3-Month Writing Intensive with Sarah Fay
This is an exclusive opportunity to work closely on your writing with me as your editor and mentor.
Our work together is about you becoming the writer you’re meant to be.
The goal is to accelerate your growth as a writer and save you from wasting years trying to do it yourself or in writers’ groups or programs.
This is 100 percent customized to you and your needs. In addition to your Substack posts, I’ll mentor you to produce pieces to pitch media outlets outside of Substack. We might also look at chapters or excerpts of full-length works if you’re working on a book.
By the end of our time together, you will:
have the skills you need to make people (including agents and editors) want to read (and keep reading) your work,
publish with confidence, and
see tangible results on your Substack (engagement, subscribers, paid subscribers) and/or beyond (having pitched to media outlets and/or agents).
How it works
In each 30-minute Zoom meeting, you’ll receive detailed feedback from me on a Substack post, piece of writing, or part of a chapter—maximum 1500 words.
The feedback you receive will be based on the strengths I see in your writing and the skills you individually need to develop based on your writing and your goals.
According to your wants and needs, I’ll give you prompts, templates, and readings to deepen your writing practice.
Duration: 3 months—12 sessions. Typically, we meet weekly, but we’ll customize it to what you need.
You’ll submit it to me via a link to Google Docs forty-eight hours before our meeting.
Investment: $5400 for 3 months of 1:1 intensive work together
After you purchase, we’ll set up our meetings according to what works best for our schedules. You’ll have a regular meeting time and Zoom link.
✨ “Working with Sarah has been my secret weapon for my writing—both on and off Substack. I feel more confident in my writing, and I know how to continue improving as a writer. I can honestly say she sped up my learning curve by years.
I walked away from every meeting knowing how I wanted to improve and excited to work on the upcoming week’s exercises—exercises that were specific to my needs.” —Latham Turner, writing at Get Real, Man
I’m an award-winning professor of creative writing and have taught in creative writing MFA programs at The University of Iowa, Northwestern University, and more.
As a bestselling writer, I’ve navigated traditional media and publishing for over two decades. I’m a freelance writer for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, where I was an advisory editor. My memoir Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses (HarperCollins) was a USA Today bestseller and praised in The New York Times as “a fiery manifesto of a memoir.”
As the world’s leading Substack Growth Strategist and Founder and CEO of Substack Writers at Work, I help writers use Substack to build a platform and portfolio and earn an income earlier than they otherwise would be able to. I’m also Fortier Public Relations’s Substack consultant, helping their authors launch and sell their books on Substack.
My goal is to help you grow as a writer to create unforeseen opportunities. My clients have found agents, gotten book deals, been published in prestigious outlets, and become featured Substacks and bestsellers as a result of our work together.
I live in Chicago with my two beloved cats—Sweets and Baby Theo. More than anything, I want a t-shirt that says, Ask me about my cats. (All typos in all posts are Baby Theo’s fault.)
Some of the techniques we’ll cover:
Key Craft Tools to Make Your Writing Soar
Finding your voice
Storytelling
Keeping readers reading
Journalism Essentials to Make Your Writing Clear
The lead, the worthy subject, and the not-so-inverted pyramid
Writing short
A Writing Process that Actually Makes Writing Easier
How to set yourself up for success—every single day
Real writers revise (and revise and revise)
Easy editing and painless proofreading techniques
Being a pro
Pitching media outlets
Submitting to agents and editors