In our first of two readings for our 10/18/11 class, we read from Chapter Six of Dianne Donnelly’s “Does the Writing Workshop Still Work?” In reading this chapter, I noticed a lot of hangups that I currently face in my writing workshops. The lack of focus on audience, losing the audience in your writing. Donnelly quotes Walter J. Ong in saying that “There is no need for a novelist to feel his ‘audience’ in this way at all, meaning that we shouldn’t envision an audience before us as we write. As I writer, I have this stipulation to my writing. I went from writing in a classroom setting with structures and rules about how to write to a Creative Writing class where I was supposed to write “freely.” But do we ever write freely anymore? In regards to being a Creative Writing majors in a department focused on our success as writers in a “writing world.” Donnelly uses Ede and Lunsford’s to say that her assignments, at first glance (Donnelly 101), focus on the addressing of the audience rather than the invoking of them. Meaning that as Creative Writing teachers we must teach our students to write as if they were the reader and envision the story as that. We shouldn’t write competitively like many classes in Creative Writing do. We should write as if we were the reader of that very story. In the conclusion of this chapter, Donnelly suggests something many of us don’t think about, writing our stories as if they were to appear in publication. Basically, allowing ourselves an opportunity to feel that type of story developing in our heads, as if it were to appear on the glossy pages of the New Yorker or even the Writer’s Chronicle…..
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