"Workshops: Making Better Makers" - Anil Menon

Workshops are wrenching exercises that aim not so much at reinventing writing as the writer himself, recalls Anil Menon

The writing workshop can’t really teach you how to make a better story. It can however, help you become better at revealing you to yourself

In June, I attended Clarion West, a six-week, in-residence, speculative-fiction workshop held annually in Seattle. We were put up at a sorority house. The hazaar wall photographs showed grinning women, their heads crammed together in sisterly circles, fingers forked in Vs, devil horns and up-yours-bro. Six weeks of these photographs, seventeen other participants, peer-critiquing, listening to instructors, swapping and-that’s-why-I-killed-grandma stories, and squeezing out a two-thousand to five-thousand word story every damn week. I was a software guy really. I wasn’t sure why I’d thought the workshop a good idea.

Workshops aren’t common in the sciences but are very popular in the humanities. Until quite recently, there were really only two ways to learn something. You could learn it like Eklavya: indirectly and by yourself. Or you could learn it like Arjun: through apprenticeship with an expert. Either method works when what we are learning is a genuine craft. An expert is better at the craft than a newbie and everyone can usually agree on what is meant by “better.”

Some things, however, aren’t crafts. Falling in love isn’t a craft. So is being a physicist. As Feynman said in his inimitable way, “To do physics, you gotta have style.” Things that need style usually aren’t crafts. Anything that involves an aesthetic -- a sense of beauty-- or more accurately, an attitude, usually isn’t a craft. Writing may be a craft, but writing fiction (mostly) isn’t. Much of what passes for craft in writing is mostly just lore.

So how does one learn something that isn’t a craft? The key is that it’s not about the thing at all. It’s about you. The writing workshop can’t really teach you how to make a better story. It can however, help you become better at revealing you to yourself. A writing workshop is only partly about better writing. It is about the writer.

Workshops provide a lot of useful craft-knowledge: how to write better sentences, handle point of view, where to send your stories. But all those things could also be learned from books or lectures or the Net. For example, Ursula K Le Guin has a lovely and must-read book on writing called Steering the Craft. But craft-knowledge can’t do anything about the fact that writers are often their own biggest hurdles. That is why there is such a thing as writer’s block, but not say, an accountant’s block. So workshops have to provide an emotional experience.

Writing workshops achieve this by gathering a diverse group of people under one roof. The workload is heavy. You look to your instructor for guidance but what you get is a style, an attitude, an aesthetic. It can be demoralising. Here you are, grunting and heaving in creativity’s pot, while some of your peers are effortlessly producing knock-out stories week after week. You awaken and grow even as parts of you wither and die.

You die because some of the experience is about taking away an old skill. Most writers are avid readers. When we become fluent readers in a language, we stop thinking about its alphabet. Similarly, avid readers read text without thinking about how the text works. A good writing workshop will break this spell.

Workshops can fail. It’s not clear why some groups don’t cohere. Workshops can also succeed too well. If literature is possessed by a particular mania, then workshops can help spread that mania. Adjectives are now out, for example. So are adverbs and the word “suddenly.” It’s still okay to use verbs, but get a grip on your participle fetish, brah.

Jokes aside, in the education business, heavy criticism is kinda sorta good news. Take schools. In places where there are few schools, like Afghanistan, schools are praised. But in places where there are lots of schools, like the US or India, people are much less enthusiastic about imprisoning children for six hours a day.

There are few long-duration writing workshops in India. I hope we’ll have the luxury of excoriating them one day.

What I learned at C West was about the power of workshops. I learned a few tricks, made lifelong friends, picked up the biz, drank a lot of bad beer. I hung out with writers. I wrote stories. I stopped saying I was a software engineer.