Write Five Stories
in Five Weeks

A novel takes years. A short story takes a week.

You believe that “I’m not a real writer until I’ve finished a novel”, so you spend a decade in the foothills of Chapter 3 and conclude you’re a fraud and quit writing entirely.

It’s not your fault.

You are a writer, just that the starting point was wrong. Five finished stories will teach you more about how you actually write than five abandoned novels ever could.

That's the case for short stories. It's a good case, but it's also not the real reason this cohort exists.

The Writers Studio is the closest thing to an MFA workshop without the MFA. Philip Schultz built it in 1987. Ten weeks. Written critique every single week. They teach by having you borrow other writers' voices until you find your own, and that method works. You finish sharper. You don't finish a body of work.

Gotham Writers is the broadest on-ramp. Their Fiction I has given thousands of people their first real grounding in how stories actually function. If you've never been taught fiction before, this is a safe place to start. Bigger groups. Fundamentals. One or two stories. No book at the end.

Kenyon Review is the prestige play. One of the best weeks of literary instruction in the country, taught by writers whose names show up in Best American. You have to apply. You have to get in. You pay accordingly.

NYC Midnight runs multiple challenges a year. 100 words in 24 hours, 250 in 48, all the way up to 2,000-word stories in eight days. Every writer draws a genre, an object, an action. Same forcing function we use in here. Just no room, no instructor, and 32,000 writers in a forum doing it alongside you.

These are awesome programs and are worthwhile if that's what you're looking for.

Here's what none of them do.

You walk out of all four a better writer. You walk out of none of them holding a book with five of your finished stories in it and your name on the cover.

They make you sharper. An anthology makes you finished.

If sharper is what you need, try those courses.

If you're tired of being someone who hasn't finished anything, stay.

I'm Mohammad. I write Modern Myths, an essay series about the stories we mistake for reality. I've written short stories since Feb 17th, 2020 (214 strong).

I couldn't write for months. My mind was blank and I hated the idea of even pulling up a page. Then I started writing one story a week just because, and the rest of my writing came back the next week.

I built this cohort to put other people inside that, on purpose.