The Good, the Bad, and the Meh
Finding the right writing workshop
A quick note about today’s post: my focus is on open-enrollment workshops, i.e. workshops that are not part of an accredited writing program.
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A few weeks ago I was having dinner with a friend who’d recently taken an online writing workshop with an established writer who teaches workshops on a private platform. My friend is a college professor and not a novice writer, but he needed help with a work-in-progress that is meant for a general rather than an academic readership.
His instructor spent a not-negligible portion of weekly class meetings talking about his own work and telling writing-related anecdotes. There wasn’t a whole lot of craft-related discussion, and for the workshop portion of the class, students turned in one submission each of up to 12 double-spaced pages.
The class ran for two months, and it cost a little over a thousand dollars. Although that’s not an outrageous fee for a class with a seasoned writer, my friend had hoped for a more rigorous learning environment and would have welcomed feedback on more of his work.
A 20-page workshop submission is, for example, a reasonable workload for a $1000+ course, especially if the instructor is collecting the course fee directly from students. It would likewise be reasonable to expect the instructor to provide notes on 2 - 3 short writing exercises, in addition to the 12 pages submitted for workshop, and/or offer a one-on-one conference, 20-30 minutes per student.
MFA programs or creative writing classes offered through a university, for a degree or not, usually have more content-related guidelines than privately-offered classes (and the tuition reflects this). University-affiliated instructors are held to certain standards that help to ensure students aren’t shortchanged. (It can still happen, but it’s less likely.) Most of us also go through rigorous vetting and training and submit syllabi for review before our classes begin.
I’ve taught for community programs (non-degree conferring) and graduate writing programs for nearly three decades and am presently faculty director of Northwestern’s School of Professional Studies’ MFA program and am part of Stanford’s Continuing Studies’ fiction faculty, but I’ve also sat on the other side of the desk recently—in the last six years, I took late-night comedy writing, improv, screenwriting, and stand-up comedy courses and had the chance to learn as both a student and a fellow teacher. Most of these classes were fun, and the instructors were doing their best, from what I could tell.
One of these classes, however, was the most preposterous writing workshop I’ve ever been a part of—nearly 30 students, pre-recorded lectures, an assistant who taught more than the person we’d signed up to study with, and no written work submitted ahead of time for instructor review. We were also told not to email the instructor any questions outside of class.
It was both hilarious and infuriating. As a creative writing professor who, like many in this profession, critiques thousands of pages of student writing per year, I knew we were being shortchanged. If I had known ahead of time how the class would be structured, I would not have forked over several hundred dollars in order to be funneled into a Zoom classroom where I was shown recorded lectures or taught by an assistant who struck me as well-meaning enough but clearly frustrated by the scale of his writing career.
There are people who’ve gotten a lot more out of this class than I did—a friend who loved it referred me—but being a writing teacher myself, I had a much different experience.
So…this is just to say:
Before you sign up for a workshop, especially if it isn’t attached to a reputable school or university, be sure to read the course description closely. If the description is vague, you might take a minute to write to the instructor or whoever hosts the course for more information before you sign up. If the course content and structure are clear, excellent! But if you’re unsure what you’ll be doing in class, and you have specific writing goals, it’s a good idea to ask for more details.
If, for example, you have a finished draft of a novel or memoir and are looking for notes, there are novel- and memoir-in-a year programs such as those StoryStudio Chicago offers. Doubtless other similar, long-term classes are available elsewhere. You might also consider hiring an editor for notes on completed drafts if you can afford to.
As always, write on…
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Thank you to
& for a lightning bolt of book love this past Saturday. Joanna contributed the essay, “The Best Books You’ve Never Read,” to , and what she wrote about my first novel, Little Known Facts, is so generous and bittersweet.