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  • Workshop
  • Online: Zoom
  • Adult (18+)
  • 5 Weeks

Writing Group: Shitty First Drafts

No Longer Enrolling

  • $170.00 Non-Member
  • $150.00 Member

Class Description

This is a facilitated writing group designed for accountability and community building. An instructor will be present to facilitate and offer general guidance, but this is not a writing class, and it won’t involve craft lessons or in-depth feedback on your writing. Please check out our hundreds of writing class offerings for those features! These groups are a great option for anyone who’s at work on a project and looking to set aside some time each week to make progress on their writing and connect with others.

As Anne Lamott wrote in her seminal essay: "Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts." And yet, many of us find it difficult to turn off our inner editor as we write—instead, we become more like Joseph Grand, obsessively tweaking sentences as we dream of readers doffing their hats at our utter marvelousness, and failing to get past the first paragraph.

In this writing group, the only requirement is that you let your imagination loose, and your fingers fly, for almost all of our 90-minute sessions. We'll make a little room at the end for volunteers to share one or two sentences of outlandish dreck, and at the beginning for a line or two from last week that we're actually rather happy with.

Scholarships Format/Location

Thanks to the excellent literary citizenship of our donors, scholarships are available for all GrubStreet classes. To apply, click the gray "APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIP" button. In order to be considered for a scholarship, you must complete your application at least one week before the start date of a class. Please await our scholarship committee's decision before registering for the class. We cannot hold spots in classes, so the sooner you apply, the better. Scholarships cannot be applied retroactively.

For more detailed information about GrubStreet scholarships, including how to contribute to scholarship funds for other students, click here.

This class will take place using Zoom videoconferencing. After registering, a yellow Resources tab will appear in this section containing a link to join class. Please note that you will need to be logged into view the Resources tab.

Zoom Participation:

In our experience, the intimate nature of a writing workshop benefits from on-camera participation. Students are of course welcome to turn their camera off whenever they need to, but it is a community norm for cameras to be on most of the time. You can learn more about using Zoom here.

Zoom Accessibility:

You can enable closed captioning at any time during the meeting by clicking the CC button at the bottom of the screen. If you'd like to access the transcript after class, please make sure to let your instructor ahead of time that you'd like a copy.