Creative Writing Workshops

This creative writing workshop. It’s interesting, twenty or thirty of us crammed in a tiny room around a table. All of us looking for a reason for our madness, seeking other people who share our big dreams. Many of us can’t finish a story. Some of us are writing novels. Some haven’t written much English at all.

Each week we have a short story or a novel excerpt to read and discuss, and then we “workshop” three peoples’ work. You submit your work a couple days before, so people can read it ahead of time and have constructive criticism and praise ready for you. It feels like a lot of work to add onto all the classes I already have, but if I can manage to do it, I think it’ll be good for me.

At the moment, I don’t seem to be scheduled to any particular week to share my writing; it’s possible that we have too many people in the class to read everyone’s work. I don’t really care, I think, if my writing is critiqued. My novel really needs a full critique, the whole thing. I’m not sure how helpful having the first chapter torn apart (again) will be. The first chapter always seems to be the one most critiqued, since submitting later chapters would leave out a lot of possibly crucial backstory. I could work around that, maybe writing a short summary for people to read before an excerpt, but we’ll see if I even get put in the timetable.

On another note, I’ve decided I’m too busy to continue with the 50 book challenge… for now. I’m sure I’ll read once I have time, perhaps this summer, maybe before. Once I manage to finish another book, I’ll put up another review.