75 Best Short Story Creative Writing Classes in 2024

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.

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 talk, we’ll explore the craft of writing fiction that doesn’t move—fiction contained in a single, discreet space as large as a house, and as small as a bed—and the implication it has for our understanding of gender, characterization, plot, and time.

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.

Trace the roots of the horror genre and begin crafting a story of your own. In this seminar, award-winning author and lifelong horror fan Nino Cipri will guide students through the process of writing horror, from generating ideas to the final revision and submission process.

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?

In this class, we’ll look at what puts the flash in flash fiction and nonfiction, examining topics such as urgency, intensity, movement, and more. Through readings, discussion, and exercises, we’ll explore the paradoxical expansiveness of short-form writing and invite its breadth and depth into our work.

Readers love variety, especially at the sentence level. In this fast-paced session for absolute beginners and pros in need of a refresher, we'll explore periodic sentences, fragments, parataxis, parallelism, anaphora, epiphora, assonance, juxtaposition, ambiguity, and more.

In this 2-hour course, we’ll borrow inspirations from poetic forms, genre conventions such as time limited devices, and learn six common traditional and unconventional story structures by weighing the risks and rewards of each form.

Learn how to identify several pivotal events of your life and shape one of them into a work of fiction or non-fiction. Following a tried-and-true formula, you will learn how to identify, begin, and structure an autobiographical story.

Learn dialogue, develop characters, use point of view, learn to read analytically, and polish your work to send it out! This workshop will teach participants how to edit other’s work, read like a writer, scrutinize sentences, and how to submit to magazines.