Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.com
Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use
A Workshop Lexicon
The "Paragons" Iteration -- from PARAGONS: TWELVE MASTER SCIENCE
FICTION WRITERS PLY THEIR CRAFT edited by Robin Wilson
St Martin's Press 1996 ISBN 0-312-14032-1
People often ask where science fiction writers get their
ideas. They rarely ask where society gets its science fiction
writers. In many cases the answer is science fiction workshops.
Workshops come in many varieties -- regional and national,
amateur and professional, formal and frazzled. In science
fiction's best-known workshop, Clarion, would-be writers are
wrenched from home and hearth and pitilessly blitzed for six weeks
by professional SF writers, who serve as creative-writing gurus.
Thanks to the seminal efforts of Robin Wilson, would-be sf writers
can receive actual academic credit for this experience.
But the workshopping experience does not require any
shepherding by experts. Like a bad rock band, an SF-writer's
workshop can be set up in any vacant garage by any group of spotty
enthusiasts with nothing better to occupy their time. No one has
a copyright on talent, desire, or enthusiasm.
The general course of action in the modern SF workshop (known
as the "Milford system") goes as follows. Attendees bring short
manuscripts, with enough copies for everyone present. No one can
attend or comment who does not bring a story. The contributors
read and annotate all the stories. When that's done, everyone
forms a circle, a story is picked at random, and the person to the
writer's right begins the critique. (Large groups may require
deliberate scheduling.)
Following the circle in order, with a minimum of cross-talk
or interruptions, each person emits his/her considered opinions of
the story's merits and/or demerits. The author is strictly
required, by rigid law and custom, to make no outcries, no matter
how he or she may squirm. When the circle is done and the last
reader has vented his or her opinion, the silently suffering
author is allowed an extended reply, which, it is hoped, will not
exceed half an hour or so, and will avoid gratuitously personal
ripostes. This harrowing process continues, with possible breaks
for food, until all the stories are done, whereupon everyone tries
to repair ruptured relationships in an orgy of drink and gossip.
