When I do a workshop at Wesleyan, this is how we do it.
First of all, the students receive the story a week ahead of time.
They read the story at home.
Ideally, they read it through a second time with a pencil.
And they write on the manuscript, all kinds of comments,
they write sometimes right on the words.
They talk about the punctuation.
They talk about the word choice.
They talk about large things in the plot.
They talk a lot about characterization.
They talk about the dialogue.
And they actually write those things in the margin.
Obviously in the current format,
you're not going to be able to write directly on the manuscripts, but we will
have occasion later on in this course to talk about very fine grain things.
The next thing that the students do is they write a letter to address directly to
the reader, outlining their responses.
And that's the kind of thing that I'm going to ask you to do for this class.
In a physical workshop, which I'll give you an example of in a little bit,
the writer starts out reading a page or so from the story out loud.
After that, the writer stays completely quiet and
the students give their critiques one by one, followed by a group discussion.
In the next segment, I'll put a student's story up for you to read.
Then we'll go into a real workshop to give you a sense of the kinds of things
a writer might get in response to his or her work, from people, writers,
who are practiced at doing this,
and have done a pretty good job in the past at giving good critique.
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