Best Creative Writing Classes NYC: Find Courses & Onsite Training

Learn More About NYC Creative Writing Courses

Creative writing is the art of putting ideas into words, be they stories, poems, memoirs, or anything in between. While most people think of writing novels when they think of creative writing, the skill encompasses any form of creative or persuasive expression, so you won’t need to restrict yourself if you want to learn creative writing. Learning creative writing can be an ideal way to express yourself, find your creative muse, use your words as a tool of persuasion, or just better understand your own thoughts and feelings as you write. There are also numerous practical benefits to being able to write in a more concise, persuasive manner.

What Kinds of Creative Writing Can You Learn?

Unlike a lot of skills you might enroll in a class to learn, creative writing courses tend to focus on specific genres or styles of writing. While they are likely to all teach students practical skills for organizing, brainstorming, and meeting their writing goals, most of the lessons will emphasize the specific characteristics of the style of writing that students want to pursue, since writing a collection of poems is very different from writing a novel or a screenplay.

Short Fiction

Most writers get their start in the world of short fiction, if only because it is the best place to start experimenting with the form and everyone has a basic understanding of the form. Short fiction tests a writer's ability to get their point across in a limited space, and some of the most renowned short stories of the last two hundred years only run a few pages in total. Writers like Edgar Allan Poe, James Baldwin, and James Joyce pioneered the form, and the legacy of the short story continues with writers like Alice Munro, Alice Walker, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Short fiction is about maximizing word economy and making every choice count. These courses will help students build the skills they need to write short works that are perfect for collections, sequences, or even literary magazines.

Long Fiction

Long-form fiction (usually novels, but other forms do exist) is the kind of creative writing that most people are familiar with (and that most people think of) when they think of the creative writer sitting at a computer (or a typewriter). Long fiction is more complex and time-consuming to write than most other forms of creative writing, but it is also the most prestigious, so writers looking to make a name for themselves tend to gravitate towards this style. Dating back to the early 17th century, this is the genre of Dickens, Atwood, and Smith, and it is the genre that most writers who want to see their books in stores and on the NYT Bestsellers list will want to pursue.

Genre Fiction

While it is often derided in literary circles, genre fiction is immensely popular, as evidenced by the amount of money made by paperback sales at airport lounges. Enrolling in a genre fiction course will teach you the structure and style associated with specific genres such as romance novels, military thrillers, YA coming-of-age stories, epic fantasy, and science fiction. Audiences have expectations with these stories, and you’ll learn how to satiate those expectations without sacrificing your creative flair, while also learning how to create genre fiction that is every bit as complex and nuanced as literary fiction.

Poetry

Arguably the oldest surviving form of creative writing, poetry has been described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “the best words in the best order.” Poetry is defined by its rhythmic prosody, being structured around syllabic patterns and stanza structures, and it is the genre of creative writing most directly associated with personal performance. Whether you want to write radical free verse poetry or highly structured sonnets, enrolling in a poetry class will help you better understand what you want to do and how to achieve those goals. Learning poetry can be a way to express your emotions, feelings, or political beliefs in a lyrical way, and it is the mode of fiction that offers the largest canvas for artists to utilize.

Plays and Screenplays

If you aspire to write for Hollywood or enter a TV writers' room, you’ll want to learn how to write screenplays (or their ancient ancestors, stage plays). Writing for the screen or stage is a very different process from writing for the page, not the least because it requires you to give words and actions to real human beings (or animators) to transform into a reality. Writing for performance will require you to learn how to guide actors and use your words to set scenes (including stage direction, which can be minimal or precise). You’ll also need to learn how to work within the bounds of your production budget (since you can’t just have characters decide to go to exotic locales when people would actually have to go to them) and the collaborative nature of working with other members of the production staff or other writers in a writers' room setting.

Memoir and Creative Non-Fiction

Whether you call it creative non-fiction, memoir writing, personal essay writing, or anything else, this is the art of taking your own life experiences and transforming them into creative works. This can take many forms, but all of them aim to produce creative expressions of the author’s life experiences, whether that be to explore something about their identity, their politics and morals, or just the way that their lived experience has shaped them. Learning this mode of creative writing will involve taking deep dives into your own past and sense of self to find the bits and pieces that can be reconstructed into a coherent, compelling narrative.

Op-eds and Persuasive Essays

Not all creative writing aims to entertain, but rather to instruct and persuade. Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, is among the oldest remaining forms of art, and it has become a big industry as the internet makes blogging and vlogging far more accessible to new writers. If you want to learn how to write in such a way as to persuade or proselytize, you can enroll in a course that is specifically geared towards teaching the fundamentals of rhetoric and debate. There, you will learn what techniques you need to utilize to make your argument, present your case, and convince an audience of the validity of the position you’ve staked.

What Kinds of Jobs Make Use of Creative Writing?

If you are looking to find a job that makes use of creative writing, there are a few options, mostly depending on your specialization and formal training. While the job most commonly associated with creative writing is, unsurprisingly, a professional writer (be they poet, novelist, or playwright), and, if you are interested in using your creative writing skills to make a living, this is one of the best ways to do it. That said, this isn’t really a job you apply for, since you are going to need to write something that becomes popular or successful to find steady work (which is why becoming trained in creative writing is so important).

In addition, many creative writers are brought on to work on scripted projects that need revisions or punch-ups to get them ready for the final stages (and release). This includes people who find work as script doctors or who are brought onto projects to punch up jokes or action beats (since those are their specialties). Teams of writers may get brought in to help write award ceremonies, gala events, or other specials requiring a lot of scripted speeches, and many comedians pay teams of writers to help them workshop jokes. Finally, some writers may find work as ghostwriters, working alongside celebrities or other non-writers to produce books and materials under an assumed name.

There are also a wide range of positions for creative writers who specialize in rhetoric and persuasion such as speechwriters, op-ed columnists, and even advertisers and content writers. So long as there is scripted content that is attempting to make an argument or an appeal, it is probable that one or more professional creative writers will be involved in the process (up to and including this article you are reading right now).

What Industries Use Creative Writing?

Creative writing is used in virtually every industry that even touches upon persuasion or entertainment, since, at its core, creative writing is about using language and ideas as a tool to help achieve a goal of some kind. Obviously, the film and television industry needs to hire writers who can produce scripts, and the publishing industry needs to pay for the work of writers (since this tends to be their main way of acquiring content to sell to consumers), but this only begins to scratch the surface. Writers work on live shows, video games, songs, music videos, online content creation, and even things like social media posts like professional Instagram influencer pages and TikToks. If you are hoping to break into the entertainment industry, learning specific creative writing skills can be incredibly useful.

In addition, creative writing is utilized in almost all industries that aim to persuade an audience of virtually anything. This ranges from political campaigns that employ speechwriters to advertising agencies that employ commercial writers to advocacy groups that pay writers to produce content to use in their materials. Persuading audiences is an important aspect of creative writing and, since there are so many public-facing companies and institutions interested in putting their message front and center, creative writers can find work in any of these industries.

Finally, creative writing is also an important part of public outreach and communication. While you may not think of things like messaging surrounding cancer screenings or charity fliers advertising upcoming events as falling under the purview of a creative writer, they are often handled by content creation teams whose purpose is to refine a message and ensure that communication is clear and targeted. Even if you aren’t looking to find a career as a “creative writer,” anyone in a field like outreach or public relations stands to benefit from learning how to write engaging, persuasive content.

What Kind of Skills Might You Learn in a Creative Writing Course?

When enrolling in a creative writing course, you can expect to spend time learning the skills you need to make the process consistent, efficient, and productive. Very few great works can be poured directly onto the page from the muses themselves, and most take a lot of time, effort, and energy to get right. Thus, most creative writing courses spend less time assuming they need to teach you how to be creative and more time teaching you how to do the dirty work involved in completing a creative writing project.

Brainstorming

One of the first things that new creative writers need to learn is how to get ideas flowing and how to start putting words onto the page. There are a lot of different strategies and techniques for brainstorming, but all of them focus on training writers to avoid staring at a blank document and being more aware of how to jump-start the process.

Editing

One of the most essential skills that a creative writer needs to learn is how to edit their work. This comes in three major varieties. Writers need to know how to edit their work for accuracy and clarity (learning the basics of grammar and structure), how to respond to feedback from other writers or professional editors, and how to return to their work again and again to rewrite it as the need arises. Going back to edit your work is often significantly harder than writing it in the first place, so many creative writing courses aim to help students become accustomed to this part of the process.

Navigating the Publishing Industry

Once you’ve got a completed manuscript, you aren’t quite done, since you have to take steps to get your work into the hands of a company that is actually willing to publish it. While there are self-publishing options, these services tend to be far too expensive and impractical for most writers. Often, you’ll spend time in a creative writing course learning how to reach out to publishers, work with literary agents, negotiate deals, and understand how to get the best offers possible for your work. In addition, you’ll likely learn about other venues for advertising and publishing your work, especially if you are hoping to get your work accepted into literary or poetry journals.

Conventions of Genre and Style

If you are enrolled in a course that deals with a specific style or genre of writing, you are, unsurprisingly, going to spend time becoming familiar with what makes that kind of creative writing unique relative to others. For example, you may learn how to write convincing genre topoi in a class on writing romance novels, and in a class on long-form literary fiction, you’ll learn about plot and pacing. These specific skills lessons are essential for anyone looking to break into a specific kind of writing, particularly if it is something relatively uncommon, like a songwriting or a screenwriting class.

How Do Creative Writing Classes Differ from Professional Writing Classes?

One of the things you may want to consider is whether or not you will benefit more from a creative writing course or a professional writing course. In a creative writing course, you’ll spend most of your time working on learning how to write for artistic, expressive, or persuasive projects, like how to write stories, novels, television shows, and advertisements. In a professional writing course, you’ll learn skills like editing, grammar, and punctuation as well as strategies for making everyday writing (things like emails, memos, and business reports) read well and clearly communicate their intent to their audience. Professional writing classes focus more on the writing you’ll undertake during regular business hours, making it ideal for white-collar workers, particularly those in management.

To learn more about business writing classes, please explore the Business Writing section of Noble’s Classes Near Me page.

Creative Writing Classes and Schools in NYC

If you are looking to learn creative writing skills in New York City, you can enroll in a range of courses offered by providers who aim to help students become more adept at writing for the page, stage, or screen.

Gotham Writers Workshop

The Gotham Writers Workshop provides in-person and online writing training in a variety of different subjects, with courses teaching everything from how to write novels and memoirs to how to edit at a professional level or how to write songs. These courses can be taken as short introductory seminars or as immersive, multi-week workshops aimed at helping students become more adept at all aspects of the writing process. All of the courses include opportunities for students to read one another's work and receive critique and feedback on their own writing. These courses aim to ensure that students have the guided training and personalized support they need to get their own writing projects off the ground.

92nd Street Y

The 92nd Street Y is a New York institution and one of the oldest and most storied cultural centers in the city. They offer everything from sewing and dance classes to professional and creative writing courses hosted by local and nationally renowned authors. These courses tend to run sporadically (since they are often taught by guests with limited availability), but it is worth considering keeping an eye on the course offerings. Not only do they have regular offerings in skills like writing for novels, comics, and television, but they also teach such a wide range of other skills that you may find some other class that is worth your energy to enroll in.

The Writers Studio

Operating since the late 80s, The Writers Studio aims to provide students with focused skills workshops that will help them develop as writers and professionals. They offer beginner-friendly classes and more immersive training workshops for writers who know what they want to do with their creative works. Courses are offered in-person and online, giving students additional options for receiving assistance and feedback on their work. Beginner courses include introductions to genres like fiction, poetry, and memoir, and they offer more advanced classes in immersive writing for those same genres. They have also, in the past, hosted writing workshops aimed at students working on specific subjects such as narratives of the immigrant experience or life in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

New York International Screenplay Awards

If you are looking to learn how to write a screenplay, you should consider the focused writing instruction you will receive in a course from the instructors at the New York International Screenplay Awards. In these classes, you’ll learn how to write and sell screenplays that appeal to audiences and critics alike. The courses are private writing sessions where you will have the chance to work alongside a professional screenwriter for a few hours, punching up your script, getting advice, and receiving feedback on your work. These one-on-one sessions are a great way to ensure that you are getting the help that is best suited for your needs and your stage of the writing process.

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Key Insights

Learn More About NYC Creative Writing Courses

What Kinds of Creative Writing Can You Learn?

Short Fiction

Long Fiction

Genre Fiction

Poetry

Plays and Screenplays

Memoir and Creative Non-Fiction

Op-eds and Persuasive Essays

What Kinds of Jobs Make Use of Creative Writing?

What Industries Use Creative Writing?

What Kind of Skills Might You Learn in a Creative Writing Course?

Brainstorming

Editing

Navigating the Publishing Industry

Conventions of Genre and Style

How Do Creative Writing Classes Differ from Professional Writing Classes?

Creative Writing Classes and Schools in NYC

Gotham Writers Workshop

92nd Street Y

The Writers Studio

New York International Screenplay Awards

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