Tonight I have to go read my writing and talk about writing and be a writer doing writery things for other writers, or for people who want to be writers, or people who want to throw squishy produce at writers, whatever. And lately I've seen several good posts on writing workshops, so I've got writing-on-the-brain right now.



That's where this post comes from. It is not in any way aimed at any of my friends or readers, but it refers specifically to my experiences in writers groups and workshops (primarily in academia) over the years -- and, by extension, why I no longer even attempt to join them. I am also exempting the Chattanooga Writer's Guild and its members from this essay, as I've only attended a couple of their meetings; since I was mostly there to socialize, I was none too productive, and I had a lovely time. I don't know the CWG well enough to criticize it; what follows applies only to groups I have regularly been a part of for extend periods.

The vast majority of professional writers I have met in real life and on the internet have been superlatively gracious, kind, and helpful. So this is not about them. (And obviously, if you're a writer on my friends list here, you can safely assume that none of this applies to you.)

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Other Writers

I tend to get along poorly with other writers until I know them well enough to know that they are not the sort of writers who piss me off. This may sound unfair and I'm sure that it is, but I automatically assume that other writers are assholes and that I don't want to meet them. The safest way to introduce me to other writers is to pretend that I'm a cat, being introduced to another cat in close quarters. Stand back. Get the water hose ready in case of emergency. Do not expect the introduction to go very well, and furthermore, be delighted if the encounter ends without blood loss.

And for what it's worth, this is not some nasty new aversion that developed once I got a book published. No, I've never done well in groups of writers -- even when I was sitting at home when I was sixteen, typing out trashy gothic romance novels in WordStar -- and this is due in no small part to the writers groups I've been exposed to over the years. My experiences in workshops, clubs, and gatherings, have been almost uniformly Wagnerian in their bombastic parades of awfulness ... from my wide-eyed days as a high school scribbler straight through graduate school.*

The pinnacle of my hatred was achieved at UTC my final year of M.A. studies; I was dropped into a fiction workshop with a teacher who, by all appearances, hates fiction. If it wasn't about sitting in your grandma's kitchen eating warm cookies fresh out of the oven and discussing your womanhood like a feminine hygiene commercial ... then Ken didn't seem interested in hearing about it. God help you if you were into genre fiction. God help you also if you were a graduate student in this graduate level class -- because out of the 25 people in the class, only 4 of you were grad students. The rest were pretentious undergrads who thought they were the hippest of the hip for crashing this graduate class, only it wasn't a graduate class, apparently, because look at all these freaking sophomores.

At the time, I was working three jobs -- one of which was as a contract teacher of writing level 2 (which is another circle of hell, but I won't digress here on that subject). So you know what I did for a living? I graded shitty undergraduate writing. Then you know what I did at night, as part of my graduate program? I paid UTC for the privilege of grading shitty undergraduate writing ... and in turn being graded by shitty undergraduate writers.

I'm sure that somewhere in the OED there's a long, hilarious adjective for this sort of indignity, but I bet it's hard to spell -- and that it hasn't been in common usage since Sam Johnson tossed it off at a party and Boswell wrote it down on the back of a cocktail napkin.

At any rate, I say all that to say this -- my graduate experience was the final straw, and I have never done a workshop since. And I do not doubt that my terrible workshop experiences have contributed to my general disapproval of writers, which has only avalanched over the years to form the roaring rumble of sweeping dismissal that typically characterizes my interactions with them.

This is not to say, however, that I have no writer friends. I do have writer friends -- in real life, such fine souls as eugie, godlikepoet, and fenrah. Though I've met warren_ellis in person, most of what I know and love about him stems from the internet ... and also in the "internet writer friends" category I include a rather astonishing number of other writer contacts whose daily bloggings I enjoy greatly. But you know what I almost never talk about with any of them? Writing.

Or, if we do talk writing, it's almost always something concrete or mundane, like establishing the Murphy's Laws of Writers. We occasionally exchange personal prescriptions for dealing with writer's block, or our preferred postal carriers, or hints on a new market. We complain about our lack of progress or crow about our excellent progress, but always in general terms that never, ever, EVER feature terms or phrases including (but not limited to) the following: "soul," "fulfillment," or "wept." See, here it is -- any given group of writers is going to be, on average, disproportionately loaded with writers who are there producing prose from their soul, for personal fulfillment, and it almost certainly makes them weep to talk about it (and it makes me weep to hear it -- for altogether different reasons).

This is a booby trap for people who take writing as serious business, because there is no critique, constructive criticism, nor vaguely negative commentary allowed, because you-as-helpful-critic are not permitted to say anything at all about the work without simultaneously discussing the person who wrote it. To even try is a waste of time and brain cells for the entire room.

If it's good ... well, never mind -- you probably won't encounter this. Let's say instead: when it's bad, you're not able to say so. The first defense against criticism is, "But I wrote this from my soul!" Well, your soul is boring, pedantic, and has a pitiable grasp of comma usage. Sorry. But the final bulwark of culpable denial is always this -- "I didn't write it for you, I wrote it for me!" Great. Then why are you subjecting other people to it? Take it home and read it to yourself or to your dog for God's sake, but if this is the result of your spiritual laxative, please don't put it on a cracker and tell us it's caviar.

When writing is business -- even fun writing -- there's a lot more to talk about than just souls and tears. There are actual topics of conversation open to you that will prove both rewarding and entertaining for everyone involved. People who are writing for other people are interested in things other than unblinking navel-gazing. They are interested in creating and producing good stories or content that they want other people to read and enjoy. They are aware that writing is work and that your stories are your product. Though they want them to be good as a matter of personal pride, and they may well engage in silly exercises for their own amusement, they also want to be good because they probably want to sell words someday.

Although their profession or identity as writers is important to them, writing is not the only thing they think about, or talk about, or do. If it was, they would have nothing to write about except for writing, and you can see the black spiraling pit here, can't you? In my experience, the vast majority of them do not read very many books about writing.** They'd rather write.


[edit: here's the 'I feel stupid now' follow up.]

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* I felt a special spike of affinity for the_red_shoes the other day, when she was writing about grad school and writers. So I'll say it again -- good on ya!
** Stop. Read this footnote before commenting with a recommendation. Remember that I have a B.A. in English and an M.A. in writing. If you think, for one second, that I have not read copious, flammable piles of books on writing, you are mistaken. The first person to mention Bird By Bird gets booted from my friends list and banned from this page. I've read it, and it was tolerable; but IMO Anne's best writing instruction by far comes from her other nonfiction. You want to get writing instruction from Anne? Read Operating Instructions. Vastly superior, and has nothing to do with writing except that it's gloriously well-written. Yes, I read Stephen King's On Writing, and I loved it -- but mostly because it's more or less a straightforward biography of him, and he's a funny guy.