Jacob Miller's Studio Workshop

After you've spent enough time thinking about your potential, try thinking about the potential of the language. The question shouldn't be - What can I do? - but - What can the language do?

In the process of writing it happens, from time to time, that we spill our guts on the page. The trick of revision is to learn to view our guts on the page as if they were the guts of another.

Both of the above statements offer open doors to reducing the distraction of Self in the process of writing, meant to objectify our evaluation of our own work and learn to view all characters as dramatis personae to be worked with. A side benefit is also the reduction of defensiveness to nurturing critiques that may offer a new way of viewing the work to the writer. This is but one of the approaches that has emerged from the studio Workshop and had helped to improve the caliber of the work being generated by students and also help to maintain the supportive quality of group critique.

The Studio Workshop has been operating for over a decade as by invitation only series that has handpicked promising authors who also happen to be good people, who understand the importance of nurturing colleagues and remembering, as Yeats put it, that our most important arguments are with ourselves. Much time is spent reviewing fundamentals or key components of the craft of writing. such that critiques need not linger in responding to Content, but should push into the technical territory that triggers a reader's response to such things as Dialogue, Imagery, Time Framing, Pacing or Internal Reflections, just to name the few.