73 Best Short Story 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 class, we’ll enjoy a rollicking good time by responding to poetry’s call to do just that. Students will read a wide variety of playful poetry, then experiment with in-class writing prompts designed to awaken freedom and enjoyment.

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.

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 course with author Michelle Cahill, you will learn how to appreciate and hone the craft of short fiction through analysis of contemporary short stories by PJ Norman and Lauren Groff. We will focus on how reading short fiction makes us better writers and members of an interpretive community.

Through craft lessons and writing prompts, students will have fun fleshing out their character and story ideas using food as inspiration and leave with delicious new drafts.

Have you ever inserted yourself in a memory that wasn’t yours? Woke up with a sense of deja vu you couldn’t shake? In this workshop we will practice entering our DreamSpaces–memory guided planes constructed under fragments of our past present and future–to sharpen world building in our writing.

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.

In this intensive six-week course, we will apply some real-life forms of energy (potential, gravitational, elastic, kinetic, electrical, magnetic, nuclear and thermal) to identify which aspects of our fiction are fizzing, and which might need a boost.