Savage but fair: Surviving a swank writing master class in Morocco

USA Today

4 days ago

Silk Road Slippers, a five-day writers workshop at a delicous Moroccan resort, was more scrivener's boot camp than a luxurious path to self-discovery.
MARRAKECH, Morocco – It's morning under the Atlas Mountains and publishing legend Alexandra Pringle is taking a savage blue pencil to a very nice paragraph.
At least I thought it was a very nice paragraph.
But no. It's actually a mess – jumbled, ineffective – and Pringle, former editor-in-chief at Bloomsbury Publishing in London, strikes down my wan offering with a single sentence before moving on to the next willing victim.
It's obvious, just one day into this weeklong writing workshop, that we're in the hands of professionals – three glamorous, erudite killers who've had a hand in some of the biggest and most interesting books of the last 40 years.
Pringle runs the master classes with historian and broadcaster Alex von Tunzelmann ("Fallen Idols", "Indian Summer") and Faiza Khan, a former editor-at-large at Random House, packing the plummiest accent this side of Downton Abbey. They're a formidable team – humane, perceptive, politely unsparing.
The outfit, called Silk Road Slippers, holds four master classes a year at a delicious resort hotel outside Marrakech, each featuring a different heavyweight lecturer, including winners of the Nobel, Booker, Pulitzer and other literary prizes. My session was graced by novelist Alan Hollinghurst ("The Line of Beauty"). Esther Freud, Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah , Monica Ali and Andrew O'Hagan have all given attendees a bracing taste of how it's really done.
The classes are very much open to new writers. Many at the session I attended earlier this year were already in the writing game, some with published books. But Silk Road Slippers wasn't created with literary pros in mind, von Tunzelmann says.
Among those gathered under the palms at the workshop's long outdoor table placed near an outdoor fireplace to ward off the morning chill were an architect, a publicist and a counselor. Silk Road Slippers has hosted newbies who'd spent their professional lives in business, medicine, and law.
Scrivener's boot camp
The Jnane Tamsna boutique hotel, created by French attorney Meryanne Loum-Martin (whose life would fill a page-turner) and her American ethnobotanist husband Gary Martin, was the swanky backdrop to a week of grinding mental labor. The Morocco location makes Silk Road Slippers accessible to writers from Asia, Africa and Latin America who may not care for the process of getting a visa to Europe and the United States. (U.S. passport-holders travel to Morocco visa-free.)
Despite the sumptuous trappings – the palms, the book-lined bar, the (five!) swimming pools – Silk Road Slippers is more scrivener's boot camp than a luxurious path to self-discovery. The days are filled with short writing exercises, with each hastily written passage read aloud by the author and then critiqued by Pringle, Khan and von Tunzelmann.
Writers are drilled in dialogue, setting, action, perspective – a crash course in substance and style.
In a revealing assignment, attendees were asked to write a fictional third-person scene with themselves as the protagonist. As with the other drills, the results ranged from middling (that was mine) to quite good. There wasn't a bad pen among the nine women and two men who were my classmates.
But none topped Booker Prize-winner Hollinghurst, who turned out, in the same 15 minutes as the rest of us, a richly cinematic scene placing the fictional character of Alan Hollinghurst in a tricky social encounter fraught with manners, ego, and ambition.
Just like something out of a novel.
Anyone can play
Years ago, U.S. literary wags spilled barrels of ink over the question of MFA vs. NYC, shorthand for two paths to creating a life as a novelist: the formal structure of a master's in fine arts degree, with its ready-made community and the tutelage of established teacher-mentors, or the (relatively) hard-knock life of apprenticing oneself to the New York publishing industry and living, loving, losing in the real world, with all the bruises to show for it.
Nobody was talking about this kind of thing in Marrakech. I had no idea where anyone went to school, or what credentials they may have held. Every person there was taking a leap of some kind to learn alongside – and expose themselves to – a group of discerning strangers.
There was no shortage of work. There were tears, and support among new friends. Some writing samples were raw and personal, but that was no protection from our instructors and the feedback born from their editorial instincts:
'There's too much specificity. You're putting the kitchen sink in there.'
'It's just awful. It's explanatory. It's telling us what to think.'
'There's nothing more boring than other people's dreams.'
By the end of the week, each participant had completed a passage of at least 1,000 words to be assessed in an hourlong consultation with one of our three guides.
I drew Pringle, and I've never had a more rewarding or discombobulating conversation about writing. Despite having two nonfiction books and decades of journalism to my name, Pringle pointed me to the far riskier path of literary fiction.
That gets to the heart of why even a published author might want to spend time and money on a workshop like Silk Road Slippers and why it holds so much potential benefit for newcomers. This is solitary work, and trying out your craft with trusted peers and masters of different ages and walks of life can be – as I found – a rejuvenating literary shot in the arm.