The Usefulness of Productive Misreadings
- elichvar
- May 22
- 4 min read
May 22, 2025
By John Pipkin, fiction faculty
One concern that I often hear about delivering critiques in workshop (especially from my undergraduate students) is a version of the question “What if I’m wrong?” or “How do I know if I’ve read the piece correctly?”
These are understandable concerns, especially in the semi-public forum of the writing workshop, where you not only need to have a concrete opinion, but you also have to say it out loud in front of other writers and then stand behind the ideas you’ve offered up for scrutiny. But just as good writing requires a willingness to take risks and follow your instincts, the act of sharing a critique involves a similar vulnerability.
The anxiety over the possibility of delivering a workshop critique that is “wrong” sometimes stems from deeper misperceptions of the role of a rough draft and the nature of revision. It is all too easy to think of the rough draft as simply a “flawed” or “broken” or “mistake-riddled” version of the final draft, and in this perspective revision becomes a process of correcting mistakes, which can make the writing workshop seem like a process of enumerating things to be “fixed,” and as a result, this can place the critic in the position of being “right” or “wrong.” But this approach to critique-workshop-revision misses the real point of the workshop environment, which is not to find out what is right and wrong in a manuscript, but rather to see how the manuscript lives and breathes on its own, what reactions it evokes from readers, what conversations and engagements it elicits. In other words, an effective writing workshop is more about dialogue than diagnosis.
When we think about a workshop in this way, delivering a critique is not about being “right” or “wrong” but rather about giving an authentic response to the manuscript in a way that reflects how specific choices in composition and structure have directed the reader to arrive at a specific reading. And this brings the possibility of productive misreadings.
It is, of course, entirely possible for a reader to miss a detail or overlook a piece of information or a moment of explication and thereby respond to a manuscript in a way that is unintended or unexpected by the writer. But far from being “wrong” or unhelpful, these kinds of misreadings can be among the most useful workshop responses, as long as they originate in and are supported by the text under discussion, and especially when the critic can point to a specific moment, passage, or word choice that produced the reading. Even if a reader has overlooked something in manuscript, this misreading provides the writer with the opportunity to ask what in the manuscript made it possible for an important detail to be overlooked.
It is not at all an unusual occurrence in writing workshops for a reticent critic, usually near the end of the group discussion, to say something like, “Well, I could be wrong, and I wasn’t sure if I should mention this since it might sound strange, but it kind of seemed to me that the main character might be a dog,” and more often than not, this kind of comment is followed by one or more workshop participants joining in with, “Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, but I didn’t want to say anything because I was pretty sure I was wrong.”
It's crucially important for a writer to hear responses like this from readers, since they indicate that something in the manuscript—some small detail, phrasing, or even just the general tone of the piece—evoked or inspired a reading that might not align with the piece’s assumed intention. In the case of a misreading, the usefulness lies not so much in identifying what needs to be “fixed” in the manuscript, but rather in the opportunity to dig deeper and discuss the cause-and-effect relationship between the manuscript and the reader. And this also opens the door to exploring whether the content of the manuscript might be at odds with what seemed to be the writer’s original vision or intention for the piece.
This brings us back to the idea of developing a clear understanding of how we approach the role of the rough draft. If we think of it as simply a flawed version of the final draft, then a misreading might seem to offer nothing more than a checklist of things to fix in the draft (something closer to copyediting), or the misreading might simply offer evidence for its own dismissal as something incorrect. But when we think of a rough draft as a dynamic exploration of the ideas that the final draft will attempt to express more fully, then productive misreadings serve the crucial role of helping the writer take guidance from the manuscript itself, which may lead the writer to unexpected discoveries. For example, maybe the story’s main character really should become a dog after all, or maybe they’ve been a dog from the start and the writer just didn’t realize it.
So, one requirement of an effective writing workshop is for the participating critics to feel confident in sharing their readings, not because they are confident in the “correctness” of the critique, but rather in the certainty that something in the manuscript has generated a compelling dialogue between text and reader, even if this reading seems contradictory or digressive with regard to the apparent intentions of the manuscript. A productive misreading gives a writer the opportunity to compare the intentions of the manuscript with their own authorial vision, and this intersection is often where epiphanies are to be found.
John Pipkin’s newest novel is The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter. His critically acclaimed debut, Woodsburner, was awarded the First Novel Prize by the New York Center for Fiction, the Fiction Award from the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner First Novel Prize and was named one of the best books of 2009 by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Christian Science Monitor. He was awarded fellowships at the Harry Ransom Center and from The Dobie Paisano Fellowship program. He received his PhD in British Literature from Rice University.