87 Best Nonfiction Creative Writing Classes in 2024

Writing Sprints is an exercise-intensive course designed to “unstick” writers struggling to start or continue new projects, boosting writing productivity. The course relies heavily on writing exercises (for both fiction & nonfiction writers). This class is for writers of all levels looking for inspiration and motivation.

Do you feel your writing gets bogged down in announcing, recounting, and summarizing? What you need is some scene-making medicine. Work with Attic Institute founder and two-time Oregon Book Award winner David Biespiel to learn the keys to explain less and dramatize more.

In this four-part class we'll explore the art and magic of writing as a healing process in a collaborative and supportive environment. Together, we will share our stories, read a variety of essays and short fiction in order to identify how others have utilized the written word to heal themselves.

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.

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.

Writing through heartbreak and loss can provide a tool for discovering the insight lurking beneath the pain. Such writing will stir readers’ emotions, even helping process their own pain. Instructor Andrea Meyer will assign readings and writing exercises to help you tell your darkest, scariest, and most gratifying stories.

Sometimes we become so focused on productivity or “doing it right” that we stifle our creativity. In this class we’ll focus on one of the hardest parts of writing: writing. Each week we’ll use new prompts and guided activities to inspire new creation.

In this writing course, we will discuss some non-fiction literary forms, such as memoir, essays, creative non-fiction and theme-driven autobiographical work and the differences between them, in helping situate the participant’s own work within this genre.