Running workshops
How to get started and what to expect
I think I threatened to write a post on running workshops months ago, but have entirely not done it. As I’ve recently put together a new workshop for Glasgow Worldcon though, now is as good a time as any! The idea for this post came from a few conversations with friends who wanted to try running creative writing workshops but didn’t know where to start and/or felt underqualified to do so. I thought it might be helpful to talk through how to choose and write a workshop, and also how to find gigs and manage the logistics of the event itself - hopefully making the whole thing feel doable.
For context, I’ve run workshops for a few years now, with various organisations and festivals, both in-person and online, and both pitched-for, and by invitation. I love doing them and although I’m by no means the most experienced teacher out there, I do know how to get started doing this & appear to be not entirely rubbish at it.
First, let’s deal with the ‘feeling unqualified’ thing.
So you like the idea of running workshops. They are immense fun and can be incredibly inspiring and confidence-boosting, so I totally agree, you should do it! How do you know when you’re ‘qualified’ to do so though? Well, do you have experience of any aspect of writing or publishing? Have you been doing something for a while and notched up some successes at it? If so then you’re probably qualified. That success doesn’t have to be ‘Bestselling Author’ or ‘PhD in creative writing’ or ‘Award winning author’ or whatever. It could be that you’ve published 30 short stories, or you’re a volunteer editor for a great lit magazine; you’ve beta-read, critiqued and mentored for years. The point is that you have built up knowledge of some facet of writing or publishing that other people might be able to benefit from.
If, on the other hand, you’ve just published your first short story, or you’ve just signed the contract on your first book, or you became a first reader for a magazine a month ago … perhaps give yourself room to grow first. This isn’t a race, you’ll enjoy teaching more when you can bring more to the table and are more assured in the knowledge you have.
So think about where your knowledge strengths lie, think about what areas you find yourself able to help your friends with, where you feel you’ve grown most since you started out. This is where you may be able to offer workshop material to other writers.
In terms of the dreaded Imposter Syndrome … screw it. Imposter Syndrome means you’ll push yourself to be the best you can, so you’re more likely to do a good job than someone who sails in on an ego and a half-arsed plan. Ask your friends what they think you could run a workshop on, they probably see your strengths clearer than you do if the doubt demons are busy. And then, well, try it! You might surprise yourself (I did!).
Building a workshop
Format:
The first thing to do is decide (or check if it’s for a particular event) on the timings and format of the workshop.
Standard practice is 90 minutes with a 5-10 min comfort break in the middle. Or 60 minutes, preferably still with a brief comfort break in the middle, bearing in mind it is good accessibility practice.
Online workshops will potentially have more attendees and less fluidity for reading work aloud, but more ease of posting work to share in the chat channel. Online workshops will generally need slides, handouts are optional.
In-person workshops should usually be limited to about 20 people as more gets impractical. More time is needed if you want attendees to share their work aloud, slides are optional, but handouts are strongly recommended as an accessibility aid.
Topic:
Okay, so you’ve thought of a topic you want to explore, and you know the format and time you’re working with. The next step is to narrow down your chosen topic from ‘how to edit’ for example, to something a little more manageable in the time - like ‘line-level editing’ or ‘editing for pacing’ or ‘refining your voice’. Or if your initial idea was ‘publishing short stories’, think about whether you want to focus on the logistics - finding markets and managing submissions - or on the craft side. Trying to do both risks doing neither particularly well. You always need more time for something than you think, so a workshop topic always needs to be more refined in scope than you expect (this scope will take some learning, but that’s okay, that’s what the drafting & practicing process is for).
I was recently asked to put together a workshop on Climate Fiction. That’s a huge topic. Omg I could run a series of workshops on that! So I had to narrow it down to two discrete aspects of this subject - what purposes climate fiction fulfills, and how to start shaping our own narratives. It’s still going to be a bit of a whistlestop tour!
Exercises:
Now you have a workshop sized topic, you want to build the workshop material around it. You’ll want to find a good balance between time you spend talking to your attendees, time they spend writing, and time you all spend sharing reactions to the exercises/debate points. Too much of you talking and it’s effectively a seminar. Too much writing time and it’s a writing hour, not a workshopping hour. People come to workshops both to learn and to try out new things, so ideally you want to divide your workshop topic into a series of discrete sub-topics that can be explored in short exercises. These exercises can be tackling separate skills/aspects, or they can be building on each other. They can be idea generation, games, writing prompts, research - it entirely depends on the workshop subject but you probably want to aim for activities that require between 5 and 10 mins each. Extremely roughly speaking, you can probably fit 3/4 short exercises in a 60 min workshop, 4/5 short or 3/4 longer exercises in 90 minutes.
For that ‘line level editing’ workshop for example, I might be thinking about use of language first - playing with language and Psychic Distance to create different voice effects. Then… hmm idk, something similar but editing for atmosphere. Then playing around with punctuation and spacing to alter the impact of a phrase. I might get them to read bits of text aloud to see how that can help clarify edits. That’s 4 exercises which would build on each other quite nicely, and it doesn’t sound like a lot here but would easily fill an hour, possibly 90 minutes if we dive into Psychic Distance in any detail.
Ideally then, your workshop will involve you giving a bit of introduction, setting up an exercise, writing time, chat, introducing the next subtopic & exercise, writing time, chat …. etc… then wrapping up.
You’ll need to run through this a few times so your patter sounds fluid, and to check how the exercise timings work out. The amount of discussion after an exercise is harder to dictate - it depends on people being willing to participate which can be a little slow sometimes although usually loosens up quickly. Setting aside about 5 mins before moving on is usually a good amount though.
This is an example of a 90 min workshop worksheet just to show you the balance between exercises and explanatory notes.
Practical points -
Keep slides uncluttered and clear - white text on dark backgrounds and no animations makes for gentler visuals on sensitive eyes, avoid combinations bad for those with colour-blindness, and stick to fewer slides so you aren’t clicking through too fast. Put your book covers and a contact link on the final page.
Handouts can contain summaries of what you’re saying as well as room for the writing exercises. Put your name and a contact link on the page header/footer.
How to find opportunities
You’ve got a beautiful workshop (or an idea for one), how do you get the gig?
Keep an eye out for open pitching opportunities from festivals, conventions, and writing organisations. Even if they don’t advertise calls for pitches, you can reach out to these places asking if they are taking pitches. Do so well ahead of time of events - most of them are arranging programming at least 6 months ahead, often longer.
Other venues that might welcome a pitch are libraries, local writing groups, indie bookshops and schools. If you have a writing group of your own, I recommend running the workshop with them informally too, it’s a good way of a) getting feedback and b) deciding if it’s something you enjoy.
When you do send pitches, you’ll need a title, a brief summary of the workshop, and why you’re qualified to run it - something along the lines of this old one of mine:
Remember as with anything, whether your pitch is accepted will depend partly on your pitch, but also partly on the balance of events the organiser has. So don’t be put off by a ‘no thanks’.
Once you have run a few workshops, you’ll likely start getting invited to run more. Well done! This is awesome! So it’s worth building a few alternative topics to give you new things to offer.
At an early stage in any booking, it should be made clear to you what the fee is for the workshop - it is usually in the region of £150-250 per event. SFF conventions don’t pay workshop faciliators though. They don’t pay any of their guests, it’s part of the culture, which I have complicated thoughts about. I don’t generally agree with doing so much work for free, but it might be a great opportunity to get started, or you might decide it’s worth it for your own profile.
Preparing for the event:
Check what the set up is with the organisers. For online events, confirm how & when you’ll join in. You’ll normally run a quick test call to make sure the system works and you’re happy that everything is in order. Make sure you’ll have screen sharing abilities, and ask what the process is for monitoring the event, kicking out gatecrashers and dealing with tech issues. Most organisers will have a host who stays online throughout to monitor all these things so you don’t have to worry about it. Ask about subtitling too, it’s useful if they’re on automatically so attendees don’t have to request them. If you have a worksheet, you may want to arrange for the organisers to email it around to your attendees ahead of time.
In person events - check there will be spare pens and paper, and water in the room. Arrange for the organisers to print out the worksheet if necessary. If you are using slides check your connections, remember your laptop, check the screen & tables are where you want them. Consider ventilation and noise levels - air filters are a lovely thing, open windows are great but can introduce too much noise. Another benefit of the mid-way comfort break is airing out the room and improving air quality. It’s generally better not to mask when faciliating a workshop - for anyone who lip reads - so working to manage air quality can be important.
Give yourself time to get in the zone before the event. Sit quietly with a cup of tea at home, find the green room and hide in it. It’s an intensive 90 mins, go into it unfrazzled by other stuff.
During the event
Make sure you have a glass of water to hand. Take the time to welcome everyone and introduce yourself, and introduce the structure of the workshop (e.g. ‘We’ll have a midway comfort break, we’ll be doing a series of exercises & I hope you’ll feel comfortable sharing some of your work’). With online events you can ask folk to introduce themselves in the chat channel. Whether you do that in person may depend on the group size and your timings - instead you can provide sheets of paper and ask attendees to write their names and pronouns then set the paper up in front of them.
Talk slower, and less, than you think you need to!
With each exercise, explain what you want them to do clearly, tell them how long they have to do it in, give them a 1 minute warning of time up. Ask for volunteers to share work, online that can just be posting it in chat. I know this is obvious, but take the time to be positive and encouraging in response to shared work - it can be easy to focus so much on moving onto the next thing that you forget to do this.
Try to keep a little free time at the end for wider discussion, and also try not to dash off straight away afterwards. People enjoy being able to linger, thank you, talk about it with you - and this is a rewarding moment for you too so enjoy it!
After the event:
Give yourself time to decompress afterwards if you need it. Expect to feel tired - many of us are wee antisocial hermits, this stuff is way outside our comfort zones so it’s okay to both enjoy it and be worn out by it.
You can request feedback from the organisers, or collect some yourself. You must send an invoice for the agreed fee. This is an example invoice form, feel free to adapt and use:
Also make a note of the things that worked well and the things that didn’t. Sometimes timings are off, or it turns out an exercise isn’t as clear or engaging as you anticipated. That’s fine - note it, adapt your material, it’ll be better next time.
Check in with yourself on how much you enjoy doing this. No-one has to run workshops, it’s not a requirement for authoring, so if you didn’t get enough out of it to justify the work then … you don’t have to do it. The best workshops are run not by the people most highly qualified but by the people who most enjoy inspiring other writers. But I hope you discover a love for this thing too - there’s a very special buzz in hearing that your workshop has sparked ideas or uplifted someone, and I’m excited to run my new one next week (last week, by the time this goes live)!
So that’s it, a rough and ready guide to getting started running workshops. I hope it’s helpful, and good luck diving into your own! Let me know if you’re thinking of running one. Thank you for reading!
Thank you so much for this - I'm running my first workshop in October and was anxious about getting the logistics right - this guide is brilliant.
A very helpful guide! I'd never actually considered doing a workshop before but... now I might