[This article first appeared in Lizard, Victoria University’s Professional Writing and editing program’s magazine. The University is in Melbourne, Australia where Meg Files did a Doris Leadbetter Teacher Exchange between Pima College and VU’s Diploma Professional Writing and Editing. –ed]

Writing is a lonely business, Ernest Hemingway said in his 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “Writers’ groups may palliate the loneliness, but I doubt if they improve the writing.”

I picture the man standing at his tall desk alone, writing stories full of isolated people seeking connection. If Hemingway were with us in body now, would he be sitting in his ergonomic chair before his computer, blogging away, joining chats, and posting a picture of himself in his thick fisherman’s sweater on MySpace?

I suspect he’d find that the writer’s life is still a lonely one in some significant ways. We may tap instantly into an audience, and postings may be followed by instant feedback. We may bypass the gatekeepers of editors and agents to publish our work. We may belong to an online international community of fellow writers. But at day’s end, at night’s end, there is still the individual writer choosing and ordering words according to his or her own angle of vision. I wonder if this sort of loneliness, the writer facing the blank page or screen, isn’t somehow necessary to the creation of art.

Thinking about this loneliness, I polled the writers in my introductory short story class, my advanced fiction workshop, and my novel-writing workshop. All sixty of them have elected to join a class. Why? I wondered. Were they seeking Hemingway’s palliative? Did they need the connection of like minds in an actual room together?

 A few are pursuing undergraduate degrees, and the fiction writing class satisfies the college’s requirement for art credit. (Hey, why draw or paint when you can make up stories?) Of the 27 writers in the introductory course, 14 are working on degrees. Most of the others have 4-year or graduate degrees. The overwhelming majority of writers in the two advanced classes have advanced degrees (in drama, for instance, urban planning, economics, Southeast Asian Studies, petroleum engineering, and reproductive physiology — “anything you want to know about sperm, ask me.”) Among us are a lawyer, the head of a university women’s studies program, and a psychiatrist (who’s writing a wacky enough novel about a psychiatrist whose patient is God that we don’t worry too much.)

So why, with all this education, take a class at a community college, a place traditionally designed to prepare students for occupations or for transfer to 4-year institutions? The answers fell consistently into several predictable categories:

1. to develop writing skills, to grow as a writer (“Am foundering in my own writing and need help!”) (to learn to “write from the heart and worry about punctuation later”)

2. for feedback (“Friends read my work and give no helpful comments at all. Frustrating!”)

3. for motivation and discipline (“I need structure, and taking this class is my attempt to be serious about my writing”)

They offered other assorted reasons: “It’s therapy. I can get out everything and disappear into someone else’s life.” “Takes me away from my many issues that could cripple me if I gave them more attention.”

But whatever their other reasons, these writers kept circling around to this:

4. for support (“I feel part of a community of others of like mind, interest, passion, fears, and frustrations.”) (“Writing alone can be very isolating.”)

So — what would Hemingway do?

He might point out some of the hazards of writers’ groups, classes, and workshops that even my students, joiners that they are, noted:

• the limits to creativity because of word counts, assignments, and time constraints
• the problems of sharing personal work and of harsh critiques (“Possible to be victim of slash and burn critique”) (“the fear of people saying it sucks”)
• writing to win approval of the workshop members and the instructor (“Concern over mimicking others’ style instead of just going with my own style/voice”)
• the need to compete. Hemingway himself, jealous of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s success, regularly disparaged his former friend in his stories and novels.

Joining a fiction workshop myself confirmed all these benefits and hazards. With deadlines, I did produce and polish new stories. But when the other writers nitpicked (“Huh? Why would a woman who meets her lover in motels have ‘a swell collection of little soaps’?”) and failed to appreciate the subtleties of my precious stories, I left the group as soon as I gracefully could. And when each story was published, I thought, ha, I guess I showed you — an angry gloating I do not wish to encourage in myself.

Perhaps my own experience and my awareness of hazards allow me to lead workshops without hypocrisy. My students suggest:

• setting ground rules
• showing appropriate ways to offer critiques
• “just growing through the process in an atmosphere of support”
• “deciding to ‘chill’ and simply write what I know”
• “Taking risks. Going for broke.”

Perhaps the best thing workshoppers can do is take each other seriously. They respect each other, the impulse to write, and themselves. They encourage and honor individuality, knowing that voice and their separate, wonderfully strange approaches are at the heart of fresh, lively writing.

Don’t ask why I’ve just agreed to write a poem in public. As part of a literary celebration next month, thirty writers will be given a topic and ten minutes. Our efforts-in-progress will be screened live for viewers’ amusement.

Looking like a fool is a risk when writing goes public — but a risk worth taking. Whatever Hemingway believed, classes and workshops can improve the writing and ease the isolation.

For me, though, the real stuff happens behind closed doors. It’s between me and my #2 pencil.

And we love this loneliness.

****

Meg is a traveler and a year after the Australia exchange, she took another trip–this time to the Galapagos Islands with her sisters, who are visual artists. After the trip, the three published a book of poems, photos, and watercolors inspired by what they experienced. More on that next week.