I’d been invited to lead a writer’s workshop.

            It’s something I haven’t done for years, but I said yes right away, without thinking.  But the fact is, in those intervening years my understanding of what a workshop can, and probably isn’t going to be, has changed.

            It seems to me now that there are three basic types, at least where prose fiction is concerned. The most common, perhaps, is where the ‘leader’ kicks off some ‘Creative Writing’, usually by providing a line to start a story – I prefer the more convoluted approach of providing what I call a ‘catcher’ line. That is one that ends the piece! And to add a little more spice, I like it to be a randomly selected line (say, the fifth book along the shelf, the umpteenth page, and the whatever figure pops into your head line down, and the ending of whatever sentence ends on that line, sort of random). If nothing else this teaches us that it’s the meaning we imbue the words with by the preceding story that gives the words it ends on their potency.

            A second type of workshop involves writers bringing something they’ve already written.  This is based on a remark by Frank Swinnerton, a writer whose work I don’t actually know, but who was writing a foreword to a collection by a writer I do! In it he says that to make something better, we have to know what it is.

            There’s a deal of interpretation to be had around that, but considering the question, ‘why are you telling me this story?’ might be a good way to approach it. From a workshop perspective the issue becomes one of management. How do we deal with all those pre-written texts? How do we get everyone a fair shot at attention? There’s also the matter of making sure everyone has some specific work that they want to carry out on that particular piece: so a complex workshop to organise.

            I’ve tended to ask writers to reduce their story, by, say, half, and then half again – which leads to a growing awareness of the ‘why’… but you could also suggest doubling it, without moving the ends, a process that, hopefully, would lead the ‘putters in’ – Stephen King’s term – to making the story more intense.

            The third workshop type asks for neither writing nor editing, but uses a published story that’s been cut up into its paragraphs. Working in small groups the workshoppers have to reconstruct the original.  It’s a quasi-competition, but focuses on the sequences of events, thoughts, actions, dialogue and how they make the story work, and for me, perhaps the most interesting and useful of the three workshop types.

            But writers are a varied group, and all at different stages of differing trajectories. How can a single workshop suit them all? What do they want to know? About themselves? About their agendas? About what it is possible to write? About what they have already written? And what is there to know? Do we even know that?

            Much of the ‘bad’ writing I came across when I was workshopping – by which I mean writing where I didn’t know ‘why’ I was being told the story – was probably very effective from the writer’s perspective, because it’s effect on me was not what it was for: it was like a regurgitation clearing their system, and as such, job done.

            Where this left me with my upcoming workshop, is not clear. The simplest workshop type is the first. Get ‘em going, leave ‘em to it. Let ‘em read it out. Look for the good in whatever they come up with (there will always be some!). But it’s a cop-out really, for me and perhaps for them too. They could do as much at home, send it to a writing buddy whom they trust, and get as much useful feedback.

            Is that one to one engagement with someone who has some understanding of what your ‘why’ is, likely to trump the random comments of a stranger? I suspect so. It depends, like everything else on what we’re trying to do. That’s what we need to find out, so that, in Swinnerton’s words, we can ‘do it better ‘.

            Wish us all luck with that, in and out of workshops!