If you’ve taken a class in Oberlin’s Creative Writing department, you’ve probably participated in some kind of writing workshop. A writing workshop generally requires students to submit a sample of writing so that their peers can read it and give them feedback. I’ve known a lot of students, myself included, to be anxious about an upcoming workshop. If it’s your writing that other students are reading, there’s a possibility that they’ll think your work is bad or that you’re a bad writer altogether. If you’re giving feedback, there’s an expectation that your feedback will somehow be both perfectly kind as well as helpfully critical. Both parties in a workshop feel that they must somehow prove that they belong in the workshop by writing a perfect piece or giving perfect feedback. Obviously, though, there’s no such thing as perfect writing. Arguably, there’s not even such a thing as good writing. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman had two nearly opposite styles, but both of them were great American poets. There are no guidelines for writing a good book, a good essay, or even a good text. If there were, you could just take a Khan Academy course on creative writing. Approaching workshop as if there’s a definitive standard for good writing is robbing students of a constructive experience. Workshop only works when we use it to understand each other.

If there’s no way to prove that any piece of writing is good or bad, why do we have workshops? When I write, I’m attempting to translate the way my brain perceives the world into a form that can be understood by other brains. We all have grown up with different families in different homes, from different towns, and with different values. I am not going to see the world exactly the way you do. If you were to pick up a piece of my writing, the way you understand it would be dependent on the experiences that you use to shape your perspective. For me, the value of having my writing workshopped comes from collecting those different perspectives like data. 

I’ll come into a workshop with a hypothesis about the effect of my writing. For example, I might write a short story that I’m hoping will make my audience feel sad. When I start getting feedback, I’ll ask the other students to point out the way they felt while reading specific sections. If some of the students felt that the piece was funny or lighthearted in some areas, I’ll get to know more about why they read the piece that way. Then I can evaluate if I’d like to change the piece in order to evoke a different feeling in that particular audience. Instead of coming away from that workshop thinking that my piece is bad, I’ll leave with a better understanding of how my words are reaching the audience of my classmates. That shift in perspective can make the difference between giving up and trying again.

Using a workshop to voice a piece’s emotional impact takes the pressure off of workshoppers as well. It can be intimidating to give your honest feedback to a writer. Maybe everybody else in the room seemed to interpret the writing differently than you did, or maybe you don’t feel like you have any real critiques of the piece. Maybe you just didn’t get it. All of these perspectives are valuable information for the writer to have. Every time you add something to the discussion, the writer gets a better sense of how their writing is digested by different audiences. Approaching a workshop from this angle also allows you to read and enjoy your peers’ writing without worrying about producing something to say about it. I’ve learned so much from reading the work of my peers without an eye for what’s good. It’s so much more fun to read their work assuming that it’s already good; instead of correcting it, I can just try my best to understand it.

Creative writing is an art. There’s no one way to do it; it’s not even results-based. The point of the Creative Writing classes at Oberlin is to introduce young writers to many kinds of writing and many kinds of writers in the hopes that they’ll finish their time here with a better understanding of their own writing process. If you keep in mind the fact that your audience is going to bring a diverse set of perspectives to a Creative Writing workshop, it will lower the stakes for everyone. The pressure to produce good writing is taken off the writer, and the pressure to give good feedback is taken off the readers. The workshop becomes a conversation instead of a critique.