In an earlier Kernel, I wrote about being a good workshop partner, about the ways you should approach, evaluate, and discuss another person’s writing. But there are two roles in a critique, the commenter and the writer, and if you are engaging in workshops, you will eventually find yourself in that second, more vulnerable position. While being workshopped may seem like a straightforward event (you supply your writing, you show up, you receive feedback), there are things you can bare in mind to get the most out of the experience. The following advice will help you maximize the value of the critiques you receive.
Enter with optimism
I’ve sometimes, not infrequently, listened to writers disparage a piece that they are about to share. “I don’t think it’s salvageable.” “It might just be an experiment.” “I might throw it all away.” In my opinion, these thoughts are natural but not valuable. If you want to share a piece with a writing group, it is because something in it excites you, and if something in a piece excites you, it is worth pursuing. When you submit work, you will receive a mix of advice and opinions. It is possible that some critique will agree with your inclination to throw the whole thing away, but it is more likely that fresh eyes will see the spark that excited you and help you find new kindling for that flame. To be open to those suggestions, you must first reject preemptive pessimism. Instead, tell yourself (and believe!) that you will leave a workshop better able to serve your story.
Receive with humility
One of my favorite things about writing is that it is unmasterable. No matter how much you learn about any facet of writing, there will always be more to learn or tweak or customize. There is point of view, dialogue, characterization, setting, exposition, backstory, worldbuilding, description, and an infinite number of other elements. Each of these elements lives on an infinite continuum, and there are infinite combinations of the infinite elements at infinite points on their continuum. What I’m saying is this: If you think you are going to submit a perfect story and wow your workshop partners, you are, quite simply, wrong.
There will always be something about your story that can be critiqued. Whether you choose to accept and incorporate that advice is a different story, but when you request criticism, you should be ready to receive it.
Synthesize advice
You will receive bad advice. You will receive misguided critiques. You will receive mandates that are predicated on an understanding of your piece counter to your intentions. All of this feedback can still be useful, and knowing how to extract the value is perhaps the most important skill you can hone in regards to being workshopped.
For the most part, people entering a workshop space are doing so with good will. These readers are looking for the sparks we’ve talked about, and they will find them. They will also find the raging rivers trying to drown out those sparks. Then, like a bad metaphor about fire and water, they will not always be able to explicitly tell you what's working and what’s not. Finding the sum of your critiques is your responsibility.
Here is an example: There is a story submitted about a girl and her dog. They are best friends and walk to school together every morning. Critiquer #1 suggests the dog should go missing. Critiquer #2 suggests the girl should stay late at school, keeping her and her dog apart. Even more confusingly, critiquer #3 suggests replacing the dog with something that poses a threat to the girl—maybe a dragon!
What is a writer to do with this critique? They could rewrite their story to be about a girl and her dragon. The dragon could get lost on their way to school and the girl, forced to stay late in her classroom, could be worried sick about where the dragon has gone.
The writer could do that, but maybe that erases all the careful nuance and symbolism they have weaved in. Perhaps that new story is not conducive to the writer’s voice. Maybe the writer just doesn’t like that version of the story. Rather than making any of those changes, the writer might sit with the critiques and wonder why (if they were savvy, maybe they even asked their critique partners!) these changes were suggested.
This imaginary writer might realize that what all of their critique partners wanted was higher stakes. If they agree, they can heighten the stakes any which way they please.
In the end, making the most of being workshopped has less to do with action, and more to do with mindset. You must enter that space knowing what you’ve asked for, being open to receiving it, and being smart about applying it.
My kernel of advice: Be optimistic, humble, and savvy when being critiqued.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Shelby is 30 pages into reading Dead in Long Beach, California, Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, and she’s already hooked! Told (so far at least) in a first-person collective omniscient voice, the story starts when the protagonist walks into her brother’s apartment to find he died by suicide. In the moment, she grabs his phone, and, later, she texts from it, acting as her brother. Already, grief is taking an interesting shape in this story, and Shelby’s looking forward to how that will unravel as she reads on.
Natalia was out of commission this week in terms of reading but managed to collect good reading lists on political theory from an old Notre Dame professor. She’s itching to get started and apply her brain to her favorite subject.
Sarah had a busy week. She attended two author talks sponsored by her university: a craft talk by Maurice Carlos Ruffin about drafting his just-released book The American Daughters, and a lecture by Jeff VanderMeer, whose Southern Reach trilogy she is currently listening to on audiobook ahead of discussing it in one of her graduate seminars next month. Sarah also read Linda Hogan’s Power, a novel centered around the killing of a panther on the border between tribal lands and mainstream America. She just finished up a unit with her undergraduates in which she read and taught Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Oh, and she had her first pitch session with an agent. It has been a lot. She has developed laryngitis. It’s a good thing there’s only one more week until her spring break.
This week, Neidy finished Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee and read the first half of In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Neidy is impressed that Machado’s beautiful sentences are as present in her nonfiction as they are in her fiction. The book recounts Machado’s experiences in an abusive relationship. Though the topic is hard to read about, the content is rendered with care and sincerity. Keeping true to her goal of a new short story draft every month of 2024, she also powered through the roughest draft of a short story for February.