Article #17
What's a Great Writer's Workshop?

A great writer's workshop is one where both the presenter feels like a significant contribution has been made to each member of the workshop; and, the participants all feel more confident in their writing technique at the end of the workshop.

I recently conducted a 20-hour-workshop at Marygrove College in Detroit over two weekends.  There were eighteen participants and at the end of the workshop, I felt that each person had improved considerably and that there were at least six or seven members of the group with real potential as writers.

Some members of the Workshop just felt better about their writing with no particular desire to seek publication as a goal and that's all right too.  Most participants understood the basics of plotting, characters, scenes and settings.  They also realized for the first time, how important a good summary of their manuscript was to them as well as some future edition as a guide, not to mention some future publishing house editor.

Initially, a summary of the manuscript has to be well crafted in about ten pages to "hook" an editor on your story as well as the characters before the editor even gets the actual manuscript pages.  If the story doesn't appeal to them, I'll guarantee you, most editors never even get to the actual pages.  After the writer is satisfied with the short summary, many successful authors then revise it to a 50 or 60-page summary that the writer uses as a guide when writing the manuscript.

Jeffrey Deaver, best selling author of the Bone Collector and other suspense novels, recently confessed in an outstanding article in the November issue of Writer's Digest that he uses the Outline (or Summary) as a "skeleton" to which he later adds prose.  The outline to Deaver appears to be one of the important and necessary ingredients to his writing a well-received novel.  This takes him about eight months to complete working six or seven days a week, eight to ten hours a day.  The actual manuscript is written in approximately two months.

Writing must be learned like any other performing art form such as the piano, ballet, acting or any other profession.  After you've learned the basics, it doesn't necessarily mean you'll be invited into Carnegie Hall, Paramount Studios or into the executive offices of Doubleday Publishers.  But, at least you'll be able to handle the basic fundamentals of good writing, which incidentally is rewriting, rewriting and rewriting again.  But this is a subject of a future article.

One of the best mechanism's for a Writer's Workshop is immediate feedback for the participants, both from other members of the group as well as the presenter.  This gives the writer an idea of how the structure of his or her writing efforts appeal to the other members of the group.  Anyways, we had a great workshop at Marygrove College, and I would urge each of you to attend at least one workshop in your community and give yourself a chance to improve your writing skills.  If you have any specific questions about workshops or anything else concerning your writing techniques, contact me by e-mail and I'll try to be helpful.