Beyond the Writers' Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction

by Carol Bly

An innovative new approach to teaching and writing creative nonfiction from veteran teacher and critically acclaimed author Carol Bly.

Teachers and writers everywhere are facing the limits imposed by the prevailing models of community or MFA “workshops” or, at the high-school level, “peer review.” In Beyond the Writers' Workshop Carol Bly presents an alternative. She believes that
workshopping’s tendency to engage in wry scorn and pay exaggerated attention to technical details, causes apprentice writers, consciously or unconsciously, to modify their most passionate work.

Inspired by a philosophy of individuality and moral rigor, Bly combines ideas and techniques from social work, psychotherapy, and neuroscience with the traditional teaching of fresh metaphor, salient dialogue, lively pace, and analysis of other literary work in her pioneering new approach. She also includes exercises and examples in an extensive practical appendix.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Education

400 pages, Paperback

First published April 17, 2001

Reviews

[William Schram · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like books that do what they say on the cover, and Beyond the Writer's Workshop is one of them. Carol Bly doles out tips on improving your writing.

Bly focuses on creative nonfiction. It's how you write when you make a diary entry or talk about how your Summer Vacation went. She fills the pages with good ideas. For example, if you want to write better, you have to read amazing writing. After all, writing is a skill, and you can only do so much when you are limited to your own experiences.

The book might improve your writing if you follow the advice contained within. It discusses drawbacks to the American public education system, too. Given how they have one teacher for every forty students, those teachers are miracle workers of the highest order. So the problem is Congress and how they don't like education. I'm not sure if this is still true, but I can't imagine the state of education changing so quickly.

Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.

[giao · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carol Bly examines the current education system presented to us by the U.S. government and truthfully states the detrimental negligence for the future of education in America. Statistical, psychological, social, and behavioral developments are presented about the surveyed youth and adults, from the grade school viewpoint to the graduate school level and experiential level. The best part of this book is that most of it compels a student to search for ways to learn when they are in an classroom that is being taught by a careless teacher. She gives critical and structural feedback, and exercises for ways to think rather than what to think, noting that all scientific and creative processes are important. It is not only a book great for those who want to write creative fiction or non- fiction, but for anyone who wants to be a good teacher, student, artist, historian, and scientist.
A good book to read over and over and over again.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I want to like this book and hoped to find the exercises energizing, but it is difficult to get past Bly's moralizing and her obscure phrasing. For someone who wants writers to dig deeper and get past all that awful media stimuli, she sure has a lot of rules, and she isn't very good at articulating them. Ironically, I recognize some of these techniques from writers' workshops I've attended, and found them useful, mainly because they were stripped of all of this book's judgmental editorializing. Her tone is patronizing and her instructions subjective. Ultimately, I am disappointed.

[Julie M · Rating 2 out of 5]

opinionated, gutsy writer - died in '08; from St. Paul, a heroine among writers/teachers at the Loft. She uses odd sentence structure to get her points across, and sometimes her references are rather obscure, to me.

[Rebecca · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found it elitist and insulting most of the way through. Don't waste your time or money.

[http://www.kirylinsvoice.com/2007/02/...]

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cranky, but I don't mind cranky. Lots of counterpoints to conventional workshop wisdom. A good read for creative writing teachers, even if you disagree with her approach.

[Sarah LaFleur · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a drag for me. I picked it up to fulfill a requirement for school for a craft book on creative nonfiction. The only piece that I found useful or interesting was the beginning where Bly discusses psychological approaches to writing creative nonfiction. The rest of the book was riddled with so much of her bias and contempt and instructions for teaching creative nonfiction, which I found very bizarre as this is a book listed as how to write, not teach, creative nonfiction. Overall I found it stuffy and confining.

[Angbeen · Rating 3 out of 5]

pretty good! has some very useful and interesting advice + tips, useful writing exercises etc. however, i don't feel like i got a lot of the 'beyond' of the beyond the writers' workshop - a lot of this was kinda just critquing the writers' workshop and how it operates + talking about building resilience as a writer. all fine things to say but it doesn't give you much by way of alternate models or ways of doing that. which is ok! but meant i felt a bit like i was skimming through a lot of what just felt like her Opinions

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was enormously useful to me when I was choosing a MFA program, and again when I began teaching creative writing. Though Carol Bly has a few axes to grind, her grinding makes surprisingly interesting reading. The sections on writing exercises, ethical issues, and the elements of a good writing workshop are excellent.

[Joan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just don't think Bly is much of a writer, sorry. Much too didactic and full of unnecessary jargon. Occasionally, though, there were flashes of insight that I appreciated, which got me through most of the book.

[Dolly]

not what I had hoped for...

[Liz Harmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is invigorating and uncompromising in its ethos and in how morality intersects with writing and teaching writing.