Writing Workshops and Goal Alignment

One of the hard lessons I’ve learned this year involves writing workshop. More specifically, what happens when the writing workshops and your goals don’t match up.

I took a workshop in spring. I was trying to fall in love with drafting again, forge forward and leave my language-specific insecurity behind so that I could see a draft completed. Edits are where language specificity comes into play. The workshop I took in spring focused on the intricacies of language, especially short form and literary, with highly polished excerpts to be critiqued on.

And while I did learn a lot at the spring writing workshop, the focus was all wrong for what I was trying to do.

I had thought going in that a writing workshop would be good for me. It focused on writing. How wrong could I go with that premise?

Pretty far, actually.

The writing workshop heavily impacted my output speed, my self-consciousness for first drafts, my vision for future sections of m plot, and turned me to fixate on sentence construction during crafting. All of these things worked together and stifled me. I thought a writing workshop would help my writing and while I did try to take as many lessons from it that I could, I wasn’t at the right stage or in the right class for my type of writing.

I was stifled for a long time. I felt the class helped a lot of people who had taken it with me. I couldn’t help but think what was wrong with me that I did not glean the amount of benefit they had from the class?

I had to take time to relax, to let the anxiety leftover from the class wash away. I had other things to focus on, fortunately: a new job, lots of life things wrapping up, and lots of new life chapters beginning. Going to When Worlds Collide in August helped get me back on my feet and I was able to relax into writing again. Talking to my friends who have self published and continue to move forward helped me. Realizing through my job that so so so many books are published through so many publishers, big and small gave me perspective.

I don’t think I need writing workshops outside of my writing organizations anymore. Beside, my writing organizations are more about being social with likeminded people than totally learning new concepts and micro-critiquing my work. If a writing workshop comes up that is a perfect fit? I’ll go for it. But, until then? No. What about you?

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