I’ve rambled before about workshop handouts as a structuring principle. I’m hoping these posts will gather into a bigger idea!
In the meantime: I’m continuing to think about handouts. This is driven by two considerations: confidence and personal convenience.
- Confidence, because I like knowing that whatever else happens in the workshop the participants will leave with A Thing.
- Convenience, because a functional, contained handout can take the place of a script — I can talk to the booklet and the slides.
It’s possible for handouts to take over a workshop, usually through quantity. But once an idea is strong enough, I think a useful handout choice can be felt — it starts to push back against the structure of the workshop plan and direct the flow into a physical, logical format. (It’s also a bit of a visual cue for timing.)
My current process:
- Worry for a while without writing. (This collects and distills what I already know.)
- Abruptly, put all thoughts in place on paper.
- Sketchy trial arrangements.
- Drop into actual format.
- Let prior thought and the boundaries of the page answer outstanding questions.
- Print and work with that format.
Here’s the process for the three-hour Australian Gothic Stories masterclass I gave at the Brisbane Writers Festival last weekend.
- In notebook:
- Drop all ideas onto a notebook page and then start roughing out an order. Is it a flowchart? Is it a mindmap? Is it a plan? None and all. (I’ve done this outlining process several times in the observation journal, doing rapid-fire designs of hypothetical workshops.
- Work out what might be a reasonable progression, and where whirlpools form. (Do description exercises belong in genre, ideation, writing, or editing? These questions can be solved by careful and then pragmatic thought — but the shape of the handout also suggests answers to the gnarlier problems.)
- (Doing this on paper highlights those little gnarls and feedback loops in a way working digitally doesn’t.)
- Consider format and scale.
- I’ve used a one-page table handout for related, smaller workshops, but it’s not an object on its own, and doesn’t give a lot of room for writing.
- What’s feasible? The zine format created a lovely reference guide for the map workshop, but it’s too small for this long a workshop.
- This needed something larger. A little A6 (or smaller) booklet is a very pleasing object, and harder to crush in a bag. But I wanted to workshop attendees to leave with a solid collection of reference imagery, techniques, ideas, structures, story treatments, and writing towards one of those stories, and that needed more page real-estate!
- Fold a blank A5 mockup, label sticky notes with topics/exercises, and rearrange them. I didn’t develop this step to a final layout. This exercise is mostly to (a) confirm this format should work and (b) get a physical feeling for the page size and limitations.
- Set up a document (I used InDesign) and continue the rearrangement there. Some workshop-order decisions are made at this stage, based on previous thought, yes, but also influenced by what sits on the opposite page. At this point I’d committed to the format. I was mostly going back and forth on whether it should be slightly too few pages (squashed) or slightly too many (a bit of extra writing room).
- Write on it in the workshop, as variations and timing adjustments suggest themselves — for example, there was a fun mini-exercise I added in because I thought the class would work well with it.
Kathleen Jennings 