Good readers make better writers - guidelines for critiquing work from your peers (and yourself!)

There’s nothing more nourishing to a writer’s growth than having a captive readership forced to offer feedback. But let’s face it: your mom is never going to like your short stories and your friends say they’ll read them and give honest commentary, but they definitely won’t even open the document. Hence, workshops!

Workshops have been a part of my writing life pretty consistently for well over 15 years now, and I find them indispensable. To me, there’s nothing better than getting comments from insightful readers and listening to a discussion about my work from points of view that I had never intended or considered. But I also know that workshops can be, for others, anxiety-inducing moments of vulnerability, even at the MFA level where one might assume all participants are pretty accustomed to the process. Even graduate programs unfortunately don’t screen for apathy, competitiveness, and narrow-mindedness.

I’ve participated in workshops with people who didn’t give notes, people who wanted to prove they were the smartest person in the room, people who wanted to push their style on everyone, people who’ve stormed out of the room because they disagreed with the comments they received. Some have earned six-figure book deals, some have won national-level awards, some have quit writing altogether. Workshops have such a breadth of talent and personality and I love it, but those characteristics don’t necessarily make a workshop valuable from a writer’s perspective.

It’s impossible to make a good workshop on your own. A lot of the onus is on the workshop leader to ensure that everyone contributes to the extent that their experience will allow. But it bears enumerating some guidelines that I’ve come to follow over the years for what makes a good workshop reader so we don’t end up being that one weirdo that everyone talks about years later.

Really, this advice applies to anyone acting as a reader with an eye toward critique, in or out of a workshop. The process is the same, at least for me, whether I’m workshopping a submission in a weekly writing group, or critiquing a friend’s work.

Remember: The practice of reading and critiquing is essential to improving your own skill as a writer. Apply these techniques when you edit your own work!

Read it twice

Approach the first read as you would any story you were reading for pleasure. Let it absorb you and don’t worry about writing comments just yet. When you’re finished, write down that first impression. This is the kind of reading most people do, so if you react strongly to anything, you can be reasonably sure that a casual reader will react to the same parts.

The second read should be more analytical. Take notes! Ask more questions of the story and try to figure out how it works. Break it down into constituent scenes, plot threads, themes, however you want to slice it, and use the following guidelines to help you think about the intent and the construction of the piece.

Describe the story

Start big-picture:

• What effect does the story have on you as a reader?
• What did you take away from the reading?
• Who is the story about?
• How do the focus characters learn and change over the course of the story?

These questions help us think about what the story might be trying to achieve vs what it does achieve. This is not the time for recommendations or prescriptive comments. It’s about conveying to the author about the overall effect of the story. Whether this jives with the author’s intent is up to the author.

Get more granular. Talk about the effects of particular scenes. This is similar to the wider point of view above, but at the scene level.

• Where are we situated in space and time?
• What descriptive details are mentioned vs not mentioned? How does this direct the reader’s attention?
• What effect did each scene have, and how did it contribute to the trajectory of the story?
• What are the main sources of tension throughout the story and what scenes increase or decrease that tension?
• How do characters change from one scene to the next?
• What does each character want and what happens when they do or don’t get it?
• What kind of subtext is present in each scene, if any, and how does it motivate the characters?
• What drives the story forward? What makes you want to keep reading?

This is how we begin to break down the inner workings of the story to find out how it achieved the effects we described earlier.

We can go even further and talk about the story at the sentence-level, but I usually don’t want to spend workshop time on that since most stories aren’t usually at the point at which a sentence-level discussion is meaningful. However, when the situation warrants it:

• What ideas does each sentence convey?
• What do particular word choices imply about the dispositions of each character?
• How does each new sentence build on the ideas built up by previous sentences?
• What sentences are most impactful and why? When do they occur in the scene?

Consider the writer

What does the writer want their story to be? What do they want their story to achieve? Most workshops I’ve done require the author to present work without notes, then to remain silent during the group discussion. If you know what the author’s going for, then great! You’re in a much better position to remark on how well the story achieves the intent.

If you don’t know, can you tell from how the story is written? This is where it’s important to talk about how the story does work, rather than about how you think it should work. Let the author decide if your impression of the story is the one they were trying to achieve. Often, your opinion will be one of many, especially in a workshop setting. Definitely be careful not to dictate what a story should strive to do. It’s not your story! A story’s effectiveness is a spectrum, and you can comment on it to the extent that you understand what the story is trying to achieve.

It doesn’t matter if you like the story or not

Sometimes a story isn’t to your taste, and that’s OK. But that doesn’t absolve you of the duty to provide honest, thoughtful commentary. You may never enjoy high fantasy or flash fiction or office dramas or whatever, so you may never enjoy the submissions from certain of your peers. Find something you can relate to. At the most basic level, writing is a form of communication, and the author must be communicating something to you that you can interpret.

You may not be able to comment on genre tropes, but you may still be able to comment on character motivations, scenery, pacing, structure, prose, and talk about how those aspects work.

Can you compare the piece, or aspects of it, to something else you’ve read? Could you compile a list of works the writing might use as reference during the revision process? Obviously, don’t be a jerk and recommend something like Strunk and White or the OED in bad faith.

Which brings me to my final note…

Don’t be a jerk. Corollary: Be nice

As in life, so too in workshop. Everyone’s trying to improve. Workshop isn’t a place to showcase your finest writing, but the stories people write can often be quite personal. Read in good faith and use each piece as an opportunity to improve your close reading, broaden your literary vocabulary, discuss new ideas, and meet some interesting people.

Workshop is a great place to hear stories you otherwise would never have heard, and receive comments from people who might never have read your work. It’s a great forum for unique points of view and often for long-term friendships. Not every workshop is amazing, but it can only be as good as the people in it. Elevate others and you’ll elevate yourself.

Enjoy, and keep writing!