Creative Investment in Creative Writing Workshops
Creative writing in all its ambiguity may seem a difficult subject to teach. To teach writing is a daunting task in itself; to teach someone to create means to teach them something subjective in nature. In their article on defining creativity, Barry Liesch and Thomas Finley analyze Biblical definitions of creativity to conclude that the act of creation is something only capable of God, something that exists in humans in only a mirrored state (1984). Even the Greeks argued over the definition of creativity with Plato asserting it to be the inspiration of divine madness and his pupil, Aristotle, suggesting creativity exists in the mind, somewhere between melancholia and its temperaments; this Aristotelian concept provides the basis for more modern studies that correlate creativity and levels of mental stability (Akiskal and Akiskal 2007). Also in the contemporary era, writer Steven Pressfield in his book The War of Art believes that the only way to improve one’s craft is to sit down and work on it; however, he believes that by doing this and by saying a prayer to the muses much like that of Sophocles in the Plato’s Phaedrus, the muse will recognize his dedication to his craft, come down from the heavens, and provide his word divine inspiration (Pressfield p. 113). While people have not settled on a definition or origin of creativity, various voices from antiquity, the Renaissance, and the present have believed that creativity is something divine or otherwise out of humanity’s control.
In this case, to be responsible for teaching someone how to create in the ways of gods and poets is an insurmountable weight, and it is one that must be handled with care. What, exactly, should be the job of creative writing courses? What, exactly, should students invest, and with what should they leave? These are questions I pondered in my research, although they are questions it would take much greater research to answer. In my paper, I seek to explore the ways creative writing is taught commonly and in the present. I aim to learn for what creative writing classes hold themselves responsible. I try to discern what students are welcomed to invest in the class and what they recieve.
I narrowed my research on creative writing workshops. According to Jill Stukenberg, these have been a common practice for over one hundred years (2016). In these courses, students are commonly required to read their peers’ work closely, express both praise and criticism for the piece, and in turn put their own writing up for review. The author of the workshopped story witnesses their readers’ reactions to their piece and can therefore learn how their ideas are conveyed and how they can convey them more efficiently. However, there are developmental discrepancies regarding writer development in the idea and management of a workshop. According to Charles Bazerman in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, writing expresses thoughts, ideas, and emotions that are reconstructed by readers when they attempt to comprehend these things in the text; for this reason, “every expression shared contains risk and can evoke anxiety. Writers often hesitate to share what they have expressed and may even keep private texts they consider most meaningful” (Bazerman paragraph 5). In contrast to many other classes that require writing to be turned in to just the professor or teaching assistant, workshops require students to share with an entire class of their peers. Creative writing, too, can be much more personal to the writer than academic writing, and therefore, the social yet critical nature of the workshop can feel even more exposed tan a typical class (Stukenberg 2016). In my research, I found that oftentimes, this can create anxiety in the students as the class is so focused on others’ perception of one’s creative writing. For students who are either new to writing or new to the genre in which they are writing, this anxiety could increase.
At the University of North Texas, I interviewed three students who had taken Intermediate Creative Writing: Fiction within the past academic year. The two female students had the same professor and assignment but different classes, and the third and the only male had both a different professor and assignment. In the interviews, I explored how the structure of the class, the nature of feedback, and the assignments given can affect a student's investment in the class and therefore in creative writing. Generally, I sought to get a basic understanding of the writers I interviewed, their experiences in creative writing classes (specifically, for the sake of the research, fiction workshops), and what they wanted from said experience in comparison and in contrast to what they feel like they received from it. While my small sample pool consisted of multiple genders, races, and sexualities, it was not large enough or diverse enough to provide an entirely accurate sample. This research can serve as a basis off of which further research could expand and therefore reach wider conclusions.
ELISE
When I interviewed Elise, I was surprised to find that I received the perspective not of a self-proclaimed “creative writer” but rather of a Writing and Rhetoric major. She took Intermediate Creative Writing: Fiction to fulfill an English elective and, admittedly, for fun. Although she enjoys essays, she “writes to think” and has journaled in her free time since she was younger (Elise 2018). In her calm demeanor, her preparation for the workshop, and her curiosity for difficult subjects, I recognized Elise’s intuition.
When I asked her about the workshop, she said she was nervous beforehand and had to keep reminding herself that “I am not the story,” therefore emotionally distancing herself from the story in preparation for the critiques she would receive (Elise 2018). This reminded me, ultimately, of another Threshold Concept—Kevin Roozen’s assertion that writing is linked to identity and that “through the writing we do, we claim, challenge, perhaps even contest and resist, our alignment with the beliefs, interests, and values of the communities with which we engage” (Roozen paragraph 3). Roozen claims that writing identifies one with certain communities, even if that community is simply the community of writers. Elise, who told me she identifies as a writer, aligns with this definition; however, in her saying that she isn’t her story, she separated not just herself from the piece, but she also separated the act of writing and the story she had written. She identified as a writer without identifying with the story. If these are to be two different things, Elise could have entered the class as an invested writer, but she could still, theoretically, have to be convinced to invest in the type of writing presented in the course.
The assignment for Elise’s class was to write a short story that retells a myth or legend using the same main character, conflict, and time and place. She chose to retell a story from Marguerite of Navarre’s collection of French stories. The original myth was about a relationship between a princess and an older knight and explores the nature of the love in question. Elise added a prince, who served as the narrator, the princess’ brother, her protector from the knight’s attack at the end of the story; however, the big twist Elise put into the story was in the unrequited love that the prince felt for the knight (Elise 2018).
When Elise’s story came up for workshop, I was able to attend her class and observe the discussion. The class had already workshopped three stories a week for the past three weeks, and on the night of Elise’s workshop, two stories had already come before her. It was Halloween. Some students were already in costume. It was nearing 9pm , and I could feel that like any college kid at the end of a three-hour class, these students were growing tired. Students had snacks they’d purchased on break, and one student, who had a three hour poetry writing workshop immediately before the three hour fiction writing workshop, had resorted to sitting on the floor to somehow keep himself from falling asleep. All the same, after Elise read her first paragraph and then fell silent (according to Jill Stukenberg’s assessment, this is typical in the creative writing workshop), the students rallied to discuss her story.
At the start of the workshop, various students tossed out comments on anything from the point of view of the story to the scientific possibility of a sword sinking into someone’s back and skewering the heart out through the chest. The exhausted student spoke up from the floor to say that he wanted the image of the ocean at the beginning of the story to be paralleled at the end. The professor chimed in every once in a while, but he pulled back each time with the promise of revealing his thoughts at the end of the workshop. For a while, the room was a flurry of ideas, and Elise, like me, scribbled down notes before they could be overwhelmed by a new idea.
The last half of the workshop, however, revolved mainly around one topic: the attempted rape scene at the end of the story. Students argued with one another over the relevance of the scene, whether it could be expanded to be more impactful, whether it should be left alone, whether it should be toned down to just a stolen kiss, or cut altogether. By the end of the workshop, the class reached no consensus, and the professor stepped in to assert that in his opinion, it was not, in fact, necessary to the plot of the story. The plot of the story, he said, was the internal conflict the prince felt when he found out that the knight he thought he adored loved not the prince, but the princess. With that, students passed comment sheets around the circle and to Heather. They packed up their things, chatter arose from the room, and students drifted out the door in little clusters. It was time for candy and Halloween parties.
In my interview with Elise, she told me she enjoyed the workshop—especially the first part in which her peers suggested a variety of comments and ideas. She even said that she liked that she couldn’t speak until the end of the workshop. She said she was embarrassed when the suggested parallel of the ocean came up because she thought she should’ve imagined it herself, but she was ultimately glad it was mentioned. However, when I asked her about the debate over the end of the story, she laughed, and her voice fell. On her end, “a good conversation turned into an argument between the class about whether that scene should be included or not. I felt excluded because I couldn't chime in and explain why it was there” (Elise 2018). To Elise, the workshop began to fail when it got stuck on the same idea; even the professor commented on the debate. This particular example, a discussion of the content of the story and how the other students believed it should change or stay the same, was direct; these comments in this argument attempted to dictate what Elise should include or not include in her story. She preferred the more suggestive, facilitative comments from the earlier part of the workshop over this debate.
At the end of the class, Heather confided in me and in a few of her fellow class members that the rape scene was in the story because the it was a key part of the original story she was supposed to retell. The professor had suggested that students change the myth by altering the point of view, inventing characters, or choosing which parts of the story to tell and which parts to omit. However, Elise told me that she “didn’t feel confident enough to change the myth” (Elise 2018). This, perhaps, explains why she told me in her interview that she was more attached to the original story than to her original writing. It may also play into her ability to identify as a writer but not as the story she turned in to workshop. The assignment, either due to its nature or lack of clarity, prevented Heather from feeling comfortable enough to invest very deeply in her short story. As someone who “wants to investigate ideas,” the stipulations of this assignment could have made it just that—an assignment and not much more. If the job of a creative writing class is to teach students investment and creativity in the craft, Elise did not fully benefit from it.
When I asked which workshop comments she valued the most, she said that she would be more likely to revise her short story to the professor’s standards than the students’. All the same, she said she would do this because “she trusts him” and that she’s “not really worried about the grade” (Elise 2018). Despite her reason, she reaches the consensus that the professor’s word is above that of the students. She still asserted that she enjoyed the workshop because she wanted reactions and comments from the students, who are more of an audience. She also claimed that “students expect better writing” because they are not as accustomed to and accepting of writing in an unpolished state. However, she planned to focus on the professor’s word, and in doing so, she gives him an authority not over just her grade (she wasn’t worried about the grade) but over her writing.
It seems that Elise’s experience benefited from a collaboration between student and professor commentary—just as the workshop intended. However, that doesn’t mean things went smoothly. There was still a misconnect between Elise and the assignment, and the workshop still, in her eyes, went awry when the class became directive in their critique of the story’s content. Perhaps it is because of her lack of control over these things that she expressed a discontent with the experience and a lack of deep passion for the workshop and assignment. Come the end of the interview, Elise told me she’d gone into the class expecting and wanting to find an atmosphere charged with “webster’s dictionary creativity” (Elise 2018). However, she did not feel that creativity and passion for the assignment. One could venture to say that this lead to her frustration towards the end of her workshop; if she felt she lacked the creative freedom to greatly alter the plot of the original myth in her short story, sitting through critique of said plot could not be beneficial to her as a creative story writer. Especially considering Elise is typically a journaler or an academic writer who went into the class for credit and exploration more so than an innate passion, the things controlled by the workshop—such as the assignment—are more crucial to determining her investment. While she enjoyed the course, she did not feel as if her writing as significantly impacted by it.
TRINITY
During the second interview I conducted, I met with Trinity, a Creative Writing and Technical Communications double major. She had the same professor as Elise and also had to retell a myth; the only differences in the course were the semester in which she took it and the students in the workshop. Because her class had already passed, I was unable to sit in on her workshop.
Trinity told me she identifies as a writer, and she described her writing preferences as somewhat ambiguous. She told me that she writes the most fiction, but that more than anything, she just loves to write and wants to make a living out of it after graduation. Unlike Elise, she had taken Intermediate Creative Writing: Poetry prior to Fiction, and at the time of the interview, she was enrolled in Intermediate Creative Writing: Nonfiction. While Trinity initially came off as a bit reserved, she opened up to me easily and warmly during our interview (Trinity 2018).
Trinity expressed a clear division between her emotional investment in the fiction writing assignment versus other types of creative writing. All of her writings are “like her children,” but she said she has felt “overwhelming emotion” when journaling, writing poetry, or writing creative nonfiction; she said that the same emotions did not flow through her retelling of the myth, The Girl with One Hand (Trinity 2018). The myth originates from Swahili and explores the relationship between a brother and sister who lose their parents; the brother asks them for their property, and the sister asks for their blessing. Throughout the rest of the story, the brother tries to destroy his sister’s livelihood, but the blessing manifests as luck that keeps her alive and fairly happy. Trinity said that she made the myth her own by adding characters and scenes as well as changing the ending in which the girl, after her brother convinces her husband she is a witch, is accepted back into her husband’s arms.
However, Trinity still described the assignment itself as “far removed from anything I would want to write about” (Trinity 2018). Right from the start, I witnessed her discontent with the class overall as, like Elise, this was the only piece of fiction she would write for the entire semester; she wanted the chance to try her hand at an original story and receive feedback on this. The only other grades in the course consisted of participation and revision of the myth retelling after workshop. She admitted that she couldn’t really invest in the story when she felt like she lacked the complete independence of creativity (Trinity 2018).
All the same, when I asked Trinity about the workshop experience itself, she said it was one of her favorites. She felt that most people in her class were “generally understanding that the story was a rough draft” (Trinity 2018). In saying this, she implied that the attitude of the other students in the workshop can make or break the experience. Following this, she mentioned a student whose commentary was bordering on aggressive; she believed the professor had to speak with him about his behavior because the student “never said anything nice about a story before tearing it apart” (Trinity 2018). While I only received Trinity’s description of the tone of the workshop and what she perceived as inappropriate behavior, her words still implied that providing praise in a workshop is a necessary part of proper workshop etiquette. According to Trinity, praise or lack thereof has the power to set a tone.
Still, Trinity was overall content with the workshop. She entered expecting and wanting commentary to focus more on plot, character, and story structure rather than grammatical discrepancies, and she said this expectation was upheld. More than anything, she wanted to know if her writing “moved” the reader in an emotional way (Trinity 2018). Here, she emphasizes an emotional connection to her writing as a priority; however, if writing conveys identity, and the writer is not emotionally invested, does this writing in fact convey identity? If the writer is not invested in the piece, will the reader be either? If writers like Trinity, to whom the readers’ emotional investment is a priority, cannot or do not emotionally invest in the assignment, leading the readers to also remain distant, the workshop does not benefit the writers on this level. While the issue of the workshop can oftentimes be the investment and motivations of fellow students as individuals inside and outside of the classroom, a presiding issue can be rooted in the space the students are given in the workshop to invest their identities.
Trinity enjoyed the workshops; she was not invested because of the assignment. If she wanted the workshop to explore emotional investment in writing, then she would ideally be invested in the writing herself. The workshop, while overall pleasant, did not fully address this. When I asked her if she wanted to feel like the workshop had more of a “magical of whimsical” atmosphere imagined of typical creative writing courses, and if this description could be true, she said “I wished it could’ve been that sort of transformational experience. I wish we could’ve all become best friends, cue the montage, et cetera. But it wasn’t, and I didn’t expect it to be. It was still just a normal class” (Trinity 2018). Here, she wanted the class to be inspirational in these ways; she said it was not, and one must question if it should be. Regardless of the answer, Trinity wanted to experience creative inspiration, but she did not feel as that she did.
TRENT
My third interview and only male student, Nathan, casts a calm yet thoughtful air over the room. He was a Creative Writing major with an affinity for philosophy, and this reflects in his tendency to entertain multiple sides of an argument and pause before answering a question. He took Intermediate Creative Fiction Writing in Spring 2018—the same semester as Trinity—and had a different professor and therefore a different class. Before that, he’d taken poetry writing, and at the time of the interview, he was enrolled in creative nonfiction writing. He told me that he started writing fiction when he was younger and has written the most in that genre; however, at the time of the interview, he expressed the most interest in and dedication to his poetry. When I asked him if he identified as a writer, he said, casually, that he “hated to get too postmodernist,” but he was hesitant to identify himself in any one way (Nathan 2018). As he pondered the question as if it were presented by one of his philosophy professors rather than myself, a peer, he concluded that “if my identity is that I try to understand things, then writing aligns with that. I don’t know if I identify as a writer...I identify so much with my actions. But writing is a thing that would come up in a conversation of what I do” (Nathan 2018). With my research considering the nature of identifying and investing in writing, Nathan’s immediate question of the definition of identity itself makes him an interesting voice in the discussion of writing investment and the writer’s identity. He is conscious of the separation between his work and his identity, but he is also aware of the separation between his identity, in a way, the act of writing. Like Elise, Nathan said he “likes to understand things...and often thinks of things in the context of writing” and in turn believes that “writing is a space in which I can view my emotions in a different way. I can investigate them” (Nathan 2018). When he uses writing to change a viewpoint and examine himself, Nathan continues to analyze the theme of distance; writing is the tool, and his identity is assessed through it. However, he still admits that—especially when he has not written for a long time—that his writing feels emotional and he has to “just dump it all out” (Nathan 2018). Like Elise, Nathan invested in his work both mentally and emotionally, and he still made the conscious effort to distance himself from his work both for self-examination and for workshop.
As the only one of my three interviewees who had a different Fiction Writing professor than the others, Nathan also had different assignments. The main grades in his class were the writing of a scene and, later in the semester, a short story. There were no other stipulations regarding the content of the stories; they didn’t even have to be related to one another. Perhaps it is because of this advanced freedom that Nathan had less complaints about the course overall. Nathan was brief in his description of his first assignment, the short scene, as a depiction of a “digital funeral” (Nathan 2018). While he had the freedom to imagine whatever story or scene he desire, he still felt that “with fiction, you have character, so you’re already distancing yourself” (Nathan 2018). He said that poetry (in which he typically uses an expressionist lense) and creative nonfiction are more personal types of writing because it is directly about the writer. In fiction, Nathan believes that the character as an imagined person creates a shield between the writer and the emotions of the piece. Therefore, while Trinity and Elise’s complaints about the assignment in their classes directly related to their lack of investment in the pieces they wrote, Nathan asserts that the distance he felt to the writing for the class was rather about the genre itself; both he and Trinity expressed that they invested more emotionally in their poetry and creative nonfiction classes.
When Nathan’s workshop came up in conversation, he claimed to be fairly satisfied with the experience. He wanted discrepancies of character and plot to be addressed before issues such as grammar and sentence structure, and he said that they were. All the same, he was open to sentence level critique because language provides the “building blocks” for the story (Nathan 2018). Nathan also noted that while most people were kind and understanding, some were overly critical—but he “didn’t mind it” (Nathan 2018). In this way, Nathan reasserted that, like Elise, he consciously emotionally distanced himself from his writing in workshops. He ultimately asserted that he “hopes people criticize what needs to be criticized,” but he wanted more suggestions than direct changes to his work; to Nathan, ideas for ways to fix the problems in a story are more helpful than directions on how to do so (Nathan 2018). This is how a workshop, where numerous voices comment on a writer’s work, is helpful to keeping the critique too focused.
Nathan also had a similar attitude to the other interviewees when it came to professor feedback; he said that he “didn’t always feel like the professor’s suggestions were suggestions” but rather were more mandatory than others (Nathan 2018). He explained that when he did revisions of work for the class, he revised closer to the professor’s vision and fit student critique and commentary in where he could. Still, the revisions requirements for the class were only that the writer should, in Nathan’s words, “change something drastically” (Nathan 2018). He stated that he viewed professor feedback as of more value, but almost as a devil’s advocate, he ventured to say that the wide feedback of his peers was also crucial. This, perhaps, lead Nathan to believe that “the mood and excitement is determined by the people in the class” and in saying so assert that as the most important factor in workshop enthusiasm (Nathan 2018).
Admittedly, Nathan never expected the class to be a “magical” experience (Nathan 2018). When I asked if the class inspired his passion or creativity in writing, he said it did so only because it required him to, for the time being, write more and to spend more time thinking about writing. The comments he received in workshop, he said, held no long-lasting impact on his writing. Considering Nathan was the only one of my three interviewees who expressed any feeling of positive change in his writing, and it was because of the increased amount of writing rather than workshop feedback (which Elise and Trinity both desired), I can conclude that writers perceive growth through their own writing. Like Pressfield, Nathan felt that his writing benefited most from the simple act of writing. The workshop gave him pointers on revision, but the increased writing experience increased his interest in writing.
Nathan claimed that student investment was out of the professors’ control; however according to Elise and Trinity, the professor’s assignment and lack of feedback diminished their motivation in the class and their emotional connection to their work. All agreed that their classmates could alter the tone of the workshop, making it enthusiastic, critical, or otherwise regardless of the professor’s attitude. All agreed that their writing may have been slight affected, but that it was not deeply changed by the workshop experience. This brings one back to the question—should creative writing workshops at a university level generate creativity within their students? They clearly did not feel that the courses fulfill this. Should the creative workshops assume that those enrolled already have a passion for their craft, and that the workshop’s job is only to fine-tune this skill for an audience? None of the students I interviewed doubted that they learned something from the experience. None of them regretted it, and they each enjoyed aspects of the class. But did they get from the class what they wanted? Is the purpose of a class to serve the students’ wants or to instruct them on what they may not know they need? All of these are still questions that can be addressed with further research, in further classes, and in further schools. Whether the job of the writing workshop should be to inspire interest and creativity in writing or should be to polish writing regardless of the care a piece has been given, each student I interviewed admitted to wanting to leave the class with that magic creativity and an inspiration for writing.
Regardless, the workshop is so widely used in creative writing instruction that it merits further questioning and investigation. The workshop tends to assume that the students involved have a preconceived interest and investment in writing that does not need to be bulistered in coursework. It assumes that students entering the space of critique and commentary have already established themselves as writers of whatever genre or discipline on which the class focuses, and it does not ask, really, if they are passionate about that sort of writing. Perhaps they believe that because students signed up for the class that they are automatically interested and not, like Elise, taking it because it is well-known for being “sort of fun and a pretty easy elective credit” (Elise 2018). Even other self-proclaimed creative writers may take a class about fiction even though they only really like poetry. To throw a student into a workshop where their newborn writing—and perhaps their newborn interest in the act or type of writing itself—is torn apart and put back together again has the potential to deter new creative writers who, per my research, are more common in intermediate workshops than one may think. The workshop does not necessarily have the authority over a student’s passion and creativity in writing, but it may have a responsibility to respect that creativity in whatever state it is in by encouraging students not to write simply for the audience that is the other students in the workshop, but for the joy of writing for oneself.
Works Cited
Akiskal and Akiskal. In search of Aristotle: temperament, human nature, melancholia, creativity and eminence. Journal of Affective Disorders. Volume 100. 2007 June.
Bazerman, Charles. Writing Expresses and Shares Meaning to be Reconstructed by the Reader. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing. 2015
Liesch and Finley. The Biblical Concept of Creativity: Scope, Definition, Criteria. Journal of Psychology and Theology. Volume 12. 1984.
Pressfield, Steven. The War of Art. 2002
Roozen, Kevin. Writing is Linked to Identity. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing. 2015
Stukenberg, Jill. Deep habits: Workshop as critique in creative writing. Sage Journals, July 14, 2016.
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