Different Rules For Different Tools

In college, when I took my first writing workshop class, my professor told us that a writing workshop is where everybody reads your writing, tells you what to do, ten you ignore them and do what you want. This is something I have talked about before. I still think about this advice, especially when I actually show my writing to other people for advice.

I still can get attached to my writing, so it really helps to remember not to take it personally when they scrutinize my work, and to know that I can ignore anything they say I don't agree with. If somebody starts saying something that gets my blood boiling, I release that anger in a giant ball of "I don't give a crap because your opinion means nothing to me" (which I politely keep to myself).

However. . .

That advice is not entirely universal. Writing workshops are basically a collection of strangers. You are going to have a mishmash of personalities and ideas which will give you a spectrum of opinions. Now, I have editors. More than that, they are trusted editors. They are writing soulmates. These are people who operate on the exact same mental frequency as me. They have the same thoughts about the same parts. They are people who will point out every single part of a story that I didn't feel comfortable with, even when I don't give them the slightest clue where those spots might be or what opinions I have of the strength of my writing.

I do not ignore my editors. They're smarter than me (they are certainly more perceptive). If they start giving advice that I would normally ignore, I shut my mouth and listen. I pay attention to every thought, every suggestion, and I consider them very carefully. If I even remotely agree with them, I will take their advice whole. If I thoroughly disagree with them, I will take a whole day to consider their advice from every angle to see if I'm missing something that they're catching.

I will never blindly listen to people's advice. I need to agree with it. But when I have people I trust as much as I trust my editors, I am working on an established base of them having my best interests at heart because it is their natural state as well as mine.


The point of all this is simple. A workshop is a tool. You run your draft through it and it produces a better next draft. An editor is like a one-man workshop. It functions very similarly, but it is not the same tool.

You need different rules for different tools. Understand that one way of doing things may work well for a particular situation, but that is no guarantee it will work for any other situation, no matter how similar.