Choosing Online Creative Writing Workshops

Any writers workshop you take should encourage you to continue writing. Although critiques can reveal the strengths and weaknesses in our poems and stories, the main purpose of the writing workshop is to provide the reassurance that we are indeed writers, to show us that our work is worthwhile.

This is one of the main reasons why online creative writing workshops have become so popular. Although it is the dream of many writers to earn a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) or, better yet, publish a bestseller, the majority of us are forced by necessity to work in careers outside of writing and publishing. It becomes a matter of priority: in order to pay rent, buy food, and raise our families, most of us must work full-time in occupations which do not favor creativity, let alone the art of writing.

But we are fortunate to live in the age of the internet. Online, you can find a multitude of resources for writers. Many websites specialize in providing writing tips, and a few offer free online writing classes. You can learn the Emergency Tips for Starting Your Short Story or consider the Reasons for Teaching Poetry. With a few simple clicks of the mouse, you can consider the elements of character, plot, and conflict, and then you can switch keywords to learn more about writing in meter and rhyme. These are important skills to master, and it is very convenient that we can learn the definitions quickly, without sitting through a class or browsing through library stacks.

Unfortunately, learning to name and identify a technique is not the same as mastery. Worse still, mastery of skill does not always imbue confidence - without that, it's hard to continue writing for the days and weeks and years it takes to become successful. Beyond knowledge, what we most need as writers is connection. Genuine encouragement comes through affirmation. When someone else reads our work - especially when a fellow writer reads our work - we experience the intrinsic reward of acceptance.

Most writing teachers understand this. Some instructors strive to find a flexible balance between knowledge and connection. One website, The Crafty Writer's Creative Writing Course, offers free courses that you can follow along at your own pace, and then you can post questions on their blog or pay a nominal fee for feedback. Yet we need the perspective of many outside readers - preferably readers who are also writers - to understand the strengths and weaknesses in our writing. Scribophile provides a forum where you can post your works and receive feedback from a community of writers, but without the guidance of a dedicating writing course.

(Currently, I am working on an online system which would bridge the gap between teaching and collective feedback, but I have not yet found such a system to work from.  If you know of a website which effectively accomplishes this, please leave a comment below or send a message through my website so I can post the information for others.)

For the moment, then, the best combination of genuine community and solid instruction we can access from home is the online writing workshop. And this service rarely comes free - often, the best feedback available will come from established authors who teach on the side as a way to complement their writing. For some instructors, the fees from teaching writing are simply a helpful addition to payments from their publishers. For others, though, teaching provides a critical component of their income - they depend on your tuition fees to cover food, rent, and other expenses. This is especially true for beginning authors who do not yet have extensive publication credits. For a typical MFA graduate, it may take several years after graduation to become a successful author, assuming any success at all (see the article "What Becomes of an MFA?" in The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Yet online creative writing classes are different from in-person workshops.  In my experience, a single three-hour workshop seated around a table may lead to more interaction than an entire online course spread out over several weeks.  One reason for this is time - we take online classes because we are not full time writers and students.  The other reason is the existence of banter.  Seated among colleagues, your ideas are taken in by the group and responded to immediately.  In an online course, you may write a witty comment about someone's story, but it could be a day or two before someone else reads your comment - and it isn't guaranteed that anyone will react to your comment, even if it leaves an impression.  You can't see or hear the expressions of your classmates, and this lack of social reinforcement can seriously degrade an online workshop.  Without enthusiastic support from the instructor or real dedication on the part of the students, there's a real tendency for online classes to drift apart.  A few students stop commenting on the works of their classmates, and then participation overall can decline to the point that no one wants to comment on anything at all.

Thus the ultimate advantage of creative writing online - the flexibility to participate anytime and from anywhere - can be a serious drawback if the course isn't effectively managed.  But if you are working full-time or raising a family, online classes may be the best preparation available on the road to becoming a better creative writer.  If your goal is to attend a creative writing school full-time, either as an undergraduate or to earn an MFA, then the online courses will offer the solid combination of instruction coupled with professional feedback. For myself, many of the most important stories I wrote between graduating college and applying for MFA programs were submitted for online fiction workshops.  Not all of the feedback I received was what I hoped for, but most of it was very helpful.  One instructor in particular, Karlyn Thayer, of Writers Online Workshops (now Writer's Digest University), provided the encouragement I needed to keep writing after returning from deployment to Afghanistan.

I hope this discussion on the merits of online creative writing workshops will help you decide whether or not this is the right path for you.  If you would like to read more about how to choose between the many workshops out there, please read my blog article "Choosing the Right Online Writing Workshop."  In this article, I consider the factors of writing focus, your personal budget (both money and time), the value of the workshop, and how to tell when it's time to "graduate" from the online writing classes and seek an MFA instead.