People learn to write in many different ways, some by reading masterpieces, some by going to classes, some just pick up a pen and get on with it. You can find all manner of resources designed to help teach the craft of writing, there are guidebooks, websites, courses and much more. But of all the different ways of learning I believe that the most effective way to progress with your writing is through workshops.
To clarify, workshops involve a group of writers getting together, reading and giving feedback on each other’s work, going away to make changes, and coming back to do it all over again. I don’t think my writing ever progressed faster than when I was taking part in workshops, and this article will talk about the reasons why.
1. The first reason is simple, writing can be a solitary activity and working with a group of like-minded people who are aiming towards the same goals can be a great experience. Instead of having to endure the condescending looks from friends and family when you talk about writing, you get support and active interest. Just being in a group of serious writers can be a morale booster.
2. Working with a group can allow you to come up with new ideas and help with brainstorming. There’s no substitute for being able to bounce ideas back and forth, listening to different viewpoints and working off each other’s energy. It can help to create a dynamic atmosphere that makes you see your writing in a different way.
3. As a writer you’ll likely have patterns and preferences when you work, working with others will expose you to a whole new range of writing styles and techniques that you can learn from. You might see a new way of opening a story, a well written narrative voice, or a sharp way of writing characters, all of it can be learned from, and can help to improve your writing.
4. The other writers themselves can be a resource, having people to learn from and that you can question about writing can make for quick progress. It’s like having a whole room of potential mentors to study, you might read an amazing piece of work, and then you have the opportunity to ask the writer how they pulled it off. The reverse is also true, you never learn so much as when you teach and helping out other writers can be a learning experience in itself.
5. While it may not sound like it, continuous criticism and having your work picked apart is a fantastic way to learn. Having someone with another perspective point out an obvious flaw can show you where your blind spots are as a writer. That “of course” moment is the point where you’ve really learned something. If you keep making the same errors then there’s no better cure than having someone call you out on it every time. It may seem daunting, but as long as the feedback is constructive and expressed in the right way, there’s really no better way to learn.
6. Part of the workshop process is about progression, building up from a first draft into a finished piece. Learning in stages, making improvements based on feedback, editing, and then going through the process again will teach the specifics of the craft. When you can see the difference between a first draft and final submission in a series of crumpled pages and scribbled notes, then you can see how far the writing’s come. The same applies for other people’s work, watching it develop based on your feedback reveals a glimpse backstage at the writing process and shows the development of the piece.
7. “Having trouble with dialogue, you should read book x by author y.” No matter how well read you are there will be books you’ve missed. The other writers in your workshop can point you to some great titles that you can study to improve your work, or even just a good book that you haven’t heard of.
8. Having a group of writers in the same room also opens up more opportunities for the work. Beyond the social/networking opportunities of the group, a workshop environment can allow for things like collaboration with other writers on a project. You might have come up with an idea in brainstorming that another writer thinks is interesting and you both want to pursue it, working together with someone on a single piece is like getting very focused feedback as you both work to make it better and learn in the process.
9. Workshops don’t just have to be about stuff the writer brings in, group activities and trying new styles in this kind of setting makes for good practice and experience. Getting together with a bunch of writers and working on a new technique or concept is an excellent way to learn, not only do you have a circle of people to help, but you can see the different ways that others handled the task. Practicing new skills in a group like this is a fun way for a writer to expand their repertoire and improve their craft.
10. Being part of a regular workshop group can provide you with the motivation to write, knowing that next week they’ll be people expecting to read your work can push you to produce. It can help to give you a target to work for – in this edit you need to fix the intro, this time speed up the pace. Working in this manner and setting little tasks like this can help to make you more productive as a writer, and so gain more experience.
Every writer is different and some might find workshops more helpful than others, but it’s worth giving it a try if you can scare up some other people to join in. The right group can speed up your learning and make you a better writer. Just remember to coach your criticisms in a nice way, after all, your work might be up next.
Geoff Matthews
Julia Kitvaria Sarene
I whole-heartedly agree. My writing group has been invaluable.
I would absolutely stress the necessity of finding a group of people that not only write in a similar genre but read in it as well. That has been the only downside of my group – we came together after a writing course, so we all have different reading and writing interests. As I tend to write in fantasy and scifi they are not always best placed to comment on tropes of the genre.
A couple of writing tips from a reader, if anyone is interested:
Many have seen the “How it should have ended” clips on Youtube. If you are writing a novel and you hand it over to those behind these videos, is there anything in the book that could give them an excuse to make a “How it should have ended” video based on your story? If it is, do some rewriting and if there is no way they can add the novel to their video collection, it means you have added some improvements to it.
And something else. George R.R. Martin knows a lot about history and other elements that he includes in his writing. But gold does not melt that easily If you are writing fantasy for a little older audience, I personally feel that everything, with the exception of the actual fantasy elements, should be as realistic as possible. That also includes the way people act and talk (then again, sometimes it is required that the characters in books, on TV and in movies act a little differently from humans in real life). It annoys me when I see a TV-show when one of the characters finally get a chance to meet one of the villains, and they appears to have no interest in finding the answers to all the questions everybody is dying to know.
Back to Game of Thrones. Maybe that’s how the culture was those days, but when Ned Stark said “Aye … but who holds the straws?”, it just felt a little weird for some reason. It could have been the way he said it. And if a tortured son killed is father in a situation like we saw in the previous season, would he really said “In the end, Tywin Lannister did not shit gold”? It was a good decision to leave it out. A witty thing to say, but very misplaced.
(When it comes to the Night’s Watch, is black really a wise color when they are moving on the “wrong” side of the wall? One of the first thing soldiers learn in the army is about camouflage. Maybe it is explained in the books, but it does make them easy to see against all the white.)
Another thought. If you write a novel about one subject, don’t try to include elements that are not essential for the story. I read Peter Straub’s Ghost Story recently (it was more fantasy than ghost story). Instead of just introduce the supernatural race in the novel, Straub becomes greedy and wants to explain everything that is supernatural. Cattle mutilations, ghosts, werewolves and vampires? All these mythologies can be traced back to the race in the book. The question is; would the book have been the same, and even improved, if he left this out? If yes, don’t include them. If you wish to try a new approach on vampires or whatever, then dedicate a whole story to them where they are in the center of the plot, not just an idea thrown in and then never mentioned again a couple of sentences later (after one of the characters in an out-of-character moment has explained it all to you). This also makes the novel less credible. It says that if the supernatural race in the novel had not existed, there would be no stories about ghosts, vampires and werewolves in the world. A world with no legends about supernatural beings? Not very likely.
And don’t be a slave to what came before or your original ideas. When George R.R. Martin wrote Fevre Dream, he was struggling with how to explain how the vampire would deal with running water since he lived on a boat in a river. Is the vampire’s weakness for water an essential part of the plot? If not, there is no reason to give him this weakness at all just because that’s “how vampires are supposed to be”.
Because so much Tolkien inspired novels have been written, there are those who don’t want to include any of the races he does in their work. But some wish to give it a try after all, and attempts to write about elves and dwarves. As someone said (can’t remember where); “If you wish to write about dwarves in your novel, feel free to do so. But make sure they are your dwarves, not Tolkien’s dwarves.”
Also Stephenie Meyer’s approach. She had a dream about sparkling vampires. Using her dream as a foundation for her first novel worked out very well for her. But once the novel was complete, did she really have to make them sparkle just because that’s how they were portrayed in her dream? Dreams does not always makes sense. Could she have changed the parts about them sparkling without doing something bad to her novel? I can’t see why not. If she liked the idea, she took the right decision when she decided to keep the sparkling. But if she kept it just because that’s how it came to her and she somehow felt obligated to her own inspiration, maybe she could have changed that part without feeling too guilty.
A little part that was not completed (“But gold does not melt that easily” …):
But gold does not melt that easily as seen in the death scene of Viserys Targaryen, and some of the injuries, like getting a hand chopped off in the middle of the woods and with no medical supply nearby, would most likely have been infected. Just some nitpicking, but ignoring things like that by saying “So you can accept dragons and White Walkers, but not melting gold over a fire like it was made of wax”, does not really justify if when we are talking about what is real (in this case, melting gold) and what is just magic and fantasy (dragons and White Walkers). There is a huge difference between fantasy and non-fantasy elements.