Dipping a Toe into Workshopping

by Mike Cooper

We’re finishing up the generative phase of The Forge 2025-26. Our Smithys are freewriting to music, then organizing and revising and sharing with their peers for feedback and revision. We’ve given each other some feedback so far, especially in our discussions on the Discord channels, and now we’ll dip our toes into the process of workshopping.

And why workshop?

Hemingway said, “The only writing is rewriting.”

John Updike said, “Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.”

E.B. White said, “The best writing is rewriting.”

Dorothy Parker said, “I would write a book or a short story, at least three times—once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.”

Roald Dahl said, “Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.”

Workshopping is an important step in the rewriting/revising/editing process. We generally know what we mean when we write something down. We understand all the thoughts and feelings that our characters have because we are who we are—we project all our life experiences onto the page, whether we fully understand them or not. We know what it felt like when Aunt Marge squoze our faces into her ample breasts at Thanksgiving, and that later we would be an accomplice in getting Auntie Marge a little more of the brown liquid from the bottle with the picture of the turkey on the front—which smelled a lot like her perfume—and that it would be “our little secret,” and how we were thrilled and frightened by “breaking the rules” and how our illicit collusion made us feel “grown up.” But if we just say, “I/he/she/they got Aunt Marge some more bourbon,” our reader doesn’t get the full nuance of the moment—and how it has/will affect our character’s thoughts and decisions.

So our readers are there to give us feedback. Feedback is saying, “This is what I see. Is that what you meant?” And we either say “Yes” or “Sort of” or “No, not at all,” and we go back to the page to clarify our intention.

Another great aspect of workshopping is that we get to apply our critical analysis skills to other people’s work. And in doing that, we can’t help but compare it to our own work. We therefore learn to avoid areas that we find don’t work so well in our peers’ writing, and to apply the things that we think do work well to our own work.

Let's Get Cracking with Metaphor

Irene Cooper | November 4, 2025

But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

                                                                   Aristotle, "Poetics," 1459a 3-8, via etymonline.com  

No shade to Aristotle, but I have to question the master’s definitiveness. (Also, his attachment to so-called ‘genius,’ which many a working writer understands to be less useful to her writing than plain persistence—but that’s another blog for another time.)

I have no quibble with describing metaphor as an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars. That’s money. It is, too, the focus of week three at The Forge creative writing program—how a curious and masterful use of metaphor can make one’s writing sing, and why this kind of resonance isn’t just for the poets.

Common Ground, Creative Tension

Years ago, in a workshop focused on imagery, the instructor asked us students to go deep with our observations of the world, to find meaning—or more precisely, feeling—in material and movement. A writer in our cohort wound up comparing a heartbreak to the cracking of an egg three rooms away—nearly unhearable, profoundly irreversible. A heart is not an egg. (Heck, the valved and bloody heart is not even the heart of heartbreak.) In comparing what is dissimilar, however, the writer brought to our attention what is—or could be, if we let it—common to a heart and an egg, and oh, so poignantly. (I’m still a little mad about how good that metaphor was.)

In literary and working writer discussions of metaphor, the energy that comes from this combination of similar and dissimilar is called ground and tension. Like the notion of superposition in quantum physics, it’s easier to let it wash over your brain than to try to pin it down. Here’s the thing: the body gets it. The comparison doesn’t require perfect symmetry to thrum. When we students collectively gasped at the notion of the distant cracking of an egg, it was our bodies that responded—to the sound, faint as faint can be, and to the mind’s eye image of the broken perfection of the shell, never to be the same. The ground: the egg and the (already metaphorical) heart as vulnerable vessels; the tension: the heart, unlike the egg, will, in all likelihood, recover.

Breaking Down the Big Ideas into Piquant Canapés of Feeling

Why compare at all? Well, as we (me, sometimes) say at The Forge, we turn to metaphor because Abstractions Are Often a Big Unmarked Rubbermaid Bin Taking Up Space in Your Text, Holding the Things You Really Want to Say. Metaphor in creative writing helps the mind make sense of the body by speaking directly through the senses. Sure, we can write, “The old man was lonely after his wife died,” and we will have said it in way that can be understood. Or, we can say “The man let out a little moan each time he opened the closet door and heard the hollow clacking of the empty hangers on his wife’s side,” and readers will have felt lonely in their bones (specifically those tiny bones in their mind’s ear, where those clacking hangers will continue to echo).

I’ll be eager in the coming week to talk about how the homework went, as it includes a close read of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Left Omelas,” and an assignment to write an original allegory—an extended metaphor, or as I like to think of it, a metaphor with a mandate. Nobody knew better than Le Guin: you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an Omelas.  

And We're Off!

Ellen Santasiero | October 2025

Photo by Oliver Sjöström: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-holding-black-backpack-1223649/

"The thrill of our first class was revealing myself and beginning to see myself as a writer before such supportive, talented people.” –2025 Forge student

In my twenties, I sailed off the coast of Maine as a student on an intensive Outward Bound course. On the first day, I felt so nervous as we hauled life jackets and oars and kitted out the boats because I didn’t know what to expect of the program. Could I do everything required of me? Would I make it? Or would I have to bail?

During the Forge’s first class last Saturday, I was reminded of that day in Maine because I imagined our new cohort of creative writing students may have been feeling nervous, too. After all, every intensive course is designed to coax people out of their comfort zone so they can achieve a higher level of mastery.

We started with an easy ice breaker for introductions, just like we did at Outward Bound, except in the Forge class we learned about grammar pet peeves, GI Joes, swimming with jellyfish, and that some people, apparently, hold strong positions on the matter of top sheets.

Because we believe that the best writers possess skills in critical analysis, we asked students to start building these skills by reacting to short readings we’d sent them in advance. To calm any existing jitters, we invited them to sit in small Zoom breakout rooms so they could test out their responses with one or two others before sharing in the larger group.

Back in the main Zoom room, we were pleased to hear their comments on point of view and word pairings, and questions about titling and structure. We heard several students point out how a poet played with language and syntax, another student admire the conciseness of a two-sentence short story, and another say how listening in the breakout room helped them understand the readings in new ways.

The best part, always, of any Forge class, is when students read their writing out loud. For this first meeting, we asked them to read a 500-word piece they are especially proud of. For some, this is a big, scary step, but we can flex to meet students where they are (much like my Outward Bound instructor, who, when I announced that I would only be doing the lower portion of the ropes course, just looked at me said, “OK”). Our rationale them to read on day one? They begin to build confidence in performing their own work, and we all get to hear each writer’s voice.

Throughout, there were appearances, planned and unplanned, by pets, including one student’s magical, disappearing dog. I held my terrier up to the camera and presented all sides of him for no apparent reason, not even to me.

As for that ropes course, once I got done with the lower portion and it was time to climb to the higher level, I saw that it would be awkward for me to come down, and that the next platform up didn’t look so high anymore. I was still nervous, but I climbed up. I climbed up and up until I finished the ropes course. I felt pretty good about myself then.

I could say more about the Outward Bound analogy, but I won’t, except for the fact that by the end of that program, I had got over my nerves, and achieved way more than I thought I could.

I’m confident that our Forge students will, too.