How to Actually Become a Better Writer
Why I don’t believe in traditional, MFA-style critique workshops + A detailed, step-by-step method writers can use to help themselves and others effectively refine work-in-progress
Often—very often, in fact—I hear from students about the bad workshop experiences they’ve endured. Casual cruelty delivered as so-called “feedback.” Observations untethered from the words on the page (that is to say, judgments of the writer, not the writing). Sometimes, these students are seasoned enough or just plain wise enough to suspect the problem was carelessness or lack of skill on the part of the other writer(s) and/or the facilitator, bad workshop methodology, toxic culture of the institution or organization, or all of the above.
But, more often, my students have believed the problem was their own unworthy work, and/or the fact that they’re “too sensitive” and just need to get a “thicker skin” for criticism.
I disagree, and passionately.
Creative work is sacred, vulnerable, and alive. It does not grow in the harsh soil of other people’s undisciplined opinions. In my experience, many writers have never been taught how to do a close reading, let alone how to give genuinely valuable feedback to other writers in workshop. Indeed, in one memorable workshop experience I myself endured years ago, thirteen writers sat in a circle and discussed 20-page excerpts one at a time. As per usual, thanks to the standard method, the writer whose work was being discussed was expected to remain silent, while the rest of the workshop participants were asked to go around, one by one, and state with regard to the excerpt “one thing they liked about it, and one thing they didn’t like.” After the first one or two speakers, of course, comments would become grindingly repetitive, often beginning with, “Piggybacking on…” or “As many have already said ….” And even when observations were not repetitive, they were almost always wildly subjective. Many were, unsurprisingly, distinctly unhelpful or downright unkind. How could we expect otherwise when we were asked to give feedback within the framework of our likes and dislikes?
This is why, for many years, I intentionally excluded workshopping as a component of any class, workshop, or retreat that I facilitated. Students would share work, but only to feel the aliveness of reading it aloud to peers. Only to hear in their own voice where the work soared and where it snagged. Meanwhile, I counseled my students to be careful with their work, to treat it with the respect it deserved. “Would you ask someone’s advice on your roof installation if they were not an experienced roofer?” I’d ask. “Or would you ask someone to diagnose a skin growth if they were not a doctor or dermatologist?” Why do we ask for feedback on our work with such little discernment of whether those giving the feedback have the prerequisite skills? Simply being an aspiring writer (or an avid reader) does not automatically prepare someone to analyze what’s really going on in someone else’s manuscript, let alone identify how to solve any problems and meaningfully improve the work. “So,” I would advise my students, “make sure that before you ask for feedback on your work, you’ve considered whether the person or people providing it are qualified to do so.”
I hoped that by keeping critique out of my classes, I was protecting my students from three things: 1) traumatic workshop experiences and 2) unhelpful advice on their work, and 3) wasted time.
But, as my Writing in the Dark workshop took hold, as it grew and continued into its second, then third year, and now fourth year, with many writers taking the workshop over and over and over again, I could see their desire for peer critique growing. And I realized we had as a group developed—through our continued close reading of published work, which is a hallmark activity of the workshop—the foundational skills required for reading each other’s work and talking about it in ways that could actually be valuable and instructive.
So, we developed a methodology for discussing work in progress that respects the writer, the work, and the mystery of the creative process itself. This method acknowledges that there is only one cardinal rule in the craft of writing: You can do it if you can do it. Meaning, all we have to go on are conventions of craft, but we must acknowledge that some of the most brilliant work arises from successfully ignoring conventions. Emphasis on successfully. Who can define that? Well, it has to be effective. What does it mean to be effective? It means you set out to create an effect, and you created the effect you sought. Often, however, when students break conventions, they’re doing it accidentally and/or the benefit isn’t worth the cost. These are things we can talk about objectively, not subjectively—but only if we know the writer’s intentions. Which, of course, requires that the writer knows her own intentions, which isn’t always so, especially with a work in progress. Any critical discussion of a work in progress must necessarily make room for the writer to engage critically herself with the nature of the work and its place on the trajectory of its own development. In other words, how clear is the writer on what the work is, and what it is trying to become? A meaningful workshop will acknowledge that creativity is messy, that often writers, especially with early drafts, are not quite sure of the work’s heart of heart, and that the most valuable process we can apply to helping another writer with their work is one built of a blazing, relentless attention followed by insatiable curiosity undergirded by deep respect for all that cannot be known.
Does the method work? Yes, it does. Work born and discussed in Writing in the Dark has been published in Brevity, Fourth Genre, Hippocampus, The Manifest Station, Sweet Lit, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things column, North American Review, Entropy, and many, many more journals.
With that in mind, here is an outline of how we discuss each other’s work in Writing in the Dark. You can adapt this methodology for considering your own work, for considering work by another writer, for analyzing published work in order to learn from it, and for participating in or facilitating writing workshops yourself.
Writing in the Dark Workshop Model
Note: In the virtual Writing in the Dark workshop, these are flash workshops, and we complete this entire process in 15 minutes per writer (participants also write voluntary notes on each other’s work in our course space on Mighty Networks). I also adapt this method for in-person workshops where each writer is allotted 75 minutes. I offer that info to emphasize how flexible this method is, as long as the facilitator is a strong leader and a good timekeeper.
1. Attention: All participants in the discussion should read the piece in advance, of course—but, even still, the writer whose work is to be discussed should have the opportunity to read aloud. About five minutes works well for this reading—it allows everyone to hear the work brought to life by the writer, and we will experience it differently than we did when reading to ourselves. After the short reading, we clap. Note that at this level, the writer should not give any lengthy explanations of the work, unnecessary disclaimers, etc. The writer should state whether the work is fiction or nonfiction, because these genres are governed by different conventions that will inform the discussion. Also, the writer should acknowledge whether they think the piece is a standalone or part of something larger. Finally, if the writer has one or two very succinct questions or areas of concern for the group to consider, now is the time to state those. All of this front matter should take no more than a minute. The writer is not “gagged” during the workshop, but should be encouraged to mostly listen because otherwise there will be much less time for others to discuss the work.
2. Appreciation: At this step, workshop participants share spontaneously—and succinctly!—what they loved about the work, being careful to cite the page or paragraph number of the exact bit they are noting. They can read a sentence or two aloud to emphasize their point, but they must be brief, because this level needs to move very quickly and allow time for as many people as possible to share what they loved. We have 20 writers in this session of Writing in the Dark, and attendance is often 100%, and we get through this level in a minute or two. Quick, quick! What we’re looking for here is attention to gripping or lovely images, original use of language, evocative fragments, inventive patterns, etc. In other words, what's crackling? What's alive? What's extraordinary? Make sure these observations are very precise and coming straight from the writer’s work. I call this “staying on the page.” General observations are not useful here. At this level, we’re looking for the writer to hear chips and shards of their own work in the voices of other writers who are specifically highlighting what’s brilliant about it. In Writing in the Dark, we use finger snapping or jazz hands to underscore agreement so that the writer can see where widespread enthusiasm lies without comments becoming repetitive.
3. Clarity: At this level, we’re looking to determine, as a group, exactly what is happening in the piece. In our workshop, we mostly discuss narrative prose, but we do get some poetry and also some nonnarrative prose, and even there, we just adapt this step in order to address, as best we can, the big shapes in the work. What is this thing? What does it contain? If relevant, we discern who is doing what, when, where, and how in the piece. What are the elements of the piece, and in what order? This level is not about aboutness, themes, etc. It is literally about what is actually on the page. More often than you might think, participants aren’t really sure what’s happening. Just as often, that lack of clarity is unintentional on the writer's part. And we can't really talk about aboutness if we're not 100% sure what is even happening in the piece. I find that commonly, without strong facilitation on my part, participants might hesitate to acknowledge their uncertainty about what is going on in the piece because they think it's just them, that they’re “missing something.” But I find that’s almost never the case. Instead, if something is unclear on the page, as soon as one person acknowledges that, others admit that they, too, weren’t sure. And if a writer has obscured clarity on purpose, that can be a conversation too. Is it working well? Is the cost of obtuseness outweighing the benefit, or is the effect worth it? Sometimes writers obscure clarity to protect themselves and/or because they believe it’s making the work better. Sometimes, it is. But other times, it’s just creating confusion. So, this level can be extremely valuable for some work, while for other work that’s already crystal clear, we can breeze through this step.
4. Aboutness: Here is the level where things get juicy, as we dive into what the piece is really, truly about. This is not the time for grand themes like loss, healing, resilience—such themes are much too broad. Rather, we want to grapple with aboutness in a way that sounds like, “This is a story/poem about someone wanting _______ or losing ________ or searching for _________ and learning _______.” That kind of thing. For non-narrative work, we can go to the thematic level, yes, but only if we’re also staying close to the page. “This bit about the shark tooth feels related to _______ , especially because it is juxtaposed with ________, which seems to suggest ________.” This is a hard but very, very fruitful level.
5. Curiosity: At this level, we identify questions and opportunities, always presented with the emphasis on respect for the writer, because only the writer can ever really know. Also, respect for the emerging aboutness we just identified in the previous step. Importantly, we’re not just lobbing traditional criticisms and suggestions thinly veiled as questions. This level is for actual questions, and what makes them actual questions is that the asker does the inner work to engage with their own uncertainty. I have to do this inner work all the time, as you can imagine. I might think I know that the writer should move the second paragraph up to the beginning—but then I remind myself that can only be true if the writer is trying to write the piece as I imagine it in my mind. Which is a fallacy. Once I remember that, I can honestly ask, “What if the second paragraph were moved to the beginning?” and it’s an actual question, not a thinly veiled critique. Other questions we might hear at this level include, Did you repeat that phrase intentionally? Is the second character her brother? How much time passes in this piece? Examples of opportunities we might hear include: What if you ended three lines earlier and let that image ring out? I wonder how this essay would work as flash, or how this flash would work as an essay? Have you tried this in the first person?
And at the end of a Writing in the Dark workshop, we often clap again.
