66 Best Short Story Creative Writing Classes in 2024

This two-week class is fast-paced and fun; it’s a mix of brief lectures followed by individual and team writing exercises where you get to apply the skills you’re learning right away.

Dialogue can be one of the most interesting parts of a book to read, but only if it is done right. Sharpen your writing skills and challenge yourself to craft engaging, yet believable dialogue that will keep your readers interested.

In her seminal piece, “Complicating the Narrative,” the journalist Amanda Ripley urges storytellers to find and include details that don’t fit the narrative—on purpose. In this three-hour workshop, we’ll apply this principle to our own writing.

In this class, we will examine prose conversations and explore dialogue as a tool for getting to know our characters. We will observe the many ways humans communicate and translate gestures and facial expressions into engaging written descriptions.

In this five-week course, each student will conceive and draft a short story of up to 1,200 words. We will begin with a triggering image and build from there, reading examples, working with myths and fairy tales, drafting and revising, and exploring how to begin and how to end.

Proper grammar, punctuation, and mechanics make your writing correct. In order to truly write well, you must also master the art of form and composition. From sentence structure to polishing your prose, this course will enhance your writing, no matter what type of writing you do.

The writer’s mantra – and the bane of most writers’ existence – is Show, Don’t Tell. In this workshop, writers will get down and dirty with ways to show and how to identify in their drafts where they are telling and how to enjoy transforming that telling into showing.

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!

In this course, you’ll immerse yourself in the nuts and bolts of fiction writing and gain new levels of control over your creative process, all while you produce multiple short stories or several chapters of a novel.

Folkloric expression is rich and varied in cultures around the world, both traditional and modern. Authors of fantastic fiction often draw on folkloric traditions to enrich their worldbuilding, but this needs to be approached carefully. In this class, we will explore some concepts from folkloristics, or the study of folklore, to examine the traditional structuring of narratives.

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.