What Happens in a Creative Writing Workshop: The Traditional Model

Writers gathered around a table

Creative writing workshops vary widely, but one main format persists: the Iowa model. Named for the University of Iowa’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop, this is the format that you’re most likely to encounter (though things are definitely starting to change!).

In this model, the writer submits a piece for workshop at some agreed-upon date, usually a week before the workshop. Each participant takes the writer’s story (or novel excerpt, or essay, etc.) home, and they read through the story and write a critique letter for the writer. (See here for instructions on how to write this letter!)

The next week, the workshop meets to discuss the story. During this discussion, the writer is not allowed to say anything, and must sit and listen and take notes. This is often the hardest part for the writer, but most instructors are pretty strict about this rule. The reason a writer is not allowed to speak during the workshop is that the text must stand on its own. Our impulse as writers is to explain — that’s not how we meant that! — but we can’t do that most of the time. When a reader picks our book off the shelf in Barnes and Noble, we’re not there to explain that the mother character was really supposed to be unconscious in that scene, not dead, or that the protagonist was only joking when she told her sister that the house burned down. These are silly examples, but the fact remains: if the text is saying something that the author didn’t intend, the author needs to hear that information.

This is also a good time to say that the Iowa model can easily go off the rails, and it may feel like the group is ganging up on the writer, piling on with criticism while the writer sits there, mute. I’ve seen this happen, and it’s not pretty. It’s really important for the workshop leader and participants to have a conversation at some point in the class about the goals of the workshop. For me, the single most important goal of the workshop is that the writer return to their piece excited about the possibility of revision. It’s not ever to get the writer to throw away the piece, or even to quit writing altogether. Your job as participant is to meet the piece where it is, and to remember that it’s not your story but the author’s.

Here, formats vary, but usually, you’ll start by discussing what the piece is trying to accomplish. Who are the characters and what do they want? Is theme visible yet? What is the piece about, and what form is the piece taking?

Next, you’ll usually describe what’s working well in the piece, and this is another vital step. The author gets a lot out of learning about their strengths. If someone is particularly good at character or setting or scene, that’s something they should lean in to.

After the discussion of strengths, the workshop moves to discuss issues the piece might face (I like to call these “opportunities”). You’ll be looking at plot holes, at motivations, at questions of how the piece is hanging together narratively. Focus on the big picture here, and not on small details — we’re not doing copyediting but developmental editing.

Some instructors have a rule against prescriptive advice, meaning advice that tells the writer how to fix a perceived issue. I don’t have this rule, but I do make it clear that the author must stay true to their own story — if a prescriptive fix doesn’t feel right, then the author should discard the suggestion. What prescriptive discussions do do, however, is they help all of us work through story problems. They help us imagine how we might fix a particular issue. Why would the mother show up drunk to the PTA meeting? One writer might think through a solution where a recent separation has rendered the character unable to cope normally. Another writer might imagine that a colleague’s birthday happy hour is more important than the daughter. In any case, I think it’s a really good exercise for writers to envision the web of the story — what happens if you change one thing here or there? And the writer never needs to incorporate anything that doesn’t make sense for them and for their story.

Finally, the writer does get a chance to speak! At the end, the writer usually gets a few minutes to ask questions, to explain things, to talk about what the group missed, perhaps, and how the writer can go about bringing that element forward. It’s not unusual for a writer to be overwhelmed at this moment, and I usually offer the writer the opportunity to return with questions the following week.

One last note here about workshop, and that’s to discuss what it’s for. In a standard 3-year MFA program, you will usually have two years (or 4 semesters) of workshops. In each workshop, you might only get to present one or two of your own stories. You reply, however, to a dozen or more. The real benefit to workshop is not that you get feedback on your work — although this is a super valuable thing — but that you learn to read unfinished pieces critically. We all have times as writers when we’re on our own — out in the wilderness, I call it — and if you’ve honed that critical editor’s eye, you can get your stories pretty far down the road before you need to bring in outside readers. There’s a reason that this is the dominant pedagogical method for teaching creative writing.

But again, there are drawbacks to this model, and one of the biggest drawbacks is that it can really hurt a writer’s confidence. Taking care to discuss goals is one way to avoid that destructive possibility, but other models of workshop are also beginning to take hold in academic creative writing.