A warm and creative community, Writer’s Workshop is a welcoming space for beginners and advanced young writers alike. In both our On-Campus Writer’s Workshop and our Online Writer’s Workshop, students work with accomplished writers to hone their craft and explore their creativity. Students come away with new ideas, a brimming portfolio, and a refined sense of their own voice.
Writer’s Workshop is a perfect balance of instruction from faculty, structured time to work on their craft with peers, and camp fun. A typical day begins with a seminar taught by our expert faculty. These seminars aim both to awaken your student’s natural creative impulses as well as grow writing skills with a focus on key concepts like voice, point of view, style, world-building, and more. Students use fun creative prompts to practice new techniques.
In addition to instruction from professional writers, our Program Assistants serve as mentors, assisting students that may be stuck or need additional inspiration. Great Books Program Assistants are college and graduate students who are dedicated to fostering a dynamic and supportive community of young authors.
Of course, summer camp wouldn’t be complete without fun too! There are many opportunities to unwind and socialize with peers each day, including games, guest speakers, and free time to connect with new friends. Every week closes with a Writer’s Coffeehouse on Friday to celebrate creativity. The camp community gathers together to share selections from the work they have created over the week.
Students in the Middle School Program have the opportunity to try their hand at various genres while learning and practicing key writing techniques. Students explore writing poetry, short stories, creative essays, and more. They learn tips to overcome writer's block, to artfully show the passage of time in writing, and to play with language to make writing more powerful.
Most importantly, as students cultivate their voice as writers, they learn to move beyond proofreading to truly understand editing and refinement as an important part of the writing process. Sharing work in workshops opens students to new views and new ideas and helps students embrace the creative possibilities within each piece of their work.
The High School Program turns the intensity and focus up a notch and is excellent preparation for writing college essays and cultivating advanced skills. Afternoon workshops take on greater importance for this group. Students will choose fiction, poetry, or creative non-fiction essays as their focus.
These genre-specific tracks allow students to build nuanced skills in their area of greatest interest. Led by our expert faculty, these workshops create a supportive and welcoming environment that encourages students to think of their writing from alternate perspectives and to tune the fine details of their pieces. In all tracks, workshopping with peers is emphasized, aiming to assist students in learning how to give and receive critical feedback. Learn more about the writing tracks below.
The benefits of a Great Books Writer’s Workshop program are many and wide-ranging for both beginners and advanced writers:
Exploratory (Middle School)
The Exploratory track for our younger students emphasizes short stories while also exploring additional forms. Students are encouraged to experiment with writing in multiple genres and with varying types of narration. The focus is on energizing exercises to bolster creativity as students master important skills such as vivid description and more. In past summers, students have worked on scripts, short stories, novellas, essays, poetry, and other creative forms.
Screenwriting (High School - Stanford only)
The screenwriting track explores the fascinating world of writing screenplays. Students will delve into the creative process of writing scripts as well as the technical elements of script formatting. Between exercises in their morning seminars and mentored writing sessions, students will dig into the nuances of character-building, story development, voice, and dialogue for the screen as they simultaneously explore screenplay form. And, of course, we'll put these skills into practice to create original screenplays.
Fiction (High School)
The Fiction track focuses on key elements of prose fiction including (but certainly not limited to) point of view, the play and pause of time, character and world building, and dialogue. Students are encouraged to use the creative prompts they are given during supervised writing time to build a portfolio of project starts. The intent of this portfolio is to provide students with inspiration for directions in which to grow their craft.
Non-Fiction (High School)
The Non-Fiction track explores the art of the personal essay. Through reading and examining expository, argumentative, and narrative essay forms, students will engage in the vast creative potential of essay writing. Between exercises in their morning seminars and the examples found in the essays explored, students learn the building blocks of structure, expression, vivid descriptions, and more. Beyond the growth as a writer, this track is especially beneficial for students wishing to cultivate the skills necessary to write a powerful college admissions essay.
Poetry (High School - Amherst and Online only)
The Poetry track will focus on discussions and writing that explores poetic language including but not limited to cadence, rhythm, visual texture, and meaning. Through the guidance of the Academic Directors, students will examine the potential of poetic language compared to more traditional prose forms. Exploratory readings and inspiring writing exercises will push students to develop their voice as a poet and grow their skills in new directions.