The Writing Workshop Note Book is devoted to making, remaking, and remarking on writing. Animated by a concern about how we relate to our own and others' writing and by a desire to have a felicitous effect on the reader's experience with writing and critiquing�and supported by his experience from decades of leading writing workshops�Ziegler has the following goals for this book:

1) It will be useful if you are taking (or thinking of taking) a writing workshop.
2) It will benefit workshop teachers.
3) It will be a helpful companion to a solitary writer, who can be thought of as a "workshop of one."
4) It will be pleasant to read!

While this book does focus on the workshop experience, it is impossible to truly explore the workshop without dealing with the heart that sustains the workshop's brain: the act of creation. Thus, Part One is concerned with the work that leads to the drafts on the workshop table, and Part Two emphasizes what happens around the table while these drafts are critiqued. The two Parts are not discrete: the issues in Part One often occupy workshop discussion.Teachers of writing do not open up cans of lectures; pedagogy in workshops gets doled out in brief exegeses, organized opportunistically as the work comes across the table. Ziegler replicates this process by arranging the material into notes, which the reader can absorb sequentially or alight on as he flips through the pages.

Alan Ziegler received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University, where he is Professor of Writing. From 2001 to 2006 he served as Chair of the School of the Arts Writing Division and from 1988-2001 as Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing. He is currently Director of Pedagogy, and his courses include the Writer as Teacher seminar. Ziegler has also taught extensively for Teachers & Writers Collaborative, where he was Writers Coordinator. He has worked with students of all ages and levels, and his two previous Writing Workshop books have influenced generations of writing teachers and students throughout the country. He is the founder and advisor for Columbia Artist/Teachers (CA/T), which has programs with more than a dozen institutions.

Ziegler's other books include The Swan Song of Vaudeville: Tales and Takes<, The Green Grass of Flatbush (stories), and So Much to Do (poems). He was co-editor/publisher of Some literary magazine and Release Press. His work has appeared in such publications as the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and his awards include the Word Beat Fiction Book Award (selected by George Plimpton), a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and four PEN-NEA Syndicated Fiction Awards.

Why Bother?

Writing can be such a bother, so why bother? You wouldn't have this book in your hands if you really needed a detailed answer, but it never hurts to remind ourselves:

We write because there are stories we must tell, or because we must tell stories.

We write to remember; we write to forget.

We write to create something that wasn't there before; we write to re-create (and likely transform) something that was.

We write for sheer pleasure: the pen gliding, halting, then gliding again across the page; the clicking of keys projecting words on the screen; the typewriter ribbon palpating the paper. Boris Pasternak describes his early work: "To write those poems, to cross out, revise, and correct them and then rewrite them again, was something that I felt to be an absolute necessity and gave me immense pleasure that brought me to the verge of
tears."

We write for the sense of a healing pain, the pain of a massage on a sore muscle. As Aristotle says, "Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity."

We write to move the reader in the heart and mind, or to change the reader in some way�if only to imbue greater appreciation for the moon or a cup of coffee.

We write to be called a bastard: I once sent a book of my poetry to an old friend, who responded to one of my "lost love" poems with a note saying, "Jesus, I thought I was over her. The memories you stirred with that poem..." He closed with, "You bastard." It pleased me "to the verge of tears."

Yes, writing has its pitfalls and pratfalls. Dorothy Parker (among others) has been quoted as saying that she hates writing but loves having written. I was a bit milder when I used to tell classes (thinking I was the first),"I don't always like writing, but I love having written." Now, more and more, I cherish the act of writing as its own reward. I try not to focus on the value of my creations so much that I lose touch with the joy of creation. The opinions of others and the occasional attendant perks remain coveted, but are not essential.

Now I can say that I write because I love writing, even if I don't always like what I have written.