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WRESTLING WITH A WRITING WORKSHOP

SOMETIMES A SWORD IS PREFERRED | May 4th 2008

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A city lousy with aspiring authors, New York boasts an embarrassing amount of writing workshops to choose from. Rebecca Ford reports on her time in the trenches ...

"I'm not sure I understand the underlying emotion," I said to Katy. She had written a poem that described a desire to become someone else's desk accessory. "I think you were going for boredom which is hard to accomplish without boring the reader. But I love the image of the narrator as a paperclip. I wish I had thought of that!"

I'm getting very good at finding the positive in otherwise painful stories. I'm in a ten-week writing workshop with ten other amateur aspirants. The other students in my class are writing their way through ugly divorces, premature babies, the death of the their parents and the general loneliness of New York City. Their stories are often ambitious, heavy and not very good.

I'm here for the deadlines. Ten weeks ago I signed up for this workshop because I found that I wasn't writing. Besides e-mails and blog posts and the occasional rant to the cable company, I wasn't really writing for myself. It turns out it's difficult to call yourself a writer without actually writing a story here and there.

In a city full of would-be authors, the options for writing workshops can seem endless. I chose The Writer's Studio (TWS) because a co-worker--a copywriter and talented poet--had mentioned that some of his friends studied there. As a creative-writing workshop veteran, I was drawn to their unique programme. Unlike most workshops, which require students to submit a hefty piece for critique every three weeks or so, first-level TWS students must write a two-page piece every week, each time in the style of a different author. Pieces are then read aloud to the class by someone else, which ostensibly forces the writer to listen more intently (and more vulnerably). We are not allowed to speak (or defend) when our own work is being discussed. Ideally, someone in the class will be saying something interesting.

I should also mention that TWS was cheaper than the other workshops.

I enjoyed the structured assignments in the beginning. They forced me to try techniques I never would have considered. I felt like a rusty soprano practicing scales. With each exercise my voice became more fluid, my sentences more limber, my rhythm more lifelike.

But then came the week we had to emulate Sylvia Plath's "Tulips". Plath is a brilliant poet, but rarely someone I read for pleasure. (I tend to avoid anything that makes me want to put my head in the oven. ) I struggled. I wrote ten different drafts. I toiled late at night as the deadline loomed, fiddling with the words and tweaking the emotions of my narrator. I wrote on my way to work that last morning, and every moment I could steal before it was time to go to class.

That night I sat down next to Jen, a bubbly executive assistant. She had skipped the assignment, complaining it was too hard. On my other side was pixie-sized Laura. The breasts of her protagonists seemed to grow over the course of the workshop. Week one they were "perky bumps"; by the time of the Plath assignment, they were "a mountain range of cleavage."

After the first story was critiqued, I started tapping my foot. After the second, I found myself doodling on my notepad. After the third I began to stare at the teacher's pile, hoping my gaze would make my piece rise to the top. Six, seven, ten stories later, it was my turn. Laura read my story aloud to the class. Everyone laughed at their cues, smiled and nodded their heads, and generally acted like they enjoyed my very short, short story. At least I didn't see anyone check her cell phone.

One by one they responded that they loved the details, the narrator, the diction. But, they all agreed, I had failed the assignment. While it started out dark (like Plath), it ended on a more hopeful note. Essentially, my story didn't make them want to run to the kitchen. That's when I realised I had just waited an hour and half to hear what I already knew: I can't write like Sylvia Plath. And for all her brilliance, I don't really want to write like Sylvia Plath. I sat there silently and continued to listen to their responses. No one critiqued the story I had written (despite its flaws), only the one I hadn't. I left the class disappointed. 

But my classmates were right. I had missed the point. TWS was not the place to get critiques of my masterpiece-in-progress. It was simply a safe environment to practice in. Wrestling with the straitjacket of someone else's voice had helped me to develop the muscles of my own. But they are still developing. Perhaps I'll make better sense of them in class next semester.

(Rebecca Ford is the editor of the Oxford University Press blog.)