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A Message from Jeanne Cavelos, Director

Since its inception in 1996, the Odyssey Writing Workshop has become one of the most highly respected workshops for writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror in the world. Top authors, editors and agents have served as guests at Odyssey. Fifty-nine percent of graduates have gone on to be professionally published. Among Odyssey’s graduates are award winners, Amazon bestsellers, Publishers Weekly bestsellers, USA Today bestsellers, and New York Times bestsellers.

A TRANSFORMATION

Every year, we have worked to improve Odyssey, to make it more helpful and effective. In 2022, that meant transforming the program in a major way.

Holding Odyssey online in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic revealed to me that a huge number of talented writers want an in-depth, challenging program to build their skills but can’t attend a six-week, in-person workshop. More than that, the last 30 years have taught me that a 6-week program is not the best format for all students. All writers do not write or learn at the same pace. While Odyssey students step up and make their deadlines, all-nighters don’t always produce work that best reflects the student’s progress. I’ve also learned the great value of one-on-one sessions, to generate learning goals and plans; discuss concepts and writing exercises; suggest resources and techniques; brainstorm solutions to story problems; address a student’s questions, problems, and needs; focus on a student’s unique writing strengths and weaknesses; and get to know each student so I can do my best to help them move ahead in their writing journey. Odyssey’s previous structure allowed me only about three hours of one-on-one time per student, which just wasn’t enough to do all that.

So the Odyssey Writing Workshop transformed into a breakthrough new experience: Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop.

YOUR PERSONAL ODYSSEY

Have you ever wished that you could attend your own private writing workshop that would teach you exactly what you need to know, at the right pace for you, and respond to your questions, problems, and needs in extensive one-on-one sessions?

That’s what Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop is. It’s an online, one-on-one intensive workshop experience. Each writer taking Your Personal Odyssey receives the top-quality learning experience Odyssey is known for, but that experience is customized to be more responsive to how that writer works and what that writer needs.

The renowned Odyssey lectures are broken into modules on different topics. A student must complete six modules to graduate from the program. To complete a module, a student watches the lecture recordings; does readings, journal entries, and critiques; works with the instructor to create and complete an individualized assignment; and writes a story or novel excerpt. Penetrating, detailed feedback by the instructor and guest critiquers is provided, and the instructor interacts one-on-one with the student in a deep mentoring experience. Students complete modules in whatever order they feel will be most helpful. They may repeat a module to go deeper into the content to work on a particular problem area or request a custom module to study a topic that is not already the focus of a module.

Students can choose how long they want to complete Your Personal Odyssey. Those who want to fit their learning into six weeks can apply for the first session, starting June 1. Those who feel they could learn and improve more with an experience spread over more time can apply for the second session, starting August 10 and lasting twelve weeks; or the third session, starting November 23 and lasting eighteen weeks. Working at a sustainable pace should also help students continue their progress after they complete their Odyssey.

In its first four years, Your Personal Odyssey has succeeded beyond all expectations. The flexibility of the program makes it a possibility for a wider range of writers, so we are able to help a more diverse group of writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror across the globe. The experiences I’ve had working with students thus far have been incredible. One student, for example, had major problems with point of view. The one-on-one nature of the workshop allowed us to focus on point of view far more intensely than we would have been able to in a classroom setting. She studied works by professional writers that had the point of view she was aiming for, dissected the POV problems in her own work, and revised and revised, until she had much better control of her POV. Another student was struggling with the character arcs in her novel. We did some intense study, tracking the protagonist’s change through a sample novel, which helped her understand how a character can evolve over the course of a novel and how to tie character change to the character’s personality, goals, and internal and external struggles. Students have made an amazing amount of progress. Taking the intensive Odyssey experience and focusing it on the individual strengths, weaknesses, interests, and concerns of each writer allows us to better discuss key concepts, build skills, explore complexities, and highlight those qualities that make each writer’s work stand out.

For the first several years of Your Personal Odyssey, I was the sole instructor guiding each student on their unique journey. For Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop 2026, I’m excited to announce that we’re adding two more instructors, Carrie Vaughn and Lane Robins. Carrie is a New York Times bestselling author who graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 1998. She has served as a guest lecturer and guest critiquer for Your Personal Odyssey and has been a writer-in-residence at Odyssey. Lane attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 1999 and has gone on to build a successful career writing a wide range of fantasy and science fiction. She’s been providing invaluable feedback and guidance to writers through the Odyssey Critique Service and Odyssey Consultations. Both Carrie and Lane share my passion for helping writers improve and are extremely effective at doing so. Writers they’ve worked with have praised their knowledge, advice, and ability to help writers build their skills and strengthen their work. I’m thrilled to be able to offer students the opportunity to learn from them.

Providing each student with a customized experience is quite work intensive, which means I can only handle 6 to 8 students per year in addition to all my other duties for Odyssey. Carrie and Lane will each be working with 2 or 3 students this year. That means we’ll be accepting 10 to 14 writers total in the 3 sessions, 2-7 in each session, to ensure that each writer receives an intensive, personalized, one-on-one online workshop experience. Each writer will work with a single instructor, either Carrie, Lane, or me.

In your application, you’ll be able to indicate whether you’d like to work with Carrie, Lane, or me, or whether you’d be willing to work with any of us.

A ONE-ON-ONE EXPERIENCE

Your Personal Odyssey is a one-on-one experience. You will not be part of a class or cohort. You will not meet with other students. You’ll receive in-depth, one-on-one mentoring from your instructor, and several one-on-one meetings with guest critiquers. You will be following the unique path that is most helpful for you, that teaches you the skills you need to improve the most.

Long ago, editors at publishing houses used to correspond with developing writers over several years, mentoring them and helping them fully realize their skills. When I was a senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell, I saw the last remnants of that practice fading away. Your Personal Odyssey allows you to have that deep mentoring experience and combines that with the lectures, readings, exercises, critiques, writing, and feedback that will help you make major improvements to your writing.

What will the mentoring be like? As an editor for eight years and the primary instructor at Odyssey for thirty years, I’ve worked with many writers, and I understand that each writer is different. Each writer thinks differently, builds stories differently, has different strengths and weaknesses. To improve, each writer needs to develop a different combination of skills and needs to alter their writing process in different ways. So whether your instructor is Carrie, Lane, or I, when we meet in mentoring sessions, we’ll try to provide the best guidance and suggestions for you. We’ll explore the unique opportunities and challenges you face as a writer. We’ll be looking at your writing process and its connection to the strengths and weaknesses in your work. We’ll discuss which weakness you want to target first and discuss possible techniques that could help you improve that weak area. As Your Personal Odyssey continues, we’ll target your weak areas one by one and chart your progress. We’ll work together on creating your individualized assignment for each module. We’ll discuss the lectures you’ve watched and the readings, journal entries, and critiques you’ve done and how they can lead to improvements in your writing. When you’re working on a new submission, we can brainstorm and problem solve, and after you’ve received feedback, we can examine whether your attempt to improve a weak area led to a stronger story.  We’ll answer your questions and discuss any problems, difficulties, or concerns you have. In short, we’ll do our best to help you make progress on your unique writing journey.

I mentioned above that with Odyssey’s previous structure, I met one-on-one with each student for a total of about three hours. Your Personal Odyssey involves interacting one-on-one with each student for over 30 hours.

THE LECTURES

The Odyssey lectures, developed over the last 30 years, have become renowned for their insights, specificity, and depth. As the primary instructor at Your Personal Odyssey, I provide an advanced, comprehensive curriculum, covering the elements of fiction writing in detail. To improve your writing, you need to understand the various tools and techniques writers can use to create a strong story. Many workshops, unfortunately, offer only brief, superficial lectures. At Your Personal Odyssey, the lecture recordings run 2-3 hours, mostly 3 hours, and you’ll be watching at least 30 of them. If you watch all the videos, they total 184 hours. That’s a lot of content. In the lectures, we study some of the most beautiful and powerful writing in the field to gain understanding of what these tools can do when wielded with skill. I’ll also explain the common failings of developing writers and how to avoid those pitfalls.

The program includes guest lectures by award-winning authors P. Djélì Clark, Fonda Lee, Melissa Scott, Nancy Kress, Jill Tew, Mary Robinette Kowal, Steven Barnes, P. A. Cornell, Tim Waggoner, David Corbett, Eric James Stone, Nisi Shawl, Greg van Eekhout, Barbara Ashford, and Sheree Renée Thomas; bestselling authors R. F. Kuang, Carrie Vaughn, Brandon Sanderson, E. C. Ambrose, Meagan Spooner, Maggie Stiefvater, and Gregory Ashe; award-winning editor/publisher Scott H. Andrews, award-winning literary agent Arley Sorg, and more.

Also included are guest question-and-answer sessions by most of the above plus bestselling author David Brin, and award-winning editors John Joseph Adams and Sheila Williams.

THE ASSIGNMENTS

Journal Entries: A lecture can provide information, but whether you’re attending it in person or watching it online, it won’t improve your writing unless you put the concepts and techniques discussed into practice. Just as a pianist needs to practice with scales and a quarterback needs to practice passing the ball, writers need to practice various tools and techniques, so they become proficient with them. That is the purpose of the journal entries. Each lecture will have an associated journal entry for you to complete to help you begin to incorporate that content.

Readings: Readings are another important component promoting your learning and improvement. You’ll be reading and studying a number of short stories and at least one novel that will provide us with helpful examples of various techniques. You’ll also be reading some essays exploring genre and some essays on different aspects of fiction writing.

Critiquing: Critiquing the works of other writers is an especially helpful task. It allows you to develop the editor part of your brain: to become more aware of the various components of a story, evaluate why they are working or not working, and suggest ways the piece might better accomplish what it is attempting. These skills of noticing, evaluating, and problem-solving are key to improving your own work. You’ll be assigned pieces to critique with each module that will help you gain awareness of the concepts and techniques covered, to build the associated skills, and to strengthen your particular weak areas.

Individual Assignment: With each module, you and your instructor will work together to devise an individualized assignment that allows you to pursue your particular interests and focus on improving your weak areas or on making the most of your strengths.

Writing: Prior to the start of the program, you’ll submit a second piece, in addition to your application piece. Both pieces will have a maximum word count of 4,000 and will be critiqued by your instructor. Over the course of Your Personal Odyssey, you’ll be writing and submitting for critique 6 more pieces, each 6,000 words maximum. Two of those will be critiqued by guest critiquers, and four will be critiqued by your instructor. In critiquing stories, Carrie, Lane, and I give unflinchingly honest, concrete, detailed feedback. Critiques average over 1,500 words each, and line edits on manuscripts are extensive. Critiques are designed to maximize their helpfulness. You will not be coddled, and you will not be attacked. You will learn the strengths and weaknesses of the piece, why they are strong or weak, and how the piece, and your writing in general, might be improved. You’ll have one-on-one sessions accompanying each of those critiques, either with your instructor or with the guest critiquer.

Guest critiquers include award-winning authors Fonda Lee and Melissa Scott; multi-award-nominated writer Shiv Ramdas; award-winning editor Scott H. Andrews; and award-winning literary agent Arley Sorg.

AFTER YOUR PERSONAL ODYSSEY

Those who successfully complete Your Personal Odyssey will be invited to join a mastermind group with other Odyssey graduates, where you can continue your learning, exchange critiques, help each other solve problems, and find companionship and support.

You’ll also be invited to join the Odyssey Discord and become part of the wider Odyssey community.

And you’ll become eligible to be invited to The Never-Ending Odyssey, the 8-day program for Odyssey workshop graduates.

SHOULD YOU APPLY?

Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop is an advanced program for writers whose work is approaching publication quality and for published writers who want to improve their work. This is a serious, demanding program. While each writer’s pace is different, my best estimate is that Your Personal Odyssey will require a minimum of 420 hours of work total. Those choosing the six-week session will have to complete a minimum of 70 hours of work per week; those choosing the twelve-week session will have to complete a minimum of 35 hours of work per week; and those choosing the eighteen-week session will have to complete a minimum of 23 hours of work per week. Of course, the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. You should be prepared to write new material, either short stories or novel chapters. After you complete your first module, you won’t be able to submit anything that was written before the workshop began, unless you have radically revised it since starting Your Personal Odyssey. The best way to improve is to write new material that incorporates what you have learned and then receive feedback on it.

To succeed in Your Personal Odyssey, you need to be highly motivated, eager to try new writing tools and techniques, open to feedback, and willing to work intensely and move outside your comfort zone. You should not apply unless you are ready to hear about the weaknesses in your writing and ready to work to overcome them.

In choosing which session you’d like to apply for, consider your available time, the speed at which you normally work and write, and whether you would learn best from a very concentrated experience or a more extended one.

No matter which session you want to attend, the application deadlines are the same. If you’d like early action on your application, you should apply by February 20. We created the possibility of early action to help those who, if admitted, need several months to arrange their affairs before embarking on Your Personal Odyssey. Applicants will be notified by March 20 whether they have been admitted under the high standards of early action or whether their applications will be held over for consideration for regular admission. Those who apply by the regular application deadline of April 10 will be informed of their status by May 10.

A JOURNEY TOWARD REALIZING YOUR POTENTIAL AS A WRITER

I created Odyssey because I love working with developing writers, helping them on their unique journeys toward realizing their potential and making their work the best it can be. My experiences over Odyssey’s 30 previous years have been incredible. Talented writers of all ages, some already published, from all across the US, Canada, Argentina, the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, France, Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia, India, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore, have embarked on epic voyages of discovery with me. I’ve watched students make major breakthroughs, and I’ve followed their progress after the workshop as they’ve submitted their work, piled up the rejection slips, made sales, and built wonderful writing careers for themselves. I’m constantly told by graduates that they learned more at Odyssey than they learned in years of workshopping and creative writing classes.

Odyssey provides a supportive yet challenging environment. Going on Your Personal Odyssey is a great way to focus on your writing, giving it the time and attention it needs. If you’d like to dedicate your energy on improving your writing, I hope you’ll apply.

If you’d like to know what previous Odyssey students thought about the workshop, you can visit the Graduates’ Comments page, the Graduates’ Experiences page, or the Odyssey classes page.

You can also find videos of Odyssey graduates describing their experiences below.