You have been raised to be polite; you don’t want to hurt this man’s feelings, especially if these items are gratis. So you take the eggplants and the detergent and the horse and you try to make the curry when you get to your apartment, but you don’t have what you need to make it; instead you have a horse. He’s cute, certainly, but you can’t help but feel like your life has taken a direction that you did not want it to go in. You feed the curry, which isn’t very good, to the horse, who poops on your rug.
Is it possible to get what you actually need out of a workshop, instead of the desire to never write again? Can you make a curry with some detergent and a horse?
Ask for what you need
Now that I’ve been writing and publishing for a while, it’s mind-altering to realize that workshops do not have to be a vomitorium of disgruntlements from your workshop peers. Did you know that you can ask for specific feedback? Did you know that you can challenge people to give you more than meh?
“I think it’s a nice idea to tell people what you specifically want help with when your piece goes up for workshop,” says author Julia Fierro, who founded the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop in 2002. “Pacing, plot, the narrative structure, the pace of dialogue . . . If you don’t ask for what you need, you can have this out-of-body experience during the workshop; I’m here, but I’m not here.”
To protect yourself against the tepid feedback that the author and founder of the workshop program CRIT, Tony Tulathimutte, calls “the bland reading the bland,” encourage specificity from your peers when your piece is on the chopping block. If someone says that they don’t like one of your characters, ask if there is a technical choice that impacted the way they feel. And as a workshopper, you should challenge yourself to the same standards. Saying that you “liked” or “didn’t like” something isn’t helpful: offering ideas the writer can use to solve a problem or improve a passage is.
Learn what to let go of
You’ll encounter different personality types in workshop, and if you take all of their advice to heart, the only thing you’re going to want to write at the end of workshop is an SOS.
“You can get wounded in a way in workshop that you will eventually figure out is time wasting and pointless,” says Tony on the topic of bad feedback. “There are pernicious aspects to it: the tacit pressure to pander, to people please, to impress either the teacher or the people you are sharing a room with. This is inevitable, I don’t know a way to work around this: the group gaze of a workshop only heightens this pressure. You just have to stick with it long enough that the participants learn to workshop the manuscript, not the author.”
You also have to learn where your peers are coming from so that you don’t get wounded. People have preferences and biases: if you’re in a workshop with the same people long enough, you’ll start to understand why they say the things they do. Maybe that one dude just doesn’t “do” science fiction; the teacher secretly yearns to write erotica; nothing resonates with that one student unless you’re writing about her.
Nevertheless, during your initial critiques, you are going to have a dozen people throwing feedback balls at you and you only have so many hands. First-time workshoppers have a tendency to incorporate all the recommendations they were given into their revision, resulting in what Julia calls a “Frankenstein.” This happened to me: after workshopping an unruly piece during a summer conference, I spent four dismal months revising a draft honoring each of my classmate’s opinions: This one will make Sonia happy because no one’s using foreign words; this one will please Jeremy because the narrator’s motivations are clearer. I ended up with nineteen drafts of that short story, each one of them further from the kernel of magic I’d had in the first. It took me a year to let the useful feedback rise to the top of my brain (and to let go of everything else) so that I could actually think, with agency, through what I needed to do to make the story stronger in a way that preserved its weirdness. That story, “Notes from Mexico,” won an award in a chapbook contest, and it’s closer to the original first draft than not.
This is not to say that I think that I, or you, or any writer, should be above constructive criticism, or that other writers (and readers) don’t have the ability to help us with our work. (They do. I would be incomprehensible without my editors.) What I want to emphasize is that workshops can’t actually help your writing until you understand how to preserve your special sauce. Protecting what is odd and tender about your voice is not you saying that you write better than anyone else, so screw all of their opinions . . . it’s about knowing where your creative boundaries are and getting to the point where you can distinguish useful feedback from biased criticism. The former will actually serve your manuscript. The latter usually comes from a writer who prefers you write like them.
This level of awareness takes time to come by, and in order to get there, you’re going to have to ruin a few pieces by incorporating bad advice. Once you know how to sieve good advice from the extraneous, you can workshop to the high heavens, with your armor intact.
Find positive in the negative. Even in the comments of [name redacted] That Person You Can’t Stand
There are going to be asshats in your workshop, and if you can’t find a way to transform their tomfoolery into something positive, animus will poison your writing time. “Even with the reader who doesn’t like your work, who doesn’t read it correctly, who 100 percent isn’t your ideal reader and is giving you the kind of feedback you absolutely don’t want,” says Catapult’s writing programs assistant, Stella Cabot Wilson, “even this person’s feedback might still be helpful in some way—either as something to strike against, or for giving you a new idea or opening up how you think about your work.”
Also remember that the workshop is a crash course in what it feels like to have other people read and publicly comment on your private writing. If you can maintain your dignity and confidence when a windbag calls your content “navel-gazing,” you’ll be better prepared for the faceless online commenter who gives your debut two stars because he doesn’t like the shirt you’re wearing in your author photograph.
If there’s someone in workshop that you just can’t make the positivity leap with, use your interactions with them as a character study: at least you’ll have material to draw from when it comes time to write a jerk.
It is a truth known but little spoken that the secret to great writing is revision. After putting countless failed manuscripts out to pasture, I’ve come to see writing as the pleasurable—even hedonistic—part of the writing process, and revision as the work.
In revision, you improve the places in your manuscript that can be deepened, tightened, or clarified, and you cut . . . a lot. In Stephen King’s craft book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he suggests that a good second draft is the first draft minus 10 percent. In the movie Neruda, the actor playing the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda says, “To write well, delete.” Did Pablo Neruda actually say this? Let’s pretend he did!
Like a lot of baby writers, I started out attached to every word I wrote. My sentences defined me! Each one advanced not just the narrative of my story, but my personal one as well. I valued baroqueness over efficiency, circuitous reasoning over candidness, the em dash over the period. My writing was overlong and hyperactive, in need of scissors and sedation, both.
If I’m proud of anything in my writing process, it’s that I have become a Herculean deleter, callous and unfeeling, my only queen the work. On a Thursday many years ago, three days before my agent was going to send my first novel out on submission, she called to tell me how excited she was about it, how absolutely positive she was that this was going to be my debut book, and