Greetings my over-caffeinated, alcohol-soaked, sleep-deprived final exam takers and final paper writers. You are either done or nearly done and you are still alive, whether you think you are or not.

In this final blog of the semester, I want to talk about workshopping. More specifically, I want to talk about critique: how to give it, and perhaps more importantly, how to receive it.

The timing of this blog is no accident. Last week, I told you to finish. This week I am going to tell you how to take that finished piece and expose it to the cruelty of the world at large. No pain, no gain, my gaggle of introverted escritoras.  

There is no better way to improve your work than to have not only readers give you input, but fellow writers. I know writing is a lonely job. A lot of us write because we don’t want to socialize. Stephen King, when he is on tour giving lectures has a standard schtick about how writers aren’t supposed to be in front of the mic. We are the undercover observers, off to the side, taking everything in and reporting about it later in our writing.  That being said, workshopping can be a productive tool in your writing arsenal. Readers are essential. Readers who are writers are even better—if they understand the contract of workshopping.

The contract of workshopping is an agreement between everyone present in the workshop that the sole purpose of coming together is to learn to be better writers. It is the epitome of the “two brains are better than one,” mindset. You are probably sick of me telling you there are few absolutes when it comes to writing. However, one rule that is written in marble and virtually unchangeable is that someone who is not you will always be a better editor of your work than you are.  A corollary to this rule is that you cannot proofread yourself. Even if you have no one to read for you, use spellcheck, Grammarly, anything that will give you an objective evaluation of your work. You are too close to it. You won’t see the extra “the” you put in the last sentence.

When you workshop, you are being read by and reading fellow writers’ work. The three almost invariable rules of all workshops are, 1) you must find something you like about the piece you read, 2) you must point out something you think can be improved, or if you don’t have anything, something that you want the writer to explore further, and 3) you must be specific. Numbers one and two are self-explanatory. I will elaborate on them anyway, but many people have the most problem with number three, especially if they aren’t very analytical people. 

An example of a generic criticism is “I found this scene boring,” or “that didn’t make sense to me.”  These are reader reactions. You might not get much more than that from your significant other, or your sister, or your non-writer friends. However, when you are workshopping you are there to talk “shop,” pun intended. You are critiquing work as a reader and a writer. Simple reader reactions aren’t enough. Let’s take, “I found this scene boring.” In a workshop, that doesn’t help the writer very much. If you lost interest in the scene, point out exactly when it happened. Something like, “the wife was thinking about how the husband used to remember every little romantic thing, but lately he hadn’t, and she wondered why. I thought you were going to explore that feeling, but then she started thinking about how her mom took her to the carnival and I didn’t see the connection, so I lost interest and skipped ahead.”

Now the writer may not understand why that happened, and five people in the group may say, “no, the carnival wasn’t a distraction, because the mom took her every year until she died, and that is why the wife loved the husband, because he was so constant and loving.”  It doesn’t matter if you are “right” or in the majority with your opinion. It does matter that you have a reason for liking something or not liking something and that it comes from a writer’s perspective. Whether the author finds your comments useful or relevant or agrees is less important than the fact that you have “writerly” reasons for your critique.  You are a writer. You know what dilemmas writers face. You need to frame your comments in that way. When you read something, or watch a movie and something works, or doesn’t work, you can look and see why.  If you think that the reveal at the end of a story that the wife seems contrived, you can see it is because the writer didn’t drop enough hints for your subconscious to entertain the possibility. If that story is in your workshop, you can suggest to the author that maybe the wife needs to get a mysterious phone call, or visitor that is explained away, but still a little suspicious.  The more specific you are, the better it is for the writer. Don’t say, “I loved this scene. It was great.”  Say, “when the grandson picked up the giant dog that was dying and carried it to the car, it was the perfect metaphor for loving people despite their foibles. Yes, the grandmother is not a nice person, but that isn’t the dog’s fault, and that dog is her world. We take care of our own. We may have problems with them. They are still our own.”  Saying that will let the author know the scene touched you. And even if that isn’t what they meant—perhaps they didn’t even know that is what they meant, and you discovered it for them—they now have a genuine, specific reaction and emotion to work with.

What if you are on the other end of the critique, though?  Everyone in the group has a copy of your story, or maybe you just read it aloud to the group. Now you wait for them to speak their mind.  How do you handle that?

To answer that, I am going talk about a Youtuber that I watch regularly. I am a musician as well as a writer, and Adam Neely has a YouTube channel where he talks about bass, and being a working musician, and a lot of esoteric musical theories. For a while, he had a segment on the channel where he invited musicians to send him short pieces for critique. The segment was called “How to Not Suck at Music.” He also replies to comments on his videos. One commenter was concerned with making his work public because he didn’t think he could handle the criticism. What Adam Neely said was that critiquing something should be an act of love. I think that is the perfect way to say it.

 I am not going to critique something that I don’t care about.  If I offer my advice, the only motivation should be because I want your piece to be the best it can be. As Adam Neely says, though music is subjective, he does have a master’s degree in it, and he has been a working musician for eight years, so he has probably made the same mistake you are making right now or been in the same dilemma of trying to get his point across but going about it in an ineffective way, so his advice and critique have some technical merit. In a workshop, your fellow writers also have some technical merit. Everyone in the workshop is trying to write effectively. If you keep in mind that everything they are pointing out is in the spirit of achieving that goal, it will make the criticism sting a little less.

So, I will leave you to the Winter Break with this. Though in the abstract, workshops can seem like daunting places to be, and fraught with the possibility for pain and embarrassment, I have found that in real life, they are almost always safe places where the workshoppers form a sense of community and help each other grow.  That being said, choose your workshops carefully. If you think there are toxic people in the group that are just there to tear everyone down, don’t go back. Try to be open to criticism. You want your writing to be the best it can be. If you have the right people that share that same goal, workshopping can be invaluable to learn how to express your thoughts more effectively.

I will see you all in the Spring. Do NOT stop writing, my friends.

Namaste’ for now..