Every week, one organization or another will offer you a class. It feels like there are more classes than are topics, sometimes. You might be weary of seeing classes about developing fascinating characters, or the best way to approach a nonfiction book for more complex topics. The ways you’d organize an AI primer today has endless possibilities, for example. One approach could be to help readers imagine what an AI would feel about you, the user.
Writing classes can be a good starter when you’re learning your craft. Beyond that, you can find and pay for a workshop, the experience where your peers and a seasoned moderator review a part of your work. If you’re all writing short stories or articles of under 6,000 words, great. The entire work will be workshopped. You come away with a half-dozen reviews of the work. If you’re well-served, it’s not six copy edits with a passionate paragraph added to the last page to sum it all up.
However, many writers are creating a bigger project while they work to become authors. A small nonfiction book is 30,000 words, not 6,000, and a novel can run beyond 80,000 words in total. You need patience and hardworking peers alongside you to get a full book workshopped. It also doesn’t help your peers that they see the book in chunks every month, or twice a month. That’s a lot of time in between opinions.
Classes beg us to keep our opinions to ourselves, for the most part. A lecture with slides and with examples from other writing is good instruction. Practical application of these newfound skills comes through practice and then revision. You write, then someone you trust reads it to help improve it.
That’s the other gear, once you’re ready: coaching. Yes, a workshop will let you learn how to revise writing. Very interactive. Then you want to punch through, like a contractor’s punch list. You need a general contractor. That’s your coach, who’s an editor and has seen dozens of book projects. You either draft for an editor-coach’s eye, or you revise. Works just as it does at publishers.
While considering your options, it can help to discover if a workshop has ever resulted in or helped produce a published book. Short of revising to an editor’s notes, workshops are the best way to carry your drafting into publication status.
Considering the astounding cost of undergraduate writing education today — tuition of $50,000 is not uncommon — workshops and author coaching are a great value. Classes are inexpensive for good reason. You’re buying lectures. Many do not even have tests. A Q&A at the end of 90 minutes is not a way to ensure you’ve absorbed the learning. You do that through work, reviewed by an coach who edits.
