by Anne R. Allen
What’s over-workshopping? It’s what happens when writers attend too many writing workshops or critique groups where they’re fed dogmatic, my-way-or-the-highway rules. Following rules too closely can slow down your story (and your career.) It can also eliminate what’s creative and original in your work.
You can spend years schlepping that WIP from workshop to workshop, never letting your writing career take off. This can be simple fear of success. Or it can be a kind of addiction to writing rules.
Writers need to realize that in writing there are no hard-and-fast rules. There are only guidelines. You want to learn the basic rules of writing and grammar, of course, but following rules to the letter can squelch a story and snoozify a reader.
Remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
Here are some of the workshop criticisms we can often ignore.
1.“Your character wouldn’t do that!”
This is my unfavorite thing to hear in a critique or editorial note. It’s almost always unhelpful because nobody knows your character the way you do.
It often means the critic wants to make your story about herself. What she means is “I wouldn’t do that,” or worse, “My mental stereotype of that kind of person wouldn’t do that.”
I once had a beta-reader who said I should cut a scene where a distraught woman absentmindedly eats most of the frosting she’s made for a friend’s wedding cake and rushes to make another batch before the guests arrive. “She wouldn’t do that,” the beta reader told me. “When I’m nervous I can’t eat.”
She was denying that anybody could have problems with emotional eating because she doesn’t.
Bestseller Catherine Ryan Hyde tells a story in our book How to be a Writer in the E-Age about the critiquer who insisted “a truck driver wouldn’t read Proust.” The man was simply stating his stereotyping of truck drivers, not anything of use to the author. A fan of French literature who drives a truck for a living is interesting. A stereotype is not.
These are the kind of critiques that lead to over-workshopping. A newbie writer might take these things to heart and remove exactly what makes her characters sparkle. She can also end up with a “jackalope” freak of a character made up of bits of personalities of all the people in the workshop that is in no way recognizable as a real-life human.
2. Don’t repeat a word in the same paragraph
Would A Tale of Two Cities be improved if its first line read: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of historical eras.” (And Mr. Dickens, the “was” police would be all over that sentence!)
Or maybe Anna Karenina should have opened like this: “Happy families are all alike; every morose clan is despondent in its own way.”
Thesaurusitis can be a much bigger problem than repetition. 😊
3. Never use multiple points of view.
Multiple points of view in one sentence — or even one chapter — can be annoying and confusing to the reader. That’s what we call “head-hopping.” But novels with several points of view can be richer and have more depth.
A single “deep” POV is great for a simple, linear storyline, and it might be best for a first novel, but once you’ve mastered the basic craft of novel-writing, don’t shy away from several POV characters. I’m reading one right now by a Pulitzer Prize winner that has at least ten.
4. Eliminate “was,” “that,” and “just.”
The word “was” does not make your sentence “passive.” The verb “to be” is necessary to create several tenses and voices in English. Here’s my blogpost about tuning out the “was” police.
“Just” also has many uses and meanings. Only eliminate it if it’s an unnecessary modifier. “I just got home, so I haven’t had dinner” makes sense. “I got home so I haven’t had dinner” makes no sense at all.
“That” is erroneously maligned, too. Sometimes it’s required for clarity. Use your own judgement instead of over-workshopping your WIP into an incomprehensible mess.
5. Don’t use contractions.
This isn’t a rule. It’s just plain dumb. But I hear from writers who are told this in workshops all the time. Ack!
If you’re writing a novel in English about human, English-speaking characters, you’re writing about people who use contractions.
Writing a book in the voice of Data, the Star Trek robot, or Andy Kaufman’s “Foreign Man” might be a fun tour de force, but it could get old fast. And if ALL your characters talk like foreign robots, you’re going to have a complete mess.
Talk about over-workshopping!
I have a feeling this “rule” came from students learning to write college essays, or maybe legal briefs. But fiction that reads like a legal brief would be a massive snoozefest. There are also many different styles for nonfiction essays. On the Web, very few articles are so formal that contractions are a problem.
When you write dialogue, the #1 goal is to sound authentic, and losing the contractions will have the opposite effect.
6. Remove all adjectives and adverbs.
Seriously? Even when your POV character is, um, rather vague? This is why over-workshopping your book can make all characters sound the same. In realistic writing, some characters will use adjectives and adverbs and others won’t.
Ultra-minimalist “austere” prose may be in vogue with some readers, but it’s certainly not the norm. Chuck Wendig wrote a hilarious take on this dictum. (Warning: strong language.)
7. Never use the passive voice.
Oh, pu-leez. The passive voice exists for a reason. A scene can still be “active” if the author uses the passive voice.
It’s better for your detective to say. “This woman was murdered!” than “A person or persons unknown murdered this woman!”
Pretzeling your words into 100% “active” sentences will make your prose awkward and unreadable. A perfect example of over-workshopping.
8. Eliminate all clichés.
Unless your characters are wildly inventive poets, strange visitors from another planet, or children fostered by wolves, their dialogue and thoughts will include familiar expressions.
Don’t rob your Scarlett O’Hara of her “fiddle dee-dees” or deprive your Bogart of “doesn’t amount to a hill of beans” because of some dogmatic person in a workshop.
And there’s a difference between a cliché and a trope. Every genre has its favorite tropes. In Romance, there’s the enemies-to-lovers trope, secret billionaire trope, second-time-around trope, and many more. These are familiar plots, but not clichés. Don’t let anybody workshop away a popular plot your readers will love.
9. Punctuation is so last century.
Yes. There are newbie writers whose shell-like ears are polluted by this kind of nonsense in expensive MFA classes and prestigious workshops. Then it filters down into online writing groups and fora.
Okay, there are some literary writers, generally aging male academics writing about their sexual dysfunction, who get published even though they thumb their noses at readers by failing to punctuate their dialogue.
Other male academics undoubtedly enjoy reading their books.
The rest of us…not so much.
So unless you’re an academic with a Viagra habit, I suggest you ignore this silliness. Write for readers, not fashions in academia.
10. Always Show, Don’t Tell
This is the Grand Poobah of writing rules. But following the rule exactly can result in over-workshopping. It can slow your story down and infuriate the reader. I’ve written a whole post on why emphasis on show-don’t-tell can be dangerous.
Of course you don’t want your story to read like a 7-year old’s recap of his day. “I got up and had waffles and then Mom took me to school and I fell down at recess and the nurse put a Band-Aid on my knee and we had pizza for lunch…” All telling is boring.
But so is too much showing. Too much showing also slows the pace.
If you spend ten pages describing the shabby apartment of the murder witness, and we hear the screaming children and the blaring TV and smell the unemptied cat litter box and overflowing garbage can, your story is not going forward.
A writer should only dwell on the key scenes where important action is occurring. It’s perfectly okay to say your detective can tell the witness is a harried single mom who is barely able to cope so her testimony may be useless. Then he can move on with the investigation and your reader can get on with the story.
Start another project to avoid over-workshopping.
I know authors who have spent years taking their WIP to writers’ conferences and workshops, obsessed with creating a book that will be universally approved of. But that kind of book doesn’t exist. You can’t please all of the people all of the time.
If you fear you’ve been over-workshopping your book, try putting it in a drawer and ignoring it for a month or two. Spend that time starting another one, or writing a short story or a poem or two. Something short you can actually finish is best. Don’t show the new stuff to anybody until it’s done and you love it. Then take it to your critique group or workshop when you have more confidence in your work and can ignore advice that doesn’t resonate with you.
Remember it’s your work, and your name will be on it, not the names of your workshoppers. Make sure it’s what you want to say to your reader, not something you’ve mangled to please a handful of dogmatic writers.
by Anne R. Allen(@annerallen) November 19, 2023
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What about you, scriveners? Have you ever fallen into a pattern of over-workshopping? How did you get yourself to stop? What other rules do you see workshops over-enforcing? What’s your unfavorite writing “rule”?
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Featured image, Antoine Raspal, the Couturiers Workshop, 1760. Wikicommons
I once eliminated all ‘ly’ words in a manuscript. My critique partners told me to put some of them back because it read awkward without any.
The contraction one puzzles me. Why do we have contractions except to use them?
Alex–I forgot to include this “rule” in #6. They forget some adverbs don’t end in “ly” but they can still ruin your story. I can imagine how awkward your story sounded. Why have contractions? Why have the passive voice? Why have adverbs and adjectives? These things exist for a reason. You’re so right.
One of the problems at the root of over workshopping is that workshop friends might not read your genre at all, might not know where your work fits into it, they might even dislike that genre! Yet a newbie writer or one who isn’t confident about their style might feel obligated to take their advice anyway. Your list of “rules” is so familiar, that some of them have become cliches. I’m reading Mick Herron’s latest now and he breaks most of those rules and his prose is simply fabulous!
Carmen–Pretty much every bestseller proves these “rules” wrong, doesn’t it? Great point that negative critiques often come from people who don’t read your genre.
OMG – I followed so much of this advice as a newbie writer. I laugh about it now but back then I would go through my entire novel and take out what “they” told me to take out, be it an adverb or an adjective or a “that” or whatever. I didn’t understand “why” I was doing it. I did it because that’s what those in the know advised me to do. Then I found my “voice” or whatever the term is that is thrown around and now my books read better and feel more real. Thank you for this very clarifying post, Anne.
Patricia–Newbie writers have a lot to contend with, and this kind of bad advice doesn’t help. I’ll never forget the loooong moment of silent disapproval I endured when I first took my work to a workshop at a prestigious writers’ conference. I had written my first chapter in the past progressive tense. Heaven forfend! That tense uses a lot of “was” constructions. “I was walking down the street” is PASSIVE, they all said. None of them knew grammar, but they all knew the “writing rules.”
Huh? “I was walking down the street” is past progressive tense, not passive voice. I could see not writing “The street was walked down by me,” but that’s not what you wrote!
Liz–These people had been taught that “was” is always passive. Another one of those workshop “helpful hints” that calcified into a rule. 🙁
Taught by whom or what is the question? Certainly not CMos!
Liz–No. You will not find this stuff in the Chicago Manual of Style. 🙂
Anne—The dogmatic application of someone’s so-called “rules” is antithetical to creativity. The only input I’m interested in is from the editor/publisher who is paying me to publish my work.
Ruth–So true! Strictly following these “rules” is mostly a big waste of time. Amateurs probably can’t help your writing beyond the basics.
Ruth–This comment is from Linda Browne. The WP elves put it in the wrong place in the thread. “Exactly, Ruth.
May I add: the only input I’m interested in is from the editors I am paying to help me polish my work?”
Good stuff, Anne. But I wouldn’t expect anything else from you and Ruth. I think that Show Don’t Tell thing messes the most with new writers. And there’s one I’d like to add: Never describe your characters (or minimally describe them at the most). Go tell that to JK Rowling.
Garry–I agree about “show-don’t-tell.” It’s responsible for some of the slowest, most boring writing in the slush pile. Character descriptions can go overboard, or they can be boring, but don’t eliminate them entirely or the reader will get the characters confused.
Ah, yes. They’re guidelines. Except for #9. Punctuation is important. It’s what keeps readers from leaving your book because they can’t understand your writing.
Kathy–The punctuation thing seems to be a new quirk with the MFA crowd. I’ve heard from several newbie writers who had been hit with this rule. And I’m reading a book right now with lots of awards that has no punctuation for dialogue. A silly fad that can be destructive for new writers.
On the other hand, I just read a book that obviously had a bucket of ellipsis and em-dashes spilled on the ms. So I will argue that you can have to much punctuation 😉
Tina–The em dash and (generally misused) ellipsis are crutches that can be overused. Especially in YA or chick lit, where there’s a chatty first person narrator. We do need to be careful with these popular writing crutches. But leaving out quotation marks is unkind to your reader, even though it’s fashionable in some circles.
What a great list, Anne! I was laughing as I read it because I’ve been on the receiving end of critiques for almost all of these “rules.” The prologue of my first novel started with the sentence “It was almost graceful the way it dropped over the side of the mountain and glided down toward the valley below.” I was told I couldn’t start a book with the word “it.” I immediately thought of Dickens. The sentence stayed.
While I love constructive criticism, and I’m always willing to change, it has to be for a well-stated reason, not because of some arbitrary rule.
Kay–I’ve never heard of that one!! “It” is taboo now? Oh, my. Truly constructive criticism is helpful and necessary. But hitting new writers with silly rules like that isn’t.
Where have these “rules” come from, anyway? I went through an undergraduate and a graduate fiction program, but we weren’t given any these “rules.”
Liz–I think many of these rules come from workshops at writers conferences. They certainly don’t come from the English department, because many ignore actual grammar rules. My mom taught English at the University of Connecticut, and this stuff drove her crazy.
Never been to a workshop, sounds like a horrible way to acquire knowledge or advice. About the only rule I have problems with is the “show and tell’ rule, so I think that will always be my permanent glitch in the writing matrix. How much show is too much? How much tell is too much? Darn if I know, so I always try to approach what I write as a reader. If it looks awkward to me as a reader, chances are it’s awkward to me as a writer and needs to be pruned.
GB–Showing and telling vary greatly between genres, which is why it’s so confusing. Romance readers want to know all about what the romantic leads look like, but they don’t care much about what kind of car the bad guy drives or what kind of gun he uses to rob them. But try writing a thriller without all the specifics of the firearms and readers will have a fit. Women’s fiction wants to savor the emotional moments, but action adventure wants that story to keep up a fast pace.
Don’t get me started about writing workshop. By the time I finished my master’s degree, I was so done with having to listen to a bunch of people tell me how to write my story the way they would have written it themselves. Then write the durn story yourself!!
Liz–There is so much narcissism in critiquing that we have to ignore about 80% of what we hear. Everybody wants the story to be about them. We have to smile and say “duly noted” and ignore most of it. Do pay attention to what aspects everybody wants to rewrite though. That probably means that area needs work. But probably not using the narcissistic suggestions.
I think one of the big problems with workshops is that they aren’t asking and answering the appropriate question: For me as a reader, does this story seem to meet the writer’s intent? If not, where are the gaps?
Liz–A wise question. I think the problems arise when the critic forgets it’s about the writer’s intent, not that of the critic.
A good reason to avoid writers’ conferences!
Liz–Some writers conferences can be magic. You meet wonderful people and hear great presentations. But the kind that conducts a lot of workshops can leave many a new writer in tears.
OMG, thank you for number 3. So called head hopping can add so much depth to certain scenes. J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts) does this so well and not once have I been lost or wondered whose thoughts were being related.
#8 Never underestimate the power of a good cliché. It’s familiar to a reader and can often get the point across better than some long winded narrative. One of my favorites is “that dog won’t hunt.”
#6 I believe Sai King started that nonsense. Sometimes an adverb or adjective just fits. Maybe use them sparingly, but not at all? Pft.
#7 There’s a place for showing and telling. Telling works well especially for time jumps. It’s fine to tell that a character boarded a plane at 6:15 am and arrived in London X hours later. Nobody cares what happened on the plane unless there were snakes. And don’t get me started on the ‘was’ police.
One that didn’t make your list was the use of ‘as.’ My editor and I went round and round about this. She used the cause and effect argument. I told her that two actions can happen simultaneously. Plus it cuts down on the use of ‘and.’ It’s more efficient to state that she heard birds as she walked down the street that she walked down the street and heard birds. There was a lot of awkwardness in her suggestions. I won, by the way.
Thanks for this post, especially for those writers just getting started. You are correct that these are guidelines and not rules. But even rules were meant to be broken. If the shoe fits and all that.
Brenda–I’m not encouraging head hopping within scenes. That can be confusing to a reader unless the writer is very skilled, but presenting different scenes with different points of view can be great.
Long before Stephen King, Mark Twain said “If you see an adverb, kill it.” Of course he was addressing the overly descriptive flowery prose of his day.
Yes. “As” sentences can be more fluid than “and” sentences, so it’s often a good idea to use “as” when possible.
Great stuff. I think your advice, “ignore advice that doesn’t resonate with you” should be posted conspicuously in every writer’s studio. Well done.
CS–It’s so important to trust one’s instincts, even as a newbie. But I know it’s hard when peppered with advice.
This article makes me sad. Us creatives are so vulnerable, especially when we start out. All those rule-sticklers sound more like they want to assert their own superiority then helping those who know less. We all wish writing a book was as guided as baking a cake, but it’s not. Learning when to listen to and when to ignore advice is its own art.
I just read a book where one character did not use contractions, ever. But then, he was a snobby elf!
Tina–There are some “writers” who hang out in workshops never finishing their own work, projecting their fears on others. They become professional workshoppers instead of writers. You’re right that learning to ignore is its own art.
The world needs snobby elves. They’re allowed to avoid contractions. 🙂
Excellent post Anne. I’m with you on all counts. Sometimes I wonder what this generation of writers are being taught in some of these classes. My favs are #2, there are many times when a word repeated adds great emphasis or gives a flow to the sentence, just as you demonstrated with Dickens, and #5 contractions, my editor taught me to use them from my first book – write how a person would normally speak. 🙂
Debby–I think writers who are trained at these workshops will end up writing identical books that have no soul. Repetition is what poets do. “Don’t repeat” is what Google tells people for best SEO, because they’re looking for quick, simple reads, not art. And yes, they should teach creative writers to use contractions, not avoid them. But again, the people writing the rules are talking about writing articles and business letters, not creative prose. Sigh.
Kate Atkinson is one of my favorite writers. She breaks all kinds of “rules” and has some clever devices. One is an entire scene followed by a few lines from another character’s point of view or a third person objective author’s comment. Reading her has freed up my prose and I’m no longer so bound to not telling. I just read a critique by someone who admitted they didn’t like my genre and hadn’t read the earlier chapters I had posted. I found it useful to “defend” myself by explaining my use of cliche by one character and a slower more thoughtful chapter before a dramatic scene. Non-erotic romances for example often need more interior monologues that action fans can tolerate. We need to ignore a lot of critiques by people who don’t read our genre.
Ruchama–Atkinson sure does break rules. I’m halfway through one of her Jackson Brodie books and there has been no inciting incident so far. There must be 50 characters. You have to be as brilliant as Atkinson to get away with that, since it is anything but reader-friendly. But I’m still reading… 🙂
Listening to people who don’t read our genre is generally a waste of time. Whenever I do, my reviewers ding me for it. People don’t read rom-coms or cozies for realism. Sigh. And of course our characters use cliches! Unless they’re all wildly inventive poets, they will talk like normal humans.
I’ve never taken my WIP to a workshop. My “workshop” is Pro Writing Aid. It’s useful for catching things like using the same word (usually a pronoun) to start three or four sentences in a row, and it highlights all the words ending in “ly”, even if it’s not an adverb. I pay attention to it all, but still “trust my gut” on what I choose to revise.
Fred–I argue with those programs all the time. I hate it that the grammar checker in the new Word wants you to put commas after every other word. I get furious and call it all sorts of names. Luckily, it can’t fight back. 🙂 That “ly” thing would drive me nuts, but I’m sure most of it is helpful.
Great column, Anne! I’ve had about 2000 students, and have definitely encouraged them to hang with other aspiring writers, because that keeps you keen. But I’ve also had students who become professional students, and I understand that well. It’s fun, going to night classes, writing and reading your work out loud. Getting mild applause for it.
It’s a lot more work submitting your best work to a publisher or agent, and then writing and submitting your next and your next.
Melodie–“Professional students” is a great phrase. It’s what these over-workshoppers are. They may not take University level classes like yours, but in the same way, they get addicted to the workshop or critique group environment, and never move on to the next phase, where people who matter like agents and editors will be judging their work.
Spot on advice as usual, Anne!
One of my characters favors adverbs when he speaks. If I removed them from his dialogue, my readers wouldn’t recognize him without tags. We can blame King for that terrible advice.
As for contractions, if we’re writing in deep POV, the narrative should sound like the POV character, not a sanitized version of themselves.
Aack. There’s so much confusion in critique groups, it’s amazing we survived. 😂
Sue–I love Stephen King’s writing advice for everything but that. I like to think he wasn’t talking about dialogue. You’re so right it’s amazing we survived critique groups. I’m in a group now that’s all pros, so we mostly give each other useful advice. But we let a newbie join last year and she was so cruel (and wrong) I actually got writers block for the first time in my life.