Mentorship in Creative Writing

Mentorship project options with Ploi Pirapokin

Option 1—Your First 50 Pages
Whether you’re putting together a short story collection, novel, memoir, or essay collection, having your first 50 pages is crucial to being a quarter of the way to being done. This independent study is for all writers of nonfiction (essays and memoir), literary fiction (short stories and novels), and science fiction and fantasy (short stories and novels), and tailored to suit your manuscript’s needs. We’ll implement generative and revision exercises that will address craft techniques to polish style, voice, character development, form, structure, and specific author related processes to ensure you leave with a plan to complete your manuscript after this mentorship, along with opportunities tailored for you on what the next steps would best be, whether that’s submitting to contests, publications, and/or agents.

Option 2—Submitting to Grants, Residencies, Fellowships, and MFA programs
90 percent of a successful application to attend writing residencies, fellowships, and MFA programs lies with your writing sample. We’ll spend 10 weeks generating and polishing your writing samples along with your artist statement, project proposals, and going over strategies surrounding the submission process. You’ll leave with tips and tricks from panelists and jurors on how to make your work stand out in a submission pile, and a better understanding of how to speak about your continued artist process and intentions in a clear and concise manner. We’ll identify which offerings are right for your work, navigate the application process, and prepare and submit to 10 applications of your choice.

Option 3—Teaching Creative Writing
So, you want to teach creative writing, but don’t know where and how to begin? Whether you already teach creative writing, will start teaching creative writing, or are interested in teaching creative writing, we’ll spend 10-weeks looking at how to craft an inclusive and engaging syllabus, create lesson plans, and teaching techniques applicable to emerging and experienced writers. We’ll walk through the teaching application process, which will include a mock interview, for teaching creative writing to high schoolers, undergraduates, and adult learners. We’ll meet to chat about teaching journals and case studies on a weekly basis. This independent study provides pedagogical grounding for pragmatic classroom teaching work and offers future instructors a structured forum in which to discuss their teaching under the supervision of an experienced teacher. This applies for all genres of creative writing: poets, nonfiction, fiction, and genre fiction.

Application Requirements for Ploi Pirapokin's Mentorship: 

• Workshop history (if any, please include unofficial transcripts from any writing course work)
• Publication history (if any)
• Short term writing goal for the 10-week mentorship 
• Long term writing goal 
• Proposed project for mentorship period 
• Work sample from project to be developed during this mentorship (10 - 25 pages)

Mentorship project options with Henry Lien

Track 1: Unique Concept Generation and World-Building
Creating a unique concept to write about, or a unique take on a familiar concept, is an under exercised superpower for writers. It helps writers distinguish themselves to gatekeepers, tame impostor syndrome, and smooth their path to publication. Further, books often succeed because of the originality or richness of their worldbuilding regardless of whether they are genre works. This track includes lessons, readings and focused writing assignments that draw from Surrealist parlor games, meditation, children’s and party games, technology and research. The end goal of this track is to help the writer create a concept and build a world that are unique as well as personal to the writer and write one chapter of that work. Note that this track is most suitable for writers who only have a vague idea of what they want to write, are at the early stages of planning their project or are willing to substantially rework their project if it is already partially written. This track is less suitable for writers who already have a fixed idea of their concept and worldbuilding. This track is suitable for writers of all forms of fiction or non-fiction, including genre work.

Track 2: Plotting
This workshop teaches the writer a painless but powerful technique to create a plot outline for their novel or story without killing spontaneity or discovery. It employs a Plot Grid technique to offload the outlining process to a document that will keep track of the plotting for the writer. The Plot Grid allows for a sort of x-ray vision revealing the rhythm of the book’s plot threads. The Plot Grid empowers the writer to be in control of their story like they’ve never been able to before and enables the writer to write a book that they otherwise couldn’t because the required architecture or choreography were too intricate. The writer will complete this track with a completed Plot Grid that will serve as their roadmap for writing their book, chapter for chapter. Note that this track is suitable for all writers, whether they consider themselves “plotters” who are comfortable with outlining before writing or “pantsers” who eschew outlining and who prefer to improvise. This track is most suitable for writers who have spent time with their concept, know what story they want to write, and have begun writing but have not completed more than one third of their manuscript. This track is suitable for writers of all forms of fiction or non-fiction, including genre work.

Track 3: Freestyle
This track resembles a more traditional writing coaching relationship. The writer will submit pages, and the mentor will identify issues in the pages that could use development. Based upon that, the mentor will create lessons, readings, and/or exercises to help the writer work on that aspect. Aspects that the mentor and writer could address include subjects universal to all prose, such as character development, prose style, and plotting or to things specific to particular genres such as unique concept generation and world-building. This track is suitable to writers of all levels. This track is suitable for writers of all forms of fiction or non-fiction, including genre work.

Application Requirements for Henry Lien's Mentorship: 

• Workshop history (if any, please include unofficial transcripts from any writing course work)
• Publication history (if any)
• Short term writing goal for the 10-week mentorship 
• Long term writing goal 
• Loglines (brief 1-2 sentence description) of at least two concepts you are interested in writing 
• Proposed project for mentorship period 
• Work sample from project to be developed during this mentorship (10 - 25 pages)

Mentorship project options with Jessica Barksdale

Option 1—Submission Package
You’ve been through the process, revised, edited, revised. You’ve had readers, taken classes, and now you are ready to send your novel or short story collection out into the world. We will put our heads together and work on a strategy. One of the ways we will do this is to examine the options: the people and places that you might submit your work. Then we will get busy by crafting/honing your pitch, query letter, synopsis, short outline, and first ten pages. As you go through this submission process during the mentorship, we will do check-ins and reevaluations of the strategy. You will leave our time together with a clear way to go forward.

Option 2—Putting Together a Collection
Putting together a short story, flash prose, or poetry collection isn’t easy. I’ve published four collections, and this was the place where I felt the most confused and stymied. And I’ve seen this confusion play out while judging contests. What, I wonder sometimes, was this writer trying to say? This is what I’ve asked myself. What to start with? What to end with? And what about the middle? What is the point/idea/feeling I want my reader to have? What pieces work together and which should be put in different corners of the room? Over time, I’ve learned some strategies to help me create arcs and narrative/thematic movements within a collection, and I can help you do the same. You and I will discuss your collection as a whole and find the pieces/stories that will anchor your book. You will leave the mentorship with a clear idea about how to present your work to the reading world.

Option 3—A Sustainable Writing Life
The writing life can be lonely, and often, we find ourselves reaching out to others to find readers and like-minded folk by taking classes, joining writing groups, going to conferences and workshops. Bottom line, sometimes there we are at home struggling to stay in our chairs. Worse, we can be in our chairs, staring into a big white space, wondering what we are doing. Maybe we have a huge hit of imposter syndrome. Maybe we feel we have nothing to offer. On it on it goes, until it stops, a lot of writing time wasted. During our mentorship, I will help you reevaluate and organize your writing life. We will work on ways to keep your writing going on any given project or turn you toward one. I will present many ideas that have helped my students and me keep going, and we will set some weekly goals. I’ll share my scheduling process with you, and then try on a number of different ways until we find what works best. On hand will be many resources that I’ve used over the years to keep me going. By the end of the mentorship, you should have writing for an existing or new project.

Option 4—The First Fifty Pages
Agents don’t always ask for a whole novel right away. Often, your novel might sparkle as an idea, but they don’t want to see it all, not yet. So let’s take the first fifty pages and make them as riveting, beautiful, and wonderful as possible. Reading in ten-page increments, I’ll go over with a fine-toothed comb, providing ideas and insights from the sentence to thematic levels. You will leave this mentorship with 50 pages that sing.

Application Requirements for Jessica Barksdale's Mentorship: 

• Workshop history (if any, please include unofficial transcripts from any writing course work)
• Publication history (if any)
• Short term writing goal for the 10-week mentorship 
• Long term writing goal 
• Proposed project for mentorship period 
• Work sample from project to be developed during this mentorship (10 - 25 pages)