At a glance info:
✏️ Write a new story every day!
✏️ New themes—and new writing challenges—each week.
✏️ Taught by real authors!
What parents/caregivers are saying about WordPlay classes:
“Saundra Mitchell has been an incredible teacher for my children. She’s patient, supportive, and always brings such a positive energy to her classes. My kids said she was very enthusiastic—they felt truly encouraged and motivated to keep improving their writing. It’s clear that she cares deeply about her students and their growth. We’re so grateful to have found her!”
Pamela G.
“My daughter LOVES this class and the amazing teacher! She looks forward to it each week. Extremely engaging, creative and interesting classes! Highly recommend!”
Karen H
“My teen enjoyed this class and their experiences throughout the writing and publishing processes. They were motivated to work outside of class and felt supported.”
Sabrina P.
Daily Short Story Camp
$117 per week-long session
Join us to write a new short story every day! This class is taught exclusively by published authors, and is a great fit for enthusiastic writers and future novelists.
In this camp we deep dive into a different element, style, genre, or approach to creative writing every day! We may discuss writing convincing dialogue, writing science fiction, or creating an epistolary story. Each week is totally new!
The teacher will spend about twenty to twenty-five minutes reviewing the subject of the week, providing examples and guiding student discussion. Students will them receive a prompt based on the lesson! They'll spend approximately twenty to twenty-five minutes creating their own short story or scene based on the prompt.
Students may write their stories freehand or type them. At the end of class, students are invited (but not required) to share a short portion of their story aloud with the class. At the end of the week, students may select one of their stories to get full feedback on from the teacher.
Each week has a general "theme" that lessons and prompts will follow, but these are loose and open to interpretation-- please don't feel restricted by the theme of a given week!
Ready to register? Click to skip down to the registration calendar!
Schedule:
Week of May 19: Animal stories
We'll cover writing anthropomorphized animals, "true" animals, nature descriptions, historical events through the eyes of animals, and animal/human relationships in stories.
Week of May 26: Science fiction
We'll cover the elements of a good sci fi story, steampunk, building a sci-fi world, and the distinction between sci fi and fantasy.
Week of June 2: Fairytale Remix
We'll cover flipping fairytales, rewriting fairytales, unexpected genre mashups, the fairytale "voice", and world-building.
Week of June 9: Character Deep Dive
We'll cover the basics of creating a well-developed character, introducing a character without dialogue, character revelation using their "space", emotion in scenes, and characters that are unlike the author.
Week of June 16: Scary stories
We'll cover writing creepy stories, ghost stories, the "voice" of a spooky story, flipping something mundane into something frightening, and flipping a monster story.
Week of June 23: Writing tension
We'll cover a ticking clock story, a character being pursued, bottle episodes, the "unexpected guest" scene, and using a list to build suspense.
Week of June 30 (first week of July): Story structure experiments
We'll cover epistolary stories, stories without dialogue, stories that only contain dialogue, writing from multiple perspectives, and stories told through text message.
Week of July 7: Realistic fiction
We'll cover "first day" stories, New Year's resolutions, twisting real life to make it fiction, advice column story building, and the "and then it all came crashing down" method of storytelling.
Week of July 14: Romance and relationships
We'll cover meet cute scenes, romantic comedies, flipping a monster story into a love story, the "friends to lovers" trope, and the "enemies to lovers" trope. All stories must be PG-13 or less!
Week of July 21: Genre benders
We'll cover writing outside your comfort zone, tragic flaws, using song lyrics as story seeds, writing comedy, and changing the genre of a popular story.
Week of July 28: Superpowers and heroics
We'll cover superhero origin stories, writing bad guys we root for, suspension of disbelief, unusual superpowers, and writing an arch-villain.
Week of August 4: Fairytale Remix
We'll cover flipping fairytales, rewriting fairytales, unexpected genre mashups, the fairytale "voice", and world-building.
Week of August 11: Scary stories
We'll cover writing creepy stories, ghost stories, the "voice" of a spooky story, flipping something mundane into something frightening, and flipping a monster story.
Week of August 18: Character Deep Dive
We'll cover the basics of creating a well-developed character, introducing a character without dialogue, character revelation using their "space", emotion in scenes, and characters that are unlike the author.
Week of August 25: Science fiction
We'll cover the elements of a good sci fi story, steampunk, building a sci-fi world, and the distinction between sci fi and fantasy.