Writers Workshop

Pre-Publication Version

Writers’ Workshops
& The Work of Making Things Richard P. Gabriel

New York Addison Wesley Longman 2002

For John P. Gabriel, builder and inventor, who gave up ambition to concentrate on life

Acknowledgements
I belong to two writers’ communities: the software patterns writers’ community which is eagerly creating a new—and new type of—literature in the world of computing and software, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers alumni, the Wallies. Each of these two communities is generous beyond anything xenia could predict and more than a modest writer like me deserves. If you are a writer, then you know what kind of communities these are, and if you aren’t, you can’t imagine the warmth, support, and generosity spawned by the work of trying to write what is impossible to write. When I asked these two communities about their thoughts on the writers’ workshop, I was flooded. Literally the size of my manuscript nearly doubled in length with the advice and stories I got, and the reminders of what I once knew but had forgotten. I would like to thank them first: Beth Thomas, Bob Hanmer, Bobby Woolf, Brian Marick, Bridget Balthrop Morton, Browning Porter, Bruce Anderson, Carolyn West, Dave West, Dawn O’Dell, Dirk Riehle, Don Olson, Faith Holsaert, Gerard Meszaros, Ian Wilson, James O. Coplien, James Reed, John Gribble, John LeTourneau, John Vlissides, Jutta Eckstein, Kathy Collisson, Ken Auer, Kent Beck, Klaus Marquardt, LaureAnne Bosselaar, Lauren Yaffe, Linda Rising, Mari Coates, Mark Solomon, Markus Völter, Martha Rhodes, Martha Carlson-Bradley, Margaret Kaufman, Neil Harrison, Norm Kerth, Priscilla Orr, Ralph Johnson, Rebecca Rikner, Richard Helms, Richard Schmitt, Steve Fay, and Ward Cunningham. James O. Coplien and Bobby Woolf wrote down the writers’ workshop process as we first practiced it in the software patterns community (“A Pattern Language for Writers' Workshops,” in Pattern Languages of Program Design 4), and Neil... [continues]

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