Writing Fiction: How to incorporate workshop feedback

Part 2 of my workshop examples has come! Last week I showed you how I revised a poem based on a few notes from my peers. Today I am going to do the same with an example of my fiction writing!

For this week’s post, I debated the merits of including the full text of my fiction piece.
Honestly, just the first draft is 14 pages. The third draft is 30 pages and the completed project was about 26 pages.

There is no room for a full copy of that work on here.

Ultimately, I’ve chosen to give the highlights of my story here and show what feedback I got and how I chose to respond to it.

Now, some context: for my final year in Undergrad, I wrote a Capstone/Thesis on authorship in fan fiction. For this project I worked closely with my mentor and few trusted peers to develop two short stories – one an original work of fiction, the other fan fiction for the TV show Angel the Series created by Joss Whedon.

The piece I’m discussing today is the fan fiction.

To start, I wanted two stories with the same premise. Based on my reading habits, I chose to explore how families deal with the knowledge that the world will end in about 24 hours. And there is nothing they can do to stop it.


My first draft of this story, titled Helpless End, was just 2 scenes – the prophecy of the end of the world, and the Angel Investigations team/family deciding to go for ice cream before the end comes.

That was it.

My mentor took this and asked for me to expand on the in between moments. How did they try to fight the inevitable? Where did they go in the time between? Were they all together? Did they separate? What was so important to each member of the family that they decided to spend their last hours pursuing it?

Basically, my first draft was a summary of the important events – discovering the end of the world, a few characters discussing it, sharing the news, and coming to terms with it.

Each subsequent draft added some details.

Angel and Cordelia spent a lot of time in the sewer, as vampires do, fighting demons. Business as usual.

Wesley, Gunn team up to take Fred, the girl they are both interested in, out to the beach and the pier and just have fun, instead of allowing their competitive history to get between them. They eat crap and waste money on rigged games. They have fun.

Once the basic structure of the story is there, I give it over to my peers for notes and inspiration about big revisions.

Some of the notes I received from them:

• Why is Angel so accepting? He should have more angst if you want him to be in character to the show.
• You left Angel and Cordelia at a strange spot, where are they heading after?
• On page 29 you just gloss over a lot of time. You said, 

“The initial grief passed for Fred and Gunn as it had for the others. Acceptance comes quickly when helplessness is the only other option.“I want ice cream,” Fred admitted, hours later as the clock approached midnight.”

• What happened in those hours? How did Fred and Gunn really react – don’t they have families as well? Did they not call their families?

One peer literally said, “I don’t believe it. They get warning of the end of the world and just… go with it? WTH?”


Each of these responses was perfectly valid and useful to me, even though I really hated to hear that last comment. She was basically saying she just plain didn’t like the premise and therefore didn’t like the story.

But I took it as a challenge.

How can I make this more believable?

Really, I think I took the peer comments to heart more than the mentor comments.

I was more invested in improving what my peers saw as flaws, which is why I’m glad I decided to have them read it. (It wasn’t a required workshop, more like a writing group of others also working on the Thesis.)

I took some time and reread the story based on their comments, making my own comments in the margins to see what they saw.

I found that I agreed with a lot of them. I did not want to add Angel-angst because it didn’t fit well with the purpose of the story.

But Angel the character is very angsty, so I added a bit more of that from him, sprinkled throughout the story rather than all at the front.

A bit of restructuring took care of the sudden loss of Angel and Cordelia.

And based on how others noted they would react to the news of an apocalypse, I upped the emotional gravity in everyone in the story to create something that read as more realistic.


I didn’t have to take the advice of everyone who gave me notes (and I didn’t, really) but I felt that, as part of my thesis, adjusting to the expectations of the readers and maintaining the established characterization from the TV show, was a very important aspect of the whole project.


The most important part of revising based on peer comments in fiction, in my experience, is deciding what you want to do with your story. I wanted to convey an idea to an audience, therefore I took a lot of audience feedback into account.


The other half of this project, the original piece I wrote, was a lot more about my own vision for a world and characters. I changed a lot less from that first draft after receiving peer feedback.

In that story, I had one person suggest I try writing from another character’s perspective.

While usually I would at least experiment with that idea, that wasn’t the purpose of the story and I didn’t bother. I knew what story I wanted to tell, and that wasn’t it.


Fiction workshops are generally a lot harder than poetry workshops. They take more time to read and respond to, incorporating feedback takes a lot of commitment.

And writing fiction takes time itself – sometimes you feel horrible when a peer makes a negative comment or overlooks something you found amazing when you wrote it.

But as most writers have heard before, sometimes you have to kill your darlings.

Cut out the pieces you really love about a work. Accept that others don’t read the story as you intended. Most of all, don’t compromise on your writing for the sake of another.

Yes, I think you should cut out the parts you love if they do not add to the overall story.

But don’t revise to please someone else. Accept the revision notes if you think they improve your writing. Not because you think another will like it if you change it.

There’s my notes from a fiction workshop. Have you ever been in one? Working in a writing group? 

How do you incorporate other’s notes into your fiction (or nonfiction, or poetry, or anything)?

Thanks for reading!

Example of Poetry: How to incorporate workshop feedback

The past few weeks I’ve talked a lot about workshops and the value of peer review in revising a draft of writing. This week I want to show you how I take advice from peer reviewers and edit a poem I wrote for a class.

I wrote a draft of a poem for the imagery unit of the course, following the prompt to make a title using the form “The (Image) of (Abstration)”. Drawing from a place I loved as a kid, I called my poem “The Park of Imagination” and wrote about this play park I frequently went to when I was 6/7 years old or so.

For the sake of brevity, I’m just going to go over the first two stanzas:

For the Original Poem-

Flat swatches of brown and green  

Kicking up the dust and grime 

Of a time, once, when you held hands 

Spinning through the old haunt 

But time has not been kind to your old spot. 

The termites gnawed through the heartstrings, 

The sweat slid between you 

A barrier to repel the connection 

And spin you apart in different directions 

As you build momentum and grasp tighter.

I had not thought very deeply about the subject of this poem – but my peer reviewers did.

Unfortunately, I failed to copy direct comments form those reviews and I can’t share those here (went to look for them online and the segment of the course is closed because the course ended, oops).

But- some major notes that shifted my thinking about the poem:

• Many fluff words and conjuctions that aren’t needed in this poem.
• The use of “you” is strange. Maybe try using “us” instead.
• The first line of stanza 2, about the termintes and heartstrings, was really powerful.

At first, I just decided to try the suggested changes and see how I felt. I removed the conjunctions and reread the poem.

It was tighter and made the emotions pop out more vividly.

Then I decided to change every “you” to “us” and read it again.

Holy wow!

Suddenly the poem was not about a place or a distant memory of when I was 6.

Suddenly the poem was very obviously (to me) about an old friend who I had lost touch with. These two memories didn’t even take place at the same time in my life.

The park was from age 6. The person I met when I was 12.

But the images of gnawed on heartstrings, the dynamic of pulling apart and falling into disrepair, was clearly about an old friendship.



Without the input of an impartial reader outside my own head, I may have never made that connection. I think the resulting poem was a lot more personal and important to me.

Was it better?

I think so, but I really think that can be up to you.

Here’s the first two stanzas again. Also, I changed the title to “Tornado Memories”:

Dust swirls above flat browns and greens

Kicked up memories in dust and grime

Of a time, once, when we held hands.

Spinning wildly in forest decay

Leaving snail tracks in our wake.

Time is not kind to wistful minds.

The termites gnawed through heartstrings.

The sweat slid between us 

Two like magnets repulsed by connection 

Spinning us apart in different directions

You, swept in the dancing arms of love. 

Me, windswept, clawing to grasp tighter.

I really like the second version!

Basically, I wanted to use this post to show how, even innocuous comments like suggesting a change of pronouns can impact how you, as the writer, see the poem.

Such a small suggestion, but a big change!

Now you don’t have to take all the advice you are given.

But I like to try out some simple changes like this just to see if I like it.

You can always change it back, after all.

Any comments and suggestions? 

Want to share a poem and get feedback? That sounds fun! Wanna try it? Leave a bit of poetry in the comments and see what feedback you get.

Next week I’m going to do something similar with a fiction piece I had workshopped, so stay tuned if you prefer fiction/prose. I’m getting to that!

Learning to Use Writing Prompts

I was not the biggest fan of writing to prompts in high school. I would always look for stuff online to jump start my writing and I always felt … off, like wearing an ill-fitting dress.

When I realized that answering writing prompts was a large part of my first ever creative writing class in high school, I was nervous. I did not like prompts.