You know what comes right after stuff-your-gut season? New Year’s resolutions! You know, something like finishing (or starting) that Great American Novel you’ve been hammering out since you last had ideals, or shreds of hope that you would be accomplished. To help you get over the hump on your book, a writing workshop could be helpful, but those are pricey, and they also means being stuck to a class schedule. Unless of course, you take a new pay-what-you-wish online writing workshop being offered by a Brooklyn writer and editor.
A Year of Writing is a self guided workshop from Alice Bradley, a Brooklyn-based writer and instructor who’s been published in a slew of publications like The Berkeley Fiction Review and Nerve, and is currently the online editor at Creative Nonfiction. The course works simply: Pay what you can and get weekly emails delivered to your inbox. Every month the course will cover a different subject. January will be ideas, February plot and theme, so on and so forth.
While she doesn’t give an exact price to pay, Bradley does advise anyone taking the course to not pay so little you don’t take the course seriously. It’s gotta be enough that the chunk of change is going to motivate you to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. The pay-what-you-can sound like a great draw, but just be aware that with this course there is no feedback from the instructor or other students taking the course, so this might not be the best option for the slacker types who needs a watchful eye to keep them on track.
For all genres of writers including fiction, poetry, memoir, etc. could you gift this course for a writer friend of yours? Maybe. But you’ll have to make you’ll have to make up your mind how much you’re willing to part with in exchange for the course, which includes writing prompts and recommendations for further reading, by Jan 1, 2014 because that’s when registration ends.