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Workshop 101: Finding a Critique’s Focus

I have been thinking long and hard about what element of my current workshopping class bothers me so much. Is it the content of my fellow classmates? No, not especially. It makes for queasy nights, but all in all the writing isn’t that bad. Is it my professor? No. We don’t agree on our writing […]

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Workshop 101: Your Audience Matters

In case you can’t tell, these little blurbs come to you when something happens in my workshop I don’t agree with. Last night a classmate brought in a piece of YA Christian Fiction. This particular piece was slightly heavy-handed, but nothing a little clipping here and there couldn’t fix. It’s still a rough draft. As […]

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Workshop 101: Don’t Waste Time You’re Already Wasting

This one, honestly, isn’t all that insightful. However, I found myself in my workshopping class again, working over three very different pieces. One was a short vignette length experimental piece that I found very entertaining. Another was a longer melancholy piece about family discord. The final one was a very long piece that included crass […]

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Workshop 101: Keeping Perspective (and a plug for Writing Excuses)

Sometimes I forget that I operate in a community I have no real place in. I am an academic to one degree, but sometimes I think that’s a very acute angle. I took a scene in to my workshopping class earlier this week. When I initially wrote it, I was very pleased. But as I […]

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Workshop 101: Being Different

A number of months ago, we were discussing in a workshop class the ways of being an artist. My professor said she was still looking for someone who was different and not mimicking someone else, arguing that nothing since Ulysses has been truly original because can trace its experimental roots to Ulysses. I disagree. I […]

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Workshop 101: Writers are Liars

This is part one because I just know I’m coming back to it. I can just feel it. So, I’m in an MFA program right now, and I’m learning very quickly that my style of writing is not considered art. This should offend me, but it doesn’t. I mean, we’ve all seen what can be […]

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