way she did.

We also tell ourselves that if we’re able to see the flaws in another piece of writing, we can better spot our own. But does it work this way? Am I becoming a better writer or simply better at critiquing someone else’s writing? Most of us (even those who lead the workshops) are not taught how to give helpful feedback to others. While we may have good intentions and spend an enormous amount of time preparing for the workshop, our comments are not always helpful to the writer.

In “Toward a More Democratic Workshop” (Poets and Writers, March/April 1998), Lex Williford tells how his story was shredded by a famous young writer leading a workshop. The young writer had opened the discussion by saying to the group: “This story’s awfully derivative, don’t you think?”  By the end of the workshop, Williford says, “My face burning, I looked down at my story, a thing I’d struggled on and off with for over a year, and turned it over on the seminar table. The famous young writer spent the rest of the workshop doing what he’d come there to do: to talk about himself and his stories and to sign copies of his book.”  In Williford’s copy, he wrote: “In honor of the beating we give and take. Thrive.”

In her essay,  “Mild Sadism in Writing Workshops,” Carol Bly tells of a time when one class member started the discussion of a fellow writer’s work by saying, “I may as well get this over with,” in a tone of pronounced disdain. Bly says, “The rest of the participants took this same tone when they spoke. No doubt they were experiencing what psychologists call moral drift, or the bystander effect: That is, you have various, slightly conflicting opinions on a subject, but when you hear others speaking in a single tone or with a single judgment, you let your thoughts slide over to that judgment the way iron filings nudge loose and then nearly fly to a magnet.”

Bly’s emphasis on judgment is a crucial one. I believe one of the main flaws of the workshop method is the rush to judge (this is good, this is bad) before a piece has fully evolved. We can’t seem to talk about art anymore without immediately judging it. We walk out of a movie and ask, “Well, what did you think? Did you like it?” The same comments are often asked of fellow readers before we read a book. Maybe we don’t want to waste our time on something that is not good.

There is danger in this rush to judge: it automatically stops conversation. People move into a defensive mode, an argumentative position. I remember Natalie Goldberg saying about a piece of writing, “Good. Good that you wrote that. Now continue. Write more.”  Certainly revision is necessary, but a specific judgment from someone else doesn’t necessarily lead us to a sound revision.

Okay. I’m going to pause here and continue my thoughts on the workshop method in my next blog. In the meantime, send us your thoughts, experiences, ideas. Onward!

 

How I Got a Life

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Cherise Wyneken
Guest Author

“If the circumstances are right, suffering can teach and lead to rebirth.”
—Anne  Morrow Lindbergh

We were standing in front of a large window at the Miami Airport watching a plane take off with our last child leaving home. Barely into adulthood, our other three children had been left behind in California when we moved to Florida. What am I going to do with my life now?  I thought. Should I cry or celebrate?  A big black hole had appeared ready to suck me in.

Eventually I realized that I was now free to pursue my long desire to be a writer of children’s stories. I began taking creative writing classes at nearby universities. In the process, I became hooked on poetry and writing stories from my life. In time I sent my work out for publication. Slowly it began to appear in various journals, periodicals, books, and anthologies. The black hole had disappeared – filled with friends and writing projects.

But one doesn’t need to write for publication. Computers make it easy to run off copies of our stories to give to our children. My husband, who grew up in South India, has many interesting tales to tell from his childhood. “Write them down for us, Dad,” our children say.  When our son was reading one of my childhood stories to his daughter, she stopped him and asked, “What’s Johnny cake?’’ She knows it as corn muffins or corn bread.

When we moved back to the San Francisco East Bay, I continued my involvement with writing. Recently I won a prize: the publication of a collection of my nonfiction articles, Stir-Fried Memories, from Whispering Angel Books – a kind of blue ribbon culmination of my years of writing. The black hole has been avoided. I’ve got a life!

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Cherise Wyneken, whose story “The Daughter-in-Law” appeared in When Last on the Mountain: The View from Writers over 50, began writing in her early fifties. Now at 83, she is still active with various writing projects, including a poetry column for the Oakland Examiner’s online edition at: www.examiner.com/poetry-in-oakland/cherise-wyneken  See also, http://www.authorsden.com/cherisewyneken & www.whisperingangelbooks.com.

C. K. Williams: On Being Old

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I’m feeling my age today. After a wonderful trip to Peru, I’ve returned home to Minnesota. While in Peru, my husband and I climbed Machu Picchu and visited the Peruvian rainforest. I felt downright young. We were on the go everyday. We were at the top of the world where matters of age and one’s aching bones were forgotten in the glory of the vistas.

On top of the world at Machu Picchu

But now back at home, I’ve come down with a nasty head cold–and well, I’m definitely in the valley today. But being laid low has given me a chance to watch this amazing lecture by C. K. Williams, “On Being Old.” I invite you to make yourself a cup of tea and spend an hour listening to C. K. Williams talk about what it’s like from the vantage point of an old poet.

Just click on this link:

After you’ve had a chance to watch, we’ll talk about his ideas in my next blog. I’ll be back to my old self then, and I’d like to know what you think.

Enjoy.

Good Ole Boy

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I love family stories. I love being reminded that only a generation ago, our parents might not have been able to go to school. I love my new home in the South where people tell me stories at the Harris Teeter meat counter about how it was to butcher “back home,” and students in my writing workshop at the senior center tell me about priming tobacco.

Tony R. Lindsay’s parents were from rural farm families in the Great Smoky Mountains. His mother, one of thirteen children, was motherless from the age of nine. On occasion, her father would ride off to look for another wife and might be gone for ten days, sometimes leaving the children with nothing but potatoes to eat. She left home when she was twelve to live with her sister in Knoxville, and became a seamstress in a sweatshop at fourteen.

His mother never went to school. His father, one of ten children, got as far as the eighth grade. Twice, actually. His coach asked him to stay in school so he could play basketball an extra year. But the nearest high school was too far away for his family to consider sending him.

Tony grew up in Knoxville, but spent summers and as many weekends as he could in the Gatlinburg area, particularly in Cades Cove, a sheltered mountain valley that was settled in the late 1700s. His was a church-going family—twice on Sunday, Wednesday night prayer meetings, Thursday choir practice, Friday night socials.

He graduated from the University of Tennessee and, before retiring, managed several factories in various parts of the country. He began writing about eight years ago when he read a quote on his older daughter’s bulletin board at the school where she teaches gifted students: “If you want to be remembered after you die, you must do something worth writing about or write something worth reading.”

“I figured it was too late for me to do something worth writing about, but maybe I could write something worth reading,” Tony says. So he went to critique groups and workshops, took copious notes, wrote and rewrote his stories about rural people, mountain people. He wrote about Homer Guthry and Elwood Hatmaker, young boys exploring the Cove; about Lefty Goins, proprietor of a roadhouse and brewer of moonshine; about Bluford Nodding, “a dim-witted, towering sequoia of a man,” who was never seen without his Bible. Collected now in Tattletale Roadhouse and Social Club, his stories are often seasoned by a salty religion and peppered with analogies like those his father used. “Hawkshaw smells like a wet turtle climbing out of a privy,” being one of the milder ones.

When not writing, Tony tools around in a 1966 pickup and likes to boast “that his wife and TV both work.”

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Go to www.secondwindpublishing.com for information about Tony’s book.

Tell Me More

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If I had to choose one book for my desert island writing retreat, it would be Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write. Fear and laziness are sent packing when I read her words.

Brenda Ueland

“Everybody Is Talented, Original, and Has Something Important To Say,” she announces right off as the headliner title of Chapter One. She goes on to say how this originality, talent, and truth comes out when each of us pays careful attention to the world around us and writes from that unique perspective.

Brenda Ueland was born in Minneapolis in 1891 in a home overlooking Lake Calhoun. She returned to Minneapolis after a sojourn in New York where she worked as a journalist and was part of the Greenwich Village bohemian crowd (John Reed, Louise Bryant, Eugene O’Neill).  She continued her work as a writer, editor, and teacher of writing. I remember seeing her feeding the geese around Lake Harriet, another Minneapolis city lake. She was a swimmer and an avid walker, sometimes walking nine miles a day. She died at age 93, in 1985.

About her classes at the Minneapolis YWCA, she writes in the preface to the second edition: “I think I was a splendid teacher, and so did they.”  Her words capture her spirit and honesty. She is captivated by the unique lives of her students. She listens and encourages them to keep writing.  “The only good teachers are those who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny, whose attitude is: ‘Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out.’ ”

I remember a Vietnam vet in one of my classes many years ago. He stopped by my office to ask if I would read a poem he had written. “I carried this around with me all during the war,” he said. He took out his billfold and unfolded a single sheet of paper that had been folded and re-folded so many times it almost fluttered away in the air.

He read this poem that compressed all his feelings, everything about the war and loss, into a few lines. Then he folded and re-folded it and put it back in his billfold. The poem contained all his anguish, pain, love. We talked about his poem, and I told him how amazing it was. “Now write more,” I said. “Tell me as much as you can remember.” His poem contained more than any one poem could contain. It was breaking at its seams for all the power it held in its folds.

Sometimes this happens to us as writers.

We write one story, one poem, one essay, and then carry it around with us.  We take it to every writer’s group or class we join. Maybe we change or add a few words here and there.  What would happen if we said to ourselves, Yes, I wrote that. Good. Now I’m going to write more? Imagine someone who wants to hear it all. Sure, we can go back and revise, but don’t get stuck in that one place.  Keep pushing out, taking risks, Write about the day you are living in. Tell me how the fish darted away when you swam in the lake with your eight-year-old granddaughter. Tell me about your friend who is dying. Tell me about what it’s like to go bald or to let your hair go silver. I want to know.

I started off this entry talking about a desert island. Sometimes I do feel as if I’m stranded on such an island of my own making. I question how I got there and why I ever wanted to write anyway.  Brenda Ueland finds inspiration from many great writers, artists, and composers (Blake, Chekhov, Van Gogh, Mozart) as she makes her case: we are not alone. And if we look around, it isn’t a desert island—more an oasis.

One of the reasons Carol and I are creating this website and writing blogs together is because we believe we writers need each other.

Carol and I could never have done the anthology alone. When one of us would be ready to throw in the towel, the other would be all happy and up beat. When one was busy, the other one took up the slack. We have done all this through writing. We have only seen each other in person twice: once when we met in Russia and once when we met in North Carolina. Carol’s blogs inspire me; she inspires me. I hope together, with other writers (Brenda Ueland, Susan Surman, Molly Peacock, Shirley Deane), our students, and other creative people (Mrs. Delany, Ruth Hodges, Lenore Latimer), we can create an oasis.  We can say to at least one other person, “Tell me more.”

(In my next blog, I’ll talk about what we do after we’ve written pages and pages. Where does all that writing go? But first we have to write!)