I read somewhere that the two things people fear more than death are public speaking and writing. Now when you combine the two, getting up and reading what you’ve written in front of a bunch of people – well it’s a wonder that anyone ever has the nerve to take a writing workshop.

After years of conducting workshops I have to say that I know some of the bravest people in L.A.  To enable that bravery it’s important for a workshop to be a safe place because we’re naked when we write, and to be safe you have to have very clear guidelines when you read to get feedback on your writing – whether it’s in a workshop in the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension or with a group of friends who meet once a month to read their stuff in someone’s living room, or two writing buddies meeting at Starbucks to exchange their latest work. Here are some of the guidelines that I use in my workshops:

– The writing is addressed, not the personal. If someone reads fiction we take it as fiction. We don’t ask if it really happened and the writer doesn’t tell us. (Better it should be made up – it’s fiction.)

– If it’s memoir or a personal essay we take it as the truth, and again, address the writing in it, not the personal. We don’t question the validity of the story. This is a sacred pact between the writer of non-fiction and the reader: I’m telling you the truth. (You-know-who violated that pact and Oprah cut him up in a million little pieces right there on TV).

– We address what works in the writing first, and then what confuses us or what we have questions about. We take notes during the reading so our comments will be very specific. Workshop is about helping other writers reach the full potential of their stories, to point out what might not be needed (but usually has to be written in the first drafts to get where you’re going) and what moves us and fills us with emotion, what we want to know more about, what needs to be clarified, simplified or expanded. It’s an exercise in generosity – time and attention is paid. It’s about the craft of writing.

To write well, truthfully and deeply, we need to be at our most vulnerable. This is our life we’re writing about, our feelings, the pain of the past or the hope of the future – or in fiction, here’s our imagination in full naked view. I suspect a lot of wonderful writers have thrown in the towel because of snarky comments in some workshop. One mean girl or nasty guy remark can be devastating.

Sometimes this can be more subtle. Every time I teach I learn something new – and I realize that I need to be even more alert and vigilant about the feedback students are receiving from one another because in a recent advanced memoir and personal essay class a wonderful writer, who has been in my workshops for years, read a very scary, difficult scene with a terrible person in it and a couple of the comments expressed disbelief that he could have been real. I didn’t jump on this as hard as I should have, and I appreciated the writer emailing me later to let me know how she felt about the experience. Not having her work believed by a few students was painful to her and made the workshop feel less safe.

It takes so much courage to write your truth in a memoir, and so many years to get to the place where you can finally attempt to put your story on the page, that to have anyone question its truth cannot be part of a writing workshop.

Of course the feedback we really want is that we’ve nailed it, it’s perfect, and don’t change a word. (I personally have never been told this.) But all work needs to be read by other people because writers lose perspective after multiple drafts, and a writing workshop is a good place to start and can help you push your writing beyond where you thought it could go. But if you don’t feel safe, speak up or just leave. Writing needs to be nurtured, not torn apart.

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If you’d like to share any experiences you’ve had getting feedback in a writing workshop, good or bad, please leave a comment.