On Writing and Writing Workshops

By Rena Vanstone

Why do I go to writing workshops?

No one has ever asked me this directly, but I have sensed the vague outline of that question whenever I tell my family or friends that I can’t make plans because I’ve committed to spending a few hours in a room with strangers learning how to write. Of course, this is an oversimplification of what goes on at a writing workshop.

If someone had asked me why I signed up for the Your Voice: Your Story: Creative Writing Workshop at Crafting Community: A Symposium on Arts Practice and Research, with Andrea Thompson and Lauren Kirshner, I might have said something about meeting new people, having just moved to Toronto a couple of months earlier. That is part of it. Another reason I could have given was that the title itself intrigued me. “Your Voice, Your Story.” Voice is one of the things I am self-conscious about with my writing. I started writing when I was young and became most serious about it as a teenager. I fear that my writing “voice” has become stuck in that time. The idea of my writing being called “juvenile” freezes my fingers on the keyboard. Flights of fancy and wild musings fall apart at the thought of what my voice should be – mature, sophisticated, serious, and “grown-up.” I’m not sure when I first felt this way, perhaps when I started university and the imagined audience for my writing morphed from other teenagers to adults. In my imagination, these were “real” adults – people with life experience – and I, at 18, could not fathom what I had to say that would interest them.

Writing workshops can be intimidating, so just showing up counts for a lot in these situations. Fortunately, with six of us around a table, there was an immediate comradeship and casualness. It is telling of Lauren and Andrea’s wisdom that one of the first activities we did in the workshop was a ‘Creative Autobiography.’ In this activity, adapted from the modern dancer Twylah Tharpe’s The Creative Habit, we were instructed to write down our earliest memories of being creative, thus rooting ourselves and our writing in the serendipity and freedom of childhood. 

The creativity of childhood is unmatched, unrestrained by grown-up doubts and insecurities and the oppressive voice of the inner critic. Perhaps it is not unreasonable that I fear sounding childish when engaging in creativity; perhaps the paradox is that one cannot be creative without indulging, at least somewhat, in one’s inner child. 

I go to writing workshops, as well, to learn something new about the craft of writing – because there is always something new to learn. At this one, Lauren introduced the idea of a ‘creative self’ and a ‘critic or editor self’ from Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. The editor self is the one who shows up when you are staring at a blank page and tells you that the idea you have is wrong or not good enough. It seems simple as soon as they pointed it out, but I needed to hear it nonetheless: the editor has no business being there when you’re in the drafting phase of writing, just trying to get the words out. You can’t improve something that doesn’t yet exist, and that is the role of the editor self – to improve your writing at a later state. The workshop gave me a handy phrase to tell my editor self, “Thank you for sharing, but you don’t belong here.”

So, there are multiple reasons why I attend writing workshops – to connect with other people and remind myself that I am not alone in this often-lonely endeavour, to see writing from a new perspective, and to get a momentary rush of motivation for writing. These are all true and valid reasons for attending writing workshops, but they do not entirely get to the heart of the matter. That is because I began with the wrong question. The more important question is, why write at all?

There was a short workshop activity where we were asked to list our muses and I – in an act of self-tenderness or perhaps slight narcissism – put my younger self. In another activity, we were given the prompt, “Why write?” and instructed to write without lifting our pens from the page for fifteen minutes or so. I wrote about, or rather to, myself at the age of 15. An age when I most needed to feel like I wasn’t alone in my experiences and often sought connection through books. So, maybe my writing voice isn’t “stuck” at 15; maybe the truth is that I will always be, in part, writing for myself at 15. And that is a reassuring thought, because that means I am writing for a kind audience.

It's all too easy to become immobilized by your inner critic, especially when they are telling you what your writing ought to sound like – and moreover, when you lose confidence that you can make it sound like you think it “should.” This “should” often comes from what you imagine other people want from your writing and, much like the inner critic, has no place in the early stages of writing. That inner critic can disguise itself as an imaginary audience, who can inhibit your writing just as severely if they are disgruntled, jeering critics or adoring fans with unachievably high expectations. To write for that inner critic or imaginary audience is to start with such a heavy burden already on your shoulders. I found through this workshop that, to write freely and without fear, I had to write only for my younger self.