Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things: Patterns, Poetry... [Paperback]

Richard P. Gabriel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 2002

For more than 100 years, Writers' Workshops have offered writers deep and generous insights into their own work: insights that have helped them improve, and often inspired them to take their work in exciting new directions. Recently, technical, scientific, and business professionals have also discovered the immense value of the Writers' Workshop format in solving their creative problems. Now, an experienced leader and participant shows how Writers' Workshops work -- and how they can help everyone from poets to software architects. Richard P. Gabriel considers the Writers' Workshop as process, ritual, and experience. He explains what conditions are required to make it work, how to run one, how to participate in one, how to survive one -- and how to use it to further your own work. In the first section of the book, Gabriel introduces a model of writing and the writing process, illuminating the commonalities between writing and other forms of creative expression, such as software development. Next, he draws on the experiences of participants to illuminate every aspect of the Writers' Workshop, including preparation and setting, the author's reading, shepherding, summarization, positive feedback, suggestions for improvement, clarification, and revisions. Work in Progress introduces the Writers' Workshop to a wide new audience, including: new writers who want to improve fast; veteran workshoppers; technical people and scientists; businesspeople seeking to improve collateral material and presentations; and software practitioners.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"Richard Gabriel explains clearly and thoughtfully why and how the workshop approach can methodically enhance individual vision through communal creativity. Poets, come down from your lonely garrets! Programmers, emerge from your cubicles! Read this book. Your friends can help you and your art may be the better for it."

—Guy L. Steele Jr., Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

"This comprehensive guide to the practice is packed with anecdotes and examples, entertaining reading threaded with lots of useful, practical information. I think it's destined to be an indispensable sourcebook for creators of all kinds, regardless of their fields."

—Janet Holmes, MFA Program for Writers, Boise State University, author of Humanophone

"After reading this book I'm eager to fully experience workshopping and see what the process really can bring to me and to others. Gabriel's extension of the workshop format to refining other types of work sets the wheels spinning for me. How many other 'things that need refinement' can benefit from the same treatment?"

—Kent Beck, Director, Three Rivers Institute

"Richard Gabriel writes with insight, experience, and a wry sense of humor that casts light on this little explored creative activity and kept me reading from the first page to the last."

—Richard Schmitt, author of The Aerialist

The writers' workshop provides creative writers with a time-tested teaching and revision tool, and business and technical professionals with a new and effective alternative to impersonal peer reviews and scientific workshops. In this intense, interactive, gift-based forum, writers help each other hone their craft and improve individual pieces of work.

Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things describes in detail how to conduct and participate in a successful creative or technical workshop. You will learn from the author's own struggles, as well as from the collective experience of the software patterns and creative writing communities.

Topics include:

Origins of the writers' workshop

How the workshop works

The nature of creative work

Workshop players and settings

Workshop preparation

The author's initial presentation

Restating and summarizing the work

Providing positive feedback

Suggestions for improvements

The author's response and revision

Whether you write poems, short stories, documentation, or software, the collective energy of a writers' workshop can significantly enhance innovation, clarity, and effectiveness in your writing. Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things will help you get the most from a workshop experience.

020172183XB05312002

About the Author

Poet and computer scientist Richard P. Gabriel, Ph.D., M.F.A., introduced the writers' workshop to the software patterns community. He is the author of Patterns of Software (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Performance and Evaluation of Lisp Systems (MIT Press, 1985). His poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines.

020172183XAB05312002

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Pearson Education; 1st edition (June 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 020172183X
• ISBN-13: 978-0201721836
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,398,464 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The magic of the PLoP conferences, revealed, July 15, 2002

By 

Kyle G. Brown (Apex, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things: Patterns, Poetry... (Paperback)

Every fall, just after school starts, some of the finest minds in object-oriented programming depart for an extraordinary conference in an improbable location. Held at a turn of the century mansion hidden among the corn fields of central Illinois, the PLoP (Pattern Languages of Programs) conference is one of those rare, magical events where everything you know about the way the software world works is turned on its head.

Instead of "acolytes" gathering around the feet of the "master" to hear the same talk that he gives at every other conference, experienced folks like Richard Gabriel, Ralph Johnson, Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham sit and give personalized advice about how the patterns and pattern languages written by first-time authors can be improved and strengthened. It's a place where you might find out one of your dinner companions has written four books on OO design and speaks at conferences twelve times a year, while the other is a new graduate student just getting started in the field.

How does this occur? And why do people keep coming back year after year? The key is in the primary innovation of this conference -- bringing the notion of an Author's Workshop to computer science. Richard Gabriel is the person who introduced that idea to the computer science community, and he writes lucidly and joyfully about the wonder and the terror of Author's workshops in this delightfully agreeable little book.

In this volume, Richard describes how the Author's workshop came out of the creative writing and poetry community, and provides a roadmap for carrying out a writer's workshop. He describes the benefits of the process, and gives sage advice to the participants in such workshops. He draws his stories and examples from his varied experiences in workshops in both communities (software and literature) and explains why such an unlikely way of doing things has come to be so valued and cherished by the software patterns community.

So, if you've wondered why people in the software patterns community are so set on the way they run their conferences, read this book and you'll understand why. But that's not the only value; reading this book can give you insight into how to improve your own writing in any genre, and how to marshall the resources of your communities to improve the quality of your work. I'm hooked on this process, and I'm delighted that I finally have something to refer people to so that I can share some of the magic of this unconventional way of teaching, and learning.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Guide to the Creative Process, December 6, 2002

By 

Steve Berczuk (Arlington, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things: Patterns, Poetry... (Paperback)

This is a unique book. It tells you about the writers workshop
process. The writers workshop process has its origins in the creative
writing community, and has been used in the software patterns
community. Richard Gabriel explains how the process can also be used
in other domains where creative effort is involved, such as reviewing
marketing materials. I book for two reasons. First it provide great
insight into the creative process (as applied to anything) and the
values that are used in the writers workshop can benefit anyone who
creates things, even if they don't use the workshop process. Second,
if you do want to use writers workshops, this book explains the hows
and whys of them. I had been involved in workshopping software
patterns since 1995, and I though that I pretty much understood what
they were about. I learned a lot reading this book. <br/>

I recommend this book for anyone who involved in the creative
process(of any sort): Software engineers, writers, teachers, and
students.

5.0 out of 5 stars A demonstration that writing code is a form of creative writing, April 30, 2008

By 

Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things: Patterns, Poetry... (Paperback)

If you are a programmer, attending a writer's workshop may not be an event on your list of things to do, as you probably do not consider yourself a writer. And yet, if you are a developer on a widely used piece of software, the consequences of what you write may be seen by more people than read the material of all but the most popular of authors. Furthermore, despite all efforts to quantify and qualify software development as a branch of engineering, it remains a creative act, and the code of the best developers is similar to poetry. It reads like a great sonnet, with a rhythm and flow that impresses and teaches you.
Furthermore, software development is more than just creating code, there are associated documentation and help files to be written. While substantial improvement in the quality of user's manuals has been made over the past several years, much of it is still abysmal. Therefore, if I were to be named the manager of a large software project, I would require the complete set of documentation writers to attend a writer's workshop that follows the guidelines put forward in this book. Gabriel describes in complete detail how to manage such events so that everyone is exposed to the gentle, yet firm and complete form of criticism so necessary to good writing. He is certainly a rare individual, a combination poet and computer scientist, and he has introduced the concept of a writer's workshop to the software patterns community. Gabriel is clearly also a talented expository writer, as the explanations are an excellent combination of memoir interspersed with instruction.
His experience in facilitating and attending such workshops shows a depth of background and understanding that exudes confidence in this form of training for designers. It is clear to me that everyone in a software project who writes something permanent can benefit from a workshop, and that includes the programmers. The most difficult hurdle in making such workshops a success is handling the problems of fragile egos, passionate beliefs in a system, insecurities and overly harsh criticism. Gabriel describes circumstances where he has been the witness to and recipient of criticism that is beyond the normal bounds considered to be constructive. This experience is put down in great detail and used as a backdrop for instructions on how to make the workshop process as egoless and constructive as possible.
After I thought about if for some time, it was clear that a poet is an ideal person to teach developers about writing. For a poet must write with great clarity, brevity and purpose, for even the best poem can be weakened by one or two inappropriate words, a fact that Gabriel mentions using a couple of examples. Programs too, must also be written to such specifications, and even the best programs can be rendered into lawsuit fodder by a few incorrect statements. Poems are also constructed using abstractions and metaphor, the very foundations of modern programming techniques.
Finally, the best advice that Gabriel gives about writing is the best advice that anyone striving for success can receive. He attributes it to golfer Jack Nicklaus, but in fact different versions have been uttered by many people, few of which are athletes. The story is that after Nicklaus made a very difficult shot, a (ignorant) spectator told him how lucky he was to have made that shot. The tart response from Nicklaus was that his luck always seemed to improve the more he practiced. Writer's workshops are fundamentally an act of directed practice, which is the best there is. Anyone who writes anything more permanent than grocery lists can benefit from a properly run workshop and in this book Gabriel shows you how to organize and execute a successful one.

Published in Journal of Object Technology, reprinted with permission