[ SECRET POST #6107 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6107 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 32 secrets from Secret Submission Post #873.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

tbh that's not really something fandom is going to provide. If you want your writing brutally ripped up for your own good, find or start a Milford method writing workshop circle - your local community college probably has at least one for original fiction, and some fandom friends and I did one on Slack a few years ago that was pretty easy to set up (no comment on what it did to the friendships.)

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I've participated in workshops using that method, for writing and short films. Never knew the name of it. I always really enjoyed it because it let me see how my work came across to others. The negative feedback was always surprising and interesting to think about, it made me more confident as an artist because I had to decide which feedback aligned with my vision and would take me in the right direction, as opposed to feedback that would distort my vision and was a potential negative reading I was willing to accept.

[(Anonymous)]

Strict Milford is pretty specific to SF fandom I think, I think in literary fiction it's more likely to be called Iowa style or something? But yeah it can be interesting to do with a group of fans online if you can find three or four other people who might be interested - since it's not really focused on discussion you can even do a pretty good adaptation of it in a locked DW comm.

I've never found it all that useful for myself, because I have no problem ripping my work to shreds all by myself! What I need out of a writing tutorial is a chance at intensive back-and-forth discussion of what to do about it and help figuring out what criticism is and isn't worth listening to for a given story, and your standard Milford style workshop isn't very good for that; I get more out of a good beta reader or just staying up till 2 am jawing with people informally about stories. But I can see how it's very helpful for people who *do* need help with the ripping apart step.

[(Anonymous)]

TIL. Interesting that it's so ubiquitous when it's not the best method of workshop for everyone. What I found most helpful about it was getting negative and positive feedback that I hadn't anticipated. I am only able to see flaws and strengths in my work from my own perspective. It's not always a pleasant experience but getting insight into how my more abstract and personal work came across was great.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah see I'm still at the stage of "ugh this is too abstract and personal, nobody would ever want to see it, look how pretentious this is and I've put in all kinds of stuff that nobody else will get" so the more criticism-focused kind of workshops go the wrong way for me (I think a lot of fanwriters are like that, which is part of why fandom has the no-harsh-criticism culture it does.)

The reason I was able to remember what it's called is there was actually a big discussion about it in SF fandom a year or so ago; parts of SF fandom really tend to push that everybody who wants to be a pro needs to go to at least one intensive Milford boot camp, because getting your work ripped apart by other writers is the only way to learn. And there were a lot of people pointing out that because it's so dependent on criticism from the other people in the workshop, if you do bring a very different perspective than most of the other people in the group it can just have the effect of beating everybody into writing the same homogeneous style. But at the same time a lot of other people talked about how amazing it was and that wasn't their experience at all, it was very encouraging for finding your own voice. And then someone pointed out that making stories more homogeneous is what it was designed for; crit circles were invented during the Cold War as a way to stomp down the rise of communism in the arts. But on the other hand learning to write a story that does work well for the majority of people isn't necessarily a bad thing, even if it does lead to greater conformity - writing inaccessible artistic masterpieces isn't everybody's goal.

So anyway, yeah, "crit circle" style workshops can be very useful for some people (and I think they're worth everybody doing once!) but in a lot of the US they're basically all there is for creative writing teaching, and a lot of creative writing teachers don't know how to actually teach writing beyond leading crit circles, that's where it becomes a problem. I did a creative writing program in college and luckily there was some other stuff because the "workshop" part was definitely the least useful to me, the criticism pretty much all boiled down to "you aren't writing the same kind of stories I want to write" (and tbf that was usually most of my criticism of everyone else, too.)

[(Anonymous)]

All of that makes sense to me. Yeah, I found it helpful, but certainly not the only style of workshop I would ever want to do. I can see how it could be misused to create a bullying environment as well. In my experiences, I enjoyed thinking over where I wanted to change my work to be more understandable to people outside of my marginalized identities and where I wanted to keep it just for myself and people who knew what I was talking about. In some areas I was interested in compromising and in some I was not. In a more toxic group that could have been a worse and less constructive experience for sure. Thanks for the info, I never knew a bunch of this...