The Significance of Workshopping

Okay I'm going to make a sweeping statement. When you are doing a Writing MA the single most important thing you will do is take part in workshops. Forget the lectures where you write a few tricks of the trade (in a notebook that you rarely open), forget the critical essays (in which you do your level best to stay on the polite side of passive aggressive while ticking off points on the marking criteria) and forget the day schools where a few successful exercises make you feel extra-special. Workshops are where you will actually learn.

This blog left off shortly after my first experience of workshopping. The result was a sad Sam! You see I'd submitted something I'd worked hard on. I thought it was good. It wasn't. This is the first thing workshops will teach you: You aren't even close to being as good as you think you are.

The next time I submitted it was with something fresh, vicious and cold. The feedback was far better. It wasn't perfect by any stretch but it was a vast improvement. The prose was stronger, it was more focused and it had pace. I was jubilant. I went away feeling as if I could carry on that story and make it my magnum opus. Arrogance. I submitted the next section to a jury of my peers and it was already losing its way. My focus was slipping.

So I switched tack. My third workshop submission was a mostly-autobiographical childhood piece. The narrative voice was less distinct but the prose remained strong. I thought that, for my first venture into real world fiction, a reportage from my own past might allow me greater emotional investment than something I made up. It worked to a degree but it was also a backward step. The narrative was broken. The emotional significance I saw in the work wasn't there for anyone else. My own mind was taking shortcuts.

Again I was left despondent and this is the second thing workshopping will teach you: Don't get clever. You still aren't as good as you think you are.

The fourth thing I submitted was a piece I'd been dying to write. All through my previous submission this idea had been rattling around at the back of my head. My brain was putting it together and every now and again it'd poke me in the back of the eye and question why I hadn't started writing it yet. Once I'd cleared the backlog of commitments and put pen to paper it just flowed. Of course the first draft was pretty horrible but by the time I sent it off I was pretty damned proud of it. The feedback was good too. Best thing I'd written. Want to read more. Big improvement.

I went home happy and confident I could do that well in the future.

You might wonder why I'm bothering to tell you all this instead of explaining how workshopping actually helps. The answer is I don't know. It's a subconscious thing born of being torn down, rebuilt and doing the same to your fellow students when it's their turn. Every time you take your red pen to another writer's piece of work a little of your own harshness bounces back and sticks in your gullet ready guide you in the future. It just works and the experience is nothing short of astounding.

So what's the final lesson workshopping will teach you? I'm not really sure since I've got there yet. I expect to discover it's an iterative process. No one's writing is consistently good and even the best writing can be judged subjectively. I've got one more workshop left and I expect that for me the final lesson will be: You still aren't as good as you can be. Keep working your arse off.