It doesn’t matter if you’re taking your first creative writing class or your twentieth - the gut-wrenching nerves you feel in your stomach whenever it’s time to discuss your work never really fades away. After all, you’ve been working tirelessly on your story or poem, editing and re-editing it, painstakingly arranging words on a page for hours on end, until it sounds perfect (at least in your head). It can be quite terrifying to just offer your work up for critique.
At least a million questions run through your mind. Will they like my story or poem? What if they hate it? Or what if they completely misread the whole thing and don’t get the underlying message or theme? What do I do if no one talks or makes a comment? What if there are too many different opinions? Whenever these thoughts start running rampant in my mind, I force myself to stop and take a deep breath. All these thoughts exist only in my head. None of it has happened or will even happen.
This is what I tell myself every time my mind gets the best of me. Although this only helps to calm my nerves a bit, I’ve found a variety of other methods that have proven to be useful when I hyper fixated on outrageous situations that merely exist in my head.
One of the main things I remind myself of is that while workshops are meant to be helpful, the words of your peers or even your instructors are not the Holy Bible. They are merely giving you suggestions based on their own personal experiences and literary tastes. Remember that everyone in the room has lived through different experiences, which influences what types of stories or poetry they enjoy. This is not a reflection of the quality of your work.
Another important thing to note is that feedback is meant to be helpful. When someone offers criticism, it can be hard to hear, especially since we’ve spent so much time on our story or poem. In the short run, constructive criticism may hurt. However, in the long run, this type of feedback can help us become better writers or at the very least, become writers who are more aware of how our writing sounds to a diverse audience.
No matter how many workshops we’ve been in, the fear is naturally still there. After all, it’s extremely nerve-wracking to allow someone else to see all your vulnerabilities spilled onto the page. But at the end of the day, workshops and constructive criticism help us grow as writers - both creatively and professionally.
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