The Fictional Fictional Audience, or Why I Kind of Hate Creative Writing Workshop

I went on this rant for Essence and Taryn in class earlier, but I think I'll recreate it here for the benefit of all you fine folks.

I mentioned today that it seemed best to me to keep my students in the dark initially about the fact that they'd be workshopping thesis statements in small peer groups. My reasoning being that I feel like I'm constantly trying to push them to the other side of the circle; that is, they struggle immensely with the concept of the invoked audience, and often times default even without thinking to the more immediately accessible addressed audience. My fear was that they would find out about having to share their writing with other students, and then immediately start imagining those peers as their audience.

Then I started thinking about the concept behind creative writing workshop. It's a blasphemy, I know, what with me being a creative writing PhD and all, but the truth is, I kind of hate workshop. I've been in and out of creative writing workshops for the last 10 years of my life, and if I've learned one thing, it's that my best work comes when I'm not participating in one. It has to do, I think, with the idea of the invoked audience, the "fictional" audience. When enrolled in a workshop, no matter how much I tell myself that I am writing for the invoked audience, that is, the nameless faceless group of literature readers who will encounter nothing other than my poem, my name, and maybe some elusive biographical notes, the fact remains that I am writing for an addressed audience: those 8-10 people who gather in a room to talk about poems every week. As such, I find myself writing to very real people, and caring (perhaps erroneously) about what they think.

The truth is, this is a superficial and artificial stand-in for the real audience. In very few, if any, ways does the workshop environment mirror the actual reading public. These people are trained to critique -- to READ -- in a way that most people just aren't. What's worse is that these people know me. They know things about me and, to some degree or another, care about me. The bottom line is that the average readers -- Joe and Josephine Litmag -- don't know shit about me and don't give a shit about me. Therefore, their reactions to my work are going to be completely different from that of the workshop.

Don't get me wrong. I feel like workshop is super useful. And I love all my workshop buddsies. But I think we sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that the "audience" we attend to in the classroom is somehow analogous to the actual reading public, and it just isn't.

End rant. Chad out.

*mic drop*