How to Organize an Effective Writing Workshop

I’ve been teaching writing workshops for a year now. I have found them to be enlightening, fun and empowering for everyone, including myself. Over the past year, I’ve noticed a few things that have helped my workshops be successful. To be honest, when I first started teaching workshops, I had no previous experience. It was through trial and error that I found a nice groove for facilitating and teaching my passion – writing.

If you’ve been thinking about teaching writing or just leading a workshop activity in your next writer’s group meeting, I’d like to offer you a few tips on how to take your passion from thought to reality in a fun and exciting way.

Tip #1: What Type of Writing Do You Want to Teach. Figure out exactly what type of writing you’d like to teach others. The sky is the limit where this is concerned. You may want to teach short fiction, poetry, personal essay writing, or memoir writing. Now, once you decide exactly what type of writing you want to teach, then figure out what elements of that type of writing you’d like to dive into and teach. For instance, you may want to teach a workshop about writing short fiction, but you may want to just focus on character development or just focus on plot development. Try to be as precise as possible when developing your own writing workshop. The more specific you are with your ideas, the easier it’ll be to iron out all the details and conduct a workshop that runs very smoothly.

Tip #2: Timing is Everything. One thing you should do is figure out how long you want to conduct the workshop. Figuring out the timing of the workshop will help you figure out how many writing activities to have involved in your allotted amount of time. For instance, you may decide that you want to teach a one-hour writing workshop on character development in short fiction. Be sure that you plan out timed writing exercises and timed discussion segments that fit decently into one hour so that every aspect of character development you want to touch on is included. Timing is everything. Be sure to include timed exercises and make sure the discussion segments don’t run over a certain amount of time. While you would like for as many people as possible to participate in your workshop, you want to keep things flowing very smoothly and be sure every element of your agenda is included in the workshop. In addition, as an extra tip, be sure to type up an agenda for your writing workshop to keep yourself on track. Every time an exercise or discussion segment is completed, check it off.

Tip #3: Less is More. Try to limit how many supplies you are supplying in the workshops. Especially, since you are teaching a writing workshop, be sure to let participants know to bring their own notebooks, pens, and/or pencils. This helps in two different ways – the first way is by cutting costs for yourself, so all you need is your own writing tools and your agenda and the second way is everyone will feel more comfortable in the environment if they are writing with tools they are familiar with. They’re favorite journal or favorite pen can go a long way when it comes to how well they respond to your workshop.

Tip #4: Knowledge is Power. Please be sure that the topic you’re teaching in the workshop is one that you are truly familiar with and won’t have to do a lot of research on prior to conducting the workshop. One of the things that help workshop participants warm up to a ‘new’ instructor/facilitator is their wealth of knowledge concerning the topic. If you’re a published writer or have many years of writing experience under your belt, by all means, share this information. Use writing exercises and philosophy that you have used yourself over the years as well as exercises you’ve created specifically for the workshop. There’s a lot to be said for mixing a bit of the ‘tried and true’ methods with brand new methods to create a well-balanced learning experience for your workshop participants.

As you can see, with these simple tips you can put together an effective and fun writing workshop that will prove to be informative, exciting, and well-defined. Happy Teaching!