The Creative Writing Workshop: a Survival Kit

Abstract

The Creative Writing workshop (undergraduate and graduate) exists in two senses: the Workshop, which characterizes the distinctiveness of Creative Writing as an academic discipline, and the workshop — the subject and methodology of Creative Writing pedagogy. The nouns have spawned a verb. Student writing is ‘workshopped’ in a fashion special to the teaching of Creative Writing. In Creative Writing: a Good Practice Guide, Dr Siobhan Holland commented that Creative Writing ‘is best understood as a practice-based rather than a vocational or service-based discipline’, and that ‘The Creative Writing workshop provides the most common form of delivery for Creative Writing programmes at undergraduate and MA level.’