Adventures in Workshopping

I’ve run quite a few workshops during my writing career. They mostly consisted of peers coming together to provide feedback. At the start I based the format off my undergraduate writing experience, and over time added other features from other writers that I picked up along the way.

But I never loved the actual workshop process. The part where writers got to be social, talk craft and help each other? Great. The part where someone had to sit silently while others lined up like a firing squad to deliver their critique? Not so great.

I can already hear the people claiming they want that brutal experience. To have their work destroyed and toughing through it is a badge of honor. If you can’t hack that, the thinking goes, then you can’t make it as a writer.

But I’ve found this scattershot approach can be as harmful as it can be helpful. Other writers, given free rein, will most likely try and tell you how they would have written your story. I know I’ve been guilty of it. But that’s not helping you write a better story; it’s just showing off how smart the note-giver is.

And as I’ve taken on more consulting work, helping other screenwriters clarify their vision, it’s become a professional obligation to get better at how I give notes. And as we’ve discussed before on this site, giving other people notes is one of the fastest ways to improve your own writing.

Towards a Better Workshop

There’s a lot of advice out there on how to take and interpret a note. A go to I see often:

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

~ Neil Gaiman

Which I think is true, but also it doesn’t have to be. This quote gives up on the responsibility of the note-giver to provide useful feedback. Instead it coaches the writer on how to translate the note into something useful.

What if, instead, we all agreed to just give useful notes?

A New Framework

Over on the Screenwriters Network server, I’ve launched a new workshop group. A handful of writers have agreed to be my guinea pigs for trying out alternative workshop formats. We’re a few weeks in now, and I’ll be documenting how it goes here on the blog. Hopefully you see something that you’d like to suggest to your workshop group!

Next week I’ll go through the prep I asked the group to do before our first session. For now, I’ll leave you with the resources I’m drawing on to design all of this.

First and foremost, I’m relying on the Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. Written by Felicia Rose Chavez, a teacher and writer with decades of experience, it’s a roadmap for completely rethinking the writing workshop. The book primarily focuses on creative non-fiction, so I translate a fair bit for how to apply to screenwriting. Read more about Felicia Rose Chavez.

Some secondary texts – Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. Chavez draws on Lerman’s work for designing her own workshop format. It’s a great framework for establishing an artist-driven feedback process. Read more about Liz Lerman. Also, The 4 A.M. Breakthrough for its writing prompts.

Come back next week to see how I’ve adapted these texts for our own workshop process!