The writing workshop
Has it really been a month since I posted here?
Anyway, the writing workshop is driving me crazy. The interaction between students is virtually nil, and I blame most of that on the screwy interface... too many places to talk, no easy way to know when there's a new comment in half of them (and no automatic email notification of any kind). And there's no instructor-led critique... just the instructor writes a critique, each student is invited to write a critique, and nobody actually discusses the work.
Now, our instructor commented that this is the quietest class she's ever had, so maybe other classes are different. But I feel absolutely no energy going on here. I was more excited about the class before it started than after getting back my first critique.
Critiquing other students work is tedious and difficult... some of them are better than others. Peer feedback is... mediocre. The instructor critique is decent, but it's the highlight of the party and not the payoff I was expecting.
Basically, I feel I'm reading a book and six essays, writing some out-of-context exercise that I'd never write in the process of trying to write a real story, and then getting a little not-terribly-useful feedback. I'm not getting any discussion of the work, which is something I expect from a workshop.
I think a lot of my dissatisfaction could be solved with better assignments. They're too vague and open-ended. "Write a scene in which setting is important." I struggled for over a week just to come up with the context for the scene... writing it was easy once I had that. I would much rather have assignments like what the author of the book we're using writes (as opposed to the author of the course, who writes the assignments)... "Mark has been hired to burn down buildings. After burning down the fifth building, he's caught. Now give us his story. For the first page, start with the POV of the arsonists ex-roommate, Erik, in the first-person, giving Mark's character portrait." And it goes on much longer, telling you exactly what to write... your job is to figure out how to write it. And that's what we're supposed to be learning... the "how," and I'm spending all my energy in the "what." And I think it would make for better student discussion, because we'd all be going in the same direction and could compare and contrast our work. (If we actually, you know, discussed the stuff.)
The other part of what's bugging me about it is that I'm writing stuff because I have to, and I'm not necessarily writing what I want to write. The workshop was supposed to motivate me to write, and all it's doing is frustrating me and more or less getting in the way of my writing.
I think what I'm really looking for is a writing circle, not an online workshop.