More prosaically, we do have to consider if we ourselves are shy, funny, anxious with crowds, likely to forget things, if we work better with a flipchart or with notes, if we enjoy improvising. Perhaps ask an honest friend what your social manner is generally like. Consider how best you explain things, your presentational weaknesses and strengths. Taking a mixed bag of exercises out of books and then presenting them in a manner alien to our natures is possible, but more targeted preparation might mean everyone can actually be comfortable together. And, of course, do find out if you’re generally audible and specifically audible for any given venue or participant. There’s no reason for you to turn into a game-show host, but if you are at ease and confident with the material you are presenting, then your writers will have the opportunity to relax and take part, rather than being unconvinced by your content and worrying if you’re going to drop something, or faint. High percentages of your writers will need you to have faith in them before they can – you won’t be able to offer them this if you give every appearance of having no faith in yourself. If you are incurably rattled by groups, you may want to find one-to-one work, to act as a mentor, or to team up with another writer. Workshops are a huge source of income, but if they’re unbearable for you, then they won’t do you – or the people who attend them – much good.
If you are the kind of person who wants to make cash by rolling out the boilerplate workshop – everyone reads their work out and comments while you occasionally throw in something that sounds definitive or, better yet, make no effort at all and simply bounce back something like and what do you think about that?, thus making no actual effort at all – then I’m very surprised that you’re still reading this and I dislike you. Sorry, but I do. Everyone deserves better – always. Even you.
What is your attitude to your participating writers?
If we honestly ask ourselves this question the results can be interesting. It’s very easy – particularly after we are established in workshopping – to find that our initial response might wear down to something along the lines of: I think they are narcissistic, untalented people who stand between me and my own writing. There is no helping them and therefore I need not particularly try to be of assistance. They make me tired. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, the best remedy for tiredness, staleness and misanthropic revulsion within workshops is increased effort and increased knowledge of your participants. If you can feel that your workshop is somewhere you can go in order to explore and expand your work, while others journey with you, then – no matter how desperately you want time to write – it won’t feel like a waste of your energies. If you take an interest in your group, your group will duly become interesting. If you can bring, in a reasonable and practical manner, your own doubts, troubles and vulnerabilities as a writer to the workshop, this not only encourages others to share and address their own, it also allows you to look at the nature of character. What interests us in people? We identify with emotions, past experiences, weaknesses and quirks. We have our own; our characters should have theirs. This area alone can produce a month’s worth of discussions, study of pieces, objects, music, film segments and exercises.
If you approach a group with a convincingly magisterial air, intent upon setting them tasks that will burn up their allotted session time and keep them quiet, they may never complain. If you assume they will have roughly the same problems as most writers at their stage of development, you may not be wrong. If you give them the same old notes on page layout, application of grammar, dialogue, how to use the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook, they may not storm your desk and hit you. If you mainly kick back and offer them literary anecdotes and name-dropping, they may not throw up in your face. Equally, they may not come back, they may not tell their friends they’ve had a great workshop, they may not fill in the feedback forms with enthusiasm, they may not help you to get more gigs and earn more money, they may not offer you the pleasure of seeing them discover themselves as writers or of their company as you grow and learn together. Behaving altruistically is, very quickly, its own reward – spending an hour in a room with twenty happy people is infinitely nicer than sixty minutes spent trapped with some strangers you’re conning, or scared of, or who are clearly tolerating you, but largely dismayed.
There are, naturally, grotesque and tedious people in the world and occasionally some of them are moved to take writing workshops and you will have to deal with them. They will be relatively rare and usually surrounded by the kind of slightly nervous and almost unreasonably pleasant and patient people who are more commonly workshop participants. Treating people with respect allows them to respect you, themselves and what they are doing. If you are a writer, it is probably good practice to respect writers.
And, in all seriousness, in every workshop – as in every short story, every poem, every novel – you have an opportunity to change your participants’ lives. Your workshops can change how they write and who they are. This isn’t me being grandiose: I’m stating a not unreasonable aim, which can inspire us. We may rarely succeed spectacularly or on a massive scale, but it is relatively easy to help someone become positively different, more themselves, more articulate, more fulfilled by adjusting their interior and exterior voices. Why wouldn’t it be? Our voices are hugely important to our identities, deeply embedded in our personalities and our bodies. When we make our voices stronger, more flexible and more articulate, we can set up a cascade of positive effects. Equally, when we fail in a workshop, or behave badly, we can do actual and unpleasantly intimate harm. At this level, the writing workshop isn’t about being published. Given the current state of publishing it would be an agonising activity if it was. Writing and the writing workshop are about being more deeply alive. And that goes for the tutor, too. There are few things more wonderful than seeing someone come into focus, surprise themselves, sing out who they are, through writing. All writers get wearied at times, get stale – seeing writing at work in others reminds us of why we love it, reconfirms its power.
Under certain circumstances, having an attitude of respect for your participants may mean you have to withdraw from a workshop or an institution, if forces beyond your control mean that participants or their work are poorly treated, that their privacy can’t be guaranteed, that the expectations and enthusiasms you raise will actually open them to abuse or disappointment. Although I would always want writers’ work to be confidential if they wish it to be, working within prisons and psychiatric hospitals may mean that their material must be open to others. All we can do is point out this lack of privacy to our writers, or choose to avoid working in these contexts.
Do you know the abilities, wants and needs of your participants?
Sometimes you won’t. In fact, very often you won’t.
It would be great to read work in advance, to vet the participants in advance, to read potted biographies. This will almost never be arranged and, if it is, the additional work involved will probably be unpaid. Sometimes you will build up knowledge of a group organically over a number of weeks, months, even years. Sometimes you will enter into an existing community of writers and have to bear in mind that you are both an invited expert and a guest. But, on many occasions, you will walk in cold to an unsuitably arranged room filled with mysteries and this one hour, or two hours, or day will be all you have. Which is where time management, good planning and a depth of understanding of what writers might require – of what support you yourself might have wanted at various stages – will help you.
In some contexts – usually where you are working with the most vulnerable participants possible: children, those with special needs – you will usually have very little prior information and may be dealing with staff who cannot answer your advance enquiries helpfully. You may not even know how many people you will have in your group. This is where your self-knowledge, your wider interrogation of what you believe writing to be and how best to examine it, and a small amount of practical consideration will help you.
I’ll deal with t
he practical points first. If you are going to work with the young and vulnerable you will, of course, get a CRB check, and if you are working with the public at all – even apparently sane and healthy adults – you will have as much public liability insurance as you can afford. This is sensible and easy to ensure, and the Society of Authors and a number of other providers can help you with this.
If you are working with people who have health or mental difficulties, or both, you need to know what these difficulties are and you need enough people with you to deal with any problems. If you are working in a prison or a secure mental hospital, you need someone from the institution with you at all times and you need to know where the panic button is. It is impossible to overestimate how easily and quickly you will, in fact, find yourself alone in a room where almost anything might happen. You may be surrounded by people, all of whom may have potentially fatal fits at any time, or who may be experiencing a radically different reality from yours. Should your workshop have proved successful last week, or should you simply have failed to kill anyone on your last visit, today you may find your space packed with all manner of participants, abilities and potential risks. In a way, this is a vote of confidence. It is also something to avoid. People who work with the vulnerable or potentially unpredictable can become blasé – we shouldn’t. Be safe and be safe and be safe, and also always ensure that you and your writers are going to be safe. Apart from anything else, we shouldn’t reinforce the Hollywood/Dead Poets Society model for artistic endeavour – every group does not require a death, or even a minor injury. What we do is about life and, even if some of us insist on suffering for our pleasures, writing is actually quite hard enough work to satisfy, without additional impositions of misery.
In what might be seen as a more conventional workshop context it is still worthwhile trying to ensure that the room you are placed in will be fit for the purpose, that any equipment you aren’t bringing with you will actually be provided and will work and that you won’t be disturbed. This may mean your initial interactions with your employer can seem fussy, anal-retentive or irritating. Remember that you want your workshop to have the best chance of success and, as you respect yourself and will respect your participants, you probably need others to have some respect, too. Be diplomatic and understanding, but also firm. Of course, something will usually go wrong, despite all manner of good intentions – mechanisms will break, fire alarms will go off, animals will intrude, latecomers will come late . . . It is perhaps best to always arrive knowing that, should you be left with nothing to work with beyond yourself, you could still deliver a useful and meaningful workshop.
What is your workshop?
The answer to this question will partly be a product of what you have learned from the preceding questions. Your idea of writing, its qualities and strengths, your understanding of yourself as a writer and your relationship with your own writing, your attitude towards and knowledge of the writers in your workshop will all interact to produce pathways and responses.
My understanding would be that the best possible use I can make of time with a writer would be to read their work in advance and to give them fastidiously detailed notes – I use a numbered key so that as many notes can be packed into the text as possible, with the minimum negative emotional impact. The numbers in the key not only identify problems, they also give general notes about possible sources of problems and therefore show a way forward. The key is revised on a yearly basis. The aim with any writer I see over several sessions would be for their work to transcend the key, to become so individual (and articulate) that there are no quibbles, or that the points queried need to be individually described. These notes – or anything else the writer wishes – are then discussed in individual sessions of about an hour.
This is the most effective way that a writer can learn, in depth, from their own writing and so progress.
This is how a writer learns to write.
This is how I remember how I am learning to write.
This is the service I am most rarely asked to provide.
Outside some university programmes and Arvon courses, truly effective help for writers is thin on the ground. Worse still, truly ineffective help appears to be epidemic.
Which brings me to the classic writers’ workshop format – the one that is expected of us, within which writers present their work-in-progress in a group, the group discusses and everyone goes home. It is almost impossible to describe how many things are wrong with this. But I will try.
The work is being presented at too early a stage – exactly when the individual writer should be taking control of the piece, it is being opened to a barrage of opinions. These opinions are very often simply statements of what other writers would have done if they were writing the piece, and are therefore mainly useless. These opinions are very often as bewildered, and bewildering, as any you might expect from people who don’t yet know how to do something effectively and yet who are being forced to discuss it. Unless the tutor exercises such iron control that the group is no longer really operating as a group – Richard Ford is notoriously good at maintaining purity-of-workshop focus – then this workshop format will consist of the metaphorically blind leading the metaphorically deaf up a very unpleasant creek.
Those who are socially dominant prosper in groups – even if their writing is appalling – because groups are about groups, not about writing. Those whose work is already individual, which falls at either end of the possible bell-curve, and is quite likely to be of quality, will often feel that they are unusual within the group. Because they are. These participants are as likely to have their confidence destroyed by a workshop as they are to find their egos inappropriately distorted by premature praise.
Writing consists of a multitude of individual decisions, massive and complex control of language in depth and considerable personal responsibility – the classic workshop can accustom writers to avoiding decisions, or averaging out solutions to possibly irrelevant problems with texts which they should be learning how to master. And in a scrum of opinion, play and risk become silenced or stunted. Meanwhile, workshop exercises which set subjects remove a huge part of the writer’s responsibility – subject choice. They remove opportunities for writers to learn what their inspirations feel like, how they develop, how they can be encouraged. The workshop process can infantilise writers: having abandoned responsibility for subject and craft, the writer cannot progress without the workshop. An art that is supremely independent, adaptable and low-cost has been rendered feeble and expensive.
A good and authoritative tutor can offset some or all of the workshop’s failings to some extent, and a good group of writers can police itself and be intelligently supportive without a tutor, but still we are faced with the unalterable fact that no text can ever be examined closely enough using this format. It might do for a spot of light ‘Have you read and understood?’ This could be of use to undergraduates taking an English degree, but it does not adequately address writers’ requirements. Writers need other people to read and understand – the difference may seem small, but it is vast enough to hold the work of a lifetime. Unless we are willing to extend sessions over periods of days, and can rely on immense patience from all concerned in examining others’ work and immense tolerance when their own is subjected to scrutiny, we simply cannot use the standard workshop to look at texts in anything other than a cursory way. Although the standard format is favoured by higher-education institutions and English departments, it frequently offers a weekly time-filling farce and we should not indulge it.
What do we put in its place?
Everything else.
That sounds flippant, but I mean it quite literally, and writers given half a chance already do break away from the form as often and imaginatively as they can. If we accept that the aim of the writing workshop is simply and purely to help writers to write better, then every possible source of inspiration and stimulation is opened to us. Yes, there are times when there will be a flipchart and when w
e may look at passages of text. But it may often be infinitely more effective to, for example, stimulate voice by working literally with voice, to take the one potential positive aspect of the standard workshop – the act of reading our work aloud to an audience – and to develop writers’ ability to present their work, while releasing and exploring their voices. If a group is tentative, perhaps it might benefit from looking at relaxation techniques, guided visualisations, ways of maintaining comfortable mental states. If we want to look at character, surely we should look at drama, we may talk to actors and directors, we may wish to perform ourselves, or to interact with our characters and their development in a variety of situations. If they go on to be anything like full-time writers, the people who attend our workshops are going to be savagely self-employed. Shouldn’t the writing workshop address methods of sustaining personal enthusiasm and inspiration? This might take the form of field trips, interacting with animals, with articulate professionals in other fields, with as many manifestations of beauty as we can encounter. Any workshop will have limitations – and in a recession there may be many – but we needn’t insist that everyone (including the tutor) would benefit from a three-week trip to Buenos Aires. Part of the joy of writing is the ability it gives writers to inhabit the moment in whatever circumstances. It may be that our workshop helps the infirm elderly to look out of their windows and see more, feel more, express the complexity and dignity of their experience. A group might simply eat together, go to a concert, take a walk, or be offered texts, films, music, images that they may not have encountered – or that they have not encountered as that group. It may be that a group occasionally writes as a group in real time, works full tilt on the challenges of a sentence in the relative safety of communal effort, but with a chance of examining the detailed choices and issues within the writing process. Just as writers may relax and really enjoy reading other authors’ work aloud, it can be exhilarating to enjoy the act of writing as a group – it can offer a strangely intimate appreciation of language as an entity outwith any individual author.
On Writing Page 26