Paws and Prose: Pros and Cons of Writers’ Workshop

A workshop for writers is a place where you gather and share your work with other writers. A place to talk about your latest creative piece – often, spotting the obvious errors. But it touches upon many of the creative writing processes. Editing, developing ideas and getting detailed feedback are just a few things that workshopping provides. But like everything, it has disadvantages, advantages and things that may or may not be either.

This post will discuss what I find are the strengths and weaknesses of workshops for writers. This includes feedback, groups, editing, and the development of ideas.

Feedback

With writers’ workshops, you will get good and bad feedback. This is not the same as positive and negative. Criticism can be negative and still be good. However, someone who does not have experience in giving feedback, and maybe no experience in your genre may give bad feedback. Feedback that is not helpful.

A friend of mine received a comment on her work that she had stapled on the wrong side as if that was something that mattered. There was nothing on the work itself, or the things that were commented on were minor things that could be fixed later. Nothing to develop the story. On the flip side, you could get someone just saying the work is great and giving you nothing to work with, which is also not helpful feedback.

Not all feedback is useless though. Someone more experienced is more than likely going to give detailed and critical feedback on a piece. They point out what works, what doesn’t work, tell you when a phrase made them pause, or where they got confused. They won’t rewrite your story but pinpoint where something might need some extra attention and revision. This is the feedback that you would want from a Writer’s Workshop and what you should expect.

Learning to receive and give feedback

Sending your work out can be scary, asking someone to read your work is scary. You never know what you are going to receive. If you are new to feedback, you may take everything personally.

Maybe this is the most important one. I find that my years at university, workshopping my piece has taught me how to take feedback. Yes, there are times I think the person giving me comments on my piece has misread my work. Or their comments do not make sense. Nevertheless, I appreciate their comments, thank them and move on to the feedback of another person. I have learned that not every piece of feedback is relevant and it is not a personal attack on me.

I still consider the feedback I disagree with because maybe they have a point that is not expressed in the comment. Or maybe I can make my work read clearer by looking at their comment in another angle. If not, only then is it disregarded.

Through workshopping, I have learned to give feedback as well as receive it. The more work I give and receive critique, the more I understand what is needed when giving feedback. Something the author can work on. It’s hard to do this without a writers’ workshop or without a group of writing friends, so I would highly recommend this.

Writing Workshop Groups

Working in groups is great, especially at my university where everyone is trying to absorb as much feedback as possible. However, this is my last year, the network we have built will start to break up and we are going to have to find workshops out in the real world. This is going to be a hard task as I will probably have to find a new network — try it out and hope it works for me as each workshop group is different.

An issue that working in groups can present is that sometimes you may end up in one that is not responsive. You give someone the work and when it comes back, there is hardly anything squibbed on there. Or you may have someone with very little work and so everyone is trying to stretch their piece around to account for the people who have not come. Or They may have written more than the rest and so most people’s attention is on the bigger piece rather than the smaller pieces of work.

These can prove challenging in the professional world. You need the right group of people. Edited 2024: I found a few people on the new platform, Bluesky.

Editing in Workshops

Editing is the one that is most associated with a workshop as the work is passed around in the group. There are two kinds of way editing works. The one where you edit someone else’s work—Lish style. Maybe you’ll talk to the writer as you do it, or if you are like me after you have done it. Pointing out errors that are not easy to see when proofreading it yourself.  I personally find this helps to highlight my weaknesses and strengths.

For example, maybe someone uses too many short sentences that the work becomes too fast that the story does not develop properly – or if they use too many long sentences, the work may read too slow that it becomes tedious and the story does not develop at a good pace.

Then there is the self-editing way of editing. You have your story, maybe it’s a draft and you tell people your ideas. Listen to or read theirs. Your brain is then in a zone. When you read your own work you can spot issues that are similar to the ones you found in others. It’s bouncing off from the people around you. Listening to what they say and what you tell them and then applying it to your own work.

I find this helps to refine and find your style. This part of the workshop does not always have to include peer feedback. It is perfectly fine to sit with a group of people, editing your work by yourself as they work on their pieces too as buddy doubling. It’s great at getting you to look at your work thoroughly and refine the piece to your liking. It also makes the writer a better editor as they work through other writers’ pieces.

Developing Ideas

I often find that meeting with other people helps me to clearly see my ideas, form my work and realise what does and does not work. I can talk to the group about an idea I have and see it clearer than I did before. This helps me get my thoughts together before I even start writing my piece.

An example of this is the movie I was going to write for my lecturer. Originally, it was going to be about a father in the early 18^th century, who’s lost money through a failed shipping, the taxes were increased by the day and the shipping would have helped him stay afloat and pay for his rent. On top of this, his son was dying from poor nutrition. This led him to miss his rent payments and steal bread to keep his son alive. But then he turns to the life of piracy to stop his son from dying and find a better life.

The story is fine until the character runs to sea because it’s a story people can relate to. But when he turns to piracy, people are going to question how that will give him and his family a better life. I feel this could be shown in a work of prose. But in a 90-minute feature film, it cannot be shown as clearly. I could see this problem before I started my script, and so could others.

Be Prepared to Make Changes

If you ask someone to help you develop your idea, be prepared to make changes. You may develop something that is stronger than your original idea. With the help of my group, I managed to change the idea above to a story about a chandelier’s son who has lost everything during the peek of the industrial revolution and must learn to adapt in a changing world.

He would be right in the centre of the industrial revolution, affected by all the factories sprouting up over the place. The health issues that bought to Birmingham and would be trying to survive as a worker during the time of mass production.

It has really helped me develop my piece.

Conclusion

As a whole, workshopping has many benefits. To me, it is one of the most important processes you can have as a professional writer. It has many benefits, such as improving your editing skills, helping to structure your idea and learn more about you as a writer. It is a great way to edit, write and improve your own work and learn from others.

Thanks for Reading

Sorry for the song in the Be Prepared to Make Changes part… It got stuck in my head because of the section. So. I thought I’d share it so you all can suffer. But you do have to admit the song is appropriate. And Scar would be great at pitching a novel!

So, Scar is the author and the Hyenas are the fans waiting for the instalment. Afterall, they talk about creativity… listen to it, you’ll see what I mean.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this post on a writer’s workshop. Please feel free to have a look at my other writing posts.

Don’t forget to find me on Facebook and Bluesky 🙂

~Shannon~