Workshop is often considered the heart of the college-level creative writing classroom, but its centrality in no way means its practice is beyond scrutiny. At its best, workshop is a space where students offer thoughtful feedback on their peers’ written work and receive thoughtful feedback on their own. It’s a place where ideas flow, where stories move towards becoming realized, and where writers (re)learn their writerly priorities and readerly tendencies. It's been said that the best workshop leaves those being workshopped excited to get back to work. At its worst, workshop is a cut-throat, ungenerous environment, leaving students demoralized, uninspired, and even feeling personally attacked. Curiously, workshop is a space where even instructors who lead them disparage them; take one professor’s comment, for instance, published in an article entitled "Workshop: A Rant Against Creative Writing Classes" in Poets & Writers: “There’s something rotten at the core of most of [workshops], which makes them extremely unlikely to work.”

While workshop’s goodness or badness will likely remain up for debate, workshop’s cornerstone status within the creative writing world (at least within the United States context) remains largely unquestioned. The purpose of this page, then, is not to take a stance on what type of workshop is best, but to present three models of workshop alongside some of each model’s most important perceived benefits and drawbacks. Ultimately, it’s up to instructors and their students to shape workshop into being whatever it is they want it to be.

For additional resources for creative writing, click here.

In this section