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Julia Cooke on Following the Heat, Loving Book Proposals, and Knowing When to Stop Researching
by Writing Workshops Staff
A day ago
Hold your hand above a manuscript and you can feel where the fire is. That was the advice an early teacher gave Julia Cooke, and she has carried it through three published books with a fourth on the way: follow the heat. Find the place in a project where your own excitement lives, then lean toward it. Everything else, she says, is a worse use of your time.
That instinct sits at the center of From Research to Manuscript: A Year-Long Nonfiction Book Incubator with Julia Cooke, a twelve-month program beginning Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026 at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature. Cooke is a journalist whose reporting has appeared in The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, and Tin House, and whose latest book, Starry and Restless, traces the intertwined lives of three pioneering foreign correspondents.
Over the year, writers build a research outline for a full manuscript, an overview that maps how narrative and research interlock across the whole book, and substantial finished pages: either a submission-ready book proposal or chapters revised to submission quality. Along the way, the cohort works on the problems specific to research-driven narrative, including how to fold archival material into a scene without killing its momentum, and how to recognize the moment when more research has become a way of avoiding the page. Cooke will be drafting her own next book alongside the group, word counts rising in a shared spreadsheet, thorny problems worked out in front of the room.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Julia:
Writing Workshops: Hi, Julia. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Julia Cooke: I'm Julia Cooke, the author of three nonfiction books and a huge variety of shorter writing from reporting to essays to criticism. I've written a group biography, Starry and Restless, a book of narrative history, Come Fly the World, and a book of reporting on youth culture in Havana, Cuba, and I'm thrilled and a little scared for my next book, a hybrid memoir.
Writing Workshops: What's the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?
Julia Cooke: You'll write best when you're excited, and learning to locate that excitement and lean toward that place is the best time investment you can make in any writing project. One writing instructor told me to "follow the heat" — as if you can hold your hand above a manuscript and sense where, within the text, the fire lies — and that's helped me so much over the three, soon to be four books I've now written.
Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn't have before, what is it?
Julia Cooke: They'll understand research differently — how to use it to amplify scenes that don't appear to be research-based, how to organize it, how to turn toward it when stuck in writing, and when to turn away from it to get back to the page. They'll also learn to write a banging book proposal. I absolutely love book proposals.
"One writing instructor told me to 'follow the heat' — as if you can hold your hand above a manuscript and sense where, within the text, the fire lies."
Writing Workshops: What's the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.
Julia Cooke: "How they all wished they could go." It's the last line of Deb Olin Unferth's gorgeous EARTH 7, which I loved, start to finish.
Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?
Julia Cooke: In a research class I once taught, a student who had thought that her memoir was primarily about her was told by another student — a young woman who'd dealt with a similar family dynamic — that the book was actually about her mother's upbringing. The writer was shocked and silent for a few beats. Then she looked up and around at all of the other students' faces with this huge grin. The realization had opened up this enormous space for her to write into, and she was excited.
Writing Workshops: What's a craft move you're slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, but a small, specific technique.
Julia Cooke: When I feel blocked, I like to look at an image associated with the book I'm working on and describe it. It nearly always gives me a few sentences I want to keep.
Getting unstuck is a skill, and it is teachable. Spend a year building your research-driven book with Julia and a small cohort of writers doing the same.
Apply to the Nonfiction Book Incubator →Writing Workshops: What's a book you press into people's hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?
Julia Cooke: Rebecca West's THE FOUNTAIN OVERFLOWS. It is so atmospheric and her characters are just so real; I love that there's no plot at all, yet I can't stop reading whenever I get into it.
Writing Workshops: What's the worst writing advice that sounds smart?
Julia Cooke: "Show, don't tell." Yes, there is some truth to it, but there is a time for each mode! What people are usually saying is that showing a scene is more effective and atmospheric than telling what happened in that scene, and yet to veer totally away from telling just doesn't work to build a book.
"Learning when and how to ignore workshop critique is a huge part of being in a workshop."
Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: "Most writing classes won't tell you this, but..."
Julia Cooke: Learning when and how to ignore workshop critique is a huge part of being in a workshop.
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Julia Cooke: Anne Sexton. I did a big project on her in high school, and I just love her words.
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?
Julia Cooke: Totally candid with a sometimes messianic zeal for sharing what actually works as far as actually writing a book.
Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?
Julia Cooke: I wrote big chunks of a 400 page book in 100-word increments.
A four hundred page book written a hundred words at a time is not a magic trick. It is a system, applied for years, by a writer who knows how to keep moving when the research runs long and the shape has not arrived yet. That is what this incubator hands you: Julia's systems, a small cohort working in parallel, one-on-one meetings in every phase, and guest sessions with a literary agent and an editor once your pages are ready to travel. Bring the book you have been carrying around. Let's get it written.
The cohort is kept deliberately small, and early applications are encouraged. Twelve months from now, your book can be pages someone is reading.
Apply to the Nonfiction Book Incubator →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.
