Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Reviewing Vignettes in the Exploratory Writing Workshop

I have very few readers of my blog here at WDC. There are a greater number of nonmembers who read it for reasons I can only wonder about. Most of the members who drop by and visit probably know that I teach a WDC New Horizons class called the Exploratory Writing Workshop.

When the workshop is in session I get students to write vignettes of around 3K words to explore aspects of a novel they are thinking about writing. Each of the first six sessions has a vignette requirement that must include requirements contained in the weekly lesson. These requirements are akin to contest prompts, but instead of a single prompt there are several. My students come to the course with many different backgrounds and skill levels and I do a review on each weekly vignette submission. My review technique must take into account the diversity of student skills and so I take the following approach.

First I look for the three things I feel were best done in the submission and then look for the three things that could be most improved. With this model I can write reviews tailored to the development of each student. Aiding me are the objectives in each lesson that provide a checklist to see if the student bothered reading the requirements and addressed them in the vignette.

How (you might ask) can a student provide a vignette without reading the lesson? The answer is that many students take my workshop in order to get feedback on material they have written earlier. Rather than following the process the class is designed to offer, I often get something quite foreign to what the lesson asked for.

As a consequence the checklist of requirements is ignored and the vignette submission is about an aspect of their earlier manuscript that has nothing to do with the lesson.

Why (you might ask) do I put up with this nonsense, not issue a warning that such behavior will not be tolerated, and threaten to drop them from the workshop.

The reason is because that while most students lack the discipline to follow the program of instruction all of them want to improve as writers and as long as that is their agenda, I’m prepared to help them as best I can.

So while I point out each week the degree to which they complied with the class requirements I don’t get too hung up when they fail to address them and still offer a review that comments on the three strengths and weaknesses of their submissions.

It seems that there is a great temptation to use the workshop as a vehicle for getting review and feedback for a manuscript written prior to the class beginning rather than writing a vignette in compliance with the lesson objectives that is new and demonstrates the value of exploratory sketches prior to the outline phase of a novel. Several students have commented that writing 3K words each week with a common story and characters is too demanding and having something already “in the can” is a necessary fact of life. I don’t buy this, but I accept it and the fact that the demands of a job and family can put a premium on quality writing time.

As a consequence I remain flexible allowing students to tailor the workshop to their needs and expectations even though I think they are missing much of the benefit by using a preexisting work.