Who Are MFA Workshops *Really* For?

How many writers does it take to fix a short story? The premise of the creative writing workshop is that it takes a room full of writers, reading and offering feedback and working through the kinks of the story together. This approach has three obvious benefits: One, the writer learns how to improve the story in question. Two, the class develops their skills as readers and editors, building a technical vocabulary that will serve them in their future writing careers. And three, the writer walks away from the workshop feeling inspired, encouraged, and motivated to continue writing.

A good day in workshop succeeds on all three counts. But inevitably, there are times when these worthy aims come into conflict. Take the following anecdote, from an MFA-level workshop: A student brought in a short story that was written in the second person. At the start of the workshop, the student announced that, while he was generally open to feedback, he did not want to hear any criticism of the story’s point of view. The second person was working for him, and he had no intention of changing it.

An awkward silence followed his announcement. If the goal of this workshop was to improve the story in question, some discussion of the point of view was essential. Trying to fix the story without addressing the unconventional narration would be like, as a mentor of mine once put it, “trying to make the bed while the house is on fire.” If the goal of this workshop was to educate the class and build up their editorial skillset, a candid discussion of the story’s narration was likewise essential. If, however, the goal of workshop was to support and encourage the writer, the way forward seemed clear: the class should honor the writer’s request and limit their feedback to other, secondary aspects of the story.

How an effective workshop should handle such cases depends on what you think workshop is really for.

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Nate Dern is a graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where he received an MFA in Fiction. He had applied to MFA programs because he wanted to develop a collection of polished short stories, which he could place in literary magazines and eventually publish as a book. The time he spent in workshop, however, did not seem directly in service of that goal. “If there happens to be someone in your workshop with good taste, and maybe some experience publishing, you might hear some feedback that pushes the piece in that direction,” Dern said. “At other times, I left workshop even more confused than I was at the start.”

When I was an MFA student, I wanted very much to know whether my stories were publishable, and what I needed to do to close the gap.

He described one illustrative workshop in which the story under discussion had a glaring craft issue: “We spent the first fifteen minutes speaking in these vague generalities, because no one wanted to get into the obvious number-one thing on everyone’s mind.” This approach certainly honored the goal of encouraging the writer in question, but it was not likely to give the writer an accurate sense of their story’s strengths and weaknesses, nor to educate the class in how to address the craft issue at hand.

Had the instructor of that workshop firmly believed that the collective goal was to improve the story, they might have steered the conversation toward the offending craft issue, and suggestions for revision. Instead, the instructor allowed the students to direct the discussion—and therefore ceded to the students the decision of what workshop is actually for.

Rebecca Makkai, who teaches at several graduate creative writing programs, is a proponent of this approach. “I let students, in most circumstances, choose how they’re going to be workshopped,” she said. “That allows the class to say: This is brand-new, we’re just giving ideas and support. Versus: This is reaching a final draft, let’s find every nitpicky thing.” Makkai presents students with a workshop menu, from which they can select different activities according to their desired workshop experience: “the author asks a question of the group,” or “workshoppers talk about what is working well,” or “workshoppers ask permission to offer suggestions.”

Most of Makkai’s students follow her suggested “default model” for workshop, which includes a discussion of the story’s strengths and weaknesses. But some students lay down more restrictive guidelines. “It’s rare,” she said, “but once in a while they ask for something and I’m like: that’s not what I would choose for you. I’ll be honest, it’s often someone who doesn’t want to hear a genuine response anyway. They’ll say: I just want to ask these five questions—and the five questions are not actually that helpful. Or they’ll say: I only want to hear what people are curious about. They’re protecting themselves from something. But they’re allowed to! I’m not going to force people to hear things they’re not ready to hear yet. When they’re ready to hear the other stuff, they’ll ask for it.”

Makkai is not alone in handing the reins of workshop over to the writer. Many of the fiction professors I interviewed have dispensed with the traditional “cone of silence” model, in which the writer remains silent until the end of the discussion. Instead, these professors invite the writer to open the conversation, presenting their story in context: how many drafts the story has passed through, which areas of the story particularly need work, which categories of feedback the writer is not interested in hearing. This way, students can get exactly the education they wish for—and if they don’t want to hear criticism of their work, they don’t have to.

One motivating factor for this shift—from the writer as passive listener to the writer as active participant—is the historic flaw of the “cone of silence” model: workshop can be vicious. Every professor I interviewed had some horror story to share about a workshop in which they were forced to sit in silence as their work was ripped to shreds. Susan Choi, who teaches at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, related an anecdote in which her work was “savaged and insulted and demeaned” by a particular classmate. “My professor just sat and listened in the way that I was supposed to just sit and listen,” Choi said. “And after workshop ended, the professor invited me into their office and handed me a cigarette, as if I had just been fucked. You’d never believe it, it’s too ridiculous, I’ve never used the detail in a short story—but it did happen.”

These no-holds-barred workshops seem to have left their mark on a generation of writers, who as teachers have reacted strongly against the cone of silence model. And yet, when I interviewed current students, none of them cited viciousness as a problem in workshop. Shanley Jane Kearney, an MFA candidate at Columbia, told me that she likes the cone of silence model. “That’s one of my favorite things about workshop,” she said. “It trains you to sit on your hands a little bit. When your book is out, and a person is reading it, you’re not on their shoulder, being like: Oh this is actually what I meant by that! You have to sit there and listen to everyone misunderstand your writing—exactly as a reader will.”

Kearney suggested that workshop is in fact a uniquely supportive environment, because everyone in workshop has to read each story closely. “If someone in your workshop is confused about something, then that’s an even bigger red flag, because they are paying infinitely more attention to the work,” she said. “They might have even read the story two or three times and they still can’t figure it out. If I bring in a story and the class struggled to get the conclusion but they got it in the end—well, they still struggled. My reader’s going to struggle even more. If it was lost in workshop, then it was really lost.”

Kearney’s point hinges on an imagined future reader, who will come across the story in its published form and read without the benefit of the writer’s guidance. If the point of workshop is to revise for that future reader, then the writer’s interference in the discussion is unnecessary, even counterproductive. If, however, the purpose of workshop is to help the writer revise toward their own ideal vision of the piece—separate from any goal of publication or recognition—then the writer’s involvement in the discussion is perfectly logical.

The debate around the cone of silence model therefore reveals itself to be downstream of a more significant debate: is workshop about the pursuit of publication, or is it about craft improvement for its own sake?

Almost every professor I spoke with told me that the publication question ought not hang over workshop. Susan Choi said that publication is the “implicit long-term goal” of her graduate workshops, and that it therefore rarely comes up in discussion. Lorrie Moore, who teaches at the Vanderbilt MFA program, told me that publication is “seldom” the focus of a workshop discussion. Rebecca Makkai told me, “A lot of students are just not ready to publish yet. If publication becomes too much a topic of discussion, you’re going to end up needing to tell them that at some point, and that’s actually not helpful. You want to kind of say: The story is what it is, and let’s make it better.” Anelise Chen, who teaches at Columbia’s MFA program, compared a workshopped story to “a tender shoot, just coming up from the ground. The last thing you want to do is stomp on it. Sometimes you do need to hear the harsh news—but life will do that to you.”

The suggestion here is that, since students will inevitably hear the “harsh news” of criticism and rejection upon graduation, MFA workshops need not be the bearer of bad news. But when I was an MFA student, I wanted very much to know whether my stories were publishable, and what I needed to do to close the gap. I had enrolled in a graduate creative writing program because I wanted to hear “the bad news” in an environment where I could safely process it and learn from it. Had I believed that my faculty advisors were protecting me from knowledge of my own shortcomings, so that I might discover them after graduation rather than under their care, I would have been quite frustrated.

This lack of consensus among students and faculty about the end goal of workshop can lead to chaotic and inconclusive discussions. Some students may feel their job is to praise, others to criticize; some writers may feel their job is to listen, others to offer context; and all instructors feel that their job is to support the students, but they disagree about the best ways of doing that.

In the case of MFA programs, which explicitly prepare their students for entry into the professional writing world, I think a greater clarity of purpose is needed.

Robert Boswell has been teaching writing workshops for forty years, and called his approach to workshop “old school.” He leads a discussion of the story’s intentions and how well those intentions are met, inviting the writer to speak only at the end of workshop. “I think the writer’s job in workshop is to listen and to take notes,” Boswell said. “The whole idea of giving students more autonomy is something I agree with in a lot of university things. But in workshop, I think the idea is: Here’s my story; I’ve pushed it as far as I can; tell me what you see.”

Boswell acknowledged that some students would rather hear praise than criticism. But he argued that praise isn’t always what students need to hear. “It’s college,” Boswell said. “I don’t agree with the idea that you should coddle the students. There’s a difference between harsh feedback and honest feedback. If everyone in the room is on the side of the story, feedback is never harsh.”

What does it mean to be on the side of the story? To my mind, it means treating the story as an entity separate from the writer, and recognizing the story’s needs as distinct from the writer’s needs. When those needs diverge—when a writer is asking for praise, and yet their story needs a complete overhaul—the workshop’s first loyalty should remain to the story. After all, out of everyone in workshop, the writer is often the least likely to know what their own story needs.

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In the workshop with the second-person story, the students commented on the setting, the characters, the plot. They steered clear of any mention of the second-person narration, despite private misgivings that the story would never work in its current form.

“People want to be respectful,” Nate Dern told me, “so no one in workshop will ever say: ‘I thought this was boring,’ or, ‘If this was in a journal I would have stopped reading after page one.’ Sometimes I think it leads to everyone beating around the bush, trying not to call out the elephant in the room.”

Who benefits from this accommodating approach to workshop? It is not the students, who graduate into a professional landscape without any true sense of their readiness to publish. It is not the instructors, who must calibrate their feedback according to the students’ willingness to hear it. The clearest beneficiary is the MFA programs themselves, which can continue to attract students with wildly diverging goals. Whether students seek rigorous craft improvement or unconditional encouragement, they will be funneled toward MFA programs, where they may or may not hear the honest feedback they need to improve.

I don’t believe that all writing workshops should be one type or the other—that we should always prioritize the story’s needs over the writer’s needs, or the class’s learning over the writer’s learning. But in the case of MFA programs, which explicitly prepare their students for entry into the professional writing world, I think a greater clarity of purpose is needed. If workshop is not a space where students learn to handle criticism, how can we expect them to thrive as professional writers? And if students can graduate from a two-year MFA program without once hearing an honest evaluation of their work, what is the point of their degrees?