Throughout the years, I have enrolled in several creative writing and composition/rhetoric courses that featured workshopping various drafts of written work, and my experiences have, to quote a friend inclined to malapropisms, “run the grommet.” A wide range of involvements and efficacies, in other words. I remember the professor of one creative writing course I took as an undergrad who alternately praised and then decimated the stories I brought in, with equal hyperbole, on a weekly basis. This course was in turns demoralizing and exhilarating, and made me realize that thin skin is a condition I needed (need!) to acknowledge and toughen up.
I’m still learning not to be too precious about drafts, to not hold too tightly to my initial conception of what a piece of writing should or shouldn’t be. That flexibility is important, and yet sometimes I feel as though I ask and expect it more from my students than myself. I try to employ activities in my composition classes to derange student writing, to search for new possibilities, to look for strangeness and irregularity, as much as to encourage revision and proofreading. I also try not to frame writing exercises around ideas of success or failure, but, again, I think I still need to work on being less precious and product-oriented with my own writing.
