When I took over as Director of Writing Workshops Los Angeles, “a private writing school for the brave, enthusiastic, and talented,” in 2016, one of my long-term goals was to set us up online. For many years, our classes were offered solely in published authors’ homes and other rental spaces. We were able to reach aspiring writers in many neighborhoods across Los Angeles as can be seen in the map below, reaching an unprecedented level of access—reinforced by our price point—than previously seen in creative writing class offerings.

However, at this stage in our growth, our reach was limited to people living in Los Angeles who could travel to one of our locations. Designing and adapting some of our courses to be offered online would open up the classes to people all over the world from the comfort of their homes. In 2018, we began offering two classes to begin: “Improve Your Submission Game” (taught by me) and “Getting to the Heart of Your Characters” (taught by novelist Scott O’Connor). I trained instructors in how to use our online class platform and served as our sole tech support. Before long, we were offering several online classes per quarter with students enrolled from California to Virginia and New Zealand to Germany. A large portion of this transition was a digital humanities project: how best to teach creative writing using all of the technology and digital tools available to us.