by Writing Workshops Staff
A month ago
Some version of this question arrives in our inbox every week. A writer has found a class they like the look of, the tuition is real money, and they want to know whether it will make any difference to the manuscript sitting on their desk. Are online writing workshops worth it, or are they an expensive way to feel productive for six weeks?
It is a fair question, and it deserves better than the answer it usually gets.
Search the phrase and you will find a Quora thread whose top response comes from someone who says outright that he has never attended a workshop, a discussion board conversation from 2007, and several pages that argue the affirmative in general terms before recommending their own programs. Reasoning, all of it. Very little evidence.
What follows is an attempt at the harder version: a ranking of the evidence a writer can weigh, starting with the kind that proves almost nothing and ending with the kind that is difficult to fake. We run a writing school. We have an obvious stake in the conclusion. That is precisely why the argument should rest on things you can check yourself.
What Does a Writing Workshop Cost You Beyond Tuition?
Start with what is at risk, because the tuition is the smallest part of it.
A six-week workshop takes six weeks of your writing life. For most people reading this, that time is carved out of early mornings, lunch breaks, and the hours after everyone else has gone to bed. It is scarce in a way money sometimes is not.
The larger risk is the one nobody advertises. Bad feedback does not simply fail to help. It actively misdirects, and confident bad feedback is worse than no feedback at all, because a writer who trusts the room will follow it. Here is the version of this we see most often: a writer brings in a chapter with a structural problem, receives twenty minutes of enthusiastic line-level suggestions, and spends the next four months polishing the prose in a scene that should have been cut. The sentences get better. The book does not move.
Good instruction is largely a matter of diagnosing at the right altitude. Karen E. Bender, a National Book Award finalist, teaches openings as a problem of question-setting: what does this first page make the reader need to know, and does the story answer it. That is a structural diagnosis delivered before anyone touches a comma. Kelly Luce, author of Pull Me Under (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), runs her short story bootcamp as a deliberate blend of developmental and line editing, in that order, so writers learn which problems live at which level.
Any workshop that skips the diagnosis is selling you the polish.
Why Are Most Writing Workshop Reviews Close to Worthless?
This includes a good number of ours, and it is worth being direct about why.
Reviews get collected in the days after a class ends. At that moment a student has just spent six weeks in a small, generous room with people who read their work carefully and said encouraging things about it. The feedback form is measuring the temperature of that room. It is not measuring whether the writing changed.
Improvement in prose is slow and visible late. A technique learned in March shows up in a draft in September, if it shows up at all. Ask someone in April and you are asking them to predict their own future, which nobody does well. Add the selection problem, where the students most likely to fill out a form are the ones who enjoyed themselves most, and a page of five-star responses tells you roughly what such pages always tell you.
Some reviews do carry weight. The distinguishing feature is falsifiability: a specific technique, applied to a specific problem, with a stated result. Compare a general endorsement to this, from a student in Amanda Arista's romance workshop.
"I could never move beyond writing the protagonist's upbringing. When I joined the class, all I had were the first two chapters and a vague idea of how the story would end. Amanda taught us how to structure a story using the Hero's Journey. Each week, she asked us to write a scene corresponding to one of its ten stages. That weekly assignment forced me to keep moving the plot forward instead of endlessly revising the beginning. By the final class, I had an outline, a couple of completed chapters, and ten scenes mapped to the ten stages."
– WritingWorkshops.com student
You can evaluate that. It names the problem (compulsive revision of chapter one), the intervention (a scene due each week, pinned to a structural stage), and the outcome (ten new scenes and a working outline). If the class had not worked, this student would have nothing to describe.
A Four-Question Test to Run Before You Pay
Apply this to any workshop, ours included. First, does the course description name what you will produce, or only what you will discuss? Second, who is teaching, and can you find their published work without being handed a link? Third, does the format give the instructor time to read your pages, or is feedback something that happens in the last ten minutes if the conversation allows? Fourth, and most revealing, does the description tell you who the class is not for? Programs confident in their fit will happily turn away the wrong student. Programs selling seats never do.
Run the four questions against our current schedule. Every class lists its instructor's publication credits, its format, and who it is built for.
Browse Upcoming ClassesWhat Does It Mean When a Student Signs Up for a Third Class?
Now the evidence gets harder to manufacture.
A review is something a person says. Re-enrollment is something a person does, months later, with a credit card, after the warmth of the final session has worn off and they have spent a season alone with the work. In the gap between the first class and the second, the student finds out whether anything they learned survived contact with a blank page. Paying again is a verdict delivered by someone with full information.
Read our student testimonials with this filter on and a pattern emerges quickly. "This is my third class with Carol Goodman." "This is my second workshop with Joan Kwon Glass." "I've taken all of her seminars." "I discovered the Writing Workshops a couple of months ago and signed up for five workshops at once." One writer put the whole argument more efficiently than we can.
"You asked if I would take another workshop. Of course. I can't figure out how to stop taking them. They're just damn good."
– WritingWorkshops.com student
Two things about this pattern are worth pointing out, because they are the parts that surprised us.
The repeat students cluster around particular instructors. Joan Kwon Glass, Tom Andes, Lauren Davis, Ploi Pirapokin, Mira Ptacin, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Karen E. Bender. That clustering is the strongest internal signal we have about teaching quality, and it is more reliable than any evaluation form, because it costs the student something to produce.
The second thing: a meaningful share of these repeat students already hold MFAs. They finished the two-year program and they are still buying classes. One student, back from a residency and recovering from surgery, described Lauren Davis's April generative workshop as the thing that restarted a practice her degree had left dormant. Another, currently enrolled in a low-residency program, takes our classes during breaks because her contact hours are thinner than she wants. That is not what you would expect if workshops were merely a substitute for a degree.
Which Student Outcomes Can You Verify Without Taking Our Word for It?
The strongest evidence is the kind announced by people with no stake in our enrollment numbers.
Editors, prize committees, and fellowship juries do not consult a writing school before making decisions. When one of their announcements happens to name a writer who studied with us, that is an outcome we can point to and you can independently confirm. A recent stretch of our alumni publication news includes Dan Robert's debut novel The Monster's Wife selling to Dutton in a pre-empt, an alum selected for Best American Essays 2026, Keith Hood named One Story magazine's Adina Talve-Goodman Fellow, and Marjorie Tesser chosen as one of ten 2026 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Poetry Fellows. Over a longer horizon, alumni have won the Halifax Prize from American Short Fiction and the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, the Michener Center, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.
Here is the honest caveat, and any school that leaves it out is overselling.
We cannot claim credit for those books. Dan Robert wrote The Monster's Wife. A workshop did not. The most a class can do is compress the time between a writer's current draft and their next real one, put a published author's attention on the specific problem in front of them, and place them in a room where the standard is high enough to be useful. Whether the writer then does the work is entirely theirs. What the outcomes above establish is narrower and still meaningful: writers who come through our classes go on to compete successfully in venues that are hard to enter.
Institutional signals sit alongside this. We are the official education partner of Electric Literature, and The Writer's Chronicle, published by AWP, has recognized us as a leading alternative to traditional MFA programs. Our faculty includes Guggenheim Fellow Marie-Helene Bertino, whose novel Beautyland won the American Book Award; two-time Pulitzer finalist Chloé Cooper Jones; and Thao Thai, whose debut Banyan Moon was a Read with Jenna pick.
Writers ready for sustained work on a full manuscript can go deeper: structured mentorships and year-long programs with a published author in your genre, at a fraction of MFA tuition.
Explore IndieMFA ProgramsAre Online Writing Workshops Worth It for You?
The evidence above supports a general claim. Your situation is specific, so here is where the answer changes.
A workshop is worth the money when you have material and cannot see it clearly. This is the most common case and the one where a good class pays for itself fastest. You have forty pages, or a finished draft you have read so many times it has gone invisible, and what you need is a reader with training who can name the problem in a sentence. It is also worth it when your practice has stalled. Deadlines imposed by other people work when self-imposed deadlines have stopped working, which is why generative classes with weekly assignments tend to produce so much new writing.
The third case is the one writers underestimate. If you live somewhere without a literary community, or your writing friends have drifted, a workshop buys you a cohort. Students in our classes keep swapping drafts years afterward. That is worth something no craft lecture provides.
Now the honest inverse. If you are new to writing and have no draft at all, do not start with a year-long incubator. Start with a two-hour seminar, spend a hundred dollars instead of several thousand, and find out how you respond to feedback before committing to a program built around a manuscript you have not written. And if what you want is encouragement rather than critique, a workshop will disappoint you, because the useful part is the part that stings a little.
For writers who want the immersive version, our destination retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, Tuscany, Portland, and elsewhere compress months of workshop into a single week of daily writing, craft seminars, and one-on-one conferences with faculty.
So: are online writing workshops worth it? Weighed against the evidence that holds up, yes, for the writer who brings pages and intends to use what they hear. The reviews prove the least. The re-enrollments prove more. The book deals and fellowships prove the most, and none of them were announced by us.
Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, writing for children, and publishing. Two-hour seminars through year-long programs, taught by working authors.
Find Your Next ClassAbout 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.
