33 Best Creative Writing Classes in Boston

For 45 minutes, you’ll meet fellow writers and get your creative juices flowing with some cool writing exercises. Best of all, you’ll sign off with some new ideas to ponder for the rest of your day and beyond.

What's more satisfying than leaving work behind on a Friday evening? Rounding out the week with a free writing session of course! Maximize that Friday feeling and kick off your writing weekend with us! In 60 jam-packed minutes, you’ll meet fellow writers and get your creative juices flowing!

This one-week residential workshop, running from October 8th to October 13th, 2023, focuses on writing and selling commercial science fiction and fantasy. It offers intensive interaction with best-selling authors and editors, emphasizing the creation of engaging fiction. The workshop combines manuscript critiques, new writing, lectures, and Q&As in an informal, supportive setting on Martha’s Vineyard, fostering a unique learning environment​​.

How do you bring memorable, three-dimensional characters to life enough to make that connection? In this class, equally suitable for fiction writers, screenwriters, and TV writers, we will view and analyze various movie scenes and dissect them to see what makes the characters memorable.

In this class, we will explore how screenwriting for feature-length film and TV shows can capture character, setting, and atmosphere. Through guided writing prompts and examples from the scripts we study in class, students will write original scripts with a focus on crafting specific characters and building worlds.

In this seminar, we will break down magical realism to better understand how to keep our escapist fantasies grounded without losing their captivating power over audiences. We will read through scripts to identify and discuss essential elements of magical realism and how to translate the elements on screen.

With generative writing exercises, you'll practice how to productively write from a character driven lens. As well as learn how to find the structure in what you have on a page. This class is taught from a playwriting perspective, but is well suited for novelists and screenwriters, at all levels.

This class will help writers confront challenges around telling true homicide stories. To understand how masters do it, we will read David Carr, Marcela Turati, Truman Capote, and others. In class we will investigate the masters' tricks, and learn to describe real characters, understand their motivations and tell complex plots.

This interactive online poetry workshop, conducted via Zoom, spans 6 weeks starting October 17th. It's designed for intermediate adult learners, offering an opportunity to create new works or refine existing poems. With a focus on contemporary poets and in-class prompts, this course encourages playful and experimental writing approaches, targeting those seeking to deepen their poetry skills​​.

Ready to create a trove of your own speculative fiction stories? Each week, we will focus on a new aspect of speculative fiction, and writers will submit short works to the group to read and share feedback on.

Do you dread writing descriptions? If you want a better balance of dialogue, action, and setting in your writing, this one-day seminar will offer craft examples, writing exercises, and structures to help you set the scene.

Whether you have the germ of an idea or are already well into a draft, you'll discover what makes a page-turning, heartfelt romance novel by drawing on popular examples of the genre, identifying the rules of romantic fiction and highlighting key techniques that you can bring to your own writing.