Research about adolescents sharing creative writing in interest‐driven online communities has suggested that teachers can play important roles in helping young writers realize the potential of online spaces. Framed by sociocultural notions of new literacies and a conceptual framework theorizing the rhetorical situation when sharing writing in networked publics, this instrumental case study examined the design and implementation of a high school elective course supporting students to critically analyze and participate in online creative writing spaces. The authors collected observation, interview, and artifactual data and then analyzed them inductively to generate testable assertions about how bringing together the potential audiences in classrooms and networked publics affected writing instruction and the writing act. Findings revealed how controlling the makeup of audiences raised privacy issues, cultivating interactions with audiences required persistence, and conceptualizing audiences affected these students’ writing. Suggestions for designing writing instruction to include networked publics and recommendations for classroom‐based research are shared.