To Workshop or Not to Workshop?

By Brian Fleming

Is it worth two years of your life to get your MFA in writing? Well, first consider this: an MFA is slightly less useless than a third leg. It’s never gotten anyone a job. In fact, all it does is give you time to write while surrounded by like-minded writers—which may or may not be a good thing. So, then, other than wasting two years of your life, what are the dangers of getting your MFA in writing?

Writing is an act of faith and workshop, whether at Iowa (where I went) or anywhere else, can, I suppose, serve to bolster that faith. Assure the author of the validity of his work. Give him reason to believe where once there was only doubt. Conversely, the exact same workshop, with the exact same criticism, might do just the opposite. I have found nothing more destructive to good fiction than workshopping a novel in progress - or anything in progress, for that matter. Comments, whether positive or negative, at best skew the author's aesthetic vision until his fiction is no longer his own. At worst critique can sew the seeds of serious doubt and hesitation - the bane of all the world's activities, but acutely felt in art (or sports, or aerial acrobatics, or warfare - who are we kidding, art isn't that important and writing is just another way to pass the time). Writing I've always believed is a precarious balance of arrogance and naiveté - the belief that what you're writing is important and worth telling combined with the childlike certainty that nothing else matters. Screw with the balance and the ability to produce great fiction goes out the window. My prescription for getting the most out of workshop would be to hand in a story that's as finished as you can at that time imagine; expose it to the opinion poll that is workshop, consider that was said, then move on to another story. If you learned anything it was by a process of osmosis and will come out in your next work. If you think too long on how to repair your story you risk destroying it as well as the innate confidence that allowed you to write the story in the first place. I believe it was John Gardner in the Art of Fiction (required reading, as far as I'm concerned - I'm astounded when I students say they've never even heard of it, let alone read it; it really does make attending an MFA program redundant) who said that writer's block is not a failure of imagination, but a failure of will. I would posit that will is a function of confidence - and also that confidence is a function of will.

More damaging than loss of faith, though, is writing that attempts to guard against this loss of faith by the very act of writing itself, a response that comes all too naturally when writing in a workshop environment. Writing of this kind can take many form. It can be writing that hopes to please the workshop. It can be writing that hopes to shock. Writing out of anger at the workshop, or people in the workshop. What a waste of anger! If you're going to be pissed off, be pissed off at something that matters. It can be writing that hopes to antagonize further those people whom your last submission already antagonized. Or it can be writing that hopes to win those same people over. It can be writing that hopes to confuse the workshop by being so different from your last piece. Of course, none of these scenarios are limited to the workshop, but apply to agents, publishers, reviewers and readers. As soon as the author begin to play for or against his readership, he has allowed himself to be backed into a corner that will force him to write fiction that is not true just in order to get out of that corner. Unless, of course, this playing of the audience is all part of the fiction. Trees do make a sound when they fall even if no one is there to hear them, but do we care?

There is a practical side to all this. Why, for example, turn in a novel excerpt if you already know doing so will blow your momentum? But then, why turn in a story you don't really care about just because you have to turn something in? For that matter, why write stories if you want to write novels, and vice versa? Of course, we are all learning, and it can't hurt to be forced upon occasion to write, and to read, something we might otherwise never consider. And here I do have something somewhat conclusive to say about the process of workshopping. Reading the works of your fellow students is probably the most valuable part of the workshop experience. At it's best doing so may re-assure you of what is possible in fiction by upping the ante on what you yourself want to achieve and egging you on to write an even better story. (Call this positive competition - not the destructive kind born of jealousy, different from envy, that says, "Well, at least I'm better than they are.") Likewise, critiquing another's story forces you to face problems and short-comings in your own fiction. By the means of critiquing, the workshop establishes the invaluable habit of self-evaluation, by which an author learns to tear his own work apart. It is a habit, though, like everything else learned in workshop, that comes eventually to all writers who are serious about producing great fiction (whatever that means).

Question: should anyone else be allowed into this intimate world or creation and destruction that leads the author to a product he can call finished? Everyone will have their own answer, of course. Some might find it necessary; some might find it intrusive and harmful (as I do). I think we all know that there is nothing to be learned at the workshop that couldn't have been learned regardless. At issue is whether it is best for the author and his work to allow anyone else in on the pain of this learning, or if this is a process that must, by necessity, be gone through alone? The latter, I think - it goes a long way to explain why so many students of the workshop go on to publish great fiction years after they are done, and why others disappear.

Is this what I've learned from being in the workshop?

Beats me. Maybe I knew it all along. Maybe it has nothing to do with the workshop. Maybe it's fiction. Maybe it's the way with everything. The workshop as metaphor?

Go figure.

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