The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (36 page)

I shall now go out on a limb, hunch my shoulders, clack my beak, stare fiercely, and announce that I think there are two types of workshop that are to some extent intrinsically harmful. Both types tend to corrupt the work. They do it differently, but are alike in using writing not as an end but as a means. I will call them commercial and establishmentarian.

Commercially oriented workshops and conferences range from the modest kind where everybody is dying to meet the New York editor and the agent who sells in six figures and nothing is talked about but “markets,” “good markets for paragraphs,” “good markets for religious and uplift,” and so on—to the fancy kind where everybody sneers at little old ladies who write paragraphs, but would kill to meet the same editor and the same agent, and where nothing is talked about but “markets,” “meeting contacts,” “finding an agent with some smarts,” “series sales,” and so on. All these matters of business are of legitimate, immediate, and necessary interest to a writer. Writers need
to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.

If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer’s primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I’m teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.

Establishmentarian workshops and programs, on the other hand, eschew low talk of marketing.
Sell
is a four-letter word at such places. You go to them to be in the right place, where you will meet the right people. The purpose of such programs, most of which are in the eastern half of the United States, is to feed an in-group or elite, the innermost members of which go to the innermost writers colonies and get the uppermost grants by recommending one another.

If being perceived as a successful writer is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a social climber: a person using certain paraliterary ploys to attain a certain kind of prestige. If I teach these techniques in a workshop, I am not teaching writing, but methods of joining an elite.

It is to be noticed that membership in the elite may, not incidentally, improve one’s chances to sell work in the marketplace. There’s always a well-kept road between the marketplace and the really nice part of town.

Papa Hemingway said that writers write for money and Papa Freud said that artists work for fame, money, and the love of women. I’ll leave out the love of women, though it would be much more fun to talk about. Fame and money—success and power. If you agree with the Papas, there are workshops for you, but this is not the essay for you. I think both Papas were talking through their hats. I don’t think writers write for either fame or money, though they love them when they can get them. Writers don’t write “for” anything, not even for art’s sake. They write. Singers sing, dancers dance, writers write. The whole question
of what a thing is “for” has no more to do with art than it has to do with babies, or forests, or galaxies.

In a money economy, artists must sell their work or be supported by gifts while doing it. Since our national government is hysterically suspicious of all artists, and most arts foundations are particularly stingy to writers, North American writers must be directly concerned with the skills of marketing and grant-getting. They need to learn their trade. There are many guidebooks and organisations to help them learn it. But the trade is not the art. Writers and teachers of writing who put salability before quality degrade the writer and the work. Writing workshops that put marketing and contact-making before quality degrade the art.

If you don’t agree with me, that’s fine. Just keep out of my workshop.

Finally, one more cause of time-wasting: workshop codependency, the policy of encouraging eternal returners, workshop junkies, people who go to retreats and groups year after year but don’t write anything the rest of the year . . . and the policy of giving a grant simply because the applicant has received other grants to attend other workshops and writers colonies.

A friend who was at one of the very elite New England artist colonies told me about a woman there who
had no addres
s. She lived at colonies and conferences. She had published two short stories in the last ten years. She was a professional, all right, but her profession was not writing.

Junkies always bring an old manuscript to the workshop, and when it gets criticised, they tell us about the great writers at greater workshops who said how great it was. If the instructor demands new work from junkies, they are outraged—“But I’ve been working on this since 1950!” Bearded with moss and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, they will be hauling out that same damned unfinished manuscript twenty years from now and whining, “But
Longfellow
said it was
tremendously sensitive!
”

But then, I am a workshop junky too: I keep doing them. Why?

So, to the positive side. Maybe nobody can teach anybody how to write, but, just as techniques for attaining profit and prestige can be taught in the commercial and establishmentarian programs, so realistic expectations, useful habits, respect for the art, and respect for oneself as a writer can be acquired in work-centered workshops.

What the instructor has to give is, I think, above all, experience—whether rationalised and verbalised or just shared by being there, being a writer, reading the work, talking about the work.

What most participants need most is to learn to think of themselves as writers.

For the young, this is all too often no problem at all. Many teenagers, college-agers, having no idea what being a fiction writer entails, assume they can write novels and screenplays and play drums in a band and pass their GREs and fifteen other things at the same time, no sweat. This blithe attitude is healthy, it is endearing, and it means they do not belong in a serious workshop (or, in my opinion, in a writing program ending in a degree of any kind). The very young cannot, except in rare cases, make the commitment that is required.

With many adults the problem is the opposite—lack of confidence. Women, particularly women with children, or in middle age and older, may find it enormously difficult to take seriously anything they do that isn’t done “for other people”—the altruism trap. Men brought up to consider themselves as wage earners and ordinary joes may in the same way find it hard to take the leap to considering themselves seriously as writers. And this is why, though peer groups of amateur and semiamateur writers are a wonderful development of the last decades, and though the functioning of the workshop is strictly egalitarian, the workshop has an instructor: a central figure who is a professional, a real, indubitable, published writer, able to share professionalism and lend reality-as-a-writer to everyone in the circle.

And thus it is important that instructors should not be writing teachers but writers teaching: people who have published professionally and actively in the field of the workshop.

And it is important that they should be women as often as they are men. (If they are Gethenians, this latter requirement is no problem; otherwise it should be a central concern of the workshop managers.)

Instructors are not only symbols and gurus. They are directly useful. Their assignments, directions, discussions, exercises, criticisms, responses, and fits of temperament allow the participants to discover that they can meet a deadline, write a short story overnight, try a new form, take a risk, discover gifts they didn’t know they had. The instructor directs their practice.

Practice
is an interesting word. We think of practicing as beginner’s stuff, playing scales, basic exercises. But the practice of an art is the doing of that art—it
is
the art. When the participants have been practicing writing with a bunch of other practicing writers for a week, they can feel with some justification that they are, in fact, writers.

So perhaps the essence of a workshop that works is the group itself. The instructor facilitates the formation of the group, but the circle of people is the source of energy. It is, by the way, important that it be literally, in so far as possible, a circle. This is the Teepee Theory of Workshopping. A circle of units is not a hierarchy. It is one shape made of many, one whole, one thing.

Participants who participate, who write, read, criticise, and discuss, are learning a great deal. First of all, they’re learning to take criticism, learning that they
can
take criticism. Negative, positive, aggressive, constructive, valuable, stupid, they can take it. Most of us can, but we don’t think we can till we do; and the fear of it can be crippling. To find that you have been roundly criticised and yet have gone on writing—that frees up a lot of energy.

Participants are also learning to read other people’s writing and criticise it responsibly. For a good many, this is the first real reading they’ve ever done: reading not as passive absorption, as in reading junk for relaxation and escape; reading not as detached intellectual analysis, as in English 102; but reading as the intensely active and only partially intellectual process of
collaboration with a text
. A workshop in
which one person learned to read that way would have justified itself. But if the group forms, everybody begins reading each other’s work that way; and often real reading is so exciting to those new to it that it leads to the overvaluation of texts that is one of the minor hazards of a lively workshop.

Learning to read gives people a whole new approach to writing. They have learned to read what they write. They can turn their criticocollaborative skills onto their own work and so be enabled to revise, to revise constructively, without dreading revision as a destructive process, or a never-ending one, as many inexperienced writers do.

I spoke of the psychological acuteness and sensitivity I have learned to count on and call on in workshop groups. I think it rises from the fact that the people feel that they are working hard together at hard work, and that they have experienced honesty and trust as absolutely essential to getting the work done. So they will use all their skills to achieve that honesty and trust. If the group works as a group, everyone in it, including the instructor, is strengthened by its community and exhilarated by its energy.

This is such a rare and valuable experience that it’s no wonder good workshops almost always spin off into small peer groups that may go on working together for months or years.

And it’s one reason why I go on teaching. I come home from a workshop and I write.

The Writer, that noble heroic figure gazing at a blank page who is such an awful bore in books and movies because he doesn’t get to bash holes in marble or slash brushes over canvas or conduct gigantic orchestras or die playing Hamlet—he only gets to gaze, and drink, and mope, and crumple up sheets of paper and throw them at a wastebasket, which is just as boring as what he does in real life, which is he sits there, and he sits there, and he sits there, and if you say anything he jumps and shouts WHAT?—the Writer, I say, is not only boring,
but lonely, even when, perhaps especially when her family (she has changed sex, like Orlando) is with her, asking where is my blue shirt? when is dinner? The Writer is liable to feel like a little, tiny person all alone in a desert where the sand is words. Giant figures of Best-Sellers and Great Authors loom over her like statues—Look on my works, ye puny, and despair!—This lonely, sitting-there person may find that in a work-centered workshop she can draw on the kind of group support and collaborative rivalry, the pooled energy, that actors, dancers, and musicians, all performing artists, draw on all the time.

And so long as ego-tripping is discouraged, the process of the workshop, depending on mutual aid, stimulation, emulation, honesty, and trust, can produce an unusually pure and clear form of that energy.

The participant may be able to carry some of that energy home, not having learned “how to write,” but having learned what it is to write.

I think of a good workshop as a pride of lions at a waterhole. They all hunt zebras all night and then they all eat the zebra, growling a good deal, and then they all come to the waterhole to drink together. Then in the heat of the day they lie around rumbling and swatting flies and looking benevolent. It is something to have belonged, even for a week, to a pride of lions.

1
. I use the verb “to write” here to mean writing literary and/or commercially salable prose. Writing in the sense of how to compose a sentence, why and how to punctuate, etc., can indeed be taught and learned—usually, or at least hopefully, in grade school and high school. It is definitely a prerequisite to writing in the other sense; yet some people come to writing workshops without these skills. They believe that art does not need craft. They are mistaken.