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:

Writers who struggle with starting a new idea and need some surefire methods of jumping right in.

Your instructor:

Erin Karbuczky — writer, workshop facilitator, and creative process expert

Takeaways:

• Explore the question at the heart of your story

• Discover how conflict creates structure

• Use your protagonist’s “authority” to shape their character arc

• Create tension and surprise with cleverly placed details

• Set the mood with atmosphere and tone

• Layer up meaning with symbols and motifs

By the end of this workshop, you’ll have six new clever hacks to help unlock your story, build your plot, and develop your characters, until you’re ready to write!

Find A New Way into Your Story

When it comes to writing prose, I’ve always had an affinity for beautiful sentences and an intuition for voice. That all lent itself well to writing poetry, which is where I got my start, but when I decided I wanted to be a novelist, I had a bit of catching up to do in terms of things like structure, conflict, and characterization.

Always a good student, I spent my time reading a lot of craft books and tried my best to internalize the advice. But the more I read, the more I noticed that many craft books teach the various components of fiction and writing entirely separately from one another, with a chapter or so on each component.

This confused the heck out of my brain, because while I understood what they were saying about each part, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get the parts working together — as a whole body, like a piece of writing should — until I developed my series of “story equation” hacks, which put corresponding elements together from the start, taking out the guesswork. I hope they can help someone else out there who also needs to see it presented differently.

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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:

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

Don’t set expectations you can’t keep!

Derek Askey, The Sun: It’s not particularly difficult to tell when a submission’s opening has been labored over more than the pages that follow: A compelling beginning might give way to rote, unimaginative prose, or a voice that had been clearly and memorably established in the first few paragraphs fades into blow-by-blow descriptions or stilted dialog. It’s often such a shame: Why couldn’t the author keep up that level of writing? Where did they lose their way?

It’s a natural impulse, of course. You know your piece is being read alongside thousands of other submissions, and you want to impress right out of the gate. There’s no way they’ll stop reading after an opening sentence like this — it’s perfect! But in truth, the pieces where such high-quality writing is spread across the whole submission: Those are the ones that get passed along to our editorial staff for further consideration. Even the most gripping opening can fade — and quickly! — in a reader’s mind if what follows doesn’t live up to its promise.

Keep exposition to a minimum

Steve Chang, Okay Donkey: At Okay Donkey we love “off kilter” work that’s not quite normal, and what that means in terms of submissions is that we get a ton of pieces that start with great premises… but then they tread water.

Why?

One reason is that, often, these pieces get bogged down in exposition. We get a great situation with potential but then the story feels compelled to explain all the ‘what’ of it, the history of everything and everyone involved, the rules of the world, the ‘how and why’ of getting into such a situation, etc.

I think writers would be surprised by how little exposition is actually needed for a piece to do its job. Yes, context is great (and necessary) but it should serve the forward momentum of a piece. It offers a deeper understanding of what’s happening, sure, but that understanding should also heighten the reader’s anticipation of what might come NEXT.

It’s not just idle looking back. It can do so much more.

And, yes, the act of looking back can generate great forward momentum if handled correctly, like in Rina Olsen’s Skeletons in the Closet or Brittany Ackerman’s Boy Crazy, but these stories are also driven by other factors, such as character agenda and cause and effect.

All I’m saying is: it’s not necessary to overwrite expo dumps. So why do we get so many submissions that do?

I think it’s a symptom of the draft. The writer is figuring things out on the page. Then forgetting to clean up the mess of construction. Or they think the mess IS the construction.

The solution, for me, is to maaaaybe differentiate between drafting and revising as modes, and keeping different questions in mind when doing one or the other.

Developing Your Story…

So many writers get stuck in the middle of a story — so how do you keep the momentum going, escalate the plot and develop your character arcs to keep readers hooked?

Go further & deeper

Derek: One of the best pieces of advice I’ve been given on pacing is from my mentor when I was in graduate school, Steven Schwartz, who often reiterated that stories, as they advance, need to go both further and deeper.

He was referring specifically to fiction, but I think the rule applies to nonfiction as well, and it’s one of the things that’s often in my mind when I read submissions for The Sun:

1. Is this plot merely advancing, or am I actually becoming more invested in the people (or characters) being described as this piece goes on?

2. If something’s happening on the page, is it something that matters?

3. Is this particular exchange of dialog so important that it needs to be in quotation marks and conveyed in full, or would it be better to summarize it and get to something more important? (And, if it’s the latter, does the reader really even need to see it at all?)

4. Are the characters, or people in the essay, the same as they were when the piece started? Have things gotten more difficult for them? Better? How are they handling that?

I’ve found that, so long as you’re accomplishing at least some of these things, concerns with pacing kind of take care of themselves. I’ll add that nothing kills pacing quite so much as a character or a narrator spending too much time in their head, or walking around aimlessly, or otherwise squandering their precious time on the page.

Does every paragraph need to take the piece further and deeper? Does every sentence? Well, probably not, but it isn’t a bad idea to take a look at maybe every page (and no less than every scene) and make sure it’s doing just that. Does every paragraph in your piece deserve a place in it—does it justify its presence? Or, perhaps more to the point, would you feel the same way about that paragraph if it had to stand up to the scrutiny of being the very first one in your piece?

By and large I just want to know I’m in good hands with an author: that, if I’m spending a lot of time in a particular scene, or with a particular character, the author has a good reason for me to be there. Once you start feeling like the author’s lost hold of that authority, things can go off the rails pretty swiftly.

What now? So what?

Steve: Once we have a draft on the page, maybe our guiding questions are no longer ‘what’ and ‘how and why’ etc, but ‘what NOW?’ and ‘so what?’

‘What now?’ is what the reader should be thinking, periodically. They should be looking ahead in anticipation, not just passively receptive. Have we shaped our draft to help them do so?

‘So what’ can guide us when considering how much exposition we need. Whenever something transpires on the page, we have to ensure that the reader understands the ‘so what’ of it. And by doing so, we also get into the consideration of motivations, stakes, and consequences and whether all of that is on the page yet.

Simple, right?

Use observation & detail to propel your story forward

Rachel Dillon, Ploughshares: Whether a submission reaches the maximum word count or is only a couple hundred words, I am most interested in consistent, confident, surprising work; work with a clear, trustworthy voice. By “trustworthy,” I don’t mean that the characters or speaker need to be reliable or likeable — rather, I want to feel like I am in good hands. I want to trust the writer to carry me through the rooms of their piece, whatever those rooms may hold.

It’s important to note that, though I used it above, I’m often wary of the word “voice” when describing the writing and writers I love. It calls to mind the nebulous, overused advice sometimes given to emerging writers: to “find your voice.” Locating yourself among the chorus of writers you read, write alongside, and admire can feel like an insurmountable task — but when I think about a writer’s voice, I’m not only thinking about the syntax, lexicon, and formal experimentation at work in their piece. I’m considering the writer’s ability to observe. These observations might come from their daily environment, their personality, their literary lineage.

While reading, I ask: What sensory details stand out to a character or narrator? How might the way they see their world enrich my understanding of my world and, in the words of Naomi Shihab Nye and Vievee Francis, build our “shared world”? These questions complicate how we might define “voice,” and makes room for the strangeness and mystery that comes from deep, daily observation.

Devon Walker-Figueroa’s story Hold Harmless, published in our Fall 2025 Longform issue, exemplifies how close attention to language and hyperspecific characterization can propel longform prose forward. In one particularly memorable scene, a character named Alma eats a cruller. Alma describes the cruller’s taste as “sweet and awfully wonderful, the smallest hint of lemon in the dough.” Walker-Figueroa’s story is over 40 pages long, but that detail — that hint of lemon — sticks with me; in part thanks to its specificity, in part because I love a hint of lemon in all baked goods, and in part due to the rhythm of the sentence itself, and the way it’s rendered so perfectly in Alma’s speech (the quick clause-comma-clause structure, plus “awfully wonderful” — a phrase I can hear every time I read it). As a reader, I trust Walker-Figueroa to both carry me and surprise me — her observations are consistently compelling and strange. She paints a world that I am sad to leave when the story ends.

Endings: Nailing the Landing

Finding the right ending for your story can be a huge challenge, and can make or break a submission — whether it’s too on the nose or leaves us unsatisfied — so how do we wrap things up in short fiction?

Take the reader on a journey

Steve: The other issue with pacing I see a lot is when a writer heads directly for the ending — the solution to the problem posed by the premise — and a compulsory ‘beautiful’ moment.

So what we get is an A → B flip.

For example:

‘My mother hates how I have extra tentacles’ → ‘Starting today, I will love myself.’

or

‘I get bullied at school’ → ‘But today I fight back.’

What I might be talking about is the concept of ‘earning’ an ending vs. a protagonist solving a problem without doing any work. A story that involves the latter is like… a pre-solved problem. The solution just hasn’t been announced yet.

This might be more of an issue for shorter pieces. At Okay Donkey we publish up to 1200 words for prose. So, when working within the confines of flash, writers might feel rushed to deliver the goods.

Maybe?

But how we get where we’re going is important too. And there’s room, even in flash, for journeys. What I recommend for writers who head straight for their endings is simply: Learn to turn.

(Or escalate. Like in this piece by Skyler Melnick.)

What do I mean by turn? Change course. Compound or alter the problem. Get knocked off-path by a reveal or some combo of action-reaction.

Example:

This piece by Chris Scott appears to be about a strange door in the woods but what is it actually about? Where’s the turn here?

Of course, a straight shot from A → B can work fine if done well — that’s a whole other topic — and a turn doesn’t necessarily have to occur via plot.

Example:

This piece by Didi Wood appears to be a straight shot from A → B in terms of plot but how does it ‘earn’ its ending?

Derek: Finally, I’ll leave you with the words of The Sun’s founder and editor emeritus, Sy Safransky, whose thoughts on submissions are more eloquent than I’ll ever manage:

“I’m looking for a writer who doesn’t know where the sentence is leading her; a writer who starts with her obsessions and whose heart is bursting with love; a writer sly enough to give the slip to her secret police, the ones who know her so well, the ones with the power to accuse and condemn in the blink of an eye. It’s all right that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking until she writes it, as if the words already exist somewhere and draw her to them. She may not know how she got there, but she knows when she’s arrived.”

Inspired to write? Heck yeah.

Find even more tips on developing your short fiction, writing exercises, and editorial insights right here:

Bosh out your next short (short!) fiction draft in just 10 minutes with micro-expert Darien Gee:

A comprehensive guide to flash fiction — from initial idea to final draft — with award-winning short fic author Jo Gatford:

Go even deeper into the editorial and revision process with Steve Chang in this four-part workshop:

The only resource you’ll ever need on submitting your writing to lit mags, from the co-founder of Chill Subs:

Plenty more gems to be found in our Short Fiction, Editing & Submissions workshop catalogues, too…

And shout out to our friends at Lit Match Collective — a writers’ community led by editors (co-founded by Steve Chang!) offering tons of literary events, activities, 1-to-1 consultations and conversations to help us all grow and connect.

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.