In a video that began making the rounds last month, Meg Stalter describes herself as a writer in New York City (“can you get any more cliché than that, no you can’t” she said), and gives some writerly advice.
“Write every day, every second of the day. When you wake up, you should be looking, ‘Where’s my writing stuff that I use to write?’” Ms. Stalter is a comedian, and her video has gone a little viral. Even Lin-Manuel Miranda now follows her on Twitter.
Her impersonation of a writer giving advice to aspiring writers is funny because it’s true. Thanks to tweets, comment threads, Instagram captions, Facebook confessionals, newsletters, self-publishing and the internet’s insatiable thirst for first-person essays, everyone is now a writer (or a “content creator”). With an oversupply of words and increasingly distracted demand, making money in a side hustle or day job is harder than ever.
And so there has been a surge in writer seminars, workshops and salons, to which mostly nonprofessional (or not-yet professional) writers sign up for advice on ideas, structure, tone and pitching from published authors, writers and editors who are looking to augment the income that goes along with the full-time career everyone on the internet wants — until they find out what it pays.
The author Meghan Daum created her writing “master class” about a year and a half ago after noticing Twitter vitriol directed at smart but unpolished essays that she assumed had not been well edited.
Ms. Daum, a former columnist for The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times Book Review and author of the forthcoming nonfiction book “The Problem With Everything,” said that she was able to develop a contrarian voice in the 1990s without fear of being assailed immediately by a social media mob.
“I realized this was a luxury I had that many new writers today do not,” said Ms. Daum, 49, who has taught writing at University of Iowa and Columbia University. “There is an anticipatory anxiety about what the internet reaction might be and what pushback they will get on Twitter. So public thinking becomes about appealing to your tribe, and that is defeating the purpose.”
In early 2018, she introduced the first of her weekend-long, application-only sessions. For $1,200 per person, groups of about eight spend Saturday and Sunday at her Manhattan apartment, in Washington Heights — or, on one occasion, for $1,800, in a borrowed house in Los Angeles — for a course in first-person essays or memoir, with a focus on idea creation, writing, editing, rewriting and pitching. (The New York program used to cost $1,600 and included a chef-cooked dinner. Also, smaller groups pay slightly less because with fewer students, more time is spent writing during the workshop itself.)
Ms. Daum invites guest speakers and provides a catered lunch.
“I tell my students, ‘We are going to come to this work as if I am your editor, and as if it was 15 years ago when an editor would actually talk to you on the phone or even take you out to lunch,’” she said.
Emily J. Smith, 37, was working as a product manager for tech companies when she signed up. She dreamed of a career in writing but couldn’t quit her tech day jobs to enroll in a pricey master of fine arts program.
When she heard from a friend about Ms. Daum’s workshop, she applied immediately. “I write essays, personal essays, that try to emulate her style,” Ms. Smith said, “so getting her feedback on my work was an incredible opportunity and I also wanted to meet her and get to know her.”
Her work with Ms. Daum, as well as in workshops led by another writer, Chloe Caldwell, helped Ms. Smith learn to write essays about relationships, power and the culture of online dating, like those she has published in the Rumpus and Medium.
Ms. Smith now has a literary agent and is including in a book proposal an essay she worked on with Ms. Daum in the seminar. Ms. Smith also created a dating app meant to combat the loneliness of online dating that her essays describe. Called Chorus, it will allow a dater’s friends to help play matchmaker.
“I think I was able to raise V.C. money because I have established a presence in writing about online dating,” she said.
‘Is My Story Valuable?’
A boom in first-person essays of love, heartbreak and transcendence — including, yes, the popular Times column Modern Love, and amplified by the ease of spilling one’s guts online — has helped support a mini-industry for confessional writing seminars.
For some 20 years, Joyce Maynard, the author of books including the memoir “At Home in the World” and the novel “Labor Day,” has hosted an eight-day seminar in the volcano-surrounded Mayan village of San Marcos La Laguna, Guatemala, where both published and aspiring writers develop work.
The cost is about $3,000 for what, according to the marketing copy, sounds a lot cushier than the proverbial garret: “Renowned chef Henry Lehr and a welcoming staff nurture you with over-the-top amazing food and massages, leaving you free to think only about your story.”
Dani Shapiro, the author of the memoirs “Inheritance” and “Devotion,” hosts a two-day $3,500 retreat in Salisbury, Conn., that offers skill training, vocational advice and the sort of emotional calmness that few professional writers would describe as part of the job.
“We will write,” her website says. “We’ll discuss the writing life. We will share our work and learn. We will revise. We will enjoy inspiration, camaraderie and quiet.”
Such gatherings make Jessica Ciencin Henriquez’s Making Modern Love seminars a bargain at $399. Most of her four-week workshops, which were introduced in 2017 after her own Modern Love essay was published, are held online. (Two four-week sessions are held in person, annually, in New York.)
She said the workshop seeks to quell the nagging voice that asks, “Is my story valuable? Does anyone even care?”
Ms. Henriquez added that teaching this way allowed her to stick with her own writing, by increasing her annual earnings while doing meaningful work.
Writers’ seminars can be sharply focused on results. Caroline Koster, 53, a corporate lawyer in New York, was traveling this summer with her family in Kentucky and reflecting on the differences between Appalachia, where she visited each summer as a child, and Brooklyn Heights, where she lives and raised her children.
She returned home on a Sunday night and immediately began to write the first draft of an essay, which she brought to Susan Shapiro’s Instant Gratification Takes Too Long seminar the next day. The five-week program, which Ms. Koster heard about from the women’s Facebook group What Would Virginia Woolf Do?, costs $500.
“I was concerned about America and what was happening in the country,” Ms Koster said. “I had a Joan Didion moment and picked up the pen.”
Ms. Shapiro has hosted the sessions in her Greenwich Village living room for 10 years with the objective of writing, editing and publishing a piece at the end.
Three weeks later, with Ms. Shapiro’s help, Ms. Koster indeed had an essay. She did something really old-fashioned with it: She sent it to a general-submissions email address at The Wall Street Journal. Within a few days she heard back from an op-ed editor who wanted to publish it.
The piece, “Politics Won’t Come Between My Appalachian Cousins and Me,” was published by the newspaper four days after she sent it. Ms. Koster was then invited to appear on “Fox & Friends.”
Lexie Bean, 28, another student of Ms. Shapiro’s, had as an undergraduate at Oberlin College put together an anthology of writing in which people wrote letters to one of their body parts. Upon graduating, Mx. Bean then self-published a second anthology, with victims of abuse also writing the letters.
During Ms. Shapiro’s seminar, which Mx. Bean took twice, the writer worked on an essay about the origin of these anthologies. It was published in Teen Vogue.
“It just snowballed from there,” Mx. Bean said. A small publisher put out a third anthology, “Written on the Body,” with letters from transgender and nonbinary people. Mx. Bean now has a contract with Penguin Random House to write “The Ship We Built,” a book for middle-grade readers.
Pitfalls and Pit Stops
Part support group, part tactical networking event, writing seminars such as these have existed formally and informally at least since Gordon Lish at Yale in the 1970s. “Everyone is talented, original, and has something important to say,” wrote Brenda Ueland in the 1938 classic “If You Want to Write,” clearly not anticipating Twitter.
But with the new surplus of words and images has come a new generation of educators to guide the way.
In January, Caroline Calloway, 27, known for her long, confessional Instagram captions, hosted a creativity workshop in New York, which was meant to be the first in a “global tour.” She charged $165 a person for the six-hour event.
When the programming turned out to lack much instruction for writing captivating social-media copy, the internet reacted with anger and ridicule.
Ms. Calloway explained this week that her intent was merely to create an event that would bring together her followers and bring to life her personal “brand.” She said her mistake was in labeling the event as she did.
“My ‘Creative Workshop,’ which went viral as a scam, was named so because the title, ‘Come Sit in a Room and Talk about Your Feelings While Seated on the Floor Eating Salad and Planting Flowers in Mason Jars and Taking Photos With Flowers in Our Hair,’ doesn’t have the same ring,” she said. (We disagree, tbqh.)
After spending the winter in actual retreat, and then feeling creatively revived this spring, Ms. Calloway hosted in August a comeback creative workshop which this time asked people to bring a piece of written, visual or digital art to work on. Again she charged $165. This time she named it the Scam.
In a different vector of the new writer economy is Elizabeth Gilbert, the mega-best-selling author whose book “Eat Pray Love” helped create the genre of memoir-as-spiritual-self-help books, and who has become a headliner of educational, inspirational and wellness events around the world, not unlike a rock star on the road.
Last year outside of Santa Cruz, Calif., Ms. Gilbert and Cheryl Strayed hosted Brave Magic, a three-day retreat (“exploring the pathways to expressing yourself and your story in the world”). (About 600 attended, some paying $450 a person.)
This fall she will deliver the keynote address at Soul Tribe Live, in Nova Scotia (a two-day pass costs about $400).
She also will speak at Attune, a wellness event in Georgia, in Serenbe, a new “mystical, urban utopia” on the outskirts of Atlanta. A four-day pass plus a king bed in a Serenbe “townhome” costs $2,500. An “Elizabeth Gilbert Meet and Greet” costs an additional $125, but tickets are sold out.
She is headlining the Inevitable U workshop, to be held at Columbia University in New York from Nov. 1 to Nov. 3. Standard tickets to the event cost $1,497. V.I.P. tickets, which grant access to an intimate Q. and A. lunch with Ms. Gilbert and the opportunity to take your photo with her, cost $2,500.
“I wish I could afford to have her two days,” said Alena Chapman, a writer and speaker who is hosting the event.
Ms. Gilbert is backpacking in France but said, in a statement conveyed by her publicist, “Sometimes I earn money by teaching my creativity workshop at expensive retreats designed for the sort of people who can afford an expensive retreat. Then I take that money, and I use it to offer this same workshop for free, to the kind of women who could never afford it otherwise.”
Ms. Gilbert and Jennifer Pastiloff, a yoga instructor, are hosting an invitation-only, free “creativity and personal development” workshop in Philadelphia on Oct. 1. (The event is oversubscribed so spots are no longer available.)
Ms. Chapman said that attendees will learn “how to access their creative spirit” and leave the seminar with a new ability to write and make art.
There has been some blowback on social media in response to the ticket cost of the event, which Ms. Chapman acknowledged. But she said that it costs a lot of money to produce an event of this scale, with speakers of this renown, in New York City. (A representative for Ms. Chapman said in an email that Ms. Chapman will “offer periodic sales for a limited amount of time and tickets.”)
“People think we’re doing it to line our pockets, and I can tell you I don’t even see us making much on this at all,” she said.
