Hiya, welcome to The Forever Workshop.

First time? Read this first »

Back again? Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

A workshop for:

Short fiction writers looking for insights, guidance and practical tips on putting together a collection of their work.

Your instructor:

Shome Dasgupta — author of 13 books and former Wigleaf Top 50 series editor

Takeaways:

• Explore four approaches to building a collection — and how each suits your work

• Navigate the logistics: word count, story order, and landing on the perfect title

• Understand the publishing process, from finding the right home to handling setbacks

• Learn from Shome’s transformative experiences with four very different collections

By the end of this workshop you’ll have a clearer idea of what to expect from creating a short story collection, with prompts and exercises to help you shape your own.

Four Ways to Put Together a Short Fiction Collection

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Hiya, welcome to The Forever Workshop.

First time? Read this first »

Back again? Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

A workshop for:

Fiction writers who want to craft three-dimensional, relatable characters that readers, agents and editors will love

Your instructor:

Maurice Carlos Ruffin — award-winning author of national bestseller The American Daughters

Takeaways:

• Five practical methods to elevate and upgrade your characterization

• How to make your protagonist feel distinct and three-dimensional

• How to use your character’s complex inner world to prompt them into action

• How to pile on the challenges and conflict to test your protagonist’s mettle

• An exercise to help you create (or develop) a character with depth and nuance

By the end of this workshop you’ll have a handful of easy ways to deepen your understanding of your protagonist, and be full of brand new character ideas…

Five No-Fail Ways to Create an Amazing Protagonist

Do you find that your protagonist is plain, boring, and uninteresting? Does she refuse to do anything memorable? Is your book petering out as a result?

Today’s workshop will explore different approaches for upgrading your characterization. Because an amazing protagonist is a protagonist that agents, editors, and readers will want to meet.

Here are five failsafe techniques to build a wonderfully engaging main character:

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Hey friends,

Welcome to another round of Tell Us Something We Don’t Know — where we source a panel of literary experts and ask them questions about whatever the heck. Today, the heck is pacing and our instructors are experienced editors from three top-tier literary magazines:

The Experts:

• Derek Askey — senior editor at The Sun

• Rachel Dillon — award-winning poet, teacher, and managing editor of Ploughshares

• Steve Chang — co-founder of Lit Match Collective and fiction editor at Okay Donkey

The Takeaways:

• Effective pacing techniques to keep moving your story forward

• How to draw out your unique voice through detail and observation

• Common pacing issues editors see in submissions and how to fix them!

• How important is a strong opening or a killer ending? And what about all that stuff in the middle?

By the end of this workshop, you’ll know how to capture the attention of editors, develop your stories with depth and nuance, and keep readers hanging on every word.

Let’s Begin at the Beginning…

Opening lines, exposition, pacing, and living up to the promise of your premise

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Hey, welcome to The Forever Workshop.

First time? Read this. Back again? Here’s what we’ve got for you today…

A workshop for:

Novelists who want to create a solid (but flexible) plot outline to take them through the first draft and beyond!

Your instructor:

Nina Schuyler — award-winning novelist, creative writing teacher at Stanford, and expert on

Key takeaways:

• What plot is, isn’t, and why it matters

• Techniques for crafting a ‘causation’ plot full of momentum

• Why change is the single most important factor in your character’s journey

• A step-by-step guide to formulating your novel outline

By the end of this workshop, you’ll have a step-by-step outline for a story that you can’t wait to write!

How to Plot Your Novel (Without Sobbing in the Middle)

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Hey there, story-seekers.

Jo Gatford is here to deliver your next course—Smash Your Flash: The Craft of Short (Short) Fiction.  During this workshop we’ll be covering a range of different approaches and exploring the elements of flash fiction, including: 

• How to get started: borrowed structures 

• Mining for subtext and identifying the ‘turn’

• Manipulating time and space

• Interweaving story threads 

• Experimentation and magical realism

• Difficult subjects: how to write around them

• Developing and editing your flash drafts

It will be a smorgasbord of techniques for you to build a flash with. The trick is finding the right structure, voice, and style to suit your story idea, which is exactly what we’re going to learn!

Lessons

About The Instructor

Jo Gatford is the author of The Woman’s Part, a hybrid collection inspired by Shakespeare’s women, and holds an MA in Shakespeare & Theatre from the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. She is also an award-winning novelist, poet, flash fiction writer and scriptwriter, with over 70 publications, including the Bath Flash Award, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge, trampset and Stylist. She has been an editor and mentor for 15 years, and has been teaching creative writing and narrative theory for over a decade. Find out more at www.jogatford.com

A big part of writing a novel is making decisions and sticking with them. Many aspiring novelists get tangled up trying to write every kind of book at once or fail to approach their choices strategically.

In this workshop we will demystify the process by discussing eight key craft topics to focus on when getting started. By the end of the workshop, you'll be fully prepared for your novel-writing journey ahead.

Lessons

About The Instructor

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Dear Edna Sloane, Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here, as well as the forthcoming Animal Instinct (Putnam, 2025). She has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, Conde Nast, and other organizations, and has taught creative writing at NYU, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, the Yale Writers' Workshop, and Writing Co-Lab, an experimental cooperative she helped found. Amy's work has appeared in many publications including the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Coastal Living. Amy has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children. You can find her at amyshearnwrites.com or @amyshearn.Writing a novel. It’s like running a marathon or climbing a mountain: one of those stretch goals that can change you. When you’ve done it, whew, there’s nothing like that sense of accomplishment! And, like with running a marathon or climbing a mountain, the process itself – training, let’s call it – is something that will seep into every corner of your life

Join Steve Chang, fiction editor at Okay Donkey, for a four-part masterclass in how to objectively analyse and revise your writing like a pro.

In this workshop, Steve will share what editors wish writers knew about crafting, revising, and submitting — with detailed breakdowns of stories that have been taken through the revision process and author Q&As about what, why, and how they did it.

Through interactive lessons on narrative structure, characterisation and craft, you’ll get professional insights into how an editor thinks. And, by the end of the workshop, you’ll have a toolbox of new editorial methods to apply to your work!

Lessons

Your Instructor

Steve Chang is a MacDowell Fellow and fiction editor at Okay Donkey. His writing has been published in Epiphany, Guernica, North American Review, The Southampton Review etc. and supported by Loghaven, MASS MoCA, Ragdale and a bunch of other stuff that would hook you up too if you’d apply. Want tips on how? Chat with him at Lit Match Collective, a writers community led by editors.

Hi, Forever Workshoppers!

Welcome to The Freaky Flash Collection with Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, where we will write four pieces of scary good flash fiction.

Each lesson, we’ll focus on a different craft tool we can wield to create bite-sized fiction that haunts, lingers, challenges, frightens, and more. Then we’ll put that tool to use through original prompts designed to really activate the creative juices.

And by the end of the workshop, you’ll have four freaky pieces of flash to submit to journals and a brand new appreciation of how to use horror techniques in your writing.

Lessons

About The Instructor

is a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. Her queer horror novelette Helen House was named one of the Best LGBTQ Books of 2022 by NBC News. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle, an assistant fiction editor at Foglifter, and the former managing editor of TriQuarterly. Her short stories appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and others. Some of her culture writing can be found in The Cut, The A.V. Club, Vulture, Refinery29, and Vice, and she previously worked as a restaurant reporter for Eater NY. She has held fellowships with Tin House and Lambda Literary.

Those of us who attended old-school MFA programs may have received some dismissive ideas about genre fiction, but the truth is that we can learn a lot from this kind of writing.

Elements of speculative fiction that are important in any literary work include world-building, imagining alternate realities, using various iterations of the monster, and always keeping the plot moving. This course is a fun way to welcome more imagination and play into your writing life!

Lessons

About The Instructor

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Dear Edna Sloane, Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here, as well as the forthcoming Animal Instinct (Putnam, 2025). She has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, Conde Nast, and other organizations, and has taught creative writing at NYU, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, the Yale Writers' Workshop, and Writing Co-Lab, an experimental cooperative she helped found. Amy's work has appeared in many publications including the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Coastal Living. Amy has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children. You can find her at amyshearnwrites.com or .

The best horror writing is about so much more than just monsters and ghouls but rather uses those monsters and ghouls to tell deeper, more layered stories about human relationships, grief, loss, society, politics, identity, and themes beyond the spectral.

In this workshop, you will learn how to write horror that upends, devours, surprises, unsettles, disorients, and titillates the reader. You don't have to consider yourself a genre writer or have any horror experience to benefit from learning how to harness fear and the uncanny in your writing.

Lessons

About The Instructor

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. Her queer horror novelette Helen House (Burrow Press) was named one of the Best LGBTQ Books of 2022 by NBC News. She is the managing editor of both Autostraddle and TriQuarterly. Her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, Foglifter, and others. Some of her culture writing can be found in The Cut, The A.V. Club, Vulture, Refinery29, and Vice, and she previously worked as a restaurant reporter for Eater NY. She was a 2023-2024 Tin House Reading Fellow and a 2023 Lambda writer in residence. Her fiction will be featured in the upcoming anthology Be Gay, Do Crimes, out from Dzanc Books in 2025

Speculative fiction is a vast umbrella that encompasses several genres and includes topics ranging from swords to superheroes to space opera. But no matter the time or place (or even dimension), they all are all connected by their use of imaginative elements.

No matter whether you are a sci-fi savant, fantasy fan, or horror hobbyist, you will learn how a little make-believe can go a long way towards expanding your stories beyond our everyday reality.

Lessons:

About Your Instructor:

Grace P. Fong

Sometime ago, we put out a social media blast on Chill Subs’ accounts asking folks for the best speculative fiction workshop they ever took and who taught it.

Grace was recommended a shit ton of times. Picking an instructor for all of you is intense, you’re going to have them for a whole month so they gotta be good. After squirreling through Grace’s website and social media I decided yep, she’s the one. 

Her achievements were impressive — her stories have appeared on Reactor (formerly Tor.com), Apex, and Uncanny Magazines and have been recognized by the Ignyte Awards, FIYAH x Levar Burton Reads, and the Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, but it was actually this line in her bio that got me….

We’ll be brutally honest with you: Humor writing is hard. Not impossible, but hard. However, it can be easier with the right process and feedback. In this workshop, Alex will teach you that process. In fact, this workshop will demystify humor writing. 

Lessons

About The Instructor

Alex Baia is a humor writer and comedian in Austin, TX. He has published humor in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Austin Monthly, Eater, Points In Case, and other fine publications. He is the editor of the humor site Slackjaw on Medium. Find out more about Alex's writing and comedy projects at alexbaia.com.