9 Best Writing Classes in Washington D.C.

A single 90-minute evening session with Lisa Jan Sherman at The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, $60 ($50 for members), on Tuesday 13 October, 7pm to 8.30pm. Prompts are used to pull up memories, characters and places and turn them into poems, scenes, dialogue or stories. Aimed at people who are stuck rather than people working a specific manuscript, and short enough to try without committing to a term.

Four Wednesday evenings with Story District at Industrious, 1255 Union Street NE, 7th Floor, Washington DC, 6.30pm to 8.30pm, running 9 to 30 September. The work is finding a real story from your own life and shaping it - story arc, scene building, finding your voice - in a deliberately low-pressure room. Story District is DC's long-running live storytelling organisation, so the craft taught here is narrative rather than performance coaching. Two further runs follow: Tuesdays from 6 October and Wednesdays from 28 October. Price is shown at enrolment.

Two Saturday sessions with Caroline Bock at The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, $100 ($85 for members), drafting a series of micro stories of 300 words or less that stand alone but can also link into something larger. 17 and 24 October, 10am to 12.30pm. The linked-sequence angle is the useful part - most flash workshops treat each piece as a one-off.

Two Saturday morning sessions with food historian Dr Kelly A. Spring at The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, $100 ($85 for members), on writing your own food history. Week one covers what food history is and the forms it takes; week two puts it into practice. 17 and 24 October, 10am to noon. Explicitly a beginner course, and the historian's angle makes it more research-led than most food-writing workshops.

Three Thursday evening sessions with Beth Kanter and Anna Kahoe at The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, $150 ($135 for members), aimed at writers of any level trying to find the story that is currently nagging at them and get it onto the page. Runs 8 to 22 October, 6.30pm to 9.30pm. Two instructors on a class this size is unusual and means more individual attention than a single-tutor workshop.

A Saturday morning session with novelist Eva Langston at The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, $60 ($50 for members), on sharpening a novel's premise and learning to pitch it briefly to agents, editors and readers. Two hours on 26 September, 10am to noon - useful at the point where a draft exists but you cannot yet say what the book is in a sentence.

A single two-hour evening workshop with María Fernanda at The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, $60 ($50 for members), on how poems work visually - line, shape, white space and the techniques poets use to make an image land. One session on Thursday 17 September, 6pm to 8pm, which makes it an easy first workshop if you have not taken one before.

Three Wednesday evening sessions with poet Karren Alenier at The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, $150 ($135 for members), reading Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons closely and writing response poems from it. This is a workshop built on one difficult book rather than a general poetry survey, so it suits writers who already have a practice and want to be pushed by Stein's word play. Runs 16 to 30 September, 7pm to 8.30pm.

American University offers a two-year MFA in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Scholarships are available.