Content warning: this essay includes discussions about racism and bigotry in classroom settings, as well as briefly mentioning serious topics like self-harm or incest or sexual assault. 

For as long as I’ve been studying Creative Writing at Unimelb, I’ve heard over and over again how valuable writing workshops are. Tutors, students and lecturers alike all place an incredible amount of stock in this feedback process.

Creative writing workshops are a dedicated section in writing classes where students share their work with their peers. For those who aren’t used to sharing their writing, workshops can be a little daunting.

When I was a nineteen-year-old undergrad Creative Writing major, I remember being so nervous. I’d written a sad little poem about my high school lesbian heartbreak, which I had to share over Zoom (since this class was running during COVID). My tutor asked if I wanted to read it out loud and I said I’d rather not, so he read it out instead.

To my relief, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, which is probably what I needed back then. I was so fragile when it came to my writing. Anyone could have broken me, but they didn’t.

From that point onwards, I was sold. I believed wholeheartedly in the value of these workshops, even when my experiences in them weren’t entirely positive. I loved giving others feedback and helping them develop their work. I loved the thrill and adrenaline of whether other people would like my work. 

For the most part, I found that my classmates were really kind—even if I wasn’t always super flattering with my criticisms.

I looked forward to workshops every semester, and when I graduated and took a year off, I found that I really missed them.

So, when I returned for my master's, I expected to feel the same way as I did during my undergrad.

But a lot changed in the year I took off.

Unthought out feedback and ‘poo store gate’ (yes, you read that right)

When I returned, I was more cynical of the world. My writing was different. I was more confident, less willing to take shit and more willing to give honest feedback.

Perhaps most notably, though, I had started openly talking about my transness and using they/them pronouns. 

What I found when I returned was that workshops had stopped feeling particularly useful or even enjoyable to me. When the feedback I received was positive, it felt like a creative dead end because no one offered good advice on how to continue elevating my work, and when it was negative, it wasn’t constructive at all.

Even offering others feedback—something that used to bring me a lot of joy—was suddenly emotionally taxing, largely due to the nature of the writing being submitted. Every piece felt like either self-indulgent virtue-signalling or a trauma dump with no content warnings.

I started to really question the process and even found myself wondering: have I ever received genuinely helpful advice during a creative writing workshop?

Positive feedback was instrumental in helping me build confidence in my writing, but once I had that confidence the rest of the process started to feel a little inconsequential.

I started to get frustrated. I started to reflect on some of my more negative experiences with workshopping.

For example, I’ve often had people point out writing techniques in my stories and then say absolutely nothing useful about them:

 “You know, there are some metaphors in this paragraph.”

 “Yes.”

 “Is that intentional?”

 “Is the metaphor I put in my creative fictional story, written for a creative writing class in a creative writing postgraduate degree, intentional?

 “Well, is it?”

 “…yes.”

In one class, a woman absolutely tore my piece to shreds in the written feedback she sent me before the workshop took place—only for her to change her tune entirely during the actual workshop when she saw that everyone else liked it:

“Is this working?”

“No.

“Is it too personal?”

“Yes.”

“Does it make sense?”

“No.”

“Is the second person POV effective?”

“No, I’d try something else.”

I shit you not, these were the kinds of responses she gave me. 

It was at this point that I started to wonder whether people’s feedback sometimes had ulterior motives. I found myself questioning if this woman was being harsh about my work on purpose because she was jealous, or possibly bitter about the feedback I’d given her a few weeks prior (all I said was that Taylor Swift was not the most marginalised musician ever and that she should avoid suggesting that in her piece). 

Another writing class proved to me that sometimes people just give you feedback without even properly reading your writing.

Once, after my workshop was cancelled at the last minute, practically no-one sent me any feedback on my work. Except for one student, who submitted a written response for me. At first, I was grateful, but then I read it.

The piece I submitted featured a scene where someone picked up a bag of horse manure from the side of the road.

My classmate's feedback:

“It might be a little unrealistic for there to be a poo store where people can buy poo.”

I can’t help but agree with that statement, though I can’t see how it relates to what I wrote. And frankly, if I had included a poo store in that piece, realism likely wasn’t the goal.

On top of this, I’ve dealt with dozens of peers who either submit their drafts for everyone to read only the night before class, leaving no one any time to read them, or they’ll submit two different versions of a draft for everyone to read (one within the word count, and one way, way, way over). Then they’ll innocently suggest that anyone who has time could look at the longer version, but only ‘if they wanted to’. 

It might seem harmless, but it ends up dividing the class between those who have read the long version and those who haven’t, and the class discussion becomes more or less useless to everyone other than the workshopper.

It also means (and maybe I’m putting on my tinfoil hat here) that the people who have read the longer piece are the ones with more time on their hands, and the people who read the shorter version are the ones who likely have other obligations outside of university. Consequently, those with less time available don’t get to participate in class discussions properly, even when they set aside a fair amount of time to read the workshopping piece. It’s exclusionary to certain members of the class, and is just generally poor etiquette in my opinion.

But perhaps my biggest workshop pet peeve of all—worse than Taylor Swift-motivated revenge-negging or absurdly incorrect poo store-related observations—is what I like to call, the diary entry comment.

It goes something like this:

 “This reads like a diary entry.”

Okay.

Is that good or bad?

Is the writing too juvenile? Too personal? Too self-indulgent? What makes it read that way?

What does that comment even mean?

Why would any piece of writing feedback ever be a neutral observation? Who does that help?

It often feels like a quick and easy way to discount someone’s (usually a woman’s) creative decisions and make them feel insecure about their abilities. It’s a piece of feedback I’ve rarely seen given to a man.

Which brings me to my next point: there’s a lot of ego in creative writing classes, but everyone pretends that there isn’t. People get jealous and insecure. People are more worried about saying something smart than about giving coherent, thoughtful, and well-meaning advice.

When feedback collides with bigotry

I don’t know if it’s because COVID fucked us all up, or if this is the way it’s always been, but it seems to me that no one knows how to help each other improve creatively.

And maybe it’s the demographic, too.

These classes largely consist of cis white rich people who all have chips on their shoulders about the fact that they haven’t experienced real hardships.

The result is culturally appropriative work and some truly socially isolating feedback.

In my undergrad, I was largely perceived as a woman, and in creative writing classes, that’s not so much of a barrier, since women make up the majority of these classes anyway.

However, now that I’m visibly and openly nonbinary, the nature of the sort of feedback I receive is always worse. No amount of pronoun circles or separating myself from my written characters helps: if I write a female protagonist, people will inevitably assume that character is me and end up misgendering me.

For example, In one class, I explained how my story was inspired by real events but was fictional. It was a story about a teenage girl.

The comments were along the lines of: ‘when you did this, when you did that…’, or ‘this is such a great story about what it means to be a woman.’ 

On the surface, these didn’t seem like ill-intended insults, but the more I thought about them, the more these comments bugged me. It’s strange to me that people in a master’s level university subject are unable to tell the difference between a fictional teenage girl and me (a nonbinary 25-year-old). Even if I were cis, that would be odd. 

In another class, I wrote a story mentioning my transness and my desire for top surgery. In the story, I happened to mention an Umbrella Academy poster I have on my wall.

This was the feedback I got: 

“It’s interesting you mention the Umbrella Academy. Because you know… Elliot Paige.”

This was the comment in its entirety, and it was followed up by pretty much dead silence from the rest of the class.

On a more serious note, I’ve watched white, Australian classmates push international students to write about their ‘diverse experiences’ instead of letting them explore other topics. I’ve seen people write about self-harm for seemingly no story-relevant purpose and then fail to provide content warnings. Same with sexual assault. 

I’ve seen people appropriate the language and stories of Aboriginal Australians to propel their white saviour complexes in completely exploitative ways. I’ve been in classes where people have written strangely racist fantasy monsters under the guise of exploring how white Australian culture treats First Nations people. I’ve seen a white student tell a Chinese student that she should incorporate the one-child policy into her piece (her piece was a kid’s fantasy story with zero relation to this topic). These comments are always said politely with a smile, and everyone is always keen to move on very quickly, making them harder to call out. 

I’ve read random accounts of white women talking about how they like to sleep with black men in an uncomfortable amount of detail. I’ve read the work of an author whom I can only describe as a dormant incel. And I’ve read just a frankly bizarre amount of incest stories. Not carefully thought-out explorations of family dynamics, enmeshment or abuse, but plot twists of incest seemingly included for no other reason than shock value, or to capitalise off a smut BookTok category. 

The silence that follows

I feel like maybe I’m not really meant to talk about any of this. I’m meant to keep workshops completely confidential. But I think that’s part of the problem; these spaces can be so insular, especially in master’s-level subjects. I’m not writing about this to expose or embarrass anyone. I’ve read plenty of bad, well-intentioned stories. I have no issue with those. I have no issue with writers who want to try new things and work on new skills. 

But I can’t help but feel a little taken aback by some of the content I’ve been exposed to. It all seems so callous. So careless. So selfish. Even in classes where sensitivity in writing is the goal, it so often feels like my fellow writers aren’t even trying. 

And the worst part is the silence. People rarely challenge these problematic stories or comments, neither the students nor the tutors. I know our tutors are underpaid and undertrained to handle this kind of thing. I don’t want to fault them too much, but the lack of response is so frustrating sometimes, especially when so much of the content we’re studying in class is attempting to stop us from doing the very thing that I see so many of my classmates doing. The worst anyone ever seems to get is a compliment sandwich.

Even at times when I’ve built up the courage to speak up, to question why certain things have been written or said, I’ve actually found myself cut off by a tutor or someone else in class. No one wants to sit in tension. No one wants to be uncomfortable. If anyone says or writes anything bigoted, the goal seems to be to change the subject before it gets too awkward. Then I end up looking like an asshole if I cause a stink. 

I know writing is supposed to make people uncomfortable sometimes, but the notion of workshops being a safe space for everyone to explore whatever they want only works if that flexibility applies to everyone. When pieces pushing conventional storytelling barriers are punished or piled onto for petty reasons, but bigotry is glazed over, we’re effectively elevating the same types of writers and the same types of stories over and over. We’re only creating a safe space for certain individuals. 

People should be allowed to address how a piece makes them feel. We need to give real criticism, and we need to be able to receive it too. If writers are only receiving compliments or vague observations, how will anyone ever improve? How will we stop writers from going out into the world and repeating the same mistakes other writers have been making for centuries? 

As it stands, I find most creative writing workshops to be volatile, passive-aggressive spaces. Workshop participants tend to lack etiquette and often accidentally (but sometimes on purpose), give empty feedback that, at best, is not very helpful and, at worst, isolates and demoralises marginalised members of the class. If we want workshops to be as valuable as we say they are, then we need to have an in-depth look at how they function and be honest with ourselves about what drives our writing and our feedback.