Confessions of a Recovering Workshop Writer

in which I process my journey as an author

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“Nowadays, most literary success is within the context of the academy. And this has its consequences. For if avoiding criticism in a writer’s workshop is your priority, then you’ll need to minimize your novel’s attack surface. Workshop writers are often, not always, but often, intrinsically defensive. This single fact explains almost all defining features of contemporary literature. What you’re looking at on the shelf are not so much books but battlements.” (How the MFA Swallowed Literature by Erik Hoel)

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Photo by Andrea Riedel on Unsplash

This article—and the concept of a “workshop writer”—has been living rent-free in my head since I read it back in January and felt both deeply validated and deeply attacked. It’s something that has been drifting at the edges of my mind—nearly in focus—for years as I’ve struggled with feeling a loss of my sense of grounding as a writer and wondered what on earth might have caused writing, which used to come so easily and naturally and with all the energy of a spring storm, to feel clunky and unsatisfying: the sun-scorched skeleton of a once-vibrant creature.

Well, I finally realized, it was because I’d become a workshop writer.

Once upon a time, I wrote books. Lots of books. I finished books. They were not long and they were not Good, but they were books and I had written them. I had a very good sense of what I wanted them to say and for the most part they said it, even if not in the most skilled manner. This was when I was a young teen, and I used to assume the reason for my success was simply because I was a young teen without much in the way of a life—not the wife, mother, and homesteader I am today. While on the surface this conclusion made sense, it was, of course, ridiculous, and I knew it. The problem was much worse than that.

When I was sixteen, I took my first Serious English Class. It had a discussion forum and workshop assignments and critique groups. I was practically beside myself with sheer bliss. It felt like I was entering a literary salon, some chic Parisian cafe at which I was some romantic ex-pat, when in reality, if anything, the opposite was true, and I was about to spend the next decade wandering about the Backrooms wondering what the hell had gone wrong.

You may assume, then, upon submitting my work to the forums, that I was quickly squashed beneath the boot of literary critique—and, quite possibly, it would’ve been better if I had been. Instead, they loved me. I became a rising star in the neat little box of the Workshop, and essentially a supernova in reality, because what happened was this: I stopped writing what I loved and began writing what I thought The Academy(TM) wanted to read.

I began to tailor my content, my storylines, and even my prose style as I learned what performed well on the forums and in the critique groups. It turned out I was quite skilled in the art of bullshittery, and I quickly grew addicted to the instant rewards pumped out of the slot machine in this new dopamine casino. Why finish whole books when I could just scoop up acolytes and glowing reviews like those magic mushrooms in Mario Bros for just a handful of pages at a workshop critique group? I was riding high.

After a handful of years of this workshop trick-writing, it slowly began to dawn on me that something was amiss in paradise. Whereas I’d once breezed through multiple manuscripts per year (and never once thought to myself, hmmm, I wonder what I should write about?), I suddenly realized that, for all my time in the Workshop, I had one (1) pitiful—and I do mean pitiful—manuscript to show for it. Heck, I didn’t even like that story. Didn’t care about it at all. It was, in fact, a bastardization of a pre-Academy(TM) story I actually had loved, but felt needed to be altered to better suit the palate of academia. (This should never be done.)

In his essay, “The Stalin of the Soul”: How Authors Become Their Own Censors to Please the Market, Substacker Clifford Stumme writes that, “The market-censored author has little courage or sense of self.” I realized, upon the scrutiny of that sad, lifeless manuscript, that shell of a story I’d once been passionate about, that this was precisely what had happened to me. Thoroughly disillusioned by The Academy(TM), I wandered about for years without any clue what I wanted to write; what did I even care about anymore? Certainly not the praise of The Academy(TM), which I now saw for the hollow, lifeless (and perhaps even cringe) trophy it was. I just wanted to write for myself, but I no longer knew what that even meant. Who was I, anyway?

In some ways, that’s why I get on my little corner of Substack sometimes and scream into the void. I don’t know if I expect the void to scream back (I don’t) but it feels like I’m getting a little closer, maybe, to finding myself as a writer again. And maybe that sounds like some pretentious bs (totally possible), but I think there’s something to it for a lot of us—authors in this academic-facing world—something we need to be reminded of, and that is to peel ourselves off the windows of The Academy(TM), because it’s so damn easy to get yourself stuck there without even realizing it. Looking into that hideous fishbowl thinking man, I wonder what’s going on in there and before you know it, you’re holding up your work, measuring it against the thin stick of the academic purview. Wondering if, well maybe it could do with a little passion shaved off the top? Might be worth it, you think, and they’ll be eating out of your hand. You know all the right spells. But of course, it’s really them molding you, just like it always has been.

So, yeah. I’m done with that. Done being a workshop writer, done being a silly little Academy(TM) goblin. No more deals with the devil. Dobby is a free elf. So if what you find on my page here is a sort of eclectic menagerie, I make no apology for it. I’m here to write what I want, when I want to, and it’s not about the likes or the money (I’m done scouring the landscape for magic mushrooms, thanks); it’s finally, truly, just about the words on the page. And if you’re wondering why I wrote this, it’s because I needed to process my Thoughts regarding my escape and rehabilitation from The Academy(TM), but if you’re wondering why I’m publishing it, it’s because I’m almost certain I’m not alone on this road, and I hope that this confession will be of some use to others who may find themselves yet in the miasma of being a workshop writer. Maybe it’ll even help someone to get off that hamster wheel. I hope so.

And on that note, I think I’ll go touch some grass now.