When Your Story Lands Wrong: A Workshop Problem Nobody Talks About

By Andy — 2026-08-28 — Literary News

I walked past the shop this morning and a customer was standing in front of the Murakami shelf, just standing there. Not browsing. Thinking.

That's the face you make when something doesn't match up.

This is what's happening to the person who wrote that horror story. They crafted something meant to disturb—to make readers sit with dread, maybe. Instead, their workshop cohort found it hilarious. The whole room laughed. Not with them. At them, more or less.

The dissonance is brutal.

Here's what gets me about this situation. The writer isn't angry at their group. They're not accusing anyone of cruelty. There's no villain here. Nobody was trying to humiliate them. The group probably liked the work—liked it enough to respond to it. Engagement is technically engagement. But somewhere in the gap between intention and reception, the floor dropped out.

This happens more than people admit. A lot more. You can write something you've poured genuine fear or anger into, and people will encounter that same text and find it funny. Not because you failed. Not because they're dense. Because comedy and horror live very close to each other, actually. They're almost neighbours. Both rely on surprise. Both need the reader to be off-balance. The rhythm that makes someone shriek can make someone laugh if it lands in the wrong place, or the right place, depending on who's reading and what they brought to the room that day.

The question then isn't whether the group was wrong. It's what to do when your work speaks a different language than you expected it to speak.

There are a few directions this can go. You could rewrite toward the comedy you've accidentally created. That happens sometimes—a writer leans into what the work actually is rather than what they wanted it to be. You could also accept that this particular piece didn't land as intended and start fresh with something new, treating the horror draft as research. But actually, that's not quite right.

There's another option. You could sit with the gap. Listen to the laughter. Ask yourself what specifically made them laugh. Was it a specific image? A line of dialogue? A tonal shift? The more you can pinpoint, the more you understand about how readers will move through your work versus how you move through it in your own head.

Sometimes the workshop isn't telling you that your story is broken. It's telling you who your story actually is to other people.

That's not always comfortable information to have.

Source: "It's a column designed to bring hope, faith, and a love of happy hour libations to all God's favored children." — Literary Hub