Each workshop is 6 weeks long and is limited to twelve people. (Again, it will take you about four hours per week to do each of these.) These are the starting dates of upcoming workshops.
All have openings at the moment. For sign-up and more information about each workshop, click the Online Workshop tab at the top of the page.
Starting June
Class #17… June 3rd … Cliffhangers
Class #18… June 4th … Pitches and Blurbs
Class #19… June 5th … Genre Structure
Class #20… June 6th … Openings
Class #21… June 7th … Idea to Story
Starting July
Class #22… July 8th … World Building
Class #23… July 9th … Plot Your Novel
Class #24… July 10th … Designing Book Covers
Class #25… July 11th … Designing Book Interiors
Class #26… July 12th … Essentials
Starting August
Class #27… August 5th … Ideas to Story
Class #28… August 6th … Openings
Class #29… August 7th … Genre Structure
Class #30… August 8th … Pitches and Blurbs
Class #31… August 9th …. Cliffhangers
Starting September
Class #32… Sept 2nd … Essentials
Class #33… Sept 3rd … Plot Your Novel
Class #34… Sept 4th … World Building
Class #35… Sept 5th … Designing Book Covers
Class #36… Sept 6th … Designing Book Interiors
Sign-up and more information under Online Workshops tab at the top of the page.
Kevin said to watch out for being a major in Whatever. “Most are working at something that has nothing to do with their major, and a disturbing number of those are holding STOP signs for construction crews or asking folks “do you want fries with that?” Be careful.”
I gotta say this: and that’s a problem how?
Yes, if you’ve built up a lot of debt then you should get something out of it to pay it off. But if you don’t build up a lot of debt, then there is nothing wrong with education that isn’t for your career. And there is nothing wrong with real life low level jobs. The key is that you want to plan for it.
My major in everything degree worked me into the best possible job for a writer, IMHO, in that I make a really good wage for part-time work that pays all my bills and a really healthy IRA. (Plus I do get some benefits.) The education led to the skills (using a Mac computer for early desktop publishing led to a job as a Teaching Tech) – but the degrees themselves led to the job classification being defined higher than it would otherwise have been.
While too much day job stress does hurt my writing productivity, I overall agree with Dean – a crappy job is an incentive to write. It takes away your options. My job is good enough that I can enjoy writing, so I’ve moved at a slower pace than one might, but it has been a decent compromise.
Camille
Wow.
Let me get this straight: everyone who’s commenting is going into writing because they want to get rich?
Yes, I’m being sarcastic. This is a great demonstration of the power of writers and fictional characters. There was a book (I think it was Barbarians at the Gate) where the author talked about the culture of rampant greed in a major corporation. He intended it as a cautionary tale, but legions of Business students took it as a playbook.
Remember “Greed is good?” Yep, writers have power, all right, although maybe not the power they wanted. Greed used to be (and still is) considered a deadly sin in some quarters, not a moral compass.
The point of this sermonette is that using greed as the yardstick to measure success is laughable.
Now, I’m NOT arguing that writers shouldn’t learn enough about business to live a comfortable life doing what they enjoy. That’s stupid, especially since I’m on this blog. But this isn’t Wall Street, and I daresay most people write because they enjoy it. Right?
Changing the subject: So far as I can see there are two problems with getting an MFA and they are the same problems as getting a degree in baseball:
1) Given the relatively low likelihood of becoming a major league player, you’re going to have trouble paying off that expensive degree. There is a major disparity between the haves and the have-nots in both writing and baseball. There are many other professions with this disparity, including acting and (sadly) increasing numbers of the sciences, where you have <10% chance of getting a tenured job in your field, and ~0% of living where you choose if you do get tenure.
2) You don't need two solid years of education to become a writer or a ball player. Rather, you need years of practice. I'm not an MFA, but I'm surprised that they don't insist that the students crank out at least 100,000 words as part of getting their degree. 200,000 would be even better.
After all, if writing required years of education, Dean would be getting rich on the DWS school of writing, instead of short seminars. The rest is practice, practice, practice.
heteromeles, unless you were not being clear, or I am reading what you wrote wrong, which is more than likely, you spouted about fifty myths in that last post.
To start off with, why wouldn’t a person go into writing to become rich? Thinking any way else is just silly and a myth built up by all the people who think actually writing is just too much work. I am rich and most people have never knowingly read a book I have written unless they liked Men in Black or Spider-Man or Star Trek. And I sure don’t make money teaching. In fact, this year is the first year the workshops will make any money, but it sure won’t pay back the seventeen thousand dollar loss from last year. Or the larger loss from the year before. If we wanted to make money teaching, we would charge what the workshops are worth, not the small amount we charge.
So I have a real, real, real problem with the myth that you can’t get rich writing fiction. The fiction writing funds these workshops. And take a deep breath and look at the Forbes list. Take a deep breath and just do the math on a book that drifts below a bestseller list, not even on a list.
As for the likelihood of become a professional writer compared to professional baseball, there isn’t even a line. You are correct about baseball and other professional sports, very difficult to get there and stay there, but for writing not so much. Young writers WANT to make it seem difficult, and some older pros play into that myth because it makes us sound like we are more special, but it really isn’t that hard. Does it take years? Yes. Does it take drive and practice? Yes. Does it take the ability to learn and sacrifice for your writing? Yes. But there are thousands and thousands and thousands of writers making their living from fiction writing. It really isn’t that difficult, no matter what all the young writers and some old pros want to tell everyone.
The ability of young writers to convince themselves that they don’t have to work at their writing to become successful is just startling. But the thing I hate the worst is that “Can’t get rich writing fiction.” I’ve been sort of saving that for the Sacred Cows book, but every time I try to start it, I just can’t stay level.
Excuse me, I have to stare out my window at the waves of the Pacific Ocean for a few moments to calm down and wonder why I never could get rich writing fiction. (snort)
Thank you, Dean.
I would add something. IMHO, the startling thing about young writers (and not so young writers who are just beginning) is not that they don’t think they have to work, but that they don’t have any idea what you mean by the word “work.”
They spin their wheels harder, doing promotional stuff and spamming and schmoozing, and at best, their writing time is spent endlessly rewriting. They get incensed if you suggest that maybe checking your stats fifty times a day doesn’t count as working. (If you have an obsessive personality type it might count as fun. It might count as cat vacuuming, but it doesn’t count as work.)
Camille
Exactly, Camille. What I mean by work is having a work ethic. Period. James Patterson, Stephen King, Nora Roberts have work ethics where somehow they didn’t listen to the detractors who told them you can’t write six or eight or ten hours a day and they just do it. I do it. My wife does it. Most writers I know who are rich or making a nice living have good solid work ethics where they spend time creating new stories, lots of time. And they know how to keep learning.
It is why that most of the older full time professionals I know, writers who came in the same time I did or before, have moved quickly to electronic publishing. We know how to keep learning because that is what is needed to stay in this business. And a work ethic of not being afraid to sit at a computer and just write, release, and then write something new.
And to be honest, it never occurs to me to ask any writer what kind of degree they have from some college somewhere. I find my years of college funny in hindsight. But they seemed SO IMPORTANT when I was going through it. (grin)
And not once, ever, in my entire life, have I ever had to have a resume for a job. Not once. I worked such crap jobs it didn’t matter right up to the point I started selling fiction, and playing cards for a living no one asked my degree either.
Missed the point, Dean. It’s great that you can finance the courses (THANK YOU!), but the fact that you’re doing fine doesn’t mean everyone else is.
More to the point, your success doesn’t justify any student spending lots of money on an MFA. It won’t help them reach your level, as you correctly noted above.
This contrasts with one of those professional degrees you need to practice.
Or, to be honest, with my degree, which lets me do one of those necessary things that people don’t particularly want to pay for (environmental consulting) but which needs to be done if people want clean waves to look at. I resigned myself to not getting lots of money out of the degree, because I value clean waves and forests a lot more.
heteromeles, ???? I never said anything about spending money on a degree to make money with fiction writing. So why should my success justify making any money with fiction??? I seem to have said the exact opposite. I have a masters in Architecture and 2.75 years of law school behind me. I came out of school not having any debts because I am a damn good card player and I worked numbers of jobs all the way through.
I just HATE the idea that you and others think money can’t be made writing fiction. (I could not give a rats….. if you have a degree or not.) If you believe that you can’t make money writing fiction and can’t be rich from doing so, trust me, you won’t make any because you make decisions that will make that a reality for yourself.
Oh, hell, Dean — did you get rich? Damn. I missed the boat again.
Guys… I’m not saying that a ‘generic’ degree helps no one, in no way. But if you pick up $20k (or twice that, or four times that) in loans, I think it is somewhat reasonable to expect that education will help you actually pay that off – and hopefully, earn you a decent living – afterward. Too often, with the various social sciences and liberal arts, this is not the case today.
Not saying it’s always true, or that you can’t find ways to make it work for you. I know of a theater major who is an MD now – of course, she took the dozen or so extra science classes to make her a good candidate for med school; your average theater major would not be accepted due to lacking required courses. Major often has very little effect on what you do for work. That can be a good thing…or a very, very bad thing if you’re paying off those loans on minimum wage!
I don’t tell folks “go get a professional degree or you’re sunk”. There’s often a lot of value in other degrees, too. I just think it’s important to look at what your twenty to one hundred thousand dollars is buying for you. Look into it before you leap.
I can’t wait for the “can’t get rich” Sacred Cows entry, Dean (HUGE evil grin). It’s a huge one in popular fiction and yet seemingly even bigger in lit fic/MFA types. (I actually love all of your money myth-busting chapters, heh.)
Next week, Sam, if I can keep my blood pressure under control. Otherwise it might take a few more weeks for me to finish that one. I just get so worked up over that one for some reason. Of course, maybe one of the reasons writers think they can’t get rich with fiction writing is that they give all their money to some stranger with a card that says they are an agent and let the agent have the paperwork telling them how much they are making. Agents get rich and have large offices in New York off of 15% of what writers make and writers think they can’t get rich. Hmmmmmm….
Let’s be fair here: Most writers aren’t rich. Last time I looked at the numbers, the “average” professional writer made about five grand a year. There are, however, plenty of folks who make a good living at it, and some who are filthy rich. Parts of this aren’t under your control as a writer — right book, right moment, smiles from Dame Fortune — but it’s like playing the lottery: you can’t win unless you buy a ticket.
I’ve had fat and lean years, but it was always my goal to make a living at writing and I have managed to do so for a goodly time. I dropped out of college halfway through and went off to California, eventually becoming a hippie. I went back to vo-tech school years later and got a nursing ticket, parlayed that into being a PA, all of which was grist for a writer’s mill, but none of which involved a formal study of literature.
For my money, a good class in journalism will serve you as well as an advanced degree in English — if you really want to be a writer.
The English degree won’t hurt you if you really want to be a writer — as long as you understand that there is sometimes a difference between theoretical and practical.
Nobody cares what your level of education is in the writing biz. The big thing that matters is, Can you tell a good story? I’ve known Ph.D’s in English who couldn’t, and high-school dropouts who could.
(My daughter sold her first story when she was seventeen. To Dean and Kris, as it happens …)
Education is great, and the more you know, the better, but unless you want to teach there’s nothing wrong with being an autodidact if your goal is to get paid for words on a page.
What Steve said exactly. I can tell you this, I have sent more than one young writer back to take classes in English over the years, but that was to learn basic English structure to help their writing. No literature classes to deconstruct (can’t believe that’s even a word) novels.
The deconstruct thing reminded me of my college English class. We were studying poetry. We had an assignment to read this poem and pick it apart, and determine what the writer was trying to say. I must have looked at that poem for an hour or more, can only came up with a couple of lame ideas. I didn’t know what he was trying to say. I’m terrible at reading between the lines.
Next day at class, the teacher proceeded to tell us what it meant and why, picking apart phrases, speaking of how it was an allusion to this or that, etc. By the end of class the one thing I learned is that poetry was over my head, and I had no real reason to invest the effort to learn it. I never got into poetry.
It wasn’t until running into some poets working at an online magazine that I realized there was poetry I liked, and made sense to me, and I even wrote some and sold it. One even earned an honorable mention in a contest.
But to balance that out, I had a great English teacher in high school. We studied Shakespeare, and she had projects we could do, like culture of the time, clothing of the time, and other related projects. But none appealed to me, so I went up to her and asked if I could write a Shakespearean style comedy play instead. Her mouth dropped open, then she said, “Of course!” I did, a full four act play, and got an A+ on it. Lots of fun.
I wish I still had that somewhere. It would be fun to read. And I wish I had had a mentor back then as well. I had no idea about getting published and didn’t even consider it as a career choice, even though I enjoyed writing and had written some things, including a politically incorrect short story I called “Little Red Riding Hood.” And no, only slight similarities with the original story. lol.