Workshop suggestions
This is copied from a page I was given in my first workshop class in grad school. It’s extremely wordy, but having never workshopped before, I found it very helpful in terms how how to approach and critique someone else’s work. Hope you find it useful. I’ve cut out some parts about writing up a critique.
The workshop is an opportunity not merely to receive response but also to give it – a sustained practicum in criticism.
When preparing, participants should try first to discover the work’s intentions, setting aside for the moment one’s own tastes and preferences. Toward the end of the discussion, one could raise doubts about the intention – i.e., wouldn’t a third person narrator be more effective for the thematic intent; is the convention chosen too great a limitation – but at lease initially, the reader should try to describe rather than evaluate and to be open to the premises of the work. To this end, it is often useful to tell the author what you remembered best about the piece a few hours (or a few days) after you first read it. Often, a first reading will provoke more questions than comments – one pleasure of workshop is listening to your questions being answered by other readers. A second level of engagement with the task is to locate those passages/devices/choices that seem most effective in pursuit of the work’s intent or core. Often the most useful response a writer can receive is an indication of what is successful. A natural extension of this engagement is identifying passages/devices/choices that seem at cross-purposes with the rest of the work or not as fully realized, clear, detailed, or graceful as they need to be. Fourth, workshop groups can be useful in speculating about change or additions – again, though, not in blind application of the reader’s own taste or preference but in light of the work’s deepest purpose.
At all these levels of consideration, comments need to be precise and detailed, offering evidence from the text to support assertions. A workshop should not be a poll; it is insufficient to say, “I like the opening of this story,” or “I wanted to know more about the narrator” – comments should be supported by analysis and should be as descriptive as possible without sliding into jargon.
It is quite important that students monitor themselves in the crucial balance between active participation and domination. Some checkpoints might be:
*Don’t initiate the talk with a small editing point nor a broad challenge to the basic premises of the piece – a good place to begin is with that first level of engagement: description of or a question about the story’s intention/plot/central conflict
*Don’t ALWAYS be the first one to speak. New students in particular might be well advised to listen first for the tone of these conversations. At the same time, a student who never speaks denies him/herself the chance to learn through articulation and shows a lack of generosity to fellow students who speak about his/her work. Shyness is no excuse.
*Discussion is a dialogue. Members of the group should address/respond to one another as conversation unfolds yet not belabor points already covered thoroughly.
*Comments should be about the work at hand and not about the person who wrote it – writers, above all others, should be most vigilant about the power, privileges, and protection of the imagination.
*Citing historical and aesthetic contexts can be useful to the author – to recognize a formal strategy or to note a particularly interesting or daring break with convention.
In the past, etiquette of the workshop has required that the author not speak during the discussion unless called upon to supply some necessary information, not only to avoid “defense” of the piece but also to insure that he/she hears what readers take from the page (or have failed to take). Halfway through, he/she may wish to ask questions of the group or request a brief summary of the response – or to redirect the discussion. It may be more useful to experiment with the author’s participation: to ask questions, raise issues, or redirect the discussion. Nevertheless, the author’s certain responsibility is to listen carefully. A workshop maybe frustrating if there has been wide disagreement or if he/she feels especially attached to/vulnerable about the piece.
Remember that it goes back, after workshop, appropriately to the desktop. Sometimes a comment later will open a window, suggest a new way of thinking about the piece. Sometimes, the group has misnamed but nevertheless located a weakness, and this attention prompts you to a greater clarity of purpose. Most often, what you learn from the discussion will be made manifest less in the piece discussed but in new work, a furthering.
The tone of the workshop should be supportive but rigorous, analytical but not judgmental, noncompetitive, vigilant against workshop jargon or preferred aesthetic strategies. Everyone should try to put his/her egos into the back pocket. Participants should always feel free to question what seem weaknesses, poor choices, or inadvertent missteps, but should also recall that the piece has been snatched from the desktop, that some of its awkwardness may be the absence of authority that attends most work-in-progress, that it does not seek to represent the author’s best or finished work. The workshop is not an occasion for merely congratulating the author nor “fixing” a flawed piece. The importance of the workshop involves the chance to enlarge one’s capacity for strong work.
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