by Writing Workshops Staff
2 weeks ago
Every semester, the best classes we offer are the ones we didn't know we needed until the right instructor proposed them. A workshop on writing about money. A deep-craft intensive on pacing. A generative sprint where writers arrive on a Friday evening with nothing and leave Sunday night with a finished draft.
That pattern holds because we don't build our course catalog from a corporate playbook. We build it from the obsessions, expertise, and hard-won teaching instincts of working writers. And right now, we're actively seeking new class pitches for mid-summer and early fall 2026, with classes starting between July and October.
If you're a published writer with teaching experience and a class idea that would make another writer stop scrolling and say, "That's exactly what I need right now", we want to hear from you.
Below is our current programming wish list, organized by category and themed to the season. Think of it as a starting point, not an exhaustive menu. If your class idea doesn't appear here but fits our ethos of craft-driven, community-centered writing education, pitch it anyway.
Ready to submit your class proposal? Applications are open now.
Apply to Teach →Late Summer Writing Energy
Summer is for momentum. Messy first drafts, bold experiments, and the generative energy that comes from longer days. We're looking for classes that channel that heat into real pages.
Some of what we'd love to see: a weekend sprint intensive (think 48 hours, zero preciousness, one complete draft), a generative workshop built on the liberating idea that the fastest way to a great draft is through a terrible one, and a workshop designed specifically for writers squeezing creativity into full lives. That last one matters more than people admit. Ten-minute exercises, phone-first drafting, the art of writing in stolen moments: these techniques deserve a dedicated class, not a footnote in someone else's syllabus.
We're also interested in classes that examine what makes commercial fiction work. Pacing, hooks, readability, the architecture of compulsive page-turning. Whether the lens is "beach reads" or "binge-worthy novels," we want workshops that take these questions seriously as craft problems rather than dismissing them as concerns beneath literary attention.
Back-to-School Craft Intensives
September brings a different kind of focus. The urgency to study, sharpen skills, and get serious about revision. We're building out our fall slate with deep-craft classes that reward writers who are ready to push harder.
Revision-only workshops are perennially popular, and we'd love a class devoted to the ruthless art of cutting: what to remove, how to restructure, when to let go of a scene you love. We're also looking for an instructor who can teach pacing as a discrete craft skill, covering scene versus summary, white space, sentence rhythm, and the mechanics of narrative velocity.
A few more specific needs: writing the ensemble cast (juggling multiple POVs, balancing storylines, creating distinct voices), structuring reveals and misdirection for fiction of all kinds, and a class on endings. Open endings, closed endings, ambiguous endings, and why certain final pages stay with readers for years while others evaporate. We'd also welcome proposals addressing second book syndrome, because the craft challenges of following up a debut are real, and surprisingly few programs address them directly.
Harvest Season Nonfiction
Late summer and early fall are natural seasons for reflection, gathering, making sense of experience. Our nonfiction catalog is strong, but we have clear gaps we'd like to fill.
Cultural criticism is at the top of the list. The smart-take essay, the kind of writing that discusses culture, art, and ideas with both authority and style. Think the lineage of Hanif Abdurraqib, Hilton Als, Rachel Syme. We'd also love to see proposals for a braided essay workshop (the craft of weaving multiple threads, timelines, and modes of inquiry into a single piece), and a reported narrative nonfiction class for writers who want to blend research and interviews with storytelling in the tradition of David Grann, Susan Orlean, and Rachel Aviv.
Then there are the taboo subjects. Writing about money (personal finance essays, class narratives, economic anxiety on the page) remains one of the richest and most underserved territories in personal writing. Writing about work is similarly ripe: the workplace memoir, the labor essay, the career-change narrative. How do you write compellingly about the thing that occupies most of your waking hours? And for writers drawn to formal experimentation, we're looking for someone to teach the lyric essay, that productive collision of poetry and prose where fragmentation, collage, and associative logic open up new possibilities for the form.
Poetry
Our poetry catalog has solid foundations. What we need now are classes that expand into territory we haven't covered.
Erasure and found poetry is one clear gap: experimental techniques for making new poems from existing texts, including the ethics of appropriation that come with collage and remix practices. We're also interested in a class on the political poem (writing about public life and injustice without becoming preachy, staying rooted in the personal and the particular), long poems and sequences (how to sustain attention and build architecture beyond the standalone lyric), and narrative poetry for poets who want to tell stories through ballads, dramatic monologues, and verse narratives.
A late-summer generative workshop rooted in landscape and the specificity of place would round things out nicely. Write where you are, where you're from, and where you want to be.
Don't see your class idea on this list? Pitch it anyway. We update our wish list seasonally, and the proposals that excite us most are often the ones we hadn't considered until the right instructor brought them to us.
Screenwriting & TV: A Priority Growth Area
This remains our thinnest category and a major priority. We're especially eager for pitches here, and we have slots to fill.
We need a dedicated multi-week course on feature screenplay structure, something beyond the introductory level that addresses character, visual storytelling, and the specific demands of the feature form. An adaptation class (book to screen) would fill another obvious gap: what to keep, what to cut, how to think visually when you've been trained in prose. We'd also love to see proposals for writing the limited series (binge-worthy structure for the streaming era), comedy writing for TV and film (joke structure, comedic timing in dialogue, visual comedy on the page), the short film (compressed storytelling and the festival pipeline), and a writers' room simulation where participants collaborate to break a season and build a story bible together.
If screenwriting or TV writing is your area, please reach out. We have the infrastructure and the audience. We need the instructors.
Writing for Children & YA: Another Priority Gap
Our children's and YA offerings are thin, and the demand from our community keeps growing. We're looking to build meaningful programming here from the ground up.
Specific needs include a picture book bootcamp (from concept to manuscript to understanding the illustration partnership), a middle grade craft class addressing voice, structure, and age-appropriate complexity, and a YA workshop focused on authenticity and emotional honesty without condescension. On the publishing side, a class on querying agents for children's books would serve writers navigating what is genuinely a different market with different rules than adult publishing.
Publishing & the Business of Writing
Fall is prime submission season. Writers finish summer drafts and want to get their work out before the year closes. We're looking for classes that support that push.
A structured accountability workshop built around identifying target journals and agents, polishing submissions, and building a submission calendar for the fall season would be immediately useful. We also want a dedicated class on writing the synopsis, which is one of the most notoriously difficult skills in publishing (distilling a 300-page novel into a compelling two-page summary that doesn't lose the book's soul). Additional areas of interest: quality self-publishing (editing, design, distribution, and marketing for independent authors), ghostwriting and collaborative writing as a professional path, and Substack or newsletter strategy for writers who want to build a readership through direct publishing.
Cross-Genre & Fresh Angles
Some of our most successful classes don't fit neatly into a single category, and that's precisely what makes them exciting. We're always interested in unexpected, specific proposals that could only come from WritingWorkshops.com.
A few ideas that have been on our radar: writing the obsession (the John McPhee, Mary Roach, Ed Yong approach to going deep on a singular subject), historical fiction research methods (building authentic worlds without letting research drown the story), and science fiction craft as its own dedicated offering distinct from our existing speculative fiction and horror programming.
We'd also welcome a class on writing about technology and artificial intelligence, covering both fiction and nonfiction approaches to what is undeniably the strangest cultural moment most of us have experienced. And for writers who are stuck, a generative, craft-focused workshop on writing through resistance: not therapy-adjacent journaling, but practical techniques for getting words on the page when every instinct says to close the laptop.
Finally, we're interested in an online autumn writing retreat. Multi-day, designed to generate new work and build community heading into the fall. Destination retreat energy, no plane ticket required.
IndieMFA Programs
Beyond individual classes, we're always looking for instructors who can lead long-form, sustained programs. Our six-month and twelve-month IndieMFA tracks in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenwriting require instructors with the track record and the commitment to walk alongside a small cohort over an extended period. If that sounds like you, we want to hear from you.
What We're Looking For in an Instructor
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run school. Our teaching artists include National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer finalists, New York Times bestsellers, and contributors to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, McSweeney's, and dozens of other publications. We don't require that level of credentials from every applicant, but we do look for a few things consistently.
First, a meaningful publication history. You don't need a book deal to teach here, but you do need to be an active, publishing writer. Second, teaching experience. Workshop leading, mentoring, university instruction, community education: the context matters less than the evidence that you know how to hold a room and guide other writers' development. And third, specificity. We're not looking for "Intro to Fiction" or "Writing 101." We want the class that only you could teach, the one that grows out of your particular obsessions, expertise, and experience in the craft.
Our instructor application takes about 10 minutes to complete. We review every submission.
Submit Your Proposal →A Note on Timing
We update our programming wish list seasonally. What you see here reflects our current needs for mid-summer and early fall 2026, with classes starting between July and October. If you're reading this after those slots have filled, don't let that stop you. We accept applications year-round and keep every proposal on file for future scheduling windows.
The best time to pitch is now. And if your idea isn't on this list, that might be exactly what makes it the right one.
Browse our current course catalog to see what we already offer.
View All Classes →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.
