Workshop Drinking Game

I’m up the mountain at the Rio Hondo workshop, hanging out with eleven other talented writers, talking deep into the night, enjoying hot tub parties, critiquing their work, and grooving on the spectacle of the natural world.

This also means my posting here might be scant for the rest of the week.

We— well actually some of them— have invented a drinking game specially for writers’ workshops.  Here’s how it works.

You slam down a drink whenever you hear any of the following in critique:

• I’m not your audience for this story.

• The story wants to be longer/shorter.

• You’re obviously an Analog writer.

• The story really starts on Page 6.

• Here’s the story you should be writing.

• I seem to have read a different story from everyone else.

• You can do without the frame story.

• What this scene needs is a dinosaur.

• I don’t know how to read this story.

• Too many adverbs!

• You’re guilty of using said-bookisms.

• I think you should cut the prologue.

• You’re a better writer than this.

And, ultimately . . .

• Robert Silverberg wrote this story in 1961.

Happy critique!