What I Learned from Workshops
After I finished my first full novel draft, I thought, “Hey, maybe this is something I could take more seriously,” that is, try and get it published, find an audience bigger than my then-boyfriend now-husband. I couldn’t afford the huge shift of doing an MFA, so I did what was accessible to me: writing workshops. I didn’t shoot for the more prestigious or competitive workshops, but since I am in NYC, I had no shortage of venues with quality programs.
My primary goal in paying for a workshop was emotional: to figure out for myself if a writing career is something I could devote my life to, and to be more comfortable showing my work to complete strangers. Lured by their ubiquitous yellow flyer stands, I signed up for a Gotham Writers intro to fiction workshop. It was a ten-week course with about twelve new-to-writing people like me, led by a published author who had been running workshops for years.
Hard to miss when they’re pretty much on every street corner in the city.
I enjoyed the experience, though looking back I can’t say I learned a lot of theory and craft. Which was perfectly fine, since that was not my goal. I needed to feel like I was taking concrete steps toward inhabiting the life of a writer (which, now I know is much like any other kind of life), and I achieved that. I also found that having my work received and critiqued was not as harrowing as I thought it would be. (Gotham followed the booth method, where the writer has to sit in silence while everyone in the group gave their critiques; not the most ideal way to workshop a piece as I’ve learned after reading Craft in the Real World). If I can handle other writers’ critiques, maybe I can do this after all.
Encouraged by that experience, I signed up for another writing workshop, this time with Catapult. They offer genre-specific workshops by authors I was familiar with, so I thought I’d put in more time and money into actually getting better at writing. I also wanted to polish my manuscript and needed to gather more feedback. So I took two of their SFF-centric workshops, which tend to be smaller (six to eight people), and are more focused on the genres’ tropes and metaphors.
I definitely learned a lot from those workshops—story structures, works I’d never heard of before, resources that can help me improve my writing. I also got specific, actionable feedback that I was able to take into revising my project. But most importantly, the workshops gave me something I’d never set out to look for, and never expected to find from a paid class: a sense of community.
The folks in the class are all nerds like me trying to do the same thing I am, reading the same books and magazines, watching the same media. So it was easy for us to find a sense of kinship, which translated into productive workshop classes. When those ended, that kinship bonded us into writing groups that I’m still part of to this day. I’m also lucky to learn from instructors that have become mentors and friends.
So far, my workshop experience has been a bit like my writing experience: setting out to do one thing and finding something else completely different and unexpected. I thought I’d just go feel it out, give and get some feedback, learn craft tips. What I ended up learning is how to be part of a critique group, how to build friendships as an adult, and how community is such an invaluable part of being a writer.
Image credits: Arrows header photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash; Gotham Writers stand via Jazmin Ali at brokelyn.com; workshop photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash.