One of my biggest issues with workshops is the quality of discussion (or lack of discussion) that occurs in them. This characteristic isn’t the sole property of workshops. Enter any high school or college class and you’ll hear the same answer to any open-ended question: “I don’t know.” Or you won’t hear anything; you’ll just see a field of blank faces. The reasons for all this are the topic of another blog entirely, but I would like to address the lack of quality discussion in workshops in particular.
Now, I know that all workshops/writing groups vary. The success of any of these is dependant on the personality/skill level/commitment of the writers in attendance. But, the workshop model is universal enough to warrant a discussion, and that’s why I created this blog. I’m not trying to start a gripe fest here. I’m trying to find solutions to issues that pop up in workshop, maybe even design a new model. Why? Because at some point, many writers take part in a workshop, class, group, etc. There are over 100 writing programs in existence and a good majority of them use the standard workshop model (lecture, write, critique, revision, and repeat). If most writers are learning to write and to discuss the craft from the workshop, doesn’t the workshop (its benefits, its drawbacks, its form, etc.) deserve an analytical eye? I mean if we’re all participating in this admittedly strange activity (Who else would spend money to sit around a table and discuss word choice on a Tuesday night?), shouldn’t we all stop to examine how we spend our time in that space and what we are eventually getting out of it?
So I’ll begin the topic of workshop discussions, by saying that I consider a good discussion one in which the class explores an element of craft in relation to the poems up for critique without getting bogged down by specific preferences. It’s a common enough scenario: Poet A suggests that Poet B change a line break because it would be a better break/would change the line’s rhythm, etc. What’s not said is that Poet A would make that change because that’s how Poet A would write a poem. Sometimes (a lot of the time) things will get heated with two or three factions going back and forth. “Change the line break!” “No keep it the way it is!” ‘No, do it this way!” But the discussion is half-baked. No one ever asks the million dollar questions: Why does a poet use certain line breaks? Why does he/she create the line breaks he/she does?
So what would happen if instead of saying “I don’t like this line break,” Poet A said, “What is the purpose of a line break, and how can it be used by the poet?” I think that discussion would be a hell of a lot more beneficial than the back and forth debates over whether Poet B should keep his break or not, because that discussion covers more than just one poet and one poem. It opens up the writer to an exploration of craft that the first statement simply can’t. Of course, that’s tricky, because all Poet B wants is to know how to make HIS poem better, and he paid for the privilege of having HIS work discussed. What would happen if the workshop veered away from his critique to discuss A.R. Ammons or Whitman or the history of the line in poetry? How much of the workshop should be devoted to critique and how much to discussion of craft?
It may not be a popular opinion, but I think the needs of the many outweigh the few in this area. I think workshops should focus less on individual critique and push participants to ask the broader questions about craft. That’s how you create a thinking writer. Imagine what would happen, if the facilitator/teacher/Poet A/anybody took the opportunity to say, “Let’s explore this.” And as a class, right then and there, all the poets took out a sheet of paper and rewrote a poem using different breaks, different line lengths, etc. What would that workshop learn then?
But you might disagree, so here’s my question to all of you: How do we create and maintain better, more helpful discussions in workshops?
No comments:
Post a Comment