I am in no away ashamed of that title.
The Milford system is a widely used workshop critique system, used in settings as varied as Iowa’s MFA program and the Clarion workshops for SFF writers. The system itself is pretty simple. You read material beforehand, then the readers, one by one, give a critique uninterrupted by anyone other than the moderator. After all the critiques are done, the author is given a chance to respond. The intent is to reduce conflict and make the work stand on its own. It obviously works for some people — the list of Clarion graduates, for example, contains many of the field’s most celebrated writers. I just don’t understand how.
First, I should point out that I am far from the first person to critique this method. S.L. Huang (you should read the Water Outlaws, by the way) has written an excellent, comprehensive piece addressing many of the failings of the system from the point of view of POC and other minority authors. My complaint is similar but perhaps simpler: Milford misunderstands how many people learn and improve.
The Milford method not only minimizes conflict, it minimizes communication. Yes, I know that author is given a chance to respond and answer questions at the end, but that does not seem designed to foster real communication. The same rules apply — they speak and everyone else listens. The point of critiquing a work is to help the author write the best version of that work possible. How can you possibly be helpful if you aren’t talking to the person? If all you do is read the work then offer your opinion without giving the author a chance to discuss or explain what they were attempting to achieve, you have lost a critical component of any teaching relationship. Asking questions, probing assumptions, playing out possibilities — that kind of collaboration is much more helpful in a much shorter amount of time in my experience. Simply reading something and then, one by one, reading a report of what you did and did not like is not meaningful collaboration, in my mind.
I don’t find the argument that readers come to the work blind so critiquers should as well persuasive. Readers don’t come to books blind. They see ads, they read reviews, they see a book cover, they hear word of mouth, etc. They picked up that book because something about the chatter around it said, “this book looks interesting to me”. They may be wrong, the book may not speak to them, but they had some reason to believe it would before they opened the covers. Critiquers who do not have that same sense of expectation will likely not have the proper context to from a helpful opinion.
I much prefer collaboration, even when it can get uncomfortable. My work requires problem solving, a kind of creativity. When it is time to vet the solutions we have been working on, we do not sit idly around a table as our colleagues read off a dry report of that they think works and does not. We talk. We argue. We trade new ideas back and forth. We branch off into tangents that sometimes waste our time and sometimes solve the problem in a moment. But everything we produce is much better for that interplay, for the collaboration. Television writing rooms are often similar — the writers hash out the stories together, and then hash out the problems with the resulting scripts together.
There are, of course, problems with this method as well. You need to ensure that everyone is allowed to and feels comfortable speaking up. You need to ensure that no one is dismissed or that the arguments don’t turn personal. You need to ensure that no one or no group is allowed to sink the process into group think. I never said it was easy, but the rewards are worth it, in my opinion.
Again, maybe this is all nonsense. It does say Failed Writer’s Journey on the letterhead, after all. But I have participated in both methods. And being in a group where I can have a conversation, where I can say “No, I was trying to do X, would it help if I wrote it in A way to get that across better?” and play with that idea/character/structure with the group, where I can ask for the critiques to be focused on specific aspects of the story, where I can bounce ideas around with others, has made be a better writer in a way that the Milford method has not. Maybe not a good enough writer to be successful, but definitely better.
If the Milford system works for you, I am not suggesting you have to stop. But I am grateful that we are finally in a place where the idea that it is a superior, one size fits all route to better writing in being challenged. My brain works better bouncing against ideas, refining my own in iterative, interactive chunks. Writing, to me, is better when it is truly collaborative. And Milford simply is not collaborative in any meaningful sense.
Weekly Word Count
About a thousand. I tried out the first person POV for the new work I mentioned a couple weeks ago and the initial feedback was that it was not embarrassingly over the top, so I am going to keep plugging away at it once I am out of the hospital.