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Creative writingtoo familiar with each other’s critical and creative practice. It is one reason why workshops in university courses often achieve a healthy dynamic the population of their workshops changes every year. They represent a compacted version of reality time wipes out a generation of writers and replenishes from the next.
Generally a workshop takes one of two tracks or, if there is time, both tracks.
There is the generative workshop, the purpose of which is to catalyse and create new writing, sometimes
by creative writing exercises, and often by reading examples for imitation or rewriting. There is the responsive workshop, the purpose of which is to assist with a critical understanding of new writing.
In these latter workshops, scripts of writing are distributed, read aloud and discussed. Student-writers collectively assist their peers in redrafting their work so that it reaches some kind of optimum state. This optimum state might not be exactly what the writer originally intended It might not even be the state that most in the group can agree upon, for that would lead to homogeneous writing.
HomogeneityOne of the wintry criticisms of writing workshops is that they produce such homogeneity within a false democracy of tender critical standards, notions of worthiness
of subject and tone in writing, and backslapping. As poetry is what gets lost in translation, there is an argument that variety, ingenuity, individuality and originality are what get lost in workshops. That need not be the case. As with our discussion of teaching in Chapter
One
, rigour is again the answer. To foster variation and originality, the workshop leader must set the temperature of the event very carefully and maintain a close watch on proceedings like the director of a play. And,
like an impartial referee, one of the tasks is to keep play flowing within the workshop, to ensure that everyone is involved and that nobody monopolises the time too greedily. The communal aim of a responsive or generative workshop is to make sure that every writer knows what every individual in that group must do to their own work to improve it or finish it. In that way, we learn for ourselves, and we learn from other models in the group.
This is the most generous aspect of communal self-interest. You become many writers while remaining true to your individual aims.
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