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A review by bhnmt61
Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses
5.0
For forcing me to re-think the workshop experience, this book gets ten stars. It is fascinating. Of course I didn’t always agree with him, he covers a lot of material and for some of it, I am not the intended audience.
I’ve been in writers groups where we used the “cone of silence” model only half a dozen times, so I don’t have a ton of experience, but I realized while reading this that all of my experiences were with a modified version of the classic Iowa model. For example, two of them were with the same instructor who specified that as readers, we could only give positive feedback — “what worked” — assuming that the problems would work themselves out on their own if the writer could see what was working.
Always the reason given for having the writer remain silent was so that she would be forced to listen to other people’s reactions rather than immediately jumping in to defend her work. But as Salesses points out, workshops tend to be full of white, well-educated students. What if white students aren’t the intended audience? What if the comments white readers make are completely irrelevant to what the author is doing? If the writer already feels silenced before the critique begins— before she even walks into the workshop — does the enforced silence feel like being oppressed?
There was a ton of stuff to think about, which is my favorite kind of book. Loved it.
I’ve been in writers groups where we used the “cone of silence” model only half a dozen times, so I don’t have a ton of experience, but I realized while reading this that all of my experiences were with a modified version of the classic Iowa model. For example, two of them were with the same instructor who specified that as readers, we could only give positive feedback — “what worked” — assuming that the problems would work themselves out on their own if the writer could see what was working.
Always the reason given for having the writer remain silent was so that she would be forced to listen to other people’s reactions rather than immediately jumping in to defend her work. But as Salesses points out, workshops tend to be full of white, well-educated students. What if white students aren’t the intended audience? What if the comments white readers make are completely irrelevant to what the author is doing? If the writer already feels silenced before the critique begins— before she even walks into the workshop — does the enforced silence feel like being oppressed?
There was a ton of stuff to think about, which is my favorite kind of book. Loved it.