Woman of Letters

Tag: workshops

Writing

April 17, 2014

You know where I had a really excellent time? The Clarion Writer’s Workshop

Clarion and Clarion West (for those not in the know) are six-week summer workshops for science fiction and fantasy writers. You go, you live in a dorm with twenty other writers, you get instructed by a different professor each week, and every week you write a story and have your story critiqued. It’s a pretty intense…
MFA

April 15, 2014

Coming up on my last workshop at Johns Hopkins (and perhaps my last one for a long time)

Already some of the other people I’ve spent the last two years with are figuring out their next steps. And I’m working on my final story for workshop. There is a bittersweetness to it, just as there is to all endings. For the last 20 or so months, our MFA workshop has been a constant…
Advice, General Principles

March 28, 2013

If you go to a workshop with the expectation that people will lavish praise on your writing, there is a nonzero chance that you will be destroyed

A bunch of my friends are going to writing workshops this summer, so I thought I’d share the most hard-won piece of advice that I possess: don’t go there looking for people to tell you that your writing is great. What makes this advice so hard-won is that I’ve gone into so many critique situations…