The Iowa Writer's Workshop, C/D?

No, but the professor is a woman also, so...

I have heard not so nice things about the IWW, as well.

Had I gotten into either of these programs I'm certain I'd be considerably less happy, more broke, unmarried, and drunk, though. So it's for the best.

(1) The Iowa workshop does seem to have sort of a "conventional" vibe. But I think that has more to do with the sorts of writers they admit than it has to do with any sort of conventionalization-effect in the workshops themselves; it's a good place to go if you want to work on writing the sort of psychologically-realistic precise-prose litfic that -- for the record -- most people do write and read.

(2) There are a couple ways workshops are sometimes assumed to "homogenize" people's writing, and I think in both cases the blame is misplaced:

a. It's imagined that workshops just don't care for or are actively hostile to anything "different." This is the complete opposite of true; in a workshop you read and talk about a lot of work, and variety is a serious godsend. More importantly, and more realistically --

b. It's imagined that workshops drill you on craft until all you can do is write conventional stories. Now yes, workshops do teach you craft, and it's true that if the people in a workshop are not entirely feeling whatever unconventional thing you're doing, they're likely to steer you toward convention: they'll tell you to flesh out your characters, or develop more of a recognizable plot arc, or cut down on whatever weird prose tics strike them as over-weird. They'll tell you what you could do to make your work more accessible and enjoyable to them, which is really the point.

I don't think, however, that this is such a terrible thing. First of all it doesn't happen so often -- people tend to be decently sensitive about figuring out what it is you're trying to do, and for instance if you clearly write stories that just aren't about psychological realism they're not going to bitch you out about it; they're not stupid; at most they're going to give you sensible, apologetic notice that it's just not working for them. Second of all you come into a workshop understanding that, and understanding where the others are coming from, and also understanding that they have no real power over you -- if so-and-so doesn't like abstracted writing you'd be an idiot to get upset that he/she didn't go for your hyper-abstracted story. A workshop is a test audience, not a judge; if nothing else you can learn from them exactly which of your unconventional tics are worthwhile and which are silly, as well as how far you can go with each before you start to make things too difficult for people.

The main thing here is having some psychic resolve about what you're doing. The best way to get compliments from a group of students and professors is to write something clearly conventionally solid that "anyone" can respect, and yes -- when you're surrounded by other people who are doing this (for clearly many are), there is a vague pressure to do it, too. It's not even always bad to try -- there are few young writers who wouldn't benefit from at least thinking about or attempting to create multidimensional characters or a well-paced psychological arc or whatever; just like abstract painters still benefit from having learned to sketch nudes. Beyond which a lot of "experimental" young writing doesn't seem to realize that it could accomplish all of its experimental impulses without having to sacrifice any of those meaty standards; that's something a workshop can certainly point out to you, that you've neglected these things not because they don't fit but because you just aren't interested in them and haven't bothered to round them out.

So, like: If Joyce brought Ulysses into a modern-day writing workshop people would have told him to make it make more sense, please. And this would leave a psychically-resolute Joyce with the knowledge that (a) he could make it a lot more accessible if he wanted, but then (b) it was up to him, now, wasn't it, and how much he believed in what he was doing?

(3) Point being that what you are basically getting out of something like this -- ideally -- is sensitive attentive readers who will make genuine efforts to give you advice about your work. Plus deadlines that make you produce the work in the first place. Plus the knowledge that the advice you're getting is in no sense binding.

(4) There's a sense of writing among something, which tends to help me personally, though I can imagine how some people might feel it pollutes what they're doing. Every week in a workshop you read the work of other young writers, and the work is always different and individual -- no matter how "conventional" it is, it is still individual to the person sitting across the table from you -- and in the end you're forced to think more about what it is that you do: how you could write and how you do write and how you want to write. You can do this with books at home, sure, but there's an immediacy in a workshop -- as you sit there really grappling with other people's work you admire certain things in it and you dislike others, and you basically think hard about what works and what doesn't and what it is that you, in particular, do.

In this sense I think that -- for some writers -- a workshop can be a dehomogenizing process, or at least a very good process during which to try things and get reactions to them and make decisions about calling and voice.

So I guess my main Attack on Workshops is something like this: I understand there are writers out there who don't work that way; they have a specific thing that they do and they need to work on that in silence; they don't need opinions. And there are other writers out there who are okay working in "public" and thinking about all of these things, but for whom this sort of process is likely to cause a sort of indecision and paralysis and general sense that they need to be more like that first type of writer for a while.

Neither of these types of people seem likely to benefit from or greatly enjoy a workshop atmosphere.

Yeah, I think that's more the influence of contemporary short fiction then the IWW. Maybe we should be blaming Chekov instead of writing programs. (The poetry out of the IWW has a pretty good breadth from what I can tell, fwiw.)

The biggest strike against workshops has to be that writing is very much a solitary activity and learning process. There's a limit on how much you can be taught vs how much you have to learn through trial and error.

The danger of workshop is when they become exercises in seeking approval. I don't mean that in the homogenization sense, more like when the workshop becomes more about the writer then the writing. Whenever I witnessed that division start to break down, I would get extemely pissed off.

But isn't the conventional wisdom that as of 1980 or so, everyone who came out of a writing workshop environment was writing stories like Ray Carver and Ann Beattie?

I forgot to turn this over and look at it from a reader view. Because the thing is that there are and always will be writers who are very good with prose and structure and all of that good crafty stuff but just don't have much to say. Which isn't a crime, cause that's more than most people. But what happens to such writers in workshops is that they come in saying nothing and leave saying nothing very professionally, and as workshops put them in line to get agents and etc there wind up being a lot of them sending stories around. That's the homogenization effect, and it's not at all the fault of the workshop, which probably taught them to write better than before they came. It's just that a workshop, while it can help you think a little better about what's at stake in your writing, can't teach you to have anything blindingly important or intelligent to say.

True, but how? Where do you get it? It seems kind of paradoxical, in that you go into a writing program presumably to work and push your work forward (whatever that means for you) but you still need that psychic resolve. Personally, I'm drawn to that kind of writing community precisely because I don't have that psychic resolve; I really, truly don't know if what I'm doing is any good. Of course, I might like it, but I'm biased, and besides, what do I know, really? I need validation. I'm not particularly proud to admit that, but there it is.

Harold Bloom to thread.

Prude, the psychic resolve doesn't have to be any massive inner faith that you're good -- the last thing you want is to verge in on bullheadedness. You just need enough resolve to understand that sometimes certain people will not get into aspects of your work because it's just not their thing, and that in general, when you get commentary, you need enough resolve and fortitude to try and think really objectively about whether it's advice you really should be taking or whether maybe whatever you did is worth sticking with, despite the apologetic grumbling you may get for it. You don't want to be the bullheaded egowrapped writer who does something genuinely bad and gets the same "sorry I still don't like this" every workshop; neither do you want to be the person who happily extinguishes anything in his writer that a majority of people in workshop don't like. Even the people in yr workshop will hate you for that.

In other words, Prude, wondering whether your stuff is any good is a fine position to be in when you go into workshop: you'll get lots of information to process about the quality of your work and how it works and how it could be better, in various people's opinions. The resolve is about knowing how to sort through that often-contradictory information and shape your stuff up. It's not hard! For the most part you know which criticisms to listen to. For the most part you already know if you're weak in some area, or inattentive to it, and you'd like said area to be stronger.