I love writer’s workshops. I have attended writer’s workshops and conferences every summer since the sixth grade, from the Kenyon Review Young Writers’ Program in Ohio to the Susquehanna Advanced Writers’ Workshop in Pennsylvania. I have volunteered at the Stillwater Poetry Festival and taught at the Everhart Museum’s Summer Arts Camp for Children. Yes, I really, really love writer’s workshops.
They afforded me a valuable sense of community in which to share ideas as well as the ability to use prompts to shift the paradigm of how I viewed my writing and perhaps, how I should write. It is a place to meet new ideas and cultivate literary relationships with those ideas. I strongly urge any writer who hasn’t attended a writer’s workshop or conference to apply. One thing to remember is, dear reader, that while every writer’s workshop has a different atmosphere depending on how long it lasts, who sponsors it, and who attends; there will always be a few notorious characters you can never escape.
At every writer’s workshop I have attended I have encountered the literary idol. The literary idol is usually a teacher at the workshop whom possesses an ego bigger than Shaq’s and a cult following bigger than Joss Whedon’s. His stories are always meta-fictional, his speaking abilities on par with George Clooney’s acting talent, and his life, sensational. In other words, imagine a Bruce Willis using a pen to beat terrorists up instead of his fists. He is a writer whose strategy for defeating writer’s block is to go out to hunt Nazis in his time machine. After he has written his meta-masterpiece about a man stranded in the wilderness until he realizes he is a fictional character and jumps out of the novel and beats up his creator, the literary idol relaxes with a bottle of gin while counting the number of hairs in his beard.
The literary idol’s life is the perfect template for one of the many screenwriting students to adapt into Oscar bait. Not that there is anything bad about screenwriting. I know and like a lot of really nice girls who want to be screenwriters. However, the screenwriters that are usually found at writer’s workshops have the compulsion to tell everyone that she/he is a screenwriter. It is like God/Allah/Yahweh/Zeus/etc. elected them as the new messiah of the human race. The only way he can make these lowly beings understand his/her message is through the glow of the boob tube. If anyone dislikes their screenplay then clearly they do not comprehend that magic of cinema and they will burn in the eighth level of Hell where Michel Bay movies play for infinity. But dear reader, don’t worry for your soul; the screenwriter will make you act out their screenplay until you are Stockholmed into liking it. Salvation will be granted to you. Salvation.
The third archetype I have continually encountered at writers’ workshops is the brooding genius. The brooding genius knows that there isn’t a god in the universe because why would any merciful being give him such the burden of white, upper class, straight cis-gendered male privilege (maybe he can ask the screenwriter to intervene for him.) Not since Shakespeare’s Shylock has one had to deal with the persecution and prejudice against them. Why can’t he escape into New York from the hell of suburban life, swear every other word, find his manic pixie dream girl until she dies, and uncover the universal meaning that nothing is meaningful. Such depth. Such boldness. Hemingway would be proud.
Now YOU are prepared to take on the writer’s workshop with the knowledge that will prevent you from landing yourself into one of the classifications of the ‘notorious characters’. You have been warned.