If you go to a workshop with the expectation that people will lavish praise on your writing, there is a nonzero chance that you will be destroyed

A bunch of my friends are going to writing workshops this summer, so I thought I’d share the most hard-won piece of advice that I possess: don’t go there looking for people to tell you that your writing is great.

What makes this advice so hard-won is that I’ve gone into so many critique situations looking for that kind of validation and I’ve rarely gotte…