Workshops: Threat or menace?
7 o'clock, July 29, 2003
Following up the whole Wolfe|Odyssey fiasco, I notice a couple of interesting things. One is the idea that a workshop — maybe this comes from the boot camp metaphor — is supposed to simulate the environment that the students will experience in the Cold Cruel World out there. Viz, for example, Liz Williams:
What's going to happen when the harsh day dawns and Dozois, Van Gelder and company judge submissions from these students in accordance with their own beliefs?
It’s never occurred to me that the purpose of a workshop is to simulate an editorial response. Those don’t need to be simulated. You don’t need to pay hundreds of dollars for them. You can get them for two bucks by putting a story in an envelope. Right?
All right, obviously I’m being too literal. But it’s interesting that so many people seem to have jumped to make the connection between harsh critique and editorial rejection. Now, letting people know what to expect in The Real World is, I suppose, one of the legitimate purposes of a workshop. But people aren’t lab rats. You don’t need a cattle prod to explain DANGER, HIGH VOLTAGE — that’s what language is for, or so it seems to me.
Then there’s the general case, as put by the inimitable Mr. Ellison:
I know how to pull the plow, how to do that job, how to make it as rough and gritty and as close to the reality of the toughest job in the world as I can when I teach. It's been proved in the fire, because dozens of the people now doing the workshop instructing were people I helped beat into shape. I only wish they'd retained their passion! To instruct otherwise is to cheat, to take pay under false pretenses, to succor the talentless and time-wasting and self-indulgent, and to short-change the ones who look on the job as Art, as a Way of Life, as a responsibility to themselves, their talent, and the rest of the human race.
The connection is’t so direct here, but note “as close to the reality of the toughest job in the world as I can [make it]”. Note, also, “to instruct otherwise is to cheat.”
I haven’t taught writing. But I’d be very surprised indeed if there really is One Infallible Teaching Method, Adapted For The Meanest Understanding.
You see this in school boards fighting over the reading curriculum. “Whole word!” “Phonics!!” “Whole word!!!” “Phonics!!!!” Nobody ever stops to consider whether there might be two kinds of students whose brains are suited for two different learning styles.
(Actually, there are at least three kinds — the third kind will learn whichever style you use, or even if you don’t bother to teach them at all. I suspect that both sides of the argument are using this group to inflate their numbers.)
I’ve seen this in kendo, too. There are instructors who think, or claim to think, or talk as if they think, that the only way to teach somebody how to fight with a sword is to beat the bejeezus out of them, literally and figuratively, and if they’re not tough enough for it they should take up flower arranging instead. And then there are instructors who do a lot with a kind word and a smile and insist that you can make a swordsperson out of anyone if you take the time to bring them along a bit.
The funny thing is, both methods work.
So what do you think? Nick Mamatas’ cogent deconstruction aside, what are workshops for, anyway?
Follow-Up
Will Shetterly has a nice post about writing teachers that says something like what I tried to say above, only much more succinctly.
I’ve known good teachers near each extreme. All writers have to decide which sort of teacher is best for them, or whether they're better off learning by trial and error.
But, frankly, if you like the idea of studying with the first sort, your money would be better spent on a dominatrix.
I thought the advantages to a "pro" workshop like Clarion, Odyssey, VP, etc., would be that you get a chance to get advice from people who actually work successfully in the field, as well as, of course, networking.
(I say this with no actual workshop experience myself, of course.)