[ 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)]

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...