I was thinking lately that I’ve spent a lot of time in workshops and have [probably] had every kind of experience in one. I figured I may as well share some of the many things I’ve learned — and ask you all to dive in and offer your own advice for others! I want to make it a series of posts for the next several Wednesdays. If you all like it, I’ll keep the craft talk going! So this week, I’m going to talk about…

Tips for the Novice Workshopper // i.e. things to get over, and fast, to maintain your sanity and survive a workshop.

[A lot of these tips can help when working with a critique partner for the first time, too.]

No one will read your work the way you read it, or the way you “meant” for it to be read. Be prepared for interpretation.

This is a big one. Especially if no one has read your work before, or the only people who have read it are family members, close friends who are not writers/readers by nature, or teachers in a one-on-one environment. It’s an alarmingly simple concept: the same words can be (and are) read in different ways by different readers, especially critical readers. There’s no guarantee anyone else will read, interpret, and see your world as you do. Reading is an intensely personal experience; not everyone will take your characters’ actions and words to mean the same things you do, or you want them to. Consider: Do you need them to read it a certain way, or are those possible interpretations enriching? Do the different ways people interpret something left somewhat open-ended give the story greater depth, or does it lead to confusion? Confusion should be cleared up, but I love when an author leaves room for interpretation. I’m not talking about cliffhanger or open-ended endings, but rather details left undefined.

For instance, in the first writing I ever had workshopped (I was fifteen), my characters’ appearances were vitally important. I needed everyone to see them the way I saw them. The reason? Because I’d seen them that way, darn it. (Which is not a reason.) Strangely enough, half of my classmates read an ethnicity into one of my characters that the others hadn’t, which started a debate on perceptions and realities, which was… enlightening. Something I hadn’t intended ended up being one of the most interesting things my peers discussed about my story. I learned early, then, that one must prioritize, in a sense. If certain information is vitally important to get across to the reader exactly the way you envision it—and you do have to ask yourself why that information is so important before you push for it—then that’s something to ask for very specific feedback on, to ensure that your readers “got it” or “saw it” the way you needed them to, for the sake of the story. But everything else you don’t need to prioritize, it’s okay to leave it open. It’s okay, really. Is it important, for instance, what color your character’s hair is? Do we need to know everyone’s eye color or height or weight or age or build or what they ate for dinner last night or what clothes they’re wearing? Etc. Priority of relevant information distribution is something I’d never considered before a workshop taught me to see it like that. Readers can only digest so much detail at once. Clogging the first pages of a story—especially in short fiction, when page space is scarce—with needless detail and description lessens the impact of the story and its characters. Before workshop, I’d never really considered how a reader digests information, how the way I reveal it can impact their interest and their imagination. Now it’s something I never lose sight of.

Criticism is important for growth; so is knowing how to take it AND how to give it.

Writing workshops are a very good way to learn how to take criticism. They are, or should be, a safe space. I’d been told, jokingly, that enduring a writing workshop is like having your soul ripped out. But possible soul-ripping-out is very perspective-based. The first time you ever receive critical feedback, regardless of how mentally prepared you are… it’s soul-wrenching, no doubt. But moving past that is essential, because the reason it hurts is either due to (1) an inexperience with criticism or (2) related to the above point, about how your reader didn’t necessarily see it the way you do. But criticism, given in a constructive way, is essential for growth.

What do I mean by “constructive”? That’s one thing I kept asking my teachers, because no one wanted to explain it to me in concrete terms. One professor explained that negative comments in workshop should be framed by positive comments. That’s helpful, sure. But what constructive criticism means to me now is feedback to help a writer make their story the best it can be—pointing out things that don’t work and why. Pointing out places that could be stronger, and how. Simply saying “This character felt flat” is not as helpful as saying, “Her dialogue felt wooden. I believed her actions but when she spoke, she didn’t feel real to me.” That I can take home and work on. Specificity and suggestions are essential. I want to come away from a workshop with “homework” to do—not a list of complaints and issues with no suggestions on how to make my story better. Even suggestions I won’t follow are good, because they show me what got my readers thinking and where my writing took their thoughts. I love knowing what possibilities are out there in readers’ minds.

Personally I never spoke in workshop when I didn’t have something to offer in the way of a suggestion. I couldn’t bring myself to point out flaws without offering solutions. What this meant, sometimes, was that I started challenging the writer with questions, ones I had, ones their story brought up for me. I always love to know the writer knows more about their story than I do, so I tend to ask a lot of questions–not necessarily for me, but for the writer to think about.

In workshops, it becomes obvious after a while what kind of criticism everyone is best at giving. (Natalie Whipple spoke a little about this on her blog last month, as regards crit partners. There are definite similarities in a workshop environment.) There’s bound to be the one person who’s a stickler for grammar, the one who pays attention to character above all, the one who’s always looking at language and page space, the one who’s focused entirely on plot and “what happens,” always pushing you to think about plot. In the workshop environment, isolating who gives which criticism consistently may help you interpret their comments on your story in a different light.

The writer’s brain gives you a different perspective when reading. Learn how to turn that perspective on and off.

If you have a writer’s brain, a writer’s passion, you are not like everyone else. (You are really a superhero! No. Sorry. Just a writer.) The workshop environment was the first time I experienced writers who were willing to look at what could be on the page rather than what was, those whose brains were programmed to look at a story in a first draft and give advice on how to make that second draft even better. That kind of reading calls for a different way of thinking about a work than a normal reader will think about it. It’s different again from say, an English major reading a text and analyzing it through a specific critical lens, or a casual reader tearing through a novel and experiencing it for pleasure’s sake.

That said, realizing that you need to turn on and off the writer’s brain when reading can be helpful. In life. Nathan Bransford discussed this idea in a recent blog post and the point he was getting at is this. Know what you’re reading and how you ought to be thinking about what you’re reading before you go into it. Turn off the hyper-analytical writer’s brain before reading a bestseller. When a friend offers you a story to critique but wants you to first give them a basic read, to “get a feel for it” or to see how it all flows… turn off the writer’s brain. Become a reader. Absorb it, don’t let the criticism start intruding until you need it to. Maybe your friend has the grammar of an orc, but is the story solid, are the characters real, is the setting evocative? It’s hard to turn off the critical brain once you’ve gotten used to it, but it’s essential to learn how to turn it on and off, otherwise you’ll be micro-criticising everything in the back of your mind, all of the time. That’s no good for sanity, people.

The writing you do isn’t the ONLY kind of writing that is (1) worthwhile for you to read and (2) worthy of your respect.

Of course you, oh wise blog reader, know this. But in my first workshop? There were kids who believed it was Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, or bust. They looked down at anything called “genre” and termed it “irrelevant” for them to (1) read and (2) ever consider writing. What could they learn from reading genre? One teacher actually told the class, straight out, “Happy endings are unrealistic, fictitious, and boring.” (I was sixteen, that was at Yale. So I cried a little.) But, contextually, this was back when Harry Potter was considered “Something my twelve year old sister is reading,” not yet a multi-billion dollar book-and-movie-and-video-game-etc franchise. Genre was something to be looked down upon, something without artistry or commercial value. Stunned, I thought of all of the fantasy books that had won awards and influenced culture—can anyone say Lord of the Rings?—and couldn’t believe that my fellow workshoppers wouldn’t give genre a chance. I was determined to prove them wrong.

(The genre-in-workshop story for me has a happy ending, but I’ll save that for another Wednesday.)

Perhaps in retaliation for this vehemence I experienced in my first two workshops, I grew to have the opinion that the only writing I should be reading was young adult fantasy. High school assigned reading wasn’t worth my time, so I skimmed most of what I was assigned, except for Shakespeare (who was and is too seminal to mess with). Those I did read influenced my teenage brain more than I should have let them. (The Fountainhead had me on a snotty individualism kick for months; The Stranger gave me an existential crisis.) So at some point I said, Screw anything not in MY genre. This Jane Austen person? Not reading her. Pride and Prejudice? BAH. …Then, my mother made me sit through the BBC’s miniseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth. Having fallen for that Mr. Darcy quite thoroughly (I blame Mr. Firth), I tore through that book in a few days—a staggering pace for me, for a non-fantasy novel. Suddenly books written before 1960 were, well, relevant. (And that Jane Austen person? I never doubted her again.) Ever since I’ve never dismissed a book out of hand and really, it was a lesson I should have learned long before high school. (Something about books and covers and judging, I think it was…)

Bottom line? Dismissing any writing out of hand is silly. (Says me, who refuses to read Eat, Pray, Love because it’s a bestseller. Um. *runs away guiltily*)

Learn to love reading aloud. Or at least learn how to do it decently. (Which means practice.)

It’s a fact of life that most of us become writers [partly] because we’re terrible at other things like, say, acting. Or speaking. Or singing. Or… the list goes on. There are some few of us writer-types who do multiple things well and I applaud them. But I—and just about 98% of all of the writers I know—do writing best. That means speaking, public speaking, public reading… that’s pretty far down on the list of things I do natively and do well. There are some writers I know who are amazing readers. They will take the story they’ve written and captivate an audience with it. I envy them. I want to be them. But I’m not, so I practice. I do try. I am still attempting to become comfortable with simply talking about my books, talking about my characters and plots without getting lost in the details. It’s something I could not do in my first workshops. I shook and could not get the words out of my mouth in a slow, coherent manner until some years later. Reading poetry aloud helped. Going to readings, hearing other writers read, helped. Listening to audiobooks helped, too, hearing actors perform books I know and love—that helped. I’m still learning and trying because a long time ago I learned that a writer can’t simply hide behind her desk for the entirety of her career. She’s got to get out, talk about her books, and even read. So. Practice.

Some people are born gifted. Plain and simple. But that doesn’t mean you are talentless.

Any artist in any field knows who I am talking about. There’s always that one boy in your high school, one girl in your college class. They are not only gifted but magical. No, honestly; you find yourself wondering whether or not they made some kind of Faustian bargain as toddlers or maybe their parents consumed an experimental drug when they were in the womb, because they are unnaturally gifted for their age, for their experience. It’s not luck—there’s definitely a difference between a lucky person who is talented and this kind of thing—this is pure, phenomenal talent. It’s always easier to spot in those dance prodigies, those chess players, in athletes, in singers. You’ve seen those kids on those singing competition shows. But with writers, it hits you in that workshop and it feels the same. God or whomever has seriously given them a talent and, well, then there’s you. Try as you might, you need several drafts to get it right. You need to hack and edit and edit and edit anything you write to bring it into the territory of reasonably good. But there’s that poet whose words sparkle on the page and she spent forty minutes last night writing that little thing of brilliance, then went and watched TV. Or the first novel that’s won a kajillion awards.

That these people exist is a fact of life. But simply because they are amazing doesn’t make your talent less. Their success doesn’t hinder yours, doesn’t affect you at all. Everyone is different, everyone works and thinks differently, and if there’s any big thing I learned by being in class after class of writers, there’s no right way to be a writer, or to succeed as one. It’s about perseverance, cheeky optimism, and yes, some talent. But talent can be grown and honed, too. (Meryl Streep went to acting school, you know.) Those magnificently gifted writers you meet along the way shouldn’t serve to discourage you, but encourage you. They’re good. But so are you, you negative, overly-critical, self-effacing ninny. I’m talking to you. You’re good too. Remember that.

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Anything to add on the topic? Any advice of your own to give based on your own first workshop or crit partner experiences? Please share!