Writing Workshops

Today wasn't the best of times.  I didn't go to sleep until six in the morning after a night of tossing and turning, pacing back and forth, and staring at the black page of a word processor.  It was sheer exhaustion that won me over in the end.  When I woke up and tried to get some work done on my novel - the sci-fi survival story - I couldn't get anything out.

It.  Just.  Looked.  Like.  Shit.  All of it.

As I tried to be more productive in other areas (catching a fly with your bare hands is productive, right?), I started to notice what was missing: workshops.

In case you don't know what a writing workshop is, it's when a group of writers come together to give feedback on each others' writing - what works and what doesn't; what the best parts were and why.  It's more than getting a pat on the back from your friends.  It's a chance for others to point out flaws that you might have overlooked, or to bring up questions and plot directions that you might have missed.

In other words, the workshop is something that they mention as an invaluable tool in every creative writing class.  In fact, it's my opinion that it IS the creative writing class.

Since finishing grad school a year ago, I haven't done a single workshop, and I think the absence is starting to make me second, triple, and quadruple guess myself; it's making me paranoid about whether or not I can actually write.

Time to go back to school.