Small Group Workshop, Paper 1

Mon, Sep 18

What’s a story? What’s an essay? 

Contrary to what you might think, your story or essay isn’t something you write. It’s actually something that only lives in the mind of the reader: a hallucinatory, synesthetic experience in which the reader imagines things they’ve never seen, hears voices say things they’ve never heard, and has feelings about marks inked on a piece of bleached cellulose — or pixels on a screen. 

It’s your job as a writer to pick and organize the words to inspire just the experience in the reader you want them to have. But it doesn’t happen all at once. First, you have to translate your own vision into language, a process which often coincides with figuring out what your vision is in the first place. Then comes the harder part: editing and revising the language so that it has just the effects you want, even if the reader is a total stranger.

This is where workshop comes in. We can’t know how our work will be received until we put it out there, but peer workshop can give us essential outside perspective on our writing. Your readers may not see what you’re trying to do, and they may not be able to tell you how to fix it, but what they can do is tell you how they experienced the words you put on the page.

When when it’s your turn to give feedback, you do the same thing in return. Don’t worry about trying to solve problems or even spot them. The best information you can give the writer is about your experience: Where did you get confused? Where did you get bored? What caught your interest? What kind of associations do their diction and images provoke? Where did you find yourself wanting a breather, or a signpost?

Working together in workshop helps all of us become better writers — and readers.