Discover the Best Creative Writing Classes Near Me
Creative writing is the art (and, probably more importantly, the craft) of writing about things that aren’t there. For the most part, people consider creative writing to mean the writing of narrative fiction, but the rubric also includes such fields as poetry, dramatic works, and some people’s tax returns. Just about anything that isn’t non-fiction can be said to involve creative writing. It’s not a skill that is fostered to any great degree by formal education, which may explain why there are so many people who think they might write the Great American Novel if they only knew where to begin. Facing that blank screen and typing “Chapter One” can be incredibly intimidating and dry up even the more fertile of brains.
Why You Should Learn Creative Writing
The main reason for taking a class in creative writing is to free up your own creativity and find your voice so that you can give birth to whatever literary creations may be stored inside of you. Maybe they’re novels, maybe they’re screenplays, maybe they’re even poems. There’s a lot they can be, and you yourself may not know what they are until you’ve unblocked the creative pathways inside your brain.
Writing fiction can be a wonderful hobby. It allows you to escape from the drab world of reality into one of your own construction, in which you make the rules and define the characters. You can even have your characters break your rules. You rarely get such omnipotence in real life, but you can at least imagine a scene in which a character patterned after your boss ends up suspended by the ankles above a pit filled with snapping alligators. Giving play to your imagination can be a terrific relaxation and getaway, as well as a great means of getting to know yourself better. It can therefore be extremely therapeutic and quite a bit more interesting than the belly-button gazing that is journaling for most people.
While there is always the chance that a publisher will drop everything to get your Great American Novel to press, the reality in today’s world is that writing fiction is more a hobby than a career. So you shouldn’t quit your job as CEO of a Fortune 500 company because you think you’re going to make it big as a novelist or screenwriter. That’s no reason not to do it; just don’t go into it with too many illusions. And, of course, the internet has created means of self-publishing that will at least get your work out there and out of your bottom drawer.
There is one aspect of learning to be a better creative writer that can help you while you’re doing your day job if it involves business writing of one sort or another: you’ll become a better writer in general through practice of the writerly craft. Your emails and reports will improve by leaps and bounds, even if you don’t pepper them with fictional characters or write them as sonnets. That may even get you noticed, with all the good things that can stem from that.
5 Ways to Learn Creative Writing
Probably the best way to learn to be a better creative writer is by taking a formal class, complete with a teacher who can read through your drafts and offer constructive criticism while teaching how to create an outline, develop and match voices to characters and pace your story so that you don’t end up on page 500 before your detective comes across the first dead body. A formal class will also keep you disciplined by giving you assignments to complete, and you’ll also benefit from classmates with whom you can discuss your work. Although writing is a largely solitary occupation, learning to write is probably best done in a communal setting.
One of the lessons of the pandemic years is that learning can take place effectively online. If you can’t find a creative writing class in your vicinity, or if you don’t want to go sit in an uncomfortable folding chair in a classroom after sitting in your uncomfortable chair at work all day, you can always attend a live online class sitting on the couch with your shoes off. Live online classes are a good compromise between being able to work with a live teacher who can offer feedback and having the convenience of being able to study in your own space.
If you like the idea of learning creative writing from home, you also have the option of an on-demand or self-paced online class. These are series of video tutorials that often come packed with useful information but that don’t afford you the chance to get that all-important feedback from the teacher. Still, you’ll be able to learn about outlines and plotting, and characters, and maybe you’ll be lucky enough to find someone in the real world who can give you feedback.
Then there’s the time-honored method of getting a book to teach you about creative writing. You may get slightly dizzy looking at the offerings on Amazon of books about writing, but there certainly are enough books of advice on how to write out there. You’ll also find no shortage of manuals written by famous authors you admire, including Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, or Stephen King’s On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft.
And you can always teach yourself. Raymond Chandler, one of the greatest of all American prose stylists, famously taught himself to write by rewriting stories from the “pulp” detective magazines that were popular in his day. He made up his own course of study, and it eventually turned him into a successful author. Another way you can teach yourself to write is by reading, both to analyze what makes other writers’ work tick as well as to absorb technique by osmosis. Finally, maybe the very best way to learn to write is by the act of writing. Every short story you pen can be a lesson: when you write, you learn about yourself, but you also learn about the writerly process.
In-Person Creative Writing Classes
If you’re a New Yorker and have decided to take the plunge and study creative writing, a good place to begin is the Writer’s Studio in the West Village. Founded in 1987 by poet Philip Schultz (author of such titles as Failure and My Dyslexia), the school is rooted in Schultz’s theory of Persona Writing. In this method, writers experiment with the personalities and styles of different famous writers in order to discover their own voices.
The Writers Studio offers a Workshop in Fiction and Poetry (Level 1) that meets for eight two-and-one-quarter hour sessions once a week. The class is founded on introducing students to the Persona Writing method. Assignments are based on bits of established writers’ texts that are used to introduce students to different styles and new personas for them to try on, rather like hats.
The 92nd Street Y, known internationally for its artistic and cultural programming, has a Reading to Write with Myla Goldberg course. In place of a workshop in which students share their work, this class has novelist Goldberg essentially reverse engineer examples of contemporary fiction in order to show students how successful writing works. Each class includes a guided exercise to reinforce the meeting’s lessons. The class meets for a total of four once-a-week sessions of ninety minutes each.
In Los Angeles, Los Angeles City College in East Hollywood offers a six-session class in Sketch Comedy Writing. Through in-class exercises and take-home writing assignments, this course teaches students the basics of sketch comedy, something that will appeal to writers, performers, and fans alike. This not-for-credit class is part of Los Angeles City College’s Community Services program, the school’s continuing education arm that teaches everything from an Introduction to Face Painting to Food Protection Manager Training.
The Los Angeles Writers Group offers a Thursday Creative Writing Workshop that is open to writers of all genres and levels. Born from a group of five writers who banded together in 2003, the Los Angeles Writers Group hosts several intimately-scaled workshops every week, both online and in-person. In the Thursday night iteration, the group leader proffers writing prompts to inspire the group, members of which are also given the opportunity to share their work-in-progress and receive feedback.
Among the interesting options available in Chicago is a class entitled Read It, Write It at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Here, the focus is on close textual analysis of great American short stories with an eye to understanding how they work. Students are then offered writing exercises to get them started on their own efforts. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is affiliated with that venerable museum and offers Continuing Studies classes like this under the tutelage of a renowned faculty. The school believes in developing its students’ creative sides as a means of facing the challenges of the contemporary world. The school is located in the Loop, not far from the Museum itself.
Washington, D.C. residents can avail themselves of The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. Founded in 1976, the Center hosts writing workshops in all genres and presents over 50 literary events a year. The Center seeks to bring writers of all disciplines together, both to form a community and to create great literature. The Center is one of the most prominent organizations of its kind, and its workshops include a one-day Poetry Bootcamp in which students work on new work and bring in older work for critique prior to submission to a literary journal, the mechanics of which are discussed as well. If you keep seeing the world in 14-line segments, you don’t need a psychiatrist: you need something like the Sonnet Crash Course that will have you reading classic and contemporary poetry and then settling in to rival Petrarch and write some of your own.
If you’re more interested in prose than poetry, The Writer’s Center also offers a six-week class in Writing the Spy Novel. It begins by looking at work by masters of the genre, such as Le Carré and Ludlum, and teasing out the ways in which they create their twisty-turny plots and manage to keep suspense at a steady simmer for the length of an entire novel. By the end of the workshop, students will have developed characters and situations of their own. If horror is more your cup of tea, then perhaps you’d want to consider Writing the Horror Story. The workshop has students read three stories in the first session to get an understanding of such concepts as suspense, fear, and character. In the remaining sessions, participants get to workshop their own terrifying works in progress. For its part, Writing Literary Science Fiction is an eight-week workshop that will have students complete a short story or a chapter of a work of speculative fiction. And, if your interests lie beyond all types of fiction, The Memoirist’s Conundrums, a one-day class that helps clarify some of the writing processes involved in the penning of a non-fiction memoir, may be right for you.
Although called the Los Angeles Writers Group, and although the group does have workshops and meetings in the Los Angeles area, they also offer courses in Carlsbad, which San Diegans will find more convenient than Angelinos will. The Weekly Creative Writing Workshop meets on Sundays. Neither lecture-based nor a critique session, the workshop begins by assigning original prompts and having participants jump in, write, and then receive positive reinforcement from their confreres. You can also choose to participate in a Weekend Writing Retreat, which alternates time for working on guided writing exercises, private writing time, a lecture, a one-on-one feedback session, and even a reception to allow members to meet each other, all only a few blocks from the beach.
In San Francisco, you’ll find the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute. Located in Lower Haight, the Institute nurtures both established professionals and enthusiastic amateurs in their creative writing endeavors. Originally devoted to teaching Jack Grapes’ Method Writing, a means of finding and developing voice rather than studying form and structure, the Institute’s curriculum has since broadened to include classes like the Drop-In Creative Writing Workshop. A self-contained workshop for two and a half hours on Saturday afternoons, the class includes prompt-based writing exercises and critique of work prepared prior to the class. Suitable for people working in fiction, poetry, or memoir, the workshop aims to provide a dash of new perspective to writers of all levels.
Virtual Creative Writing Classes
As an alternative to live in-person classes, you may wish to consider a live online class. There are many advantages to using your computer and the internet as a means of learning new skills, most of them having to do with convenience. You can study from anywhere, you can be as comfortable as you like while you’re taking the class, you’re spared having to commute to a brick-and-mortar school, and you have a selection of courses that is as wide as the world itself. You will, of course, have to outfit your space with the requirements of the online class you’ve chosen, but unlike, say, quilting, which involves acquiring fabric and a sewing machine to keep up with the class, the most you’d need for a creative writing class in addition to a computer outfitted with a word-processing program like Word, is a pad and a few sharpened number 2 pencils.
There is a very broad selection of online creative writing classes from providers across the country. Weekend mornings (Pacific Time) give you a chance to join an All Genre Creative Writing Workshop hosted on Zoom by the Los Angeles Writers Group. The workshop, like the live one offered in Los Angeles on weekday nights, is built around writing prompts that will stimulate you to come up with new work. There’s no lecture in this workshop, which gets down and dirty and has you writing right away. You’ll likely discover something new in the process, as well as receive positive reinforcement from your fellow workshop participants.
If you’d rather spend your whole Saturday working on your writing, you can consider the Saturday Creative Writing Workshop from the Los Angeles-based Writing Studio. Here, you’ll be given three periods to work undisturbed, interspersed with meditations to clear the fevered modern brain, and chances for constructive feedback on your work. The class is suitable for people of all levels of experience.
Something very different can be enjoyed Thursday evenings (Eastern Time): the 92nd Street Y in New York City as an online class entitled Comics and the Graphic Novel, which meets for six sessions and covers plot construction, character design, and how words and pictures can be joined to tell a story. You’ll need to purchase some art supplies for this class. The full list will be provided at the first class. The class is geared towards beginners.
Private Group Creative Writing Classes
Are you on the lookout for a team-building event that will be fun and tap into your staff’s creative sides? A private group creative writing class might be exactly what the doctor ordered, and CourseHorse can arrange just such an activity for you. Simply use the contact form on the CourseHorse website, and a member of the event fulfillment team will reach out to you to help plan your event.
CourseHorse also has a group class in another sort of writing: a Virtual Calligraphy Workshop. In this two-hour class, conducted over Zoom, participants learn the rudiments of modern calligraphy, a somewhat less structured art form than traditional calligraphy. Participants learn how to write and join letters and words using the basic brush strokes of modern lettering. Bouncing (writing on something other than a straight line) and flourishes are touched upon as well.
After you book your class through CourseHorse, the event fulfillment team will contact you for the addresses of all participants, who will receive all the required materials for the class (including calligraphy markers, writing paper, and worksheets) directly in the mail. You’re thus spared the hassle of rounding up the materials required for the class. This event is open to 100 participants, and you have the freedom to tinker with your headcount even after you’ve made the initial booking. You can also cancel at no charge up to two weeks prior to the event.
What Will I Need to Learn Creative Writing?
Unlike many other hobbies that require a lot of specialized equipment even to get started, creative writing calls for minimal supplies, most of which you probably already have. All you really need is something to write on, which usually means a computer armed with a word processing program. You may find that your creative juices flow better when you’re working on paper, so you should equip yourself with a couple of pads of paper (lined, blank, or graph, depending on your taste) and an assortment of writing instruments (you’ll no doubt have a preference for something by this point in your life, although it’s always good to have some pencils on hand, along with a pencil sharpener and an all-important eraser. The only other necessary tools of the trade are a dictionary and thesaurus (and a rhyming dictionary for aspiring poets), although acceptable versions of these are available online at this point in the evolution of human thought.
Is it Difficult to Learn Creative Writing?
Creative writing is a craft you can spend an entire lifetime polishing. Getting the English language to do what you want it to do is the result of constant application, so don’t expect to be a Shakespeare or a Keats right out of the gate. That said, anyone can write. Perhaps not very well at first, but with inspiration and perspiration (rather more of the latter than the former), you can learn to write stories or poems that you’ll enjoy and, maybe, that others will enjoy as well.
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