What’s over-workshopping? It’s what happens when writers attend too many writing workshops or critique groups where they’re fed dogmatic, my-way-or-the-highway rules. Following rules too closely can slow down your story (and your career.) It can also eliminate what’s creative and original in your work.

You can spend years schlepping that WIP from workshop to workshop, never letting your writing career take off. This can be simple fear of success. Or it can be a kind of addiction to writing rules.

Writers need to realize that in writing there are no hard-and-fast rules. There are only guidelines. You want to learn the basic rules of writing and grammar, of course, but following rules to the letter can squelch a story and snoozify a reader.

Remember that perfect is the enemy of good.

Here are some of the workshop criticisms we can often ignore.

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