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Our critique rules, voice guide, and what we are not. Read it before you write in.
This document exists because most writing communities will not tell you what they actually believe. They will tell you they are warm. They will tell you they are supportive. They will tell you they will help you find your voice. They will not tell you the rules of their room, because most of them do not have rules. They have moods.
Vagabond Writers Collective has rules. We wrote them down because the writers we want in the room deserve to read them before they walk in. The rules are not a marketing document. They are the operating system of a workshop. They describe how critique is given, how it is received, what is allowed to be said about a piece of writing, and what is not. They describe how we write to one another, how we write to the world, and what voice we use when we do.
We have rules because we believe the workshop is a serious place. We believe that a writer's draft is the most vulnerable thing they own, and that the room receiving it owes the work a kind of attention that most rooms cannot manage on instinct. Instinct is the kindness that says this is great. Instinct is the cruelty that says I would cut this. Neither helps. The room learns to do something other than instinct, and the rules are how it learns.
This document is also a guide to how we write in Vagabond's voice. The same constraints that produce good critique produce good prose. You name what the work is reaching for. You ask real questions. You add rather than negate. You refuse the small handful of moves the wider industry has decided to perform, and you name what you refuse so the refusal is not a posture. If you are writing anything that will go out under the VWC name, whether a critique mark, an email to a cohort, a paragraph of marketing, a system notification, a letter of recommendation, this is the document that tells you what the voice sounds like and which moves are not ours.
The voice and the pedagogy are the same instrument. A workshop is a piece of writing, made by everyone in the room, every week. The critique is the prose. The cohort is the reader. The rules are the syntax.
What follows is the syntax.
These are the rules every cohort member agrees to before they speak. They are adapted from Ron Nyswater's distillation of his years in working writers' rooms. They are non-negotiable inside a VWC workshop. They are also, when you read them sideways, the rules for how we write anything in the VWC voice.
You can extend the work. You can redirect it. You can reframe it. You can propose what could go where something is not yet working. You cannot tear something down and leave nothing in its place. "I'd cut this section" is a half-thought. It is forbidden in the room unless it is followed by what should be in that section instead.
The reason is craft, not politeness. Writers have already heard the voice in their own head saying cut this. They have heard this is not working ten thousand times. The voice they have not heard, the voice that does not arrive on its own, the voice the room is the only place to get, is the one that says this could become this. That is the voice the room exists to produce. Negation is the work the writer can already do alone. Addition is what the room is for.
Worked example. Imagined student passage, literary register:
The kitchen at dusk smelled of onions and someone else's grief. My mother stood at the sink with her back to me and washed the same plate twice. I knew, the way a child knows weather, that I was not supposed to speak. So I watched her shoulders move and counted the ways the light came in.
A non-compliant response:
"The grief metaphor doesn't land for me. Onions don't really smell like grief. And the 'way a child knows weather' line is overwritten."
Two negations and no offer. The writer leaves the room knowing what one reader did not like, and nothing else. Nothing in the response gives her a tool. She will sit down at the draft and her only option is deletion.
A compliant response:
"The onions are doing more than one job here. They're the literal smell of the kitchen, and they're also the thing that makes your eyes water in a way you can't quite call crying. I wonder if the grief is the second smell, not a comparison to the first. As written it reads like onions equal grief, which flattens. If grief is the thing underneath, the onions could be the cover for it, and the line might want to say so."
Same observation. The reader notices the same thing is off. But now there is something to write into. The metaphor gets re-pointed instead of cut. The writer leaves the room with a sentence she might attempt rather than a sentence she has been instructed to delete.
The rule operates on copy as well as on critique. When you are writing in the VWC voice about anything we refuse, you do not only refuse it. You name what you refuse, and you name what we do instead. We do not run an MFA. We run a small cohort that meets weekly for three months on real drafts. The refusal is half the sentence. The addition is the other half. A refusal without an addition is a posture. We do not strike postures.
The strongest critique is often a question the writer has not asked herself. Not gotcha questions. Not questions designed to make a point by cross-examination. Real questions, born of curiosity about the work and what it is doing.
A verdict tells the writer how you felt about the piece. A real question hands the writer a tool and steps back. The writer, not the responder, decides what to do with it. The writer's authority over the work is preserved by the form of the response.
Worked example. Imagined student passage, lyric register:
Years afterwards he would say it began with the dog. It did not begin with the dog. It began with the dust in the field that summer, with the way the dust took the late light and held it, and with the silence between his father and the man who came up the road carrying a hat. The dog was the last thing to know.
A non-compliant response:
"I love this opening. The dust image is gorgeous. I'm not sure about the inversion in the second sentence, it feels a bit precious."
Three verdicts in a row. Loved it. Gorgeous. Precious. Each one is a report on the responder's nervous system. None of them is something the writer can act on. Precious is the worst kind of verdict, because it sounds like a craft term and is actually a feeling wearing a craft term as a costume.
A compliant response:
"Why does this paragraph announce that the dog is the wrong starting place? The narrator seems to want us to know, immediately, that someone else has gotten this story wrong. Who is the someone? Whose telling of this is the narrator correcting? I am asking because the inversion in the second sentence reads to me like a person interrupting, and I want to know who it is the narrator is interrupting against."
The same instinct. The same observation that the inversion is doing something specific. But now the writer is being asked to look at why she put it there. She might find the inversion is structural and necessary because she is writing against an oral version of the same story. She might find the inversion is doing nothing and remove it. The room cannot know which. The writer can, once the question has been put.
In copy: the same discipline shows up as a refusal of the rhetorical question. We do not write "Are you ready to write?" on a button. The rhetorical question is the marketing version of a verdict. It assumes a single answer and asks for assent. Real questions ask for thought. Marketing questions ask for a click. We do not ask for clicks dressed as thought.
Before you can ask whether something is working, you have to ask what it is trying to do. This is the move the room makes first, every time. What is this draft reaching for? You name the reach. Then you respond to whether the prose meets it.
This is the rule that protects the writer working in a tradition the room is not used to reading. It is the rule that prevents the room from evaluating a quiet domestic story by the standards of a thriller, or a fragmented essay by the standards of a linear one, or a piece of literary fiction by the standards of plot-forward genre fiction. The rule asks the room to read the work on its terms before saying anything about whether the terms have been met.
Worked example. Imagined student passage, declarative register:
They closed the plant in March. The next March, they closed the second one. By the third March, what was left was the river and the parking lots and a few people who had not yet figured out how to leave. My brother was one. My uncle was another. I was the third.
A non-compliant response:
"This needs more sensory detail. We don't see the plant, we don't smell the river, we don't get inside the brother's head. The prose is too flat. It should breathe more."
The responder has read the piece against a template he brought with him into the room. Sensory detail. Interiority. Breath. The piece is not reaching for any of those things. The piece is reaching for the cadence of a list. Three years, three closures, three people who did not leave. The flatness is the form. The responder's note would destroy the piece by making it answer questions it never set out to ask.
A compliant response:
"This passage reads like a ledger. The closures are accounted for in a single sentence each. The people who stayed are accounted for in a single sentence each. The form is the inventory of a place that has been emptied. I notice that the narrator includes himself in the inventory, which is the move that turns the ledger from accounting into confession. If the form is intentional, the piece is already doing what it set out to do, and the question for me as a reader is what comes next. Does the rest of the piece honor the ledger form, or does it break out of it? If it breaks, what does the break signify?"
The reach has been named. The form has been read on its own terms. The question that follows is a real question about whether the piece will continue in the mode it has established or move out of it. The writer can answer that question. It is a structural question about her own draft, not a complaint that the draft is not the kind of draft the responder would have written.
In copy: the same rule means that before we write a sentence describing what VWC is, we have already asked what VWC is reaching for. We are reaching for a small room of serious writers working on drafts that matter, with a teacher who is also a working writer, at a price that does not bankrupt them. Every sentence about VWC has to answer to that reach. The minute the sentence drifts toward something the brand is not reaching for, the sentence is wrong and has to come out.
The writer whose work is being discussed does not speak during the discussion. This is the Iowa workshop's oldest constraint, and we keep it. Not because Iowa kept it. Because it works.
The reason is craft, not ritual. A writer who explains her work to the room is not learning from the room. She is managing the room. She is selecting from the available responses the ones that confirm what she already intended, and arguing with the ones that do not. The arguing feels like clarifying. It is actually defending. The work is built to stand on its own without her voice next to it, and the workshop is the one place she gets to find out whether it does.
There is a softer version of this rule. Matthew Salesses argues, in Craft in the Real World, that silencing the writer is itself an aesthetic position with consequences, particularly for writers working outside the tradition the room is used to reading. He is right that the rule has been used badly. He is right that the rule must be paired with a rigorous discipline of reading the work on its own terms, which is exactly what Rule 3 above is for. With Rule 3 in place, the silent-author rule becomes a discipline of attention rather than a silencing of the writer. The writer is not absent from the conversation. The writer is the reason for the conversation. She just does not have to perform her work for the room to read it.
We soften the rule slightly. The writer is silent during the discussion. At the end, there is a five-minute window where the writer can ask the room questions. Did you see what I was doing with the second narrator? is a fair question. Did you like it? is not. What would you want more of? is fair. Did the ending land? invites verdict and is not.
If you are the writer whose work is up: take notes. Do not defend. The instinct to clarify will be strong. The clarifying will not help your draft. The note will. Write down the responses that surprise you. The responses you already agree with do not change anything. The responses that surprise you are the door.
If you are in the room and not the writer: speak to the work, not to the writer's intent. You do not know what she intended. You only know what is on the page. "I think you were trying to do X" is a guess and an imposition. "The page is doing X" is an observation and a gift. Stay with the page. The writer will tell you, in revision, what she did with what you said.
The five minutes at the end belong to the writer's curiosity. She drives. The room answers what she asks. If she does not ask, the silence is its own answer. The next draft is where the conversation continues.
Voice is what stays the same across every context. Tone is what shifts. VWC's voice has seven characteristics. Every sentence we publish should be testable against this list.
Declarative. We make statements. We do not pitch. The sentence ends in a period, not a question mark and not an exclamation point. We trust the statement to do its work.
Specific. We use concrete images. Ten writers in a room for three months beats small cohorts. A draft worth sending out into the world beats significant progress. If a sentence is vague, it is wrong, and the fix is to find the specific thing the vague sentence was avoiding.
Restrained. Every adjective earns its place. Most adjectives do not earn their place. We write the room more often than we write the warm, intimate, supportive room. The noun is doing the work. The adjectives are usually getting in the noun's way.
Sober. We treat writing as serious work. Not solemn. Serious. There is a difference. Solemn is what people perform when they are afraid the work will not carry its weight on its own. Serious is what the work is doing when it is allowed to be itself. We are serious.
Literary. We do not apologize for caring about prose. The site reads like a publication, not a product. We use italic serif where italic serif is the right tool. We use rhythm and line breaks in headlines because we have read poems. We do not soften this register to make it more palatable to people who would be made comfortable by softer registers. Those people are not the audience.
Refusal-positioned. We are against several things, and we name what we are against. We are against MFAs as the only door into serious writing instruction. We are against soft community-as-workshop. We are against marketing-speak for any creative practice. We are against performative urgency, manufactured scarcity, and the optimization framing of art. We are not vague about this. The refusal is part of the voice.
Anti-institutional, not anti-tradition. We name the institutions we have considered and chosen against, and we name the traditions we inherit from. Iowa, Bread Loaf, Tin House, Lerman, Salesses, Saunders, the line of editors from Perkins through Gottlieb. We are not without a lineage. We are without a credential.
Voice is constant. Tone moves. The same brand can sound several distinct ways depending on context. The following is the same underlying idea, a session is starting soon, expressed in three tones that all stay within the VWC voice.
Marketing copy (public site, before someone has signed up):
The fall cohort opens in September. Ten writers, once per week, three months. By interview.
Cohort communication (private, to writers already in the cohort):
First session is Tuesday at 6. The reading is in the materials folder. Come having read it. If you cannot come having read it, come anyway and we will work around you, but the session will go better if you have.
System notification (transactional, generated by the app):
Your session starts in one hour. The materials are linked below.
Three tones. One voice. The marketing copy is declarative and a little ceremonial. The cohort communication is direct and instructor-warm. The system notification is unadorned and operational. None of them apologize. None of them perform enthusiasm. None of them use an exclamation point. None of them use the word please.
Another example. The same idea, we have read your application, across contexts.
Acknowledgment email:
We got your application. We read every one carefully. You will hear from us within two weeks.
Interview invitation:
We would like to talk. Pick a time below. The conversation will be about thirty minutes. Bring a question if you have one.
Decline email:
The fall cohort is not the right fit. This is not a judgment on the work. It is a judgment on the shape of this particular room. If you would like to be considered for a future cohort, reply to this email and we will keep your application on file.
The decline tone is the hardest to write and the most important to write correctly. It refuses without apologizing, names what the decision is not, and offers a real next step rather than a hollow encouragement. Best of luck on your writing journey is the kind of sentence we do not write.
The list below is concrete. It is the friction surface where voice meets keyboard. Every item is testable against actual copy.
Punctuation and typography.
Words and phrases we do not write.
Form and structure of copy.
Things we do.
| Do not write | Write |
|---|---|
| Get started | Open my account / Join the list / Read the manifesto |
| Sign up | Join / Create account |
| Welcome aboard | (delete the sentence; state the next fact) |
| Discover your voice | (do not write; we do not promise this) |
| Begin your journey | (do not write; not our voice) |
| Unlock your potential | (do not write; not our voice) |
| Take your writing to the next level | (do not write; replace with specific outcome) |
| Reach out | Email / Write |
| Circle back | Follow up / Come back to this |
| Feedback | Critique / Response / Reading |
| Content | Writing / Essay / Piece |
| Community | Cohort / Room / Workshop |
| Curated | Selected |
| World-class | (the word world rarely earns its place; remove or replace) |
| Best-in-class | (do not write) |
| Industry-leading | (do not write) |
| Cutting edge | (do not write) |
| Game-changer | (do not write) |
| Please [do anything in the interface] | (delete please; the verb stands alone) |
| Click here | (use the link with descriptive text) |
| Learn more | Read about [the specific thing] |
| Are you ready to | (do not write; rhetorical questions are pitches in disguise) |
A critique mark is a comment on a passage of another writer's draft. It has a shape. We use this shape because it produces useful response and forecloses the failure modes of less disciplined commentary.
Length: two to six sentences. A mark longer than a paragraph is usually a mark that should be its own broader response, not a marginal comment.
Structure: quote, then respond. The quoted line or fragment grounds the mark in the actual text so the writer knows exactly what triggered the response. Without the quote, the writer is doing forensic reconstruction.
Voice: even, observational, curious. No verdicts. No exclamation. No emotive language about the responder's experience. The responder is reporting what the text is doing, asking what it could be doing, or offering an addition.
Example mark on a fictional passage.
"He stood at the window for what felt like hours, watching the street."
The line as written gives me the duration through felt-like, which leans on the reader to do the time work. I wonder what the street is doing during the hours. The window is reflecting the man's stillness back at us, but the street is the thing he is watching and we do not see it. If the street is doing nothing, the standing is heavier. If the street is busy with the small commerce of an afternoon, the standing is more isolated. Either choice would land harder than the felt-like.
Another, shorter.
"a literal map of her childhood"
Is the map literal in the sense that it exists as a physical object in the room, or literal in the sense that we are meant to read the chapter as one? The figurative use of literal has gotten unstable enough that the line could read two ways. The chapter might want to choose.
Another, structural rather than line-level.
"the whole second section"
The second section reads to me as a different essay attached to the first. The first is about her mother. The second is about the river. They share the same narrator and the same town, but they are not the same piece. I wonder what the third section, if there is one, would be doing. If the river is its own essay, it might be one. If the river is meant to be a return to the mother by a different door, the door might need to be named more clearly.
In each case, the mark quotes or refers to a specific moment, responds in observational voice, and gestures toward what the work could do without telling the writer to do anything in particular. The writer leaves with a tool. The room has spoken to the page rather than to its own preferences.
Instructor notes are private. They are how the instructor records, week over week, what a writer in the cohort is working on, where she is improving, and what she might need later. The notes accumulate into the body of evidence that becomes a real recommendation letter, a real invitation to a future cohort, a real reading of a writer's three-year arc rather than a single-session impression.
What goes in:
What stays out:
Voice: the same voice as the public site. Declarative, specific, restrained. The notes are also a piece of writing. They will be read, eventually, by the writer herself if she asks for a letter, or by an outside reader if the letter goes out. The voice carries.
Example fragment, drawn from an imagined session record.
Week 6, second workshop. M. brought the chapter about her grandfather. The opening paragraph does the most work the prose has done all cohort. The cadence is hers now in a way it was not in week one. The middle section retreats to the same explanatory mode I have been naming since week three. She is aware of it and frustrated with it, which is the right place to be. The question for week eight is whether she can hold the opening cadence through the middle without explaining. If she can, the chapter is hers and the book is starting to take shape.
The note is concrete. It quotes the work in summary. It tracks an arc. It names a question. It is the kind of note that, six months from now, lets the instructor write a real letter rather than a generic one.
Cohort communications are the writing the instructor sends to the writers in the cohort, between sessions, during the run. They are not marketing. They are not transactional. They are the instructor's voice speaking to writers he knows by name and by draft.
Broadcast email to the full cohort:
Tuesday at six. The reading for this week is in the folder. Two pieces, both short, both worth reading twice. Come prepared to talk about the second one, especially the choice of present tense. I want to spend the first thirty minutes there.
If you are workshopping this week, your piece is in the folder too. Everyone please have read it before we start.
Direct, scoped to the session, gives the room what it needs, no greeting, no signoff that performs warmth.
Session reminder, two hours out:
Two hours. The link is below. Have the readings open. If something has come up and you cannot make it, write to me directly.
Operational. Short. Treats the writer as a serious adult who has signed up to be in the room.
System notification, automated:
Your session begins at 6:00 PM Pacific. The materials and call link are below.
Unadorned. The system is not pretending to be a person. The voice still does not apologize for itself or use please.
Mid-cohort check-in, instructor to a specific writer:
I wanted to write before next week. The piece you brought yesterday is doing more than the discussion got to. The opening is the strongest passage of yours I have read in the cohort. Hold on to whatever you were doing when you wrote it. We will spend more time on the middle in the next workshop. Bring a question if you have one.
Personal. Specific. Names the moment. Does not flatter. Does not generalize. Reads like a teacher writing to a writer, because that is what it is.
Marketing copy is what we write on the public site. It has the loudest voice and the most constraints, because the public site is where the brand is built or lost in a sentence.
Eyebrow pattern:
Uppercase Libre Franklin Black, tracked 2px, paired with the ruled line. Declarative noun phrase. Eight to ten characters ideal, eighteen maximum. Never a question. Never first or second person.
Examples that work:
Examples that do not work:
Headline pattern:
Declarative sentence or noun fragment. If a sentence, it ends in a period. If a noun fragment, no terminal punctuation. Short. Two to seven words is the target.
Examples that work:
Examples that do not work:
Body voice:
Serif. Often italic when standing in as a standfirst or an editorial passage. Rhythm matters. Read it aloud. The paragraph is allowed to be long if the cadence holds. The paragraph is required to be short if the idea is structural rather than literary.
Body copy carries the refusal-positioned voice when it is positioning the brand. An MFA can cost $60,000 and up. It takes 2-3 years to complete and does not set you up to be a working writer in the world. The sentence is doing work. It is naming the alternative and what the alternative costs. It is not insulting the alternative. It is being specific about it.
Body copy carries the editorial voice when it is doing the literary work of the site. The room is the place where the work gets read on its own terms. The sentence is allowed to be quiet. It does not need to sell. It needs to be true and to land.
A list of moves and modes that are not ours. Some of them are common. Some are normalized. None of them are ours.
Marketing fluff verbs. Unlock, discover, empower, transform, journey, unleash. We do not write these. They are the verbs of brands that have not earned their nouns.
Performative urgency. Manufactured scarcity, only three spots left, countdown timers, urgency banners. We have a real cohort size and a real opening date. We state them and trust the reader.
Generic testimonials. VWC changed my life. This is the kind of sentence a brand writes for itself when it cannot find one a writer actually said. If a writer has said something specific and true, we quote her by name. If no writer has said anything specific and true, we do not invent the sentence.
Manufactured awards and badges. Featured in, as seen on, award-winning. None of these on the public site unless they are true and load-bearing.
Social media voice. The breezy, exclamation-pointed, emoji-flecked register of platform-native writing. We have an Instagram account. The voice on the Instagram account is the same voice as the website. We do not modulate down to platform vernacular. The audience that responds to that vernacular is not our audience.
Conflation of cohort and community. Cohorts are small, finite, structured. Communities are large, open, ambient. We run cohorts. We do not run a community. Writers in a cohort may form lasting relationships and continue to read one another's work after the cohort ends. That is a beautiful byproduct. It is not the product. The product is the workshop.
Calling writing content. Writing is writing. Content is a category the platforms invented to describe writing they had stopped paying for. We do not adopt the platforms' vocabulary about the thing we make.
Apology for the brand's positions. We do not soften the refusal with that said, every path is valid or we love MFAs too. If the path is right for someone, that someone will find the path. We are not in the business of validating every adjacent option. We are in the business of being clear about what we are.
Use of please as an interface tic. The button does not say Please submit. It says Submit your draft. The error message does not say Please try again. It says Try again. Please is what an interface says when it is uncertain of its own authority. We are not uncertain of ours.
Centered hero copy. Heroes left-align against the section padding. This is a sitewide rule and it is enforced. Body copy may center; hero copy does not.
Em dashes. The em dash is a beautiful piece of punctuation and many writers we love depend on it. We have decided, as a publication, not to use it in user-facing copy. The decision is partly typographic, the em dash interrupts the cadence we are setting up; and partly stylistic, the em dash has become a marker of a particular online editorial voice we are not. We use commas and periods. We rewrite the sentence if the em dash was doing structural work. Resist the muscle memory.
Exclamation points. Same rule, same reason. The work is doing the work. The mark of enthusiasm at the end of the sentence is the sentence's admission that it could not carry the enthusiasm by itself.
We are not without a tradition. The workshop we run inherits from many rooms. We name them, because naming the lineage is part of being a serious place.
The Iowa Writers' Workshop. We take the silent-author rule. We move past Iowa's historical lack of guardrails on the quality of the critique itself. The Three Rules are the guardrail Iowa never had.
Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process. We take the framing that opinion is something the writer requests rather than something the room imposes. We move past the strict four-step protocol; the spirit lives in the Three Rules.
Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World. We take the foundational question, what is this trying to do? Rule 3 is Salesses' question made into a rule. We move past his case against the silent-author rule by pairing it with the discipline Rule 3 demands.
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and Story Club. We take the reframe that critique is noticing what the work is doing, not judging what is there. We take the patience required to read closely enough to actually notice.
Bread Loaf. We take the cohort scale. The ten-to-fifteen writers we hold is the Bread Loaf scale.
Tin House. We take the generative pulse. The cohort writes new work, not only revises old work.
Editorial pedagogy: Lish, Gottlieb, Perkins. Sentence-level rigor from Lish, structural patience from Gottlieb, relational depth from Perkins. The best editors operate at a craft level most peer workshops never reach. We aim for the level.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life. The discipline of attention and the honesty about cost. The cohort is built for writers who have read this book or could have written one of its sentences.
Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story. The essential distinction between what happened and what the writer is making of what happened.
Samuel Sagan, Atlantean Secrets. The tonal register: serious about the work, fierce without being cold, beautiful without being precious. Not the content. The cadence and the seriousness.
The reading list inside the cohort changes. The lineage above is the bedrock.
The writing this manual is in service of is not the writing that ends up on a shelf, although the writing that ends up on a shelf is sometimes its byproduct. The writing this manual is in service of is the writing that changes the writer doing it. The slow accrual of attention, the discipline of looking at a sentence and asking whether it is true, the willingness to throw the sentence out if it is not, the muscle of trying again. The room is for that writing. The voice is for that writing. The rules are for that writing.
If you are here, you are after the same thing. Welcome to the room.