38 Best Screenplay Creative Writing Classes in 2024

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.

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.

In this trauma-informed, skilled based workshop, you will learn embodied writing techniques from a playwright and actor. Whether you are a fiction writer, a memoirist, or a screenwriter, incorporating these embodied writing techniques will create a more vivid reading/viewing experience for your audience.

Discover the craft of outlining your story in this immersive workshop at L.A. Writers' Lab. Unleash the wildness of your imagination while mastering the art of story structure. Through lectures, exercises, and film analysis, unlock your protagonist's transformation and build a compelling narrative.

This course is for anyone who wants to learn the essence of writing for television or anyone with a great idea for a series who needs help putting it into words. You’ll learn about the language of TV writing, the importance of deadlines, and unique qualities of a televised story.

Writing for games requires an understanding of structure that goes beyond linear storytelling. In this course, you will explore the nature of interactive stories by working in different formats (choose your own adventure, virtual novels, the Telltale style, etc.) and writing games that exemplify the fundamental concepts of branching narrative.

In this one-day structure clinic, successful TV writer Farhan Arshad (Co-EP, FRASIER, UPLOAD, 3 Pilots) will help you apply the toolset of the scribe to root your story in a clearly defined genre, give it a rock-solid spine and compelling arcs that launch your pilot firmly into series.

This highly creative, yet totally practical writing course provides you with a step-by-step process that breaks the writing of your novel or screenplay into manageable weekly tasks and is designed for people working full time.

In this course, you learn not only how to properly format scene headings, action lines, characters, dialogue, parentheticals and transitions, but why these are industry standards. Even with screenwriting software, writers still struggle with the intricacies of formatting as it relates to clarity, succinctness and the reader’s emotional experience.

This three-week course will provide tips on how to harness your idea and contain it on a single page by learning how to write a One Sheet, as well as how to write a Query Letter to solicit your work.

Character and plot are intertwined. If the audience does not care about the characters, the plot will falter. This workshop will cover how to naturally develop characters and story as a single unit so that your audience connects on a deep emotional level.

This course will offer specific tips for creating and implementing advice on building the world of your screenplay. This class also covers research advice and tips, strengthening visual storytelling in action paragraphs, developing and implementing settings, examining character and plot conflict as it relates to your settings, and genre consistency.