Reader’s Guide to Workshop Day

The fateful day has finally arrived. You’re a STEM major who hasn’t had to submit a coherent sentence for a grade since College Writing: Technology & Selfhood (the latter being much harder to understand than the former). And yet now you’re here, a senior in your final semesters of college, scraping together your last few HUM credits in Creative Nonfiction Writing 1—the 8:30 AM section, no less, as it was the only time slot you could fit between your unpaid med campus lab job and the MCAT prep class your mom insisted you sign up for. You heard the writing department was an easy A—you should have known better than to trust your roommate with the writing minor; she acts like you’re the devil incarnate whenever you pull up ChatGPT. 

The first month and a half of class was manageable. The only person actually reading your writing was your MFA student professor, Beatrix-with-an-X, and she’s too preoccupied with her own manuscript about orchestra camp to care much about the quality of yours. Workshop Day was always beyond the horizon until it wasn’t, and, before you know it, it’s your turn to be radically scrutinized by your snooty Howard Nemerov Scholar and Sigma Tau Delta (don’t they know their initials are STD?) classmates. They all hate you because your fun fact on the first day of class was that you’re in Beyond Boundaries (because what even is that?). You’ve also dropped your Stanley on the hard tile floor at least three separate times over the course of the semester and the Eads infrastructure can’t handle much more.

If you already submitted your piece (not an essay, a piece) for workshop, you’re successfully over the hump. The hardest part is well behind you. Hopefully you didn’t write about anything too intimate or revealing for your classmates to silently hold against you, like the time you copped a feel from your locker buddy in seventh grade P.E. A silence like that on Workshop Day can be deafening. Ideally, you wrote something novel but safe, but realistically you (like every other Creative Nonfiction Writing-er) probably wrote something generic about your fucked-up relationship with your dad. To prepare for those dreaded 30 minutes of class time devoted entirely to you and your inability to come up with enough clever synonyms for “said,” here’s some carefully crafted advice:

  • Arrive in an outfit that makes you feel hot in a humanities sort of way (see Weil Hall or watch Dead Poets Society for inspiration).
  • Recite the words “imagery,” “diction,” “voice,” and “structure” aloud over and over until they do that thing where they sound like made up words.
  • Expect at least one of your fellow classmates to really resonate with your piece.
  • Don’t take offense when someone gets up to use the bathroom. They don’t think you suck. They just have to pee (or cry). 
  • Pretend to understand the difference between the words levity and gravity. They’ll be thrown around liberally.
  • The only feedback (good or bad) that actually matters will be from Beatrix. Any “X” scribbled on your paper is likely just her way of reminding you how her name is spelled. 
  • Feedback doesn’t actually matter. You’re a STEM major.
  • No one expects you to know how to write. You’re a STEM major.

On behalf of all of us at WUnderground, we wish you the best of luck. They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Do you and your dad need a therapist?