Since leaving my full-time position at the Dramatists Guild, I've been doing more and more of my freelance teaching online. And it's got me thinking about the ways in which meeting a group of folks for a class or a creative collaboration in video conference as opposed to in person brings new challenges but also unique advantages to the creative work. At first, of course, I chose to offer workshops online via Zoom out of necessity. In order to make myself available to a greater world of artists seeking my help, I needed to cast the net beyond my own zip code. Organizing writing workshops through Zoom has allowed me to reach more writers living in a wide variety of cities and towns across the country. I knew there would be a trade-off, of course. Meeting online is not the same as meeting in person. But the added value of gathering creative folk from all corners to co-mingle and learn from their shared experience seemed like a worthy tradeoff.
What I failed to understand at first, was just how many additional benefits the online forum could bring to this undertaking. Not only in building a sense of community among workshop participants but just as vividly, in the qualitative improvement I've observed in the writing of most workshop members. Why might this be the case?
Some possible answers:
- We are still hard-wired to want to connect in person so the artifice of talking to and listening to a person's moving image in a rectangular box on your computer screen imposes a formality on the interaction which often results in everyone getting down to business more quickly, with more specificity and more consistently as they work their way through creative problem-solving.
- In many writing workshops, the work is read aloud in workshop. But because play reading demands eye-contact among those reading the various parts and that is not something the online environment lends itself to well, I've instead organized my online scriptwriter workshops to require reading of all pages in advance. As a result the workshop members arrive having read the play that's to be discussed and all participants therefore arrive with ideas they'd like to share. The result is: each member of the group gets to know everyone else more fully through the specific issues they raise about one another's writing. Responding to a play 5 min. after first having heard it read aloud is not the same as responding to a play you read a couple days ago and have been turning around and around in your head.
- The Zoom videoconferencing platform allows for each session to be recorded. Writers hearing feedback on a first draft of a new full-length, for example, are thus freed of the burden of furious note taking and can just listen and respond to feedback spontaneously, knowing that the video of the feedback session will be waiting for them whenever they want to return to it for review.
- Because "meeting" in the online world requires little more than setting an agreed-upon day and time and logging on, teaching a writers workshop this way allows me to assign individual group members paired one-on-one feedback assignments, which they are free to complete on their own schedules. The fact that every group member engages with every other group member at least once in a one-on-one private feedback session helps to deepen trust and cohesion of the group. Trusting in a mutual respect and a curiosity about every other member's work and a sincere focused desire to make the work as good as it can be is essential to a transformative workshop experience.
I recently hosted an online conversation about Songwriting Collaboration online, something I've just started experimenting with in the National Songwriting Circle which I lead for the Dramatists Guild Institute. In this workshop, a group of lyricists and composers from all across the country are paired up (in rotation) for songwriting assignments which they complete in two weeks and then share online in workshop for feedback from the entire group.
I build the assignments to utilize the Zoom platform specifically in a step-by-step manner which I hope is encouraging collaborators to zero in on specific decisions that are made in the writing of any song. Again, by meeting online via Zoom, participants have the benefit of being able to return to saved video for review.
Here's a link to the video conversation I hosted on April 16th. During the 50 min. conversation, I referenced a list of Questions to Ask and Answer When Collaborating on Songwriting. The complete list can be found in a recent post of mine to Music Think Tank.
For more information on my online teaching schedule or to apply for upcoming workshops, click here.
