ONLINE After The Critique

Critiquing lies at the heart of many writing groups, mentoring sessions, and writing workshops. Giving and receiving feedback on writing can be a valuable skill in any writer’s toolkit. By finding strengths and weaknesses in others’ writing, we can learn to see our own writing differently. By learning from our readers what areas in our own work need improvement, we can…wait a minute—what comes next? It’s great to hear what’s working, and it can be enlightening, confusing, disheartening, and frustrating to find out what’s not working. How can you change your weaknesses into strengths? How can you apply your readers’ suggestions and implement meaningful, substantive changes that improve a story or other piece of writing? In this three-hour micro-workshop we’ll take the first steps on moving from “I’ve received a critique” to “I’ve learned and grown as a writer.” From line-by-line edits to rearranging storybeats, we’ll discuss and practice different strategies to make the suggestions come alive.

This is an interactive online class using the Zoom web platform.

Heather Osborne writes science fiction, fantasy, and romance. She earned her doctorate of creative writing from the University of Calgary, and she is associate editor of the International Review of Science Fiction. Her latest short story, “From the Shoals of Broken Cities,” is available in the anthology Shades Within Us (Laksa Media 2018).