My First Workshop!!

What a fun day today!! I had my first official short story workshop in one of my fiction writing classes today. I was really, REALLY nervous, I’ve never had a piece actually workshopped before. Actually, I’ve never even written a short story before!
It was extremely helpful and made me feel so much more confident about my writing!! All of my classmates offered super helpful advice in the workshop session.

I wrote a piece that was nonlinear, and I think it paid off. Some people really appreciated the way the timeline was constructed but some people suggested that they’d prefer a linear store. I think it’s best that this story be kept in its nonlinear construction, it’s what feels right for the story and that’s what matters!!

Some people also commented that they weren’t sure if they were ok not knowing a whole lot about one of the characters. Although I didn’t intentionally leave out description of this character I’m glad that I did…because he was supposed to play a sort of “absent” role…so it happened to work out that my unknowingly not developing a character is something I’m ok with, and something I may choose to look into more to try and make him more “absent” while conveying that his absence is important to the story.

What’s really cool is that I get all these comments and suggestions, and I get to pick and choose what I agree with and what I take into account when I go to do my revision…because it’s MY piece!! :)

I put a lot of effort into reading each piece and making comments on each piece that I feel are useful to the writer. I wish though, that I could say everybody does the same for me. Though many people spoke up in class, not as many people left comments on my piece that I felt were useful, and some people didn’t really seem to give the piece a good read—I had several people write questions to me that were answered somewhere in the piece itself. The tradeoff though is that many people did write incredibly useful comments and suggestions.

Overall, I really appreciated my first workshop session. I took a lot out of it and have decided to give this piece a while to sit, hold onto all the comments that were written to me, and go back to make some revisions in a month or two. Who knows, maybe someday it’ll be the first piece I submit for a chance at publication!!

This experience of putting my writing OUT THERE for people to read and ponder and critique has been wonderful, and I came away from it feeling more like a writer than I think I ever have before.

Maybe in the midst of continuing work on my novel I can continue writing and revising short stories to put into a collection…wouldn’t that be neat?!?

I’ve given myself a lot of work to do by taking these two fiction classes, especially with everything else going on, but so far I have absolutely no regrets. There’s nothing better than putting myself out there and taking risks on my writing, and creating a community of fellow readers and writers who all support each other!

I’m hoping this is all making sense…right now all of my own thoughts about the workshop day are still jumbled in my mind, but I wanted to let you all know how things are going!!

Who else has put a piece out there for people to read and offer suggestions on? What was the experience like for you? I have another piece being workshopped in my other fiction class on Thursday, I'll be sure to post how that goes!