My MFA at NYU began with a year-long novel workshop, taught by a fantastic writer named Chuck Wachtel. In his class, every single one of my classmates was there to write a novel. We shared the synopses of our novels with each other so we knew what to expect, and then each week we took turns submitting new chunks of 20-25 pages — usually that was one or two chapters. Over the course of the year we were each given the opportunity to workshop a total of eight times. One or two people who were writing shorter novels were even able to get in their whole projects.
What’s so valuable about a workshop focused on novels is that the discussions are tailored to the idea that you are still writing the rest of the novel. A short story workshop spends time discussing things like whether the arc of a piece is satisfying or too predictable, whether the reader is getting enough interiority from the main character, whether the style suits the purpose of the writing, whether the ending needs to go on for a beat longer or cut off a paragraph earlier. A short story workshop focuses a lot on what’s missing.
A novel workshop following the format of Chuck’s class (in which students read sections at a time) more or less considers the same questions, but from the opposite direction. It’s more about focusing on ideas like what do you need to fill in later? In Chuck’s class we spent a lot of time talking about what we were reading in relation to the future sections of the novel that we predicted and hoped for. We considered questions like whether characters were making big decisions or bringing up large conflicts sooner than we wanted/needed/expected them. We talked about the payoff those scenes needed to have in later chapters. We talked about which characters we loved to hate and which characters we loved to pity and what kind of work needed to be done on them to prevent the novel from becoming clichéd or unsatisfying.
One of the best things about Chuck’s workshop was that we were all in the same boat. We were all working on early drafts of our novels. And having a workshop that required each of us to turn in the next section of a novel forced us to keep writing even when we felt discouraged. It helped to unstick us when we found ourselves running into a wall — the workshop was inspiring and encouraging, and writing a novel became a whole different thing when there were twelve people invested in finding out what happens in your next two chapters.
In the spring semester three students left our class because their time was up, and we got three new enthusiastic novelists. One of them said to me, when he realized that all the rest of us had decided to stay together in the workshop after taking it in the fall, “It’s like you guys have already been through the war together.” He was right — that’s exactly what it felt like.
This semester (as I’ve mentioned in other posts) I’m taking Jonathan Safran Foer’s workshop. When someone mentioned on the first day of class that many of us have full drafts of novels that we’re working on, he instantly offered for us to workshop them. But in contrast to Chuck’s format, Jonathan is having us workshop complete novels (or significant chunks of them) in one sitting. We talked about one novel last week, and tomorrow we’re talking about another two novels.
So far it’s been very interesting to see how a novel is workshopped in this format. Obviously, since everyone has to read, for example, 600 pages in one week, it’s difficult to do any close reading or any line edits. But on the other hand, we can talk about the big picture. We can combine the nature of the discussions that we had in Chuck’s workshop with the type of questions that we ask in a short story workshop. We can examine the full arc of a novel, and talk about what characters or devices or plot points leave us satisfied or unsatisfied.
It seems to me that Chuck’s workshop is a great format for someone working on an earlier draft of a novel, and Jonathan’s workshop is a great format for someone working on a later draft of a novel that has already been reworked extensively.
I definitely took my workshops in the perfect order. In my first two semesters of the program, Chuck’s class gave me the courage to write a significant chunk of one of the most important projects I’ve ever taken on. I’m still chipping away at it — I feel like it’s one of those novels that’s going to take me years to finish. I’d had the idea for it for years and years before I started my MFA, and I only began to seriously work on it because Chuck and my workshop peers were so nurturing. If Jonathan’s workshop had been the very first class of my MFA experience, I think I might have felt overwhelmed by the idea of workshopping a full novel.
It’s still early in the semester, so I’m curious to see how other novels go. Watch this space for more updates.
