Reflections on the Writing Workshop

Last week, my college roommate burst into my room with a loud wail and a bunch of papers which she proceeded to dump on my already document-strewn bed. She positioned herself in a pose reminiscent of the “child’s pose” in yoga, something akin to a cat stretch with her arms out front and her body curled into an egg on the mattress, her head down, sniffing into my notebook. She was frustrated by her poetry workshop, she said, because her peer comments were unhelpful. “They don’t know what they’re talking about! I can’t bear to look at them!” she wailed, “It’s all a huge waste of time!” I was amused by her dramatic elocutions, but her frustration was by no means an anomaly among undergraduate in the creative writing department.

It is not easy to come up with a simple solution to this problem, and I know from personal experience and other conversations with fellow writers that frustration with workshops is common. Advanced writers in advanced undergraduate workshops are disappointed by the quality of peer comments in workshop, and assert that nobody (but they!) knows what they’re doing even though they’ve been through the whole system, from the introductory course through the advanced. These days, I have a different attitude towards the issue where I used to wax the same as my wailing roommate. Much of critique in workshop may not be profound and groundbreaking, but it is a court where diverse voices may be heard, and one can choose to take the advice, think about it, or not. My mother once told me that if there were more than two other people in the room, chances are, at least one of them will have something worthwhile to teach you. Something that sounds unsophisticated or nitpicky may be a sign of a potentially problematic pattern in your work. I think that my roommate’s frustration also stemmed from the suspicion that her fellow workshop members were not as well read or aesthetically refined as she. But whenever issues like this come up, when it is a question of something as subjective as taste in literature, there is no way to find a satisfactory gauge or solution to the problem.

Undergraduate workshops are not as selective as graduate workshops, and it is simply something each undergraduate writer will have to accept: that they will be thrust into dialog with a variety of skill-levels and aesthetic styles. While it is impossible, and not a good idea anyway, to make a world where everyone had good, elitist, and similar taste in literature, there are ways to create a middle ground where students are at least all equally proficient at peer critique, and the art of reading and responding to any piece of writing intelligently and efficiently. So what gets in the way of this productive middle ground? In my own university workshop experience at UW Madison, I have noticed that students often flounder during critique because they are distracted by irrelevant details, and do not know exactly what to look for. This may be due to the fact that they are unaware of the wider world of contemporary creative writing in general. Many workshop students have only been exposed to the standardized literary canon, which I think is objectively exclusive and certainly not representative of the true face of poetic history. Workshops usually do have a good syllabus in terms of texts for students to read, but the scope of a single class is unfortunately narrow, and the time allotted to talking about the texts too little. Read the rest of this entry »

Didionic Ditty

When I came across Joan Didion’s famous quote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” something about it stuck in my mind despite my skepticism and dismissal of her claim as being over-dramatic and grandiose. We don’t tell ourselves stories in order to live, I thought to myself. Didion’s words rang false, but only until I really began to contemplate the meaning of narration. In thinking about how to answer the deceptively simple question of “What does it mean to me to be a writer,” I’ve come to a new personal understanding about writing as an act of becoming and a way I affirm my voice and presence in the world.  Why do I write? What difference does it make? The answer is, in a word, everything. I write in order to exist. This claim may sound hyperbolic, but I find that we tend to underestimate how much we depend on writing as speakers of language and how necessary it is for the organization and evolution of thought. Writing is the construction of consciousness in both senses of the word.

As a child, I spent more time with words than anything else, including television and playmates, which were unfortunately scarce. The development of my identity and personality corresponds greatly to my literacy. Now that I am approaching adulthood, I am also becoming more aware of how the perception of my everyday reality is contingent on how I think, (which is basically determined by how I write.)

• On the surface, I write to arrange my thoughts, define my opinions and introspect as ways of building an identity as a member of society.
• On a deeper level, writing is the act of using language to interpret reality.

Because writing is less instantaneous than speech, it is allowed more meditation, and the revisions that narrow and focus my thought are revisions not only on the piece itself, but my own mind. When I write a poem or tell a story, I am exploring a part of my own experience in a different context. The characters I write about are representations of different facets of my personality, the imagery a reflection of my inner psyche. In essays, (such as this one!) I give structure to my opinions or an analysis of something read or experienced. These are all essential to the process of self-construction; in other words, the act of becoming, which brings me to my next big point. Read the rest of this entry »