32 Best Creative Writing Classes in Boston

For this course, you’re encouraged to bring drafts that have stymied your best efforts. Together, we’ll examine strategies for revision and discuss first and final drafts by a range of poets. You’ll learn valuable approaches to revision that will inform your writing choices beyond the classroom.

Do you have a pile of abandoned story drafts or poems? One quarter of a memoir or novel manuscript that you're still not sure what to do with? In this generative class, we'll act as gardeners, using those old drafts as compost to create fertile ground for new pieces.

In this seminar, we will read writing samples Karen Bender, Jim Shepard, Zadie Smith, Lucia Berlin, and Raymond Carver, which exemplify the ways work influences our characters' lives, decisions, and perceptions. We will also write together from an extended prompt which brings the work-a-day world into our stories.

In this craft session, we’ll analyze key passages from fiction in order to answer questions such as: What’s the difference between backstory and flashback? Are there artful ways to use these techniques that help the reader understand your character’s central motivation?

Whether characters are arguing, bantering, betraying secrets, or confessing their guilt, dialogue can be one of the most challenging parts of writing a scene. In this workshop, we’ll learn about the various ways you can use dialogue in your writing, such as to advance the plot or develop characters.

Ever dreamt of captivating an audience with your storytelling, condensing your writing into a sharp pitch, or confidently speaking in public? This course is designed for you. Uncover the craft of powerful storytelling using the classic "pity, fear, catharsis" framework and contemporary engagement techniques.

The aim of this class is to open up your writing by embracing this experimentation with form and structure. You’ll learn about the lyric essay—braided, collage, and hermit crab and more.

You love comics, and graphic novels, and you like to doodle, but perhaps you’ve never finished a multi-page comic story? Or, you are a veteran comics creator and want to draw a new one! Now’s your chance to create a mini-comic during one week this summer.

In this screenwriting and film workshop, we will learn Aristotle’s poetics, character work, scene writing, and dialogue. Further, we will immerse ourselves in clips from movies and short films and discuss how they relate to our learning techniques.

Because poetry, by definition, is political, even the choice to write apolitical poetry is a political one. In this workshop, we will develop our writing craft while engaging in revolutionary political education, specifically as it relates to the Black Power and Black Arts Movements.

This workshop is designed for essay writers who are already working on personal essay projects and want to receive feedback in a supportive and constructively critical environment. The class will include workshops of student writing, discussions on the art and craft, and readings of exemplary works in the genre.

Whether you’re working towards a novel or writing short stories, poetry, plays or genre-fluid experiments, this is an opportunity to improve your skills and learn about different literary techniques to help your big ideas come to life.