Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

I always come down on the Yes side—lightly, but with both feet.

A workshop can certainly do harm as well as good.

The most harmless harm it can do is waste time. This happens when people come to it expecting to teach or be taught how to write. If you think you can teach people how to write you’re wasting their time and if they think you can teach them how to write they’re wasting yours, and vice (as it were) versa.

People attending workshops are not learning how to write. [1] I use the verb “to write” here to mean writing literary and/or commercially salable prose. Writing in the sense of how to compose a sentence, why and how to punctuate, etc., can indeed be taught and learned—usually, or at least hopefully, in grade school and high school. It is definitely a prerequisite to writing in the other sense; yet some people come to writing workshops without these skills. They believe that art does not need craft. They are mistaken. What they are learning or doing (as I understand it) will come up later on.

A more harmful harm that can infect the workshop is the ego trip. Classes in literary writing and writers’ conferences, years ago, were mostly ego trips—the Great author and his disciples. A good deal of that still goes on at “prestigious” universities and creative writing programs featuring pickled big names. It was the system of mutual group criticism, the Clarion system, now used almost everywhere writing is taught, that freed the pedagogy of writing from hierarchical authority and authorial hierarchy.

But even in a mutual-criticism workshop the instructor can go on an ego trip. I have known an instructor who ran an amateur Esalen, playing mind games and deliberately disintegrating participants’ personalities without the faintest idea of how to put them back together. I have known an instructor who ran a little Devil’s Island, punishing the participants for writing by trashing their work, except for a favorite trusty or two who got smarmed over. I have known an instructor—oh, many, too many—who ran a little Paris Island, where a week of systematic misogyny was supposed to result in a “few good men.” I have known instructors who seemed to be running for a popularity prize, and instructors who just ran away, leaving their students to flounder, not showing up from Monday until Friday, when they came to collect their check.

Such self-indulgence can do real and permanent damage, particularly when the instructor is famous and respected, and the participant is—and they all are more or less—insecure and vulnerable. To offer one’s work for criticism is an act of trust requiring real courage. It must be respected as such. I know several people who after a brutal dismissal by a writer they admired stopped writing for years, one of them forever. Certainly a writing instructor has a responsibility to defend the art, and the right to set very high standards, but nobody has the right to stop a person from trying to learn. The defense of excellence has nothing whatever to do with bullying.

Ego-tripping by participants can also be destructive to the work of other individuals or of the whole group, unless the instructor is savvy enough to refuse to play games with the troublemaker, who is usually either a manipulative bully or a passive bully, a psychopathically demanding person. I was slow to learn that as the instructor I must refuse to collude with these people. I am still not good at handling them, but have found that if I ask other participants to help me they do so, often with a skill, kindness, and psychological sensitivity that never cease to amaze me.

Perhaps all workshops should have a sign on the door: Do Not Feed the Ego! But then on the other side of the door should be a sign: Do Not Feed the Altruist! Because the practice of any art is impeded by both egoism and altruism. What’s needed is concentration on the work.

I shall now go out on a limb, hunch my shoulders, clack my beak, stare fiercely, and announce that I think there are two types of workshop that are to some extent intrinsically harmful. Both types tend to corrupt the work. They do it differently, but are alike in using writing not as an end but as a means. I will call them commercial and establishmentarian.

Commercially oriented workshops and conferences range from the modest kind where everybody is dying to meet the New York editor and the agent who sells in six figures and nothing is talked about but “markets,” “good markets for paragraphs,” “good markets for religious and uplift,” and so on—to the fancy kind where everybody sneers at little old ladies who write paragraphs, but would kill to meet the same editor and the same agent, and where nothing is talked about but “markets,” “meeting contacts,” “finding an agent with some smarts,” “series sales,” and so on. All these matters of business are of legitimate, immediate, and necessary interest to a writer. Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.

If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer’s primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I’m teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.

Establishmentarian workshops and programs, on the other hand, eschew low talk of marketing. Sell is a four-letter word at such places. You go to them to be in the right place, where you will meet the right people. The purpose of such programs, most of which are in the eastern half of the United States, is to feed an in-group or elite, the innermost members of which go to the innermost writers colonies and get the uppermost grants by recommending one another.

If being perceived as a successful writer is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a social climber: a person using certain paraliterary ploys to attain a certain kind of prestige. If I teach these techniques in a workshop, I am not teaching writing, but methods of joining an elite.

It is to be noticed that membership in the elite may, not incidentally, improve one’s chances to sell work in the marketplace. There’s always a well-kept road between the marketplace and the really nice part of town.

Papa Hemingway said that writers write for money and Papa Freud said that artists work for fame, money, and the love of women. I’ll leave out the love of women, though it would be much more fun to talk about. Fame and money—success and power. If you agree with the Papas, there are workshops for you, but this is not the essay for you. I think both Papas were talking through their hats. I don’t think writers write for either fame or money, though they love them when they can get them. Writers don’t write “for” anything, not even for art’s sake. They write. Singers sing, dancers dance, writers write. The whole question of what a thing is “for” has no more to do with art than it has to do with babies, or forests, or galaxies.

In a money economy, artists must sell their work or be supported by gifts while doing it. Since our national government is hysterically suspicious of all artists, and most arts foundations are particularly stingy to writers, North American writers must be directly concerned with the skills of marketing and grant-getting. They need to learn their trade. There are many guidebooks and organisations to help them learn it. But the trade is not the art. Writers and teachers of writing who put salability before quality degrade the writer and the work. Writing workshops that put marketing and contact-making before quality degrade the art.