This semester I've been able to experience first hand what a Writing Center tutorial can do for creative writing as well as academic. It's like having a 40 minute long, hyper focused editorial workshop. You have more opportunity to talk about what you're trying to do with the piece, how your characters are being set up, language and tone, and so on. Unlike a small group workshop, you are able to really focus on just your writing for 40 minutes, and on the specific aspects of it that you want to touch on.
However, in their panel on Writing Centers and Creative Writers, this group of students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln were struggling with how Writing Center tutors could best serve creative writers. They didn't know how to balance letting the writer maintain ownership over the piece while also working to motivate the writer to make changes. They noted how much more personal creative writing feels from academic writing, and that these tutees were much more invested in their pieces emotionally.
What they decided on was twofold. First they would work as individual tutors to establish a higher level of trust and rapport with these tutees before the actual tutoring session. That way, if constructive criticism was offered it wouldn't be taken personally by the student. They also established genre specific writing groups where tutors acted more as the facilitators than actual members. They noted that this kept the students writing, because they were accountable to another group of people that would expect them to share come meeting time. This established a separate community of writers that they could gain suggestions from, but it did not have the authoritative feel that the tutees felt was present in a formal writing center session.
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