This is awful but I forget my password and have to re-set it every single week. Since everyone else wrote about our stories and workshop groups, and mostly because I am sleepy so my brain is turned off, I will hop on the band wagon…
I really like my workshop group – we are each such different people and our writing styles vary dramatically. We have come to an understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses as writers so the constructive criticism is well-delivered as well as well-received. I think each week, we workshop more productively because we have already talked through each other’s writing styles enough that we understand what we mean without the extended explanation at this point. I like that as a group, we are comfortable criticizing each other’s papers partly because, on the other hand, the praise for each other’s writing constantly flows.
My most recent paper was practically a biography (except for the ending), though I did not realize it at the time. I knew I was modeling each character on a real person in my life, and that the events (besides the ending) were based on true life events, but I did not realize, until my group tore it apart, how un-creative my story was! In my past papers, I had always written out of my own imagination, so whether my papers were awesome or awful, they were interesting and creative. In this paper, I completely relied on what I already knew about each character and occurrence, so I did not allow room for creativity until the ending, when I needed something dramatic or else it would be boring. Even with my ending, my group had incredible suggestions for a wild plot.