I recently wrote a blog post for Writer's Digest on workshop critiques:

Excerpt:

"Eight years ago, when I took my first creative writing course at the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, I went to a workshop run by a Canadian writer whose work had been nominated for the Giller Prize. At the end of the workshop, I stuck around with a few other stragglers to ask a question about something the writer said. In the process, I overheard a conversation between the writer and another workshop attendee – a woman who confessed to not having written for five years after being brutally critiqued by her former creative writing teacher.

Though this was new – and shocking – to me at the time, it was only the first among many stories that I heard from other writers who confessed to their work being ripped to shreds at a workshop or by a teacher in a classroom or in a writing group."

READ MORE:
http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-b...