As an MFA candidate at Butler University, we are required to take at least four workshops in our genre (fiction, non-fiction or poetry). Every semester when I click 'enroll' on a workshop, I shortly begin to prepare my stories. For me, preparing stories is a lot like scavenging. I have a lot of stories to tell, don’t get me wrong, but finding where to put them is a little tricky.
Workshops are very simple. You submit the work to the class and come back next week to get feedback on your writing. They are uniquely terrifying.
The day comes for your work to be acknowledged. Everyone has read over your writing and has put their notes in blue or red pen. Everyone has an opinion, and everyone has something to tell you. Some may change the way you see the piece entirely, others may not change anything at all.
Being critiqued in workshop is like having someone rip your heart out of your body and plate it for you like it’s a fancy hors d'oeuvre. You just hope they love it and you need them to love it, because it’s you on that plate. You also feel dead inside, because your heart is right there within the writing in front of them and they’re judging it with their own eyes. One person might prod it with their fork as it beats uselessly on the plate.
I’ve had both good and bad workshop sessions. Bad workshops are the worst thing to sit through, because you don’t end up discovering much about your own work. It’s a desolate landscape only populated by blank faces and tightly pursed lips. The professor taps their notebook with the butt of their pen and looks around the room, waiting for someone to speak. Anyone? There’s this sense of overwhelming dread that I get when workshop is going poorly. It either tells me that I have submitted utter garbage to the workshop (very likely) or that nobody had any insights into how to make the piece better (equally as likely).
Maybe it’s less like an hors d’oeurve, maybe it’s more like a mental battle. Maybe it’s like a war that you just have to outlast. It’s hell, but it’s a personal hell of your own making. You wrote these things and now you must understand why you are being punished. At its lowest point, workshops will make you question every decision you’ve ever made, writing or otherwise.
I’ve had workshop experiences where I feel like I’ve let people down by the end of it. I've felt as if I was unable to live up to the standards of the program, to the standards of these people whose work I admire. And that really hurts, putting yourself out there and making an honest effort, to receive only bad vibes in return. I recognize that it’s part of the learning process. I am going to suck most of the time, but it’s only by sucking at something that I can progress to being good at something. That’s the attitude I have to take into each week’s workshop. I suck now, but after the workshop I will hopefully suck slightly less.