When I first signed up for this class, I was honestly pretty worried about having to share my work. I was excited to learn about craft and improve on my writing, but I’ve always had terrible view on my own work. No matter what I wrote, I always seemed to find something wrong with it, which isn’t necessarily bad because nothing can be perfect and EVERYTHING has the potential to be improved upon, but I would count up everything I found wrong and immediately assume that no one had ever written anything so terrible. This outlook was probably due to me not having the opportunity to be in many creative writing classes throughout my academic career, but I had always thought that writers were supposed to feel proud of what they had written, and I never felt like that. I guess this is just a long way of saying that this class has really built my confidence as a writer, especially through the workshop process. When it was my turn for my story to be workshopped, I was literally sweating buckets and I even began editing my story to prepare for a lot of negative comments. Obviously the workshop wasn’t like that at all. It actually surprised me to hear everyone’s positive comments and even when we went onto the critique section, everyone voiced their comments in a positive way and gave really helpful suggestions. I had gotten so far into my head and so fixated on the idea of wanting everyone to like my story that I had forgotten why I started writing in the first place. I love writing, it makes me happy and I enjoy telling stories that connect with people. Sure, sometimes it sucks and I may hate ever word that I bang out on my keyboard, but it’s still a labor of love. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the biggest part of the workshop and class that I’ve learned so far is to just write. I’ll probably never be the next Shakespeare or Stephen King or Barbara Kingsolver, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that the things I do write are good and bad. My writing is made up of good things and bad things, and it’ll never be perfect, but all that matters is that there’s something on the page. This entry is longer than I thought it’d be, but here’s my ending note: You will always be your harshest critic (sorry for the cliché), but that doesn’t mean that the people around you share your mindset. Just put your work out there and you might be surprised with the response. Also: Everyone did a wonderful job during this round of revisions and should be proud of themselves! 🙂