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writerkitApparently we are talking about the Milford Method and writers workshops, thanks to this Tor.com article. (Well, mostly we are talking about it on Twitter, but since I don't do Twitter, I am talking about it here.)
I have come to the conclusion that I am probably better off for never having made it to Clarion. For that matter, I haven't really taken a lot of creative writing classes in general. Playwriting classes, yes, but Milford seems not to have penetrated those (despite--or perhaps because of-- the college one being taught by a graduate of Iowa) and there's a fair bit of focus on "does this work upon the stage" (ie "are you going to be torturing your actors or director"), which tends to keep it from winding up too much in beating-up-on-the-creativity-land, especially given that the ones I was in had a lot of actual discussion. "And we will now do a table read and then we will talk about how the dialogue flows" formed a major part of playwriting critique in every class I took.
(It hadn't occurred to me until this moment, but the majority of my formal creative writing education was about how to write plays. Of course, putting on a play is not a solitary endeavor, and so I have not really done much of this now that I have left environments with a large group of easily accessible people to put on plays with.)
I do remember avoiding the entire lit department in college on the advice of the lit students I knew, because it was big on what I did not know at the time was Milford and everyone hated it. I have been vaguely aware of the existence of writing workshops for a while and I have often wondered how exactly this was meant to improve your writing. The process sounded dreadfully regimented. I always really liked having my plays read in class because then we'd have a nice discussion of them and people were looking at my work and thinking about it and talking about it! But that worked because it was a discussion. Currently my best worldbuilding tool is infodumping at Mathfriend about my works-in-progress and he will ask questions about things that sound like potential holes-- "So how does X work, then?"-- and this forces me to think more deeply about what I'm doing.
None of this is to say I'm against critique! Remember my delight in how much the True and Proper Line Edit the good folks at Zombies Need Brains gave "Flight Plans Through the Dust of Dreams" improved not only that story but all my subsequent writing. I don't understand writers who are like "Now I am so famous I can dispense with editors!" I really don't. But that was helped a lot by being asynchronous. I got a day or two to get the instinctive "AGH THIS STORY IS COVERED IN COMMENTS" out of my system before actually engaging with it.
Gatekeeping is another matter.
Because while I've always thought the critique method sounded painful, the idea of spending several weeks hanging around with a bunch of other young writers and some well-known writers and editors sounded tremendously fun, and also then you've met some well-known writers and editors and maybe you've impressed one and this will be helpful later. For a lot of people it seems like it is helpful later; there are a number of tales of people in those groups remembering each other and soliciting stories or making introductions. Looking at the tales that have surfaced since the article went live, it looks like the connections are what actually helps people-- the people who talk about how it forced them to do better at writing are often really vague about what, specifically, it helped them do better, while they're very specific about "It introduced me to so-and-so!" And the number of editors and agents who say being a graduate of certain workshops means they'll take an extra look is enormous.
I will be coming up through the slush and whatever audience I obtain through my other projects like fanfic and the podcast. (And I have also found the podcast quite educational in the learn-by-doing sense. It's the only long-term joint creative project I've ever worked on, and both the length and the process of working with someone else teach things I could not have learned any other way.) I don't have money for workshops and my day job doesn't allow the time for most of the famed ones... and with the pandemic, I'm not even at conventions, although three pro sales and a few more not-pro sales puts me into the category of "people who could reasonably volunteer to be on panels." The lack of connections will likely make things harder for me in the course of making my name.
On the other hand, I seem to be doing reasonably well for myself so far-- a few short story publications a year and a podcast every other week, and I'm not burned out on writing like the bulk of the workshop folks who don't go on to make it big.
It's a start.
I have come to the conclusion that I am probably better off for never having made it to Clarion. For that matter, I haven't really taken a lot of creative writing classes in general. Playwriting classes, yes, but Milford seems not to have penetrated those (despite--or perhaps because of-- the college one being taught by a graduate of Iowa) and there's a fair bit of focus on "does this work upon the stage" (ie "are you going to be torturing your actors or director"), which tends to keep it from winding up too much in beating-up-on-the-creativity-land, especially given that the ones I was in had a lot of actual discussion. "And we will now do a table read and then we will talk about how the dialogue flows" formed a major part of playwriting critique in every class I took.
(It hadn't occurred to me until this moment, but the majority of my formal creative writing education was about how to write plays. Of course, putting on a play is not a solitary endeavor, and so I have not really done much of this now that I have left environments with a large group of easily accessible people to put on plays with.)
I do remember avoiding the entire lit department in college on the advice of the lit students I knew, because it was big on what I did not know at the time was Milford and everyone hated it. I have been vaguely aware of the existence of writing workshops for a while and I have often wondered how exactly this was meant to improve your writing. The process sounded dreadfully regimented. I always really liked having my plays read in class because then we'd have a nice discussion of them and people were looking at my work and thinking about it and talking about it! But that worked because it was a discussion. Currently my best worldbuilding tool is infodumping at Mathfriend about my works-in-progress and he will ask questions about things that sound like potential holes-- "So how does X work, then?"-- and this forces me to think more deeply about what I'm doing.
None of this is to say I'm against critique! Remember my delight in how much the True and Proper Line Edit the good folks at Zombies Need Brains gave "Flight Plans Through the Dust of Dreams" improved not only that story but all my subsequent writing. I don't understand writers who are like "Now I am so famous I can dispense with editors!" I really don't. But that was helped a lot by being asynchronous. I got a day or two to get the instinctive "AGH THIS STORY IS COVERED IN COMMENTS" out of my system before actually engaging with it.
Gatekeeping is another matter.
Because while I've always thought the critique method sounded painful, the idea of spending several weeks hanging around with a bunch of other young writers and some well-known writers and editors sounded tremendously fun, and also then you've met some well-known writers and editors and maybe you've impressed one and this will be helpful later. For a lot of people it seems like it is helpful later; there are a number of tales of people in those groups remembering each other and soliciting stories or making introductions. Looking at the tales that have surfaced since the article went live, it looks like the connections are what actually helps people-- the people who talk about how it forced them to do better at writing are often really vague about what, specifically, it helped them do better, while they're very specific about "It introduced me to so-and-so!" And the number of editors and agents who say being a graduate of certain workshops means they'll take an extra look is enormous.
I will be coming up through the slush and whatever audience I obtain through my other projects like fanfic and the podcast. (And I have also found the podcast quite educational in the learn-by-doing sense. It's the only long-term joint creative project I've ever worked on, and both the length and the process of working with someone else teach things I could not have learned any other way.) I don't have money for workshops and my day job doesn't allow the time for most of the famed ones... and with the pandemic, I'm not even at conventions, although three pro sales and a few more not-pro sales puts me into the category of "people who could reasonably volunteer to be on panels." The lack of connections will likely make things harder for me in the course of making my name.
On the other hand, I seem to be doing reasonably well for myself so far-- a few short story publications a year and a podcast every other week, and I'm not burned out on writing like the bulk of the workshop folks who don't go on to make it big.
It's a start.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-20 04:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-22 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-23 09:53 pm (UTC)Oh, of course. Thanks for the pointer!
no subject
Date: 2022-09-01 05:22 pm (UTC)While I'm sure there are some, I wonder how many simply wind up tripped up by the SNAFU Principle: they're big and famous enough that the number of editors who are both willing to be honest with them and don't talk down to them gets relatively small. If you're not pretty self-aware about that, and actively seeking out editorial input, it seems easy to wind up in a bubble without entirely realizing it.
While there's a definite equity issue there, what you're describing seems to be what I think of as bog-standard networking, same as in most businesses. I don't quite think of it as "gatekeeping" per se, because it's not quite so active; it's more an example of classism quietly at work, I'd say...