The reason you never get beyond the broad questions is that for the purposes of the Hollywood test screening, you have become part of a demographic sampling. You are essentially voting on what to do about the film. When Ang Lee, who directed the film that was made of my novel The Ice Storm, screened that film, he (or so I was told) wound up with a big stack of written suggestions from studio executives and others as to how he might "fix" it. As the story was recounted to me, he turned to James Schamus, the producer, and said, "What should I do with these?" The two of them thought about it for a while, and then they just threw them all away.
The creative-writing workshop that is shorn of all ornament, that pre-emptively restrains the eruption of personality, that simply goes about its business—photocopying stories, handing them out, collecting responses, handing back the responses—is, similarly, creative writing by committee. And because it is creative writing by committee, it hews to the statistical mean, which is to say the mediocre.
If the mentorship model of instruction is based on the Socratic method—a model that has existed throughout the history of education, in such strongholds of Western civilization as the monastery and the Renaissance painters' guild—the contemporary workshop comes to us more from the organizational or corporate theories of the 1950s. The workshop is, in fact, about sales and marketing. It is about pitching your story or poem or essay to the audience in such a way that the response will be predictable, measurable, and easily understood. It is about making your story do exactly what stories (or poems, or essays) have always done.
As may be evident, I disliked graduate school. On the first day of class at Columbia my workshop instructor, a now successful novelist of something like popular thrillers, remarked that he had dropped out of Stanford because he had been required to read several novels by John Hawkes. This was a red flag for me, and I was right to perceive it as such. During a workshop the same guy said of one of my stories, "I don't have anything to say about this story, so I'm just going to let the rest of you talk about it." Later in the semester he told me and one of the few others in the class who went on to publish that we would "never be writers."
Everyone has anecdotes like this. I have more of them. In my second semester I watched a professor fall asleep while reading aloud from a student's work. In my third semester a professor asked for a hand count of class members who thought my work was boring. I spent almost my entire fourth semester drinking, without any ill effects on my day-to-day life at Columbia. And so on.
Admittedly, I was not writing in the prevailing style of 1984: the style of Raymond Carver and, soon enough, of Richard Ford, Mona Simpson, and others of the dirty-realism school. These are writers I occasionally enjoy, so I am not denigrating the genre. I am merely pointing out that with an apparatus as inflexible as the corporate-era writing workshop, students will rarely have the chance to discuss approaches and ideas that lie outside a prevailing orientation, an already agreed-upon list of influences and/or values. Indeed, Carver and Ford are products not only of this corporate era but also of the Reagan-Bush period, so in a way the preference for them in a workshop setting is tautological: the system selects for itself, for its own kind of product.