Why I Stopped Attending Writing Workshops

When I was a teenager, I loved writing-themed events. Workshops, seminars, “author advice” panels, you name it. Maybe I got jaded. Or went to college. Or started getting things published in literary magazines that hadn’t been looked at by any bearded dude with a polyester beret. I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but 90% of the events started just giving me the creeps. And I think I know why: they feel dishonest.

First, let me distinguish between two different categories. Writing workshops at highly competitive writing programs  (some of the top MFA’s, such as Vanderbilt’s, pretty much have more competitive admissions than Harvard medical school).  Then you have writing classes than anyone can join. Provided they pay. Or writing workshops that are part of an event schedule at some conference or literary festival. Or the kind of writing class you find at universities that struggle with retention. This second category is, in my experience, downright damaging. Because at some point, it will become clear that the teacher (speaker/panelist) is the one who needs to keep the student pleased, rather than it being the other way around.  There are exceptions. But a whole lot of the time, you’ll hear shit like this:

Student/audience member: “Yeah, so, I’m writing a literary novel-book about a woman who is unhappy and overweight and suddenly realizes she can travel back in time to periods in which her Rubenesque form is considered beautiful.  The first 100 pages have no plot, just candy descriptions, but the ending has a twist that will knock your socks off if you know anything about 17th century chubby chasing.”

And instead of the teacher telling the student or audience member to please please please find another vocation, he or she might say something like. “Mhm… I really like the time-traveling thing. But maybe. Uh. Maybe work on tightening the plot. Hrm. Next?”

Student/audience member sits down, grinning.

If you look around the internet for a minute, you find thousands of messages along the lines of “anyone can be a writer”, “you can be published!”, “write your blockbuster today by following these 10 simple steps”. The introduction to most writing books read as if they were written by Deepak Chopra on speed.

I took “Introduction to Creative Writing” at a college that struggles with retention. The kind of college where they’ll tell you’re the Messiah as long as the tuition check keeps coming in, and where professors feel as if they have no choice but to dumb down their classes so students will write “Mr. Willard’s class was awesUme” on those shitty evaluation forms that are currently destroying American colleges. Some of the kids in the class I took would bring in excerpts from their favorite books as a class assignment. I’m talking Koontz. Picoult. Sparks. Patterson. After reading the excerpts, they would sing their praises to their interpretation of Koontz’s detective drivel as “[having] like, really good descriptions and characters.” The professor later told me she sat in her chair in literary agony. What she told the student, however, was something along the lines of, “Hm. Good example of the genre. “

Think about it, if you ever attend a writing workshop of some sort. How the speaker, while possibly having good intentions, rarely if ever dares to offend anyone. How the mood in the room is always friendly and “safe”. How no one is being honest in trying to teach something that requires honesty more than anything.

Please, Simon Cowell, start teaching writing classes. I know I’d watch “American Writing Idol”.