Offerings

Ground Rules

Toolbox

Calendar

Experience

Ground Rules for Writing Workshops
compiled by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

1. Worry not about spelling, grammar, and most of all, making sense.
Trying to make sense is the surest way to keep yourself from getting
lost, and moving beyond the edge of what you know so that you can
discover what you don't know. Let yourself go, and keep your hand
moving.

2. Follow your writing, not the suggested exercise, the facilitator or what you think you should write. Write toward the heat. Write what wakes you up the most. Along with this, feel free to experiment with poems, stories, dialogues, essays, letters, and whatever other forms the writing wants to be. Twist and change the exercises to help you find greater freedom.

3. Write in the way that helps you relax enough to take risks in your writing. Feel free to go to other rooms, lie down, stand up, run outside and breathe every 10 minutes, eat chocolate, and do whatever it is that helps you feel safe enough to write real.

4. Practice radical trust. Trust the place, the exercises, the community, and the process of witnessing one another's work. Most of all, trust yourself to write what you need to write, how you need to write it. Remember that all revealed in this workshop is confidential.

5. Own what you write (sharing with the group is always optional), and treat all newborn writing with great respect and tenderness so that it can grow.

6. Free yourself and your writing from limiting mind sets. No self-deprecating remarks when you read aloud. Strive, as much as possible, not to compare your writing with the writing of others, and not to critique, interpret or analyze away what your writing is trying to show you.

7. Remember to be a witness to others. Listen carefully with your full attention. Feel free to share your responses, but please refrain from critiquing or analyzing the work of others at this point (focusing more on the crafting of writing is best done after the writer has time to revise and shape it).

8. Let yourself be witnessed by the group. Remember that this space we create together is safe and sacred, and it is the space where you can be fully heard and seen.

9. Treat all you do as a delicious and invigorating experiment. Play. Take chances. See what ways leads to way, and what words lead to words.