Wednesday
Many writing workshops and critiques follow a predictable order. At my MFA, we often began each critique with a sentence of something "we liked about the piece." That led to a brief discussion of "likes," but then made that turn to things we didn't like quite as much, and that's what the rest of the workshop focused upon: things we didn't like and how a writer might improve them. In other words, workshop begins with a bit of talk about what is "good" and then focuses upon, for the majority of workshop time, what is "bad." It is interesting that many times during this process the writer is said to be invisible, a ghost haunting the room, more victim than active participant, undead, while the living souls pick over the work, like zombies.
In her article on collaborative pedagogy in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, Rebecca Moore Howard describes a different way of approaching this type of "peer review":
Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers, a flagship document for this approach, describes techniques for a pedagogy in which writers only work in small groups without teachers but also do not themselves model 'good' or 'bad,' and instead of playing what Elbow calls the 'doubting game,' group members respond by describing how it makes them feel. Playing the 'believing game,' they point to the features of the paper that elicited positive responses (Elbow 147-191). One of the values of expressivist peer-response pedagogy is that it not only removes the teacher from directive instruction, but it also prevents students from assuming that role in their responses. Instead of offering each other untrained and often incorrect instruction, peer respondents assume the role of reader and give the writer a heightened sense of audience. (60)
Of course, Howard here is talking about the freshman composition classroom, and that classroom isn't an exact mirror for the creative writing workshop, but it is a bit odd that workshop after workshop works with the same dynamic, each member assuming that same role. I wonder what a different model might be like, one in which peers respond as readers, whose goal isn't to improve the piece or make it better, but to give the writer that greater insight into the effect the writing has on an "audience."
Tennessee Williams rather famously wrote, "All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness." Isn't this idea true of the majority of writing workshops, with the most critical, biting commenters allowed to spout their vitriol in the name of honesty? And isn't any writer who views such comments as cruelty rather than honesty seen as a wimp, as someone who cannot take it? Not that everyone is spouting critical cruel comments, but the point is that harshness equals honesty too often in the workshop world. Of course, no one wants a room full of cheerleaders, right? Well, just once, I'd like that, maybe. On certain days.
Ra, Ra Randall.
Watch him get a handle.
On using his emotion
Connected to a notion
watch him go, go, go,
Yay, Randall.
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From Chastity West
March 3, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Well done. I entirely agree. In the fall, I was subject to this exact thing myself. My first university level fiction writing class and this scathing workshop style pervaded and people spent most of class time “instructing” the writer how to re-write his/her story. And, yes, certainly having a reader response is a critical step on the road to Best Sellerdom (or wherever the individual writer is headed) but that was just the problem. Everyone responded as critic (or condescending editor) instead of as a reader. I found the whole experience distasteful and dissatisfying and antithetical to my whole personal concept of creating art. I like the take presented here much better.
From Trish
March 3, 2010 at 8:59 pm
The workshop was one of the things I disliked most about grad school– for just these reasons. I also got the sense that some instructors enjoyed their roles as frank assessors as well and relished knocking people down just a bit.
Having used Elbow’s approach to peer editing for writing creative non-fiction, I can attest to the fact that it really changes everything about how I experienced that process. Ultimately, I found the feedback that I received from some of the informal writing others did in response to my writing and the activity of pointing, sayback and lurking where the reader notes the rich language and clever ideas in a piece by reflecting them back to the writer (pointing), then identifies themes and motifs in the writing (sayback) before going on to question what underlies the whole thing (lurking)to be far more helpful for me in fleshing out what I was really trying to do– especially in early drafts. By objectifying (to some extent) the reader’s experience of a writer’s draft, these strategies help the reader to respond with more relevant insight to the draft. “I felt ___ when ____ happened” is different from, “I really liked it when…”—especially in a group setting because it asks the reader to stay connected to the text– which, of course, is most to the point anyway…
From Randall Brown
March 4, 2010 at 6:50 am
Thanks, Trish, for sharing your insights and experience. I like that movement from pointing to sayback to lurking–and that “I felt _____ when _____ happened.”
From david e
March 4, 2010 at 9:11 am
it’s such a fine line, being cruel and being frank. i’m at the point during drafts that i’d rather have someone smack my face than slap my back. but i have no time for assholes disguised as helpful editors. i’ve gotten into a few “battles” with such people on fictionaut. once i was “right,” the other time just being overly defensive (b/c the story’s narrator was a lot like me and so I internalized the comments).
From Randall Brown
March 4, 2010 at 10:32 am
It’s a fine line, David. And there’s also that fine line between just being defensive and defending one’s self.