When you enroll in our program, a nationally published writer or editor is assigned to guide you through our course, as your personal instructor, until you graduate. Your instructor will bring years of first-hand experience in writing, marketing, and selling his or her own work to editors and publishers to help you develop and hone your own writing skills.

Like every other instructor, he, or she, will have been trained by us to teach our home study program, then closely monitored for 12 months and checked periodically as long as he or she teaches at Long Ridge. This continuing oversight supports our instructors and assures you of the highest level of teaching. 

It also provides our faculty with a window on your progress. They see the results of our instructor’s training in your assignments and, very importantly, the development of a meaningful professional bond between you and your instructor.  Our instructors deserve their reputation as the finest in the field of creative writing for magazines because, as you will discover, they earn it.

Receive personal instruction one-on-one
from a successful author

The key to our success is one-on-one training. You’re not one of 20 or 30 students in a classroom, all clamoring for the teacher’s attention. Instead, when you submit an assignment, it receives the undivided attention of your personal instructor. There’s nothing else on his or her desk, or screen, but your manuscript, nothing else to focus on but your progress in learning the special techniques of creative writing for publication.

Our program, Breaking into Print, integrates writing and marketing in eight of your assignments. Each of these assignments is designed as a potential sale because it is planned and written according to editorial requirements specified by the magazine editors themselves. Your instructor begins by reading your entire manuscript before editing it and making notations and comments directly on your manuscript. 

Then he returns it with a detailed letter of critique reviewing your progress, pointing out the strengths of your writing, suggesting how to use your strengths to even greater advantage, and discussing your weaknesses, with specific steps you can take to overcome them.

Discover your fiction or nonfiction writing niche

You don’t simply hone your writing skills in these assignments; rather, you also write for a  publication in the specific fiction genre or nonfiction category you choose, such as mystery, romance, biography, science fiction, adventure, nature or any of 86 others.   

Your instructor will edit and critique each of your assignments from the viewpoint of the genre or editor you’re targeting, and when you rework your manuscripts, with your instructor’s guidance, you’ll then be ready to prepare it for submission

At that point, your instructor will show you how to: format your manuscript to professional standards; write a professional query letter; find the “right” editor to send it to; and, in many other ways, to present your manuscript as a thoroughly professional piece of work.  

Another key guide will be a 744-page marketing reference, The Best of the Magazine Markets for Writers, which includes more than 1,800 best freelance markets in North America, and provides the submission requirements of each publication in detail.

This method of one-on-one method of instruction, integrating the editorial requirements of the publishers, is the most effective one yet developed to teach creative writing for publication. It is individualized and tailored to the personal writing goals of each student. It leads to an increasingly strong professional bond between instructor and student, which builds trust and confidence, and encourages students to spread their creative wings and fly to new heights. 

It is the method through which more than 1,200 of our students and graduates have learned to write, market, and sell their work to virtually every magazine in North America that uses  freelance writers.

Clearly, your instructor, working within our time-tested program, is the key factor in your writing success. It is he, or she, who will read every word you write and thoroughly edit and critique each of your manuscripts. You’ll work together as a team, harnessing your instructor’s skills and experience to your drive and creativity to produce work worthy of consideration by the editor or publisher of your choice.

Pass our Writing Test—Receive our Promise and Guarantee

Because we accept only superior students who complete our Writing Test and thereby demonstrate the potential to produce publishable work; because we work continuously to update and perfect our program; and because we select and train the finest, most experienced instructors in the field of writing for publication, we are the only school of creative writing that can make this promise to you:

If you pass our Writing Test and enroll in our program, by the time you finish your training you’ll complete at least two manuscripts suitable to submit to editors. You’ll also write a character sketch, plans for six stories and articles, and eight complete manuscripts.   

We are also committed to your satisfaction with our money-back guarantee:

If you’re not satisfied that you’ve become a better writer and learned how to market your writing to editors and publishers as a result of completing our program, you can obtain a prompt refund of every penny you’ve paid. Simply make your request within 60 days of the date on your diploma.