Blog
Gifts for Writers Who Have Everything
by Writing Workshops Staff
2 hours ago
Somewhere in the house of every serious writer there is a drawer. It holds three unused notebooks, a fountain pen from a birthday four years ago, a candle that smells vaguely like a library, and a mug with a joke about semicolons on it. Every one of those things was given with real affection. Not one of them has moved a manuscript forward by a single page.
This is what makes shopping so hard for the writer who already owns everything. The objects associated with writing are easy to buy and pleasant to receive, and most of them have nothing to do with whatever the writer is stuck on. So the search for gifts for writers who have everything tends to end where it started, with one more beautiful item for a desk that is already crowded.
There is a better category of gift, and it costs about what a nice pen costs, or about what a plane ticket costs, depending on how far you want to go.
What Do You Get a Writer Who Already Has Everything?
Start by noticing what they are not short of. A writer with a full shelf of craft books is not suffering from an information deficit. They know what a scene is. They have read the advice about showing and telling until it has lost all meaning. Buying them a fifteenth book about writing is like buying a marathoner their fifteenth pair of shoes.
Consider what George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is on the page. It is superb, and it is also a transcript. Saunders taught the Russian short story at Syracuse for roughly two decades before that book existed, and what he put on the page is a record of a room where students argued about Chekhov and Tolstoy in real time. The book preserves the thinking. It cannot reproduce the arguing, or the deadline, or the eleven other people who read your pages that week and told you where they got lost.
The room is the thing. Writers run out of deadline, readers, and company long before they run out of information, and none of the three fits in a box.
Isn't a Gift Card the Lazy Option?
Usually, yes. For most categories it is an admission that you did not want to think about the person. Creative education is the exception, and the reason is specific: you cannot know from the outside what the writer in your life wants to work on next.
They may have spent three years on a novel and be desperate to write something short and strange. They may want to finally take the poems seriously. They may be circling a memoir they have never mentioned to you, which is common, because the projects people are most serious about are the ones they talk about least. Picking a class for someone in that position is a coin flip. Handing them the ability to pick their own is the more careful act, not the lazier one.
What the gift buys is a room, and rooms have a documented history of producing books.
Amy Hempel wrote "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" in Gordon Lish's class at Columbia. The story is now anthologized everywhere, and its whole method is a workshop method: the withheld center, the refusal to state the grief directly, the way the narrator keeps talking about anything other than her dying friend. That compression came out of a classroom that demanded she cut until only the load-bearing sentences remained. She did not arrive at it alone in a room with a nice pen.
Toni Morrison joined a writers' group in Washington, D.C. while she was teaching at Howard, and the group had a rule that you brought new work. To satisfy it she wrote a short story about a Black girl who prayed for blue eyes. That story became The Bluest Eye. The obligation to produce something for a group of people expecting it is what pulled the first draft into existence.
The deadline is not an administrative detail. For most writers it is the load-bearing wall of the entire practice, and it is almost impossible to build one for yourself.
– Blake Kimzey, Founder, WritingWorkshops.com
Give the writer in your life a room, a deadline, and a group of readers. Good for any class, mentorship, IndieMFA program, or destination retreat we offer.
Shop Gift CardsHow Much Should You Spend on a Gift for a Writer?
Here is the diagnostic we use when someone calls the school and asks this question. Ignore budget for a moment and look at where their writing physically stops.
They have notebooks full of beginnings and almost nothing finished. This writer does not need more craft instruction. They need an external obligation and a date on a calendar. A single live seminar with a working author, around $100, is often enough to break the pattern, because it puts them in a room with people who expect them to show up having written something.
They have finished drafts that nobody has ever read. This is the most common and the most painful place to be stuck, and it is the one an object can never fix. A finished story sitting unread on a hard drive is not finished; it is waiting. An eight-week workshop, around $545, puts the pages in front of a working author and a group of peers who will tell them precisely where the attention breaks.
They have a complete manuscript and no idea what to do with it. Now the bottleneck is professional rather than creative. At roughly $1,000, a multi-week workshop paired with a one-on-one mentorship gets them line-level attention from someone who has published books and worked with agents.
They have been talking about a trip to write for years. Some writers need to leave the house entirely. At $2,000 a gift card covers most of a week-long destination retreat in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, or Tuscany, where the schedule is built around workshops, craft seminars, and one-on-one conferences rather than around sightseeing.
If none of those descriptions fit cleanly, $250 is the amount that does the most work. It covers a seminar with room left over, and the recipient can add to it themselves when they find the class they want. Gift cards apply at checkout like any other credit, so nobody is capped at the amount you chose.
Not sure what a gift card buys? Browse the classes, mentorships, and programs it can be redeemed against.
See Upcoming ClassesWhat If They Never Use It?
The honest answer is that some people wait a long time, and that this is usually fine.
Our gift cards carry no expiration date and no processing fees, which removes the ticking clock that makes most gift cards a small source of guilt. Some writers redeem within a week. Others hold on for four or five months until a particular instructor appears on the schedule, or until a season opens up in their life where they can give a workshop the hours it deserves.
From where we sit, the ones who wait often get more out of it. A writer who redeems immediately out of a sense of obligation and lands in a class that does not match their project will finish the eight weeks having learned something, but not the thing they needed. A writer who waits until the right nonfiction workshop or the right poetry seminar comes around walks in already engaged. The card is not a coupon that decays. It is a standing option.
What you have given them, in that case, is permission to take their writing seriously whenever they are ready to.
What If They're Not a "Real" Writer Yet?
This is the question people ask most quietly, and it usually comes from someone shopping for a partner or a parent or an adult child who has mentioned wanting to write a book without ever quite starting one.
A class is one of the very few gifts that takes an ambition seriously without demanding evidence first. It says: I heard you, I believe the thing you mentioned at dinner, here is a door. That is a rare message to be able to send with a purchase, and it lands differently than a leather journal, which quietly says the same thing every leather journal has ever said.
Two cautions, both from watching this go wrong.
Match the amount to where the writer stands, not where you would like them to be. A year-long intensive given to someone who has written four pages is not a vote of confidence; it is a debt, and it tends to sit unredeemed while the recipient feels worse and worse about it. Start at the seminar level. Let them decide to go further.
And give it without a reporting requirement. The gift works when it arrives free of any expectation that they will tell you how it went, show you the pages, or justify what they chose. Writers are protective of work in progress for good reason, and the most generous version of this gift is one that asks for nothing back.
Our alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and the Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and gone on to funded MFA programs at Iowa, the Michener Center, Syracuse, NYU, and Columbia. Nearly every one of them started as somebody who had not published anything yet, sitting in a first class, wondering whether they belonged there.
Gift cards start at $100, arrive by email with redemption instructions, and never expire. Good toward online classes, IndieMFA programs, and destination retreats.
Choose an AmountOne last thought for anyone still weighing this against something with a ribbon on it. The writer in your life will remember the workshop where a stranger read their pages carefully and said something true about them. They will not remember the notebook. They have a drawer full of notebooks, and they love you for every one of them, and every one of them is still empty.
About WritingWorkshops.com
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent creative writing school founded in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, and the official education partner of Electric Literature. We offer online workshops, one-on-one mentorships, IndieMFA programs, and destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, and Tuscany. Our faculty includes National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, and New York Times bestsellers with credits in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney's. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us; alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
