It is the inevitable fate of any Liberal Arts major to find themselves, somewhere down the line, trapped in a workshop class. Acting workshops, art workshops, and the topical writing workshop are all part of the journey from prerequisite classes to a major-oriented curriculum, and for many people they are dreadful. Nothing compares, no horror of public speaking or theater audition comes close, to the feeling of having your work put on the spot and criticized by your fellow classmates. Perhaps for those who have no interest in the subject of workshop, for those with zero shame in providing criticism or being publicly shamed for your work, the response is not the same. But for the average human, the feeling of being workshopped and workshopping can be particularly miserable.

I’m an English major, with a concentration in Creative Writing, if we’re being specific. I am a sophomore, and so I am only now finding myself in classes where everyone cares about the subject matter at hand. When you’re taking a low-level class that falls under certain prerequisite requirements for economics and philosophy majors alike, the classroom environment is, more often than not, comfortable. You’re all there to get a good grade and move forward with your education, to place a check in the box and move on down the line. But once you find yourself removed from the freshman comfort zone, the temperature begins to rise.

Suddenly you’re surrounded by a bunch of yous, all looking to get the job that you aspire to have, looking directly at you with a fierce sense of competition. Your sense of individuality becomes less academic and strictly personal, and in an academic class, that means that you are all, by standard definition, equals. Equal in expectation, and that is to say there is something of an assumed equality in what sort of work you’re going to bring to the table. In a workshop class, something is literally the case, where you actually bring your work and put it on a table and a teacher and your classmates literally evaluate it with equal expectations. The only thing unequal about it is the expectation of your teacher and your classmates, that is to say, your classmates expect, often, considerably more than your teacher, and I get it.

I’ve been meticulously sorting through 7 full-length short stories a week, reading and outlining and underlining every single detail of every single paper. As is only natural, I see every single flaw in every single paper. While every ounce of my being wants to act on my incredibly instinctive and defensive impulses, I find myself putting smiley faces next to “Funny!” excerpts and writing “Good use of language!’ next to an extended metaphor that I found went on for one too many commas. I’m not sure which one is worse: my unbelievable impulse to be the Gordon Ramsay of the literary world, or my cruel ingenuine sludge that I smear all over every paper, disguised as hearts and exclamation marks and terms of endearment.

I don’t know if my fiction is any good, in fact, I often think it’s bad only because all my friends say it’s good and I can’t imagine they’re any more honest than I am. I want to receive the verbal shaming of my workshop peers, who go around in a circle and each, individually, express their love or disdain for said piece. Some classmates are more constructive than others, some use (notably similar to their writing) grandiose metaphors and comparisons to explain that maybe they would have liked to know what color coat my character was wearing. Others simply repeat the phrase “Yeah, I liked it” over and over again, with particular plot points I’m left to assume that, yeah, they liked, thrown in the middle. Some are nice, and some are mean, some can’t give me a reason why they like it, and others give me every reason they hated it. But in the end, they’re all fighting for their spot on the shelf at Barnes & Noble, and I can’t help but have some amount of respect for that.