College writing workshops are where most young authors are going to improve their skills.

IOWA CITY, Iowa -- Allison Amend is sitting near the middle of a long, crowded table, trying not to be noticed. Her eyes look downward. Her smile is closed and private. She seems not to move at all, except for her hands, which press against each other or occasionally separate as she nervously twirls her hair.

Amend is a fiction writer at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and this afternoon one of her stories is being "workshopped," a process not unlike attending your own funeral. A dozen or so fellow students are discussing her work as if she were not there. Amend must help make that illusion possible.

"You're not supposed to talk," she says later. "And people don't look at you. It's a strange sensation."

Make a list of your favorite contemporary American writers and chances are good at least some know exactly what Amend went through. If it didn't happen at Iowa, it happened at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan, Columbia University or any number of other schools.

In the past 50 years, the number of academic writing programs has grown from just a handful to more than 200. Workshop alumni include some of the most acclaimed writers to emerge in the past decade, including David Foster Wallace, Mona Simpson, Allan Gurganus and Rick Moody.

"Increasingly, the best writers are writers who have been in one," says C. Michael Curtis, a senior editor at Atlantic Monthly magazine, which has published many workshop graduates.

"It doesn't mean, I think, so much that the workshop generates the writer as that writers are increasingly drawn to them as a kind of apprenticeship period, a place where they can spend a couple of years, improving their skills."

Amend's story is called "Why Boys Bounce," and it begins like this: "Sydney woke up with a mouth full of carpet again, the third time this month, and wondered if this wasn't a sign from the Great Spirit that this affair was doomed to failure." Sydney is an English major turned cyberporn writer. Her affair is with a German named Georg, so restless that he bounces even in sleep, pushing Sydney out of her bed and, more and more, out of his life.

"Are they good people?" asks the workshop teacher, author Barry Hannah. "Do interesting things happen?" For the most part, students don't think so. "Why is she with him?" wonders one student, Judith Mitchell. "I understand desperation, but this guy is such a jerk."

Others complain that the characters don't change, that their motivation is unclear, that events seem contrived. At the same time, they credit Amend for her wit and imagination and her ability with words.

"I thought the comments were pretty fair," she says. "But I thought people were closed to the type of character I created -- a woman who didn't want to be alone. People were saying, 'Why is she with him?'

"So in that case, I didn't feel I needed to make any changes. But I did agree there needed to be more motivation, more expectation."

Success at a workshop depends not just on talent, but on character, the ability to make decisions. Students will hear suggestions from peers, teachers, agents and publishers. They might be encouraged to be more experimental, to be less experimental, to use more words, to use fewer, to think about what will sell, to think only about the craft.

"I'm still working on it," Amend said. "That's the most difficult part. You get such a barrage of opinions and you have to not listen to half of them. I don't have a good sense yet of who to listen to."

There have been two major trends in American literature since the end of World War II. One is that literature has declined as an influence on American culture. The other is that writing programs have increased as an influence on American literature. Many wonder how much the latter trend has to do with the former.

The debate divides three ways. Some, a small number, argue that workshops have taken writing out of society and into the classroom, turning out bland, self-absorbed writers who themselves become teachers of bland, self-absorbed writers.

Others say workshops don't make a lot of difference, that good writers remain good and bad writers remain bad. Still others say workshops have helped literature by giving thousands both the time to write and the chance to work with experienced authors.

But whatever workshops have or haven't done, their rise says something about what has happened to literature. One reason so many established writers become teachers is that few can live solely from selling their books. One reason so many young writers join workshops is that few live in places where books are talked about.

"It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there," said author Ethan Canin, a former Iowa student who will return this fall as a faculty member.

"Books were king, but now movies are king and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live. So you search out your own little island."

These days, "islands" for literature are usually college towns. Iowa City is one of them. The population is about 60,000, a third affiliated with the school. It's a town of small shops and funky old houses, where people walking the streets all seem to carry backpacks, where few need to worry about buying new clothes.

Just as everyone in Los Angeles seems to be working on a screenplay, everyone here seems to be writing a book. Writers have status in Iowa City. Landlords are known to brag when they have one as a tenant. It's been said you can drive around at night and spot the writers in their rooms, typing by the windows. That's probably a myth, but in few places would such a myth be possible.

"Obviously, students here are in a quite special kind of environment," said Frank Conroy, the Iowa workshop's director and author of "Stop-Time," his acclaimed autobiography. "It's quite protected, relatively inexpensive and it's a real literary center."

Like many graduate writing programs, Iowa's lasts two years. About 50 students are accepted here annually -- 25 for fiction, 25 for poetry -- and at least 20 times that number are turned down. Although grades and test scores are requested on applications, manuscripts are virtually the sole criteria for admission.

Founded in the 1930s, the Iowa workshop is the oldest and most prestigious academic writing program in the country. Iowa's students have included Flannery O'Connor, John Irving, Raymond Carver and Jane Smiley. Carver, Philip Roth and John Cheever are among those who have taught here. Current faculty includes Conroy, the Pulitzer Prize winners Jorie Graham and James McPherson and the novelist Marilynne Robinson. Hannah, whose fiction includes "Ray" and "Airships," and John Casey, author of the novels "Spartina" and "An American Romance," are among the visiting faculty members.

There are many workshop legends, among them the story of Carver and Cheever bumping into each other at a liquor store. What helps make that a legend is how long ago it feels. Students now are hardly teetotalers -- some still make quick work of a pitcher of beer -- but they live more moderately, more studiously, interested in the drama of writing rather than in the drama of the writer's life.

"There is a reluctance to buy into the paradigm of the gonzo artist," said one student, Mark Baechtel. "We're asking, 'Do you need to be wracked with existential misery to create legitimate art?' "

"I went to a party recently that some of the students gave," said Casey, an Iowa student in the mid-1960s, "and I sat around, trying to keep quiet for the first hour. And finally some of them said to me, 'What was it like 30 years ago'? And I started telling a few things that happened and I realized that was a complete mistake. They just sort of hung their heads and said, 'God, we're so dull.' "

Most of the Iowa students are in their 20s and 30s. They come from all over the world and from a variety of backgrounds. Mitchell was a paralegal. Baechtel was a journalist. ZZ Packer was a public school teacher. Amend was only recently out of college. Many have worked odd jobs, just to keep writing.

A single writer once could influence a whole generation, as Ernest Hemingway did in the '40s and '50s and Carver did in the '80s. But American literature is no longer so unified. At Iowa, favorite writers include Charles Baxter, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore and Gail Godwin. At Columbia, Denis Johnson and Salman Rushdie would be on the list. Don DeLillo's name comes up often at the Michigan program.

In the early years, writing was commonly taught like any other subject, with teachers working from textbooks and students graded on weekly assignments. Now, it's agreed that talent can be nurtured, but not passed on.

There is no single way to write and no single way to conduct a writing workshop. Conroy's mantra is "Meaning. Sense. Clarity." Robinson might worry over a character's morality. Hannah likes a story with wit. Canin doesn't. Robinson speaks softly and keeps a bowl of candy on the table. Conroy serves no sweets and is known, in his own words, for leaving "blood on the floor."

"Sometimes, it's painful, yes," said Conroy, leaning back behind his desk, his gray hair brushed back and parted to the side. "I had a woman faint in class. Twice in 10 years I've had students leave in tears, although both of them came back and took me for a second semester.

"I see my work as a teacher as a very close examination of the text, of the language. Other classes are more supportive. Marilynne (Robinson) is like mom. 'Come in, there's candy on the desk.' I sometimes think the other teachers are a little closer, one to one, with the other students than I am."

At a seminar given by Robinson on "Moby Dick," it was joked that if Melville had submitted a passage for review he would have been laughed out of the workshop. Too wordy, too many digressions. Why, it would be asked, must he drone on and on about the whiteness of whales?

Workshops have been accused of pressuring students to write in a certain style. For example, Johns Hopkins and Brown University are associated with experimental writing and Iowa and Syracuse University have a reputation for traditional, narrative prose.

At Iowa, at least, the label is both true and untrue. There is nothing conventional about the work of such Iowa alumni as T. Coraghessan Boyle and Bob Shacochis. At the same time, even Iowa teachers admit they tend to be suspicious of experimental work.

"Frank, who does most of the admitting, is a straightforward writer who uses plot and character and that's what I do," said Canin, whose books include "The Emperor of the Air," a collection of stories.

"For anyone to expect Frank and me to be wild about experimental fiction is just silly. I write what I write and that's what I like to read. I lead people down the path of real plot, real character, which I think is what Frank does. If that ends up creating an 'Iowa style,' so be it."

On bulletin boards at Iowa, it is common to find announcements about an upcoming visit from a literary agent. If the Iowa workshop is an island, then agents can be likened to ships calling the writers back to the mainland. They're reminders that the time spent here is temporary, that students eventually must wonder, and worry, about the market.

"Some students don't want to hear anything about it," Mitchell said. "But we want to be published. We want to be real writers. We have no access to the publishing world so when people come from New York and talk to us, they get big turnouts."

By nature, writers are an envious race, but over the years competition at Iowa has become a gentleman's sport. Canin and others tell stories of near-fistfights in the classrooms, but current students, at least publicly, encourage each other. Mitchell recalled the reaction when it was announced that one of her stories was to be published in Scribner's annual compilation of workshop fiction.

"People just crowded around me and they were squealing and hugging me," she said. "They seemed very excited. And when I read the story at the bookstore, everybody came. It was amazing. It was like a standing-room-only crowd. I take that as a sign of good will. If they were really jealous, I don't think they would have all come."

"I think it was a lot meaner when I was there," Canin, a student at Iowa in the mid-'80s, said. "It's infinitely more collegial now, although I don't quite trust that, because I think writers are alien animals."

With magazines and publishers receiving thousands of manuscripts a week, writers need an edge just to be noticed. Workshops help. Some editors complain about the slickness of workshop writing, but there's no doubt that a manuscript from a well-known program has a better chance of being read.

"If someone has graduated from Iowa, I don't start jumping up and down in joy, but it does mean there has been a certain level of dedication," said Gary Fisketjon, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf who works with Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford and others.

"If a story comes from someone in Iowa," The Atlantic Monthly's Curtis said, "we'll almost certainly give it a careful reading with the hope we'll stumble onto the next Flannery O'Connor, or Ethan Canin, or whoever."

The relationship between writing programs and publishers works on a couple of levels. Colleges like to see alumni get published because it makes the school more appealing to future writers. At the same time, teachers worry about students who arrive looking to make connections.

"Getting published comes up embarrassingly often," said novelist Lamar Herrin, who teaches fiction at Cornell University. "It's a distraction if you're just trying to work with the art of the story and then you have agents coming around. It makes students start thinking, 'My publication.' 'My profession.' "

At Iowa, publication is a kind of taboo, although, some agents will break it. Baechtel recalled a talk given by New York agent Jane Dystel, a "hard-edged, almost cynical talk," telling students nonfiction sells better than fiction, that they should write about people in their 30s and that they should ease up on "rites of passage" stories.

"People heard that with varying degrees of cynicism," Baechtel said. "You come out of that shrugging your shoulders, saying, 'Well, I have to write what I write.' "

"I get a little bit of that at all the workshops," said Dystel, whose clients include the literary writers Gus Lee and Lorene Cary. "That's fine. They don't have to listen to me. You only have to listen to me if you want to get published."

Most students now graduating from college are entering the best job market in recent memory, but for writers it might as well be a recession. Only a small percentage are likely to publish a book and those who do will be lucky to publish many more than that. It's best not to think about the chances of writing full time.

If recent history holds up, some students will end up teaching, others will have spouses support them, and others will work part-time. Many will probably write free-lance reviews and magazine articles. Some will get into editing or will use what they learned to work for corporations.

But it has always taken nerve, a timeless arrogance for anybody to commit themselves to writing. The nice thing about the students in Iowa is their insistence that they have something to say, no matter the odds against it being heard.

On a financial aid application, Mitchell was asked what she planned to do after she graduated. Her answer was one word: write.

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