Wednesday, 04 March 2015 18:04

The Writing Workshop

The idea behind the writing workshop goes back a long way, and has a modern incarnation in the form of the current fad for ‘brainstorming’ that corporations use to gain a breakthrough in ideas. The writing workshop is a way of getting writers to develop their skills and ideas, and to work with other writers to help the creative juices flow. But does it work, and why should you try one?

Firstly, while the writing workshop was originally an education based ideal intended to bring to the fore the talents for writing and creativity, it has expanded beyond those limits to be something akin to a regular writing group, but one with a more aggressive approach to the subject. There are also online writing workshops at which writers critique each other’s work, a method that is very helpful to those who are finding they are stuck at a certain point in the process.

One major advantage of the writing workshop is that it allows – in many cases – more than one creative mind to work together; in the case of screenplays it is often the case that more than one writer is involved, as where character based writing is involved it is frequently found that having additional input can help develop different characters in a quite impressive way.

A writing workshop allows you to engage with others and share their experiences, plus their ideas.

Another form of writing workshop is the one you take part in alone, and comes in the form of a structured course that leads you through the process of writing; this can be very useful to those who are looking to branch out into other areas of writing than those they are familiar with – a novelist looking at advertising, for instance, or vice versa – and the structured format is very much appreciated by some.

One of the major things about writing, however, is that no two people will have the same approach; whether you choose to follow the writer’s workshop route, or whether you opt to stick within your traditional methodsFind Article, is up to you.

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